4chan
4chan (YO-tsu-ba) is an English language version of the infamous Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel. On 4chan, many pictures from around the world, mostly from anime and manga are posted and critiqued. There are also discussion forums in the style of the BBS 2ch. Most notably, due to bandwidth concern and growing international leeching, Japanese computer users cannot access the site without permission. So far, it has been shut down due to lack of funding or hosting 4 times. On August 11, 2004, 4chan returned for the fifth time, under new management. The site had previously died on June 20, 2004, after several attacks, lack of funding caused by a PayPal lockout, and lack of motivation from the site founder, moot.
Site Dynamics
4chan's code is based on the popular Japanese board 2chan. The site is divided into discussion boards, image and upload boards, and oekaki boards. To date, there are 20 different image boards, with topics ranging from anime to weapons to real and animated pornography. There are also 6 discussion boards, 2 oekaki boards, and one flash upload board.
When posting, a user can put in their name and email for identification, or post anonymously. The only unique identifier is the tripcode system. When posting, if a user puts the # symbol followed by a string of characters, 4chan will encrypt that string to create a unique tripcode. For example, lol#internet becomes lol !AvT/zSkROU when posted. The email field is also used to sage. If a user wants to reply to a thread but not bump it, they can put the phrase "sage" in the email field. It's considered polite to sage when replying to your own thread.
There are two chief attidudes regarding the etiquette of anonymous and non-anonymous posting. One side believes making anonymous posts is tantamount to "hiding", escaping accountability for one's posts. The other side says that using names or tripcodes are a form of vanity, and that those complaining about anonymity wish to judge posts by the username, before reading the content.
Because 4chan is a free service and uses so much bandwidth, there is often a problem with financing. moot and the mods will sometimes request donations. There has been a perpetual issue with finding a online payment service. Paypal was used, but then the owner of 5chan reported the account and froze it. Recently, the service Yowcow also shut down 4chan's account with no reason given. Often, the problem is the lolicon and shotacon boards, because their content violates the Terms and Conditions of the service. Recently, another futaba site called not4chan took over these boards, so hopefully such financial issues will not be a problem for much longer.
Famous Characters
The definitive style of the chan is the ability for totally anonymous posting. There is no registration and no post count. Some people do choose to use a handle, while others keep to the shadows of Anonymous. There are some of the more famous (and infamous) denizens of 4chan, past and present.
- Anonymous is the default tag for posts without name fields. An anonymous user is one who prefers to opt out of the race for forums recognition, preferring instead to go only by their words. Many of the 4chan moderators are known to post as Anonymous rather than letting their status get in the way of their post. It is also used for trolling statements. Sometimes FORCED_ANON is put in place by the mods, or the default anonymous name will change to mock a particularly annoying user, like #Idle/pa23Y and Nuitari-- a tip-of-the-hat to the original Toshiaki from Futaba.
- A /b/-tard is the derogatory nickname for a poster from /b/, a potentially interesting board usually considered by the rest of 4chan to have little significant value or merit, and functioning to siphon trollish behavior from the rest of the site.
- Buki-Buki is a paedophilic 4chan user who was both acclaimed and complained about at one point on the /c/ board for his posting of young cute girl pictures, some which bordered on strong ecchi. Eventually, he was banned, returned, and then left to start and moderate his own image posting board - one with strong loli undertones - and has not been seen on 4chan since. Due to a mistaken image post, Buki-Buki is most associated with the persona of a penguin (Buki^2).
- Lain was a user of 4chan when it first began. He is infamous for saying "I really want to help. You know where to find me," to which moot replied "I have no idea who you are"; Lain followed up with "Yes you do; I'm Lain, from your site 4chan." This was done in a thread that Lain started on /q/ when 4chan was first having financial troubles. Lain moved on after 4chan's fourth death to help Thock and the Idlechan people set up their substitute site. His posts to 4chan are far and few in between these days.
- moot is the owner and once sole moderator of 4chan. Without him, there would be no english chans. moot, like nearly every member of the 4chan Team, is a goon.
- Psaiyan is a poster obsessed with Ayanami Rei, and involved in many of the more torrential Rei floods. He is no longer on the boards, but much of the history of Ayanami on 4chan is his doing. Also an ordained minister and the writer of some grittily lewd fanfiction.
- pupu is widely respected for the quality of his posts, especially to /c/.
- W.T. Snacks is a 4chan administrator infamous for banning users. He's responsible for almost all of the PHP coding on the site. An actual photograph of Snacks- wearing an ersatz Happy Negro mask- has often been posted on /b/.
- Soviet Russia is one of 4chan's more widely known trolls. After his tripcode was posted on /b/, other trolls have taken to posting with his name.
