/b/search

BAM! To behold, a public bulletin board, built of both brilliance and barbarity by bastards with boners. This bastion, no mere bulwark of boredom, is a brutal barrage of blistering bullshit, barely benevolent… but behind the bigotry and boobs, beyond the bitter broadcasts of bragging buffoons: here be the body politic. A brotherhood of blasphemy, blessed with more balls than brains, battling the bland, the bogus, the benign. Bedlam? Bring it on. But I babble… better to be brief. You may call me /b/.
– Anonymous

I am bored

I’ve spent a lot of time on the Internet. From the days of eWorld, PPP dialup access, 2400bps modems, the excitement when 14.4bps modems came out. Then came broadband. After the tech installed the cable modem, I really didn’t know what to do first - sure, seeing big sites load really fast was nifty. Then came fast Usenet downloads, Hotline replaced the dialup BBS, no more having to first transfer downloads to my ISP and then to my computer. It was great.

Then came bigger and better - Web 2.0, AJAX, MySQL, PHP, and so on. Now, even with 5Mbps downstream at home, things still move slow. BitTorrent, Gnutella, Flickr, YouTube - I’d kill for more speed. Not the 7Mbps I could get from jumping to some sort of DSL package, but the 40Mbps promised by fiber connections.

So I’m stuck with a so-so connection, but on-demand entertainment is lacking. Nothing is on-demand when music and movies can take more than a week to “obtain.” How do I get my fix when I need to kill time, or when I’m just bored?

The answer is /b/.

A chance encounter

This article contains graphic imagery. You have been warned!

I was turned on to /b/ while lurking at Encyclopedia Dramatica. ED is a great source of entertainment and… education, in a sense. While it started out cataloging a lot of LiveJournal drama, it is now the premier repository of Internet knowledge. Of course if you need real information, stick to Wikipedia - for the rest of us with an “Internet” sense of humor, stick to ED.

Now I don’t quite remember how I ended up at ED, but I do recall how hard I was laughing at the definition of Lulz. It was genuinely funny, but strictly geared towards those of us with a sense of humor that has been nurtured by all of the crap on the Internet.

While browsing around ED, I came across their series of articles on 4chan. Not knowing what to make of it at first (as it seemed like a very niche forum) I popped it into Wikipedia:

4chan (Japanese:: Yotsuba, lit. “four leaves” Channel) is an English language imageboard, based on the famous Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel. It was first announced and created as an offshoot of the Something Awful forums, but soon attracted anime fans from around the world. On 4chan, many pictures (often related to anime and manga) are posted and critiqued.

Wikipedia goes on to to explain how 4chan is a mix of 35 different image boards, and mentioned something about how UK ISPs shut down access to one of the image boards due to the posting of illegal content. So far, sounds tame.

Now, Encyclopedia Dramatica defines 4chan as:

…an anonymous Japanimation-themed collection of image boards. The site is vaguely affiliated with Something Awful and is a spinoff of the Japanese-only Futaba Channel, the image board of 2ch.

Not surprisingly, most of the image boards consist of hentai. Furries are banned everywhere on the site, with the exception of “/b/”, the “random” board, which has no rules (although mods often delete furry pictures there too). This has led to much internet drama and the creation of the furry-only fchan.

Many catchphrases, such as “sauce plz”, originated at 4chan.
Also, many image macros are created there, being the most popular the O RLY and YA RLY owls.

Alright, now it’s beginning to sound interesting. I love me some offbeat humor. Of note, the only genuinely relevant image board is the /b/ board - the “Random” board:

…the playground of our beloved Internet, those joyful enough to enter here should be well advised to make friends with its inhabitants, for they like to frolick playfully. Residents include racists, pedophiles, Cracky-chan, Desu Desu Desu and Azumanga Daioh fanboys.

So I bit. And I lurked. I stayed removed from the insanity and observed, collected and cataloged. Here is just a sampling of what goes on in /b/, and my thoughts on it.

Keep in mind that this is only a brief glimpse at the state of /b/ - I’ve been following along and selecting the most attention-grabbing pieces for a little over a month.

It’s taking over my brain

/b/ is not quite a forum, not quite a chat room. By definition it is an “image board,” where folks can easily post text along with a picture. It is fast and lightweight. And it is never static.

