A shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive or disturbing to its viewers, though it can also contain elements of humor or evoke sexual arousal. Shock-oriented websites generally contain material such as pornographic, scatological, racist, antisemitic, sexist, graphically violent, insulting, vulgar, profane, or otherwise some other provocative nature. Websites that are primarily fixated on real death and graphic violence are particularly referred to as gore sites. Some shock sites display a single picture, animation, video clip or small gallery, and are circulated via email or disguised in posts to discussion sites as a prank. Steven Jones distinguishes these sites from those that collect galleries where users search for shocking content, such as Rotten.com. Gallery sites can contain beheadings, execution, electrocution, suicide, murder, stoning, torching, police brutality, hangings, terrorism, cartel violence, drowning, vehicular accidents, war victims, rape, necrophilia, genital mutilation and other sexual crimes.
Adobe Flash is, except in China, a discontinued multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich internet applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players.
Newgrounds is a company and entertainment website founded by Tom Fulp