Famous Memes
Like most message boards, 4chan has its own range of in-jokes, although many image-based gags, such as Waha and the OS girls, are borrowed or adapted from Futaba Channel and sometimes SA. Most others are based on existing characters from anime and manga. There is a lot of controversy over what exactly a "meme" is in 4chan culture, but the common definition is that it's a viral idea, propogated by many different users. Here is an incomplete and everchanging list of 4chan memes.
- animated is usually a redundant confirmation that the posted .gif is actually animated, or a trolling statement. Whether an image is animated or not can sometimes take a while, especially when particularly trolling users insist that "It's animated! But the frames are five minutes apart. Just watch it!"
- Ayanami Rei, a character from Neon Genesis Evangelion is sometimes treated with derision when appearing, especially in floods. A large-scale flood once occurred-- the response was that posting Rei became a bannable offense for a month. Reasons for this vilification include the perceived over-exposure and pompousness of the series she appears in (along with its fans) and the fan intepretation of her character as a taciturn, submissive, masturbatory otaku fantasy girl. A related meme is "ZOMG REI!" at pictures of any blue-haired characters.
- "Eyebrows," or "Amarao-Brows," is a reference to the anime series FLCL. The character Amarao's most notable feature are his enormous, rectangular eyebrows that appear to be made out of dried seaweed (nori). This meme came about during the initial Happy Negro wave, when HN was edited into an FLCL screencapture and given his own set of Amarao-Brows.
- A gaijin yonkoma is a 4-panel comic with many variations. The two pictures used in every incarnation of the Gaijin Yonkoma series show four IGN staff at E³. One picture shows them sitting in chairs, with little emotion; the other has them cheering wildly, apparently in response to news of a new Legend of Zelda video game. These have also been used as models for anime characters drawn in the same poses, most notably the characters Akane, Mitsuki and Haruka from Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien.
- "Happy Negro" is the nickname given to Santino Lee, a black porn actor featured in a series of photos from the adult website BangBus.Com. In one picture, he is shown fondling the breasts of another woman with an exaggerated expression of excitement on his face. It is this picture from which the nickname, and Lee's most common image, originates.
- "is this loli" Originally from /c/ controversy about whether posted images are too sexual to belong there. (The rules at the time permitted "mild nudity") Often the term is used to troll other posts. Also in reference to an Anonymous user in /b/ constantly making this reply to any and all pictures he saw, it caught on.
- lol internet was the the 100,000th post on /b/, by Anonymous, in an earlier incarnation of 4chan. It's famous because another poster who was trying to get the 100,000th post. After the he posted a picture of 100,000 in what was really the 99,999th post, he claimed he'd decided to commit suicide because of his failure.
- A master is out. Commonly invoked alongside the picture of a person (loli) or pet animal peeking out around a corner or a door that has been opened just a crack. The cause for this meme was a picture posted by a user from Japan showing a dog looking around the corner. The sentence is supposed to suggest that the dogs owner("a master") was out of the house("is out"), and he (the Dog) is waiting for him to return.
- "Moot", the owner of 4chan, was turned into a meme after he posted a picture from someone's vacation in Mexico of a man playfully sticking his head into a ruin. The man's face is photoshopped often onto other pictures in the same manner as Happy Negro and Cock Mongler.
- Multi-track Drifting is a reference to a particularly ridiculous chapter of the doujin manga "Densha de D", a Japanese parody comic about "Initial D"(a manga about downhill drift-style auto racing) in which the main character is shown "drifting" a passenger train.
- "Nevada-Tan" is the nickname of a 11-year-old Japanese schoolgirl who murdered another student in the classroom with a box cutter because she constantly mocked and taunted her. Her real name was never discovered, but in her class photo she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the words "Nevada". Drawings of Nevada commiting the murder and other various guro-related activities appear often on 4chan.
- "Osakaphone" was a short-lived fad before the fourth death of 4chan where it was common to post an ASCII image of Osaka from Azumanga Daioh holding a phone to her ear and saying various things. It was often accompanied with the ASCII Pedo Bear. Related is a flash video, somewhat commonly uploaded to /f/, where a sped-up verson of the song "Bananaphone" by Raffi accompanies the same ASCII rendition of Osaka, with a Gundam in a banana costume in the place of the original phone.
- Pedo Bear is an ASCII art bear copied over from the 2ch character Kuma (Bear). On 2ch, Kuma represents wilderness and nature, often exclaiming his dislike for work. In his free time, he fights Ronald McDonald and chases cute girls. On 4chan, however, he was "transformed" into a pedo during a /b/ AA flood. Other ASCII animals have been imported and assigned fetishes.
- sauce plz Humourous mispelling of the word "source", as in asking "What is the source of this image?" As an attention-grabbing pun, the request for "sauce" is sometimes accompanied by a picture of ketchup. It was also the cause of a wordfilter that automatically changed "source" into "sauce".