Spend ten minutes at /b/ and you will be treated to an exhausting amount of material. So much so, that if you delay reading a thread, chances are it will be gone into the ether the next time you reload. It is constantly changing and evolving. What is in good taste and funny at 5pm will be passé by 10pm. With 10 pages of content, there is tons of stuff that gets quickly pushed to the back, while an equal amount of stuff gets an incredible amount of recognition. I’ve even read opinions that “/b/ may as well be one page long, since it moves so quickly.” A post about a guy breaking up with his girlfriend, whether true or not, can generate responses from helpful suggestions to downright electronic assault. A post on the state of Israel will bring up snippets about racism, religion, abortion, and sometimes, Israel. While most of it is completely idiotic, there’s always a diamond of intelligence that will pop up.

Along with all of this text, there are tons of images. Image macros, where someone will stick a funny line of text over an image, are the most popular type. Internet memes, such as the whole Chuck Norris thing, started here. Acronyms are born and die here. /b/ is the frontier of Internet humor, bad taste, offensive behavior and, sometimes, illegal content.

You should note that /b/ is completely anonymous. No user names, no registration, no passwords. Access it right and you’ll be nearly untraceable. This aspect has led to some of the most incendiary content I’ve ever seen posted in a public place - if /b/ was the real world, we’d be in World War III. That, or we’d be living in perfect acceptance of one another, and everyone would be happy. It would be one or the other.

Hanging out in /b/, I found myself asking - are these people building walls, or tearing them down? Are they hate-mongers and racists, or just making fun of everyone on the planet? Is all of this in the worst taste imaginable, or on the bleeding edge of humor and irreverence?

Honestly, it is hard to come up with the words to perfectly describe /b/. I figure it is different for each anonymous person. While one may be a 40 year-old racist posting about anime, the other might be a 15 year-old anime fan posting racist propaganda. Regardless, almost all of it is offensive to someone out there.

And with almost all of it offensive - you have to laugh. At least a little.

At /b/, everyone is accountable, and no one can hide. Your skin color doesn’t matter, nor does your gender, age, weight, height, intelligence, talent, skill, and anything else that makes you, you. You are taken to task for your words, your beliefs, your statements. Government officials, terrorist attacks, pro-life vs. pro-choice, suicides, murders, video games, anime, porn of every type - it is discussed, analyzed, and torn apart. You will never need to defend yourself nor get a chance to, because everyone is anonymous. As /b/ says - “Anonymous does not forgive.”

To give a tour of /b/ to those that do not know, requires images. Somewhere over 1000 images should do the trick, and that’s what I’ve prepared. This article is useless without pictures. Along with each notable situation I’ve run into in /b/, you will find an image gallery or two. Viewing these is absolutely necessary to understanding /b/.

Two notes of interest. First, the repeated use of the word “Desu” in some of the images, and on the board itself, comes from Suiseiseki - a character from the anime Rozen Maiden “who says it extremely frequently as a kind of catchphrase. She is often simply called DESU because her name is difficult for some people to spell. Desu is a word commonly added to the end of sentences in Japan, meaning “it is/be/are/am” and so on; it is considered more formal than usual and is mainly used when talking to people you don’t know or to a superior. Desu is often a spam reply when an unwitting newcomer asks for the definition; this was probably inspired by the Dan Kim webcomic where she is constantly repeats [the word].”

Second, the use of the term “an hero.” To “become an hero” usually means to kill yourself, but it has also seen use as literally, “a hero,” only grammatically incorrect. This originates from the story of Mitchell Henderson, a young boy that shot himself supposedly due to issues in school. Something his friends wrote for him started out with “He was such an hero.” Meme born.

Please take note - chances are you will be offended by the following content. Consider yourself duly warned.

The Meat

The main content in /b/ are memes. These are snippets of text or images that just happen to get a good bit of mindshare, and are then repeated endlessly. It is artistically chaotic how these memes evolve. Like a remix of a song, multiple memes are constantly mashed together. As long as you’ve seen one meme before, you can’t help but to laugh at the new and creative, and idiotic, ways this media gets mangled.

Below are three image galleries with over 250 images total. I have taken the images out of their respective threads, so the focus would be strictly on the visuals, not how they factored into a discussion or argument. When you’re all done, we’ll move on to the next topic.

