How opinions morph (also, pacifico is a fag)

I had been trying to avoid directly mentioning 4chan on this blog, but I've used some decidedly *chan-culture-based word phrasing in the past and am currently suffering from severe withdrawal because pacifico is a fag.

But that's not what I planned on writing about when I started this post.

I was watching the ROFLcon video of the Internet Leaders panel with Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), Randall Munroe (xkcd), and moot (4chan). Towards the end they were discussing topics that for whatever reason got me thinking about how I got into 4chan and how I'd respond if I was ever asked.

I had heard about it almost from the very beginning, I think I was shown 4chan by a friend sometime in 2004. It was still widely filled with name/tripfaggotry and the whole concept of Anonymous hadn't taken hold yet (because forced anon hadn't been introduced). I didn't regularly browse the site by any means and actually struggled to remember the URL.

Later on (in 2006), after 4chan had pretty much grabbed its place in society (probably by the balls, yanking as hard as possible), I kept seeing more and more people pasting a link to an image on 4chan and discussing it, laughing, saying "that's horrible", often about the same image. I finally broke down and visited /b/ for the period of a week. I did nothing but lurk that week, as for whatever reason my internet connection was horrible (or maybe it was 4chan, I dunno) and while I could access the server /b/ was on (img.4chan.org), I couldn't access the server that processes its posts (dat.4chan.org).

That was very brief, I saved no images, laughed at a few things, and generally felt stupider at the end of the week.

It wasn't until I got tired of having the shitty wallpaper I had that I really became a regular 4chan user. My wallpaper, for the longest time, had either been nonexistant, an official wallpaper from some company (SPAM, for instance), or more recently, screenshots taken from in-game events in Guild Wars.

My concept of a good wallpaper is the opinion that the title of this post refers to. When I first started sifting through /w/, aimlessly searching for images, I had been used to wallpapers that had logos, text, and other things that I now consider to be sacrilege. Almost immediately I noticed the anti-text sentiment on /w/, as detext threads are common.

After a while of building up a collection, and finding that I had enough stuff to start being able to fill requests, I noticed a complete 180 in how I thought about text and logos on wallpapers. I hate them. Whenever possible, I photoshop them out or ask /w/ for a detext. A few good anons (and some name/tripfags) have been the source of some awesome detexts that I'm very thankful for.

I have this thing about wanting to contribute to a community while benefiting from it. I guess that's why I like BitTorrent, and also why I joined the staff at MAGFest, but I'll save those subjects for another time. So, I boned up on my clone tool skillz and started doing detexts. Not as a huge project or anything, but if I see a wallpaper posted and someone asks for the detext and I think I can do it, I'll give it a shot. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya album on my Google Picasa account contains one example of this, someone posted a wallpaper that was originally severely infested with text. After looking at it for a bit, I said "I can do this!" A good portion of the wallpaper could actually be detexted by using the rectangular marquee to copy and paste portions of the wallpaper and superimpose them over the text, but that's what happens when there's a grid pattern.

Another case was a wallpaper of Yomi from Azumanga Daioh, dressed in all black, pants slightly unzipped to reveal black lace panties. Pretty damn sexy even before the clothing is mentioned. However, she was wearing a cross on a necklace. I don't subscribe to that mythology, yet I wanted the wallpaper badly, so in about 50000 hours, I clone stamped it out and posted my version up in the thread.

Most detexts and other wallpaper edits I do are primarily for myself, but I try to contribute them back to /w/ whenever possible. There's a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside when you go to post an edit of a wallpaper you did several months ago, the thread you posted it in is long gone, etc., only to be stopped by the "Duplicate File Entry" error, meaning someone else posted it already.

Think about that. Someone else liked an edit of a wallpaper I did (fixing a weird background color, removing as much of the JPEG loss as I possibly could, and saving the result as a PNG) so much that not only did they download it to their hard drive, but they reposted it. I've always liked when I can see some sort of verification that I've had an impact on society, no matter how small.

From /w/, well, I always had /b/ open as well. But after getting used to /w/, I decided to branch out a bit and see what else 4chan had to offer. I don't remember the exact order of events, but I've come to lurk (and post on) /b/, /ck/, /gif/, /r9k/, and /w/. From doing even just this little, it's very easy to notice that within 4chan's culture, it seems like every board has its own subculture(s).

/w/ has people who clean up scans to make wallpapers out of them, people who gank somewhat decent wallpapers off of animepaper and release them into the wild, people who do detexts, and people who do vectors. Occasionally there's some original content as well. Also, there's a sense of dependency from one subculture to another, that I notice whenever I see a wallpaper or "post your desktop" thread anywhere on 4chan other than /w/ or /wg/. A good portion of 4chan users, while not regularly browsing /w/ or /wg/, nevertheless depend on those two boards for wallpapers.

I speak primarily of /w/ when documenting 4chan's subcultures because it's still the board I like the most in all of 4chan. /w/ alone has changed me. I went from maybe having an unorganized folder containing two or three random wallpapers that had logos, text, credits, etc. that I'd manually change between once every few months to having a dedicated "wallpapers" directory filled with very many wallpapers, organized into subdirectories by source, very few containing text or logos, and rotated once every 4 hours by WinWall. I'm in the process of looking for a better way to organize and rotate my wallpapers (pImgDB is going to be awesome whenever the fuck praetox finishes it), and have remnants of not one but several personal projects aimed at organizing and rotating them saved in various places on this computer as well as on my server.

Now that I think about it, all of 4chan has changed me. /b/'s inane activities, the memes, stupid sayings that will get you strange looks should you utter them in real life, even in the company of other channers, and much more have all become an irreplaceable part of my life.

So in summary, fuck you pacifico. Even if what you say is true and it's not currently raidchan continuing the DDoS attacks. If you want to DDoS something worthwhile for a change, why not fchan (furries), deviantart (furries), gaiaonline ('nuff said), livejournal (emos), somethingawful (fags), anontalk (cancer), ebaumsworld (cancer), the RIAA/MPAA (cancer/cancer), or PETA (cancer)?

Hell, DDoS the WoW realms. That way I get my friend back (until you stop). I guess he's not much of a friend if he only contacts me wanting to get together and do something when WoW is down (though strangely, during WoW's regularly-scheduled server maintenance, he's still silent).