You know how on the old internet, culture often existed in a wildly decentralized manner, but you’d come across people’s own little archives of what they’d thought was important enough to catalog? Not a centralized know-your-meme style user-contributed warzone, but a personal box of chuckles?

I’m starting mine.

This will be somewhat censored, but also not entirely SFW.

If I get sourcing wrong and you have links I can add, pick one of my contact methods and get in touch.

Spiderman means “see results”

You can’t click “see results” on a poll without voting. For reasons I know not, the common convention is to make the fourth option “spiderman.” People who just want to see results but don’t have an opinion or aren’t necessarily the audience of your poll thereby won’t pollute the other results.

Burt f***s the bees

I think this one came from a knzk post, but I haven’t found the original URL. Sometimes joked about like one is revealing a horrible corporate secret, sometimes joked about like Burt is an online weirdo like the rest of us.

John Mastodon

A pundit claimed that Mastodon’s founder was John Mastodon because he’d misread @JoinMastodon. The populace enjoys this. So far the homestuck comparison is my favorite.

Website Boy

Euphemisms on Mastodon are sort of rare because

a. they stop people from filtering out mentions of stuff, so they’re a bit rude where you might imagine someone might want to do that

b. there’s no full-text search to let sea lions target their attacks so you don’t really need them.

Nevertheless, Eugen Rochko has this one. Sometimes deployed with a fond tone, sometimes with irritation over his project stewardship.

#caturday

People post pictures of their cats on Saturday. No particularly interesting origin of which I’m aware.

F*** Brewster Kahle

An Internet Archive employee was fired for a post they made on Mastodon. We’re not going to dig up too much here and I’m not going to put in links because I don’t want to direct attention in ways that might make that employee’s professional life more difficult, but the populace was pretty much unanimously on the side of the (well-liked!) poster. There were a lot of too-absurd-to-be-illegal claims made about Kahle as well as some general “f*** Brewster Kahle, pass it along”. Speaking of which…

GNU Terry Pratchett

Not Mastodon-specific but you’ll see it passed around.

Hans from Stuttgart

I think it predates this though I think that’s indirectly how I became aware of it. If anyone has bookmarks of Hans from Stuttgart’s origin please share; for some reason, I feel like I recall khaki shorts and FOSS-advocacy both being implicated in his lore. And riding bicycles? Someone should have made that wiki.