       

Azumanga: 4chan’s semi-official anime

Azumanga Daioh is a comedy/drama manga by Kiyohiko Azuma, that was later adapted into an anime series. The series follows a group of students at a Japanese high school - it is similar in some ways to Charles Schultz’ Peanuts comic strip. The most popular character on /b/ is Osaka, apparently due to her “spacey manner and nearly constant smile.” She plays into many memes, though is more of a carrier of other memes than one herself - she could be considered a mascot.

Below is a perfect example of meme mash-up: an image of Osaka with a blank face is perfect material for mixing memes.

Cutting

During my time in /b/, I happened upon a request for pictures of cutting. Cutting is the practice or habit of inflicting pain on oneself to avoid or put off emotional pain. Of course, this being /b/, the images that were put up were the most extreme examples of this.

A day in the life of a /b/tard

MS Paint is a pretty big meme. Those that can’t use Photoshop, use MS Paint. It is like watching kids with crayons - sometimes the most rudimentary scrawl with a thick brush can be funnier than the most extravagantly Photoshopped image.

The idea for this thread was, “A day in the life of your average /b/tard.” Hilarity ensues.

Dickshirt

The Dickshirt meme started with the posting of a young man wearing a shirt, with the phrase “Bitches dont know bout my dick” on it in large block letters. All caps, no punctuation. The residents of /b/ proceeded to tear into it - kind of like throwing a hungry shark some chum. Old memes, as well as attempts at creating new ones, were slapped all over the guy.

While we’re along the lines of copying and pasting, there’s a delightful 4chan term - “copy pasta.” This is basically funny bits of text (stories, jokes, whatever) that get copied and pasted all over the board. Some of it is considered meme material, while other is just filler. It can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between original content and this copy pasta, especially on an anonymous board - but sure enough there’s almost always someone pointing it out. Most folks in /b/ have folder full of images and a file full of copy pasta, ready to whip it out when needed.

Doom

Comic mashups are a big part of /b/ life. While this isn’t a meme (yet), I thought this series of Doom comic alterations was pretty funny and creative. Not much else to say on it, as you’ll either get the humor or you won’t.

Jesus

While there are numerous discussions on religion in /b/, no one is more ridiculed than Jesus. Chalk it up to the millions of historical (and inaccurate, or overblown) images available. However it started, Jesus is just an easy target for all manner of blasphemy.

Katamari

Katamari Damacy is a video game in which you play a prince, that needs to roll a sticky ball around, collecting enough material to make the ball into a star. For more details see Wikipedia, but for those that know, this was one of the funniest threads I saw in /b/. Someone started it by posting a picture of the prince and his sticky ball. The nest posted stuck something onto the ball. And so forth, over more than 4 hours of activity. The beginning and end of the thread is included in the gallery below, so you can see how it all went down.

Lazer

The “shoop da woop/lazer” meme looks like an anime character with blackface Photoshopped onto it. It’s a huge /b/ meme, making appearances almost everywhere. The first few images in this gallery are the “core” images, followed by a selection of “remixed” ones. Not quite sure of the origin. One /b/ poster told me that it “comes from the new star wars movie and the star wars kid also known as Numa Numa guy.” I’m pretty sure that’s not it though.

Motivation Posters

This was one of the best memes I’d seen on /b/. You know those Motivation Posters you see every so often - the ones that say things such as “Teamwork: You can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.” /b/ manages to take every image and meme they can get their hands on, and crank out their own versions of these posters. The results are offensive, hilarious, sobering and sometimes brilliant. Below are nearly 200 of these works of art, split into two galleries.

    

Optimized GIF Dude

Back in 2004, a Deviant Artist named Miika Jokinen (aka Verdot) created a little character called Optimized GIF Dude. Created in MS Paint and then uploaded to 4chan, it has since spawned hundreds upon hundreds of variations - some based on memes, others completely random. He says on his site:

Yes, I have made quite a lot of these seen here, but I couldn’t have done all of them without the help of fellow /b/tards… thanks to OPTIMIZATION, even [an image] with 240 different [variations] put together (about 5984 x 5503 pixels) barely reached 1.3MB in size.

The gallery below contains 325 different variations of Optimized GIF Dude for your viewing pleasure.

Paperclip

Ah, the humble Microsoft Office Assistant, the paper clip. His real name is Clippit, believe it or not. He’ll pop up every so often while you’re working with Office to lend a hand - more often than not, he’s just an annoyance. Which leads to the remixing of Clippit, the very annoying and pushy paperclip.

Pedobear

This is one of the situations where /b/ will cross the line for some people in terms of taste. Pedobear was originally a Japanese character from another image board, *2ch. I will let Lurkmore’s great wiki explain the exact origin:

Spawned the Pedo Bear Seal of Approval shopped from old Nintendo games. Originally “Kuma” from 2ch, who is not a pedophile at all, is a nature lover, and supposedly hates Ronald McDonald.
A few users started an in-joke whereby one would post Osakaphone saying something, and the other would post Kuma with a response. As the posts began getting more and more sexually oriented, paired with the innocence and widely-held immaturity of Osaka, led some to dub Kuma as being “pedo” for her. Now Pedobear is placed after pictures of underage girls.

Pedobear gets mixed up in plenty of image macros and memes - a selection of images is below.

What 4chan cries out during sex

Like the Azumanga thread before it, this one started with an image of two people in bed, with an empty word bubble over the man’s head. Forty images later, it represented the history of memes at /b/.

Video game paintings

I came across these while on /b/. Unfortunately my attempts to find out who made them were unsuccessful. They’re “real-life” paintings of a variety of old video games, such as Super Mario Bros, Dig Dug, and more.

September 11th

I was born and raised in New York City, so the Twin Towers are a part of my upbringing. Even though it was a shock to have them both collapse on September 11th, 2001 - I laughed at these images, but very nervously. Yes, they’re offensive. Yes, they trample on the memories of those that lost their lives. Yes, they’re in the worst taste imaginable. But you can’t ignore the humor - it’s too bold and brazen.

Legendary Threads

Every once in a while, a thread pops up that everyone agrees is legendary - it’s funny, offensive, or vulgar, and often all three at the same time. Some have points, others are completely pointless. Some are even completely recursive and make no sense. Have a peek into some of the best threads of /b/ below.

Webcam abuse and invasions of privacy, or, When common sense should prevail

Please note, this section contains graphic imagery, somewhat more risky than previous images.

Time to get serious. As /b/ is an anonymous board, illegal content often pops up. Pirated music, movies and games distributed by BitTorrent or, more often, RapidShare. The biggest scourge of /b/, though, is the posting of child pornography. Technically, /b/ is a public board, so you would think people would not be tempted to post this kind of content. It is the anonymity that allows people to do what they normally would not. Thankfully the moderators remove child porn (which /b/ has nicknamed “CP”) relatively quickly, and users also have the ability to report posts of this nature.

While in reality the reaction to child porn is usually one of shock and sadness, on /b/ it is treated with a certain light-heartedness that can be very disquieting.

Stickam is a webcam community, like MySpace in a way, where users set up video feeds with their webcams and can offer chat rooms, prerecorded videos, photos, and more. /b/ loves a “camwhore” - that is, someone that will show some skin, or at least do things like writing “/b/” on their hand, over their webcam.

Furthering this agenda are Stickam raids. One person will acquire a “target” - say, a girl that looks like she may fold easily under pressure to remove her top. They’ll post this repeatedly on /b/ - soon enough, the /b/ raiders will pile into a chatroom, and spam it with line after line of nonsense. Every so often, they’ll coordinate to sweet talk the girl instead of bombarding her with /b/ material - but it’s usually memes, copy pasta, trick URLs, and of course, the infamous request “TITS OR GTFO.”

For the uneducated, that means “show your chest or leave,” to put it very nicely.

If the target agrees to demands, it is considered a “WIN.” Anything less is usually considered a “FAIL” - unless there are other goings-on that are considered entertaining.

Once of these Stickam webcam incidents involved a 15 year-old girl. While I did not see this happen live, I did see the materials posted to /b/ afterwards. This young brunette, in what looked like her bedroom, was chatting over her webcam. No sound. It looked innocent enough until she started leaning back. From there, it devolved into stripping, and then masturbation. On camera.

Did you see the movie 8MM? Remember the scene where Nicholas Cage is watching the snuff film for the first time? It felt just like that.