- "Spicy hot loligasms" has come to be associated with the two main characters from Futari wa Pretty Cure. The origins of the phrase are certain Habanero-tan comics and the notorious poster Buki Buki, who was known for making suggestive exclamations while posting pictures of young girls in /c/ (the cute board).
- "SPIKE DIES" was a trolling message referring to the death of Spike from Cowboy Bebop. It was considered an unannounced spoiler, although some posters argued that what actually counts as a spoiler for such a popular anime is subjective. Variations include replacing the name with a more current one (rude) or a very old or well known one (tongue-in-cheek).
- "Thrust vectoring owns the sky! This thing can turn on a dime, Macross Zero-style!" is a phrase in reference to the OVA series Macross Zero, which features aircraft able to change direction in an incredibly small amount of space. It was first posted as a comment on a picture of a F/A-22 Raptor, and then later placed next to pictures of other aircraft or vehicles, but was also seen on marques.
- VTEC just kicked in, yo refers to the Variable Valve Timing and Lift Electronic Control - VTEC - system in Honda car engines which compensates for the inefficiency of the pistons to intake oxygen used in combustion reactions at higher rpm speeds. The comment indicates a sudden increase in quality when it is used in context, though it has high actvity in out of context usage too. Unlike most memes on 4chan, this meme was spurned on /m/ and migrated to /b/.
- Waha is a meme adopted from Futaba channel.
- Yotsuba, (literally, "Four Leaves") besides being the name of the site, is also the name of a manga character and its eponymous manga, named "Yotsubato!" ("Yotsubato!"); Yotsuba, an energetic if dim little girl with four green pigtails, is sometimes joked to be the site's spokeswoman.
- Yaranaika Taken from a homosexual pornographic manga/doujinshi called "Kuso Miso Technic", this meme is associated with both the phrases and the faces from the said comic. Translated, the phase implies a sexual pick-up line ("Shall we do it?"). One of the oldest 2chan memes, adopted by 4chan.
- zOMG TORRENT PLZ is a request for files or images to be offered on BitTorrent. It's a jab at the demands of the internet user for instant gratification.
- zOMG NONE!!1 is an exclamation derived from the rules section of 4chan, which state that there are no rules that govern the /b/ board. Often spammed by a user via proxy immediately after receiving a siteban or IRC ban.
Bad/Short Exposure
While some memes are forged in the melting pot of /b, the vast majority never spread to the rest of 4chan, especially attempted "forced memes". A "failed meme" is an idea that for some reason didn't catch on, or was only propogated by one poster. Reidick and The Captain are examples. In fact, posters themselves can become the subject of personified "memes" that are kept around so to hasle the said user. After the user somehow vanishes or gets lost, or if the joke gets old fast, the meme stops.
- Bad Teeth Man is the name fixed on Pogues singer Shane MacGowan, though his picture does not appear often.
- "Cock Mongler" was named from a picture of a smiling redheaded man from the website for "The World's Largest Dinosaur" in Drumheller, Alberta. The words "I'LL SUCK YOUR COCK!" were added to the photo.
- Covercat came from a pornographic photograph where the participants were partially obscured by a out-of-focus orange cat sticking its head into frame. The cat has subsequently been photoshopped into (or rather, over) a variety of images.
- Cyber Akuma is a poster who is accused to be a troll on and off by the whole of the 4chan community. Quite a few of his posts were rather troll-worthy, but the meme begins when everything he says and thinks is accused of being a trolling comment. The trolling-meme didn't last.
- In Soviet Russia ... references what the world would be like if it were upside down. Almost entirely the product of the poster by same name, the meme actually serves no contextual purpose but to hopefully incite some laughter and perhaps make fun of the USSR. It works like this: if the image posted is of a cat and the comment is "Korea eat cat" as is common, the meme variaton is that "In Soviet Russia, cat eat Korea!"
- Joey, an Australian troll, is so comprehensively banned as to be rarely heard from these days.
- Milhouse is a failed and forced meme, caused by "You Forgot Poland." The same Milhouse as the Matt Groening Simpson's character.
- Queen of Punk Generally used to refer to the frequently flooded images of Canadian punk rocker Avril Lavigne - postergirl for the angry, disenfranchized youth of modern suburbia. Avril seems loved and hated in equal measure on 4chan and often serves as a catalyst for huge flame wars.
- "The Undernet (or other names like Ubernet or Underweb) is REAL! I found this... I think it is a hit to a way to find a way in..." Current running joke making fun of Lord Nat for his discovery of the map of the way into the Undernet.
- You forgot Poland was extracted from the political debates of the Bush/Kerry 2004 election. It is in general use as shorthand for a lame comeback.