Who was this girl talking to? Was it one person in a private room or many in a public one? Was it a public room in the middle of a raid? Was this girl drunk or on drugs - or did she just like the attention and/or the audience? If it was many people, how did they coax her into this? They obviously broke her down over time - the entire incident was over an hour and a half. Did this girl not think that someone would record it and distribute it? Did she not realize what males on the other end would be doing while watching this - did she enjoy that? How old were the people on the other end - 16? 26? 46? Husbands, brothers, fathers? Sisters, mothers? Extrapolating this incident, was this statutory rape? Assault on a minor? Was it just bad judgement on her part but completely voluntary? If so, is this child pornography or just “blue” material and in extremely bad taste?

Once you’re on /b/, at best you’ll be on people’s hard drives. At worst, you’ll be reposted on /b/ for a long, long time. A while after the incident, her name is still references and screenshots are still posted.

I debated putting up a gallery for this - I can’t write about /b/ if I ignore it. It is censored, of course. Additionally, I tried getting in touch with this young woman, but have not heard back as of posting this article. Should I hear back from her, this section will receive an update.

Another incident I came across involved a video that a young girl made for a boy that she was “in love with.” The girl could not have been more than 16. In this video, she tells the boy how much she loves him - then proceeds, in a move that appeared quite desperate, to demonstrate her “sexual side” to him.

This of course, I could not censor properly. But the audio tells the story just fine - sensitive material has been bleeped out. Click here to listen. (5.4MB MP3)

In summary

This was my time in /b/. What I saw in this community were artists, comedians, idiots, geniuses, and perverts. It felt like a cross section of Anytown, USA - but where everyone was allowed to do anything they wanted without fear of consequences. As often as I was impressed by the material that this group cranked out, I was more shocked overall. But it has this strange attractiveness - you end up wanting to go back to see just how far they will push the envelope.

/b/ is in a constant state of de facto war with other online communities, despite the fact that many visitors to /b/ have come from these communities. Most notably, /b/ is at odds with YTMND, Gaia Online, Habbo Hotel, eBaum’s World, and others.

Something I did notice is, although no one really knows anyone else on the board, their ability to organize is incredible. I’ve seen some /b/ raids on other boards and online services that just boggled my mind, most notably the Great Habbo Raid. This was an organized raid on a community called Habbo Hotel - a semi-3D chatroom targeted towards 13 to 20 year-olds. Thousands and thousands of /b/ residents stormed the service with avatars dressed in afros, black suits and black pants. They blocked doors with their dancing, and the swimming pool areas with cries of “Pool’s closed due to AIDS!”

It was one of the most pointless, yet unbelievably funny things I’ve ever seen on the Internet.

/b/ definitely deserves their tag of being the Random board.

Reading material

To close this out, I’ve included a few PDFs of a few large /b/ threads - one even surpasses 200 pages. Have a look for a sampling of what /b/ is like on a busy day.

If you dare, you could check out /b/ on your own. Make sure to be funny, creative, and you’d better have some pretty thick skin - chances are your first few posts will get lambasted. Lurk for about three months before posting. And don’t cry if you get reamed. You’ll notice that I haven’t linked directly to /b/ - find it yourself.

Hope you enjoyed!

• The /b/ “Manifesto.” (85K JPEG)

• Abusing an anti-porn forum populated primarily by women. (412K PDF)
• And, a standard /b/ reply. (40k JPEG)

• Saturdays are known as Caturdays. Cats get posted everywhere. (1.3MB PDF)

• Someone had uploaded child pornography to a porn-oriented version of YouTube, called PornoTube. (332K PDF)
• The page on PornoTube before the movie was taken down. The movie had well over 2500 views before it was removed. (36K JPEG)

• Discussion on the state of Israel. (420K PDF)

• “What /b/ image should I put on my neighbor’s door?” (344K PDF)

• An erotic story, with a meme-related plot twist. (268K PDF)

• Abusing a site called QuestionSwap. (564K PDF)

• A discussion on race. (824K PDF)

• A massive, 244-page sticky thread (a thread that gets attached to the top of /b/’s first page). Mostly pointless, but funny. (4.7MB PDF)

Thanks

Thanks to the following:

• David Lanham, one of the greatest artists and GUI designers, who whipped up the custom gallery icon.

• Lurkmore’s 4chan wiki, where I was able to get background on the origins of a few memes.

• Wikipedia, for strangely having odd entries such as YTMND in it.

• Encyclopedia Dramatica, for properly having odd entries such as YTMND in it.

• And of course, /b/ and all the /b/tards. Thanks for destroying my childhood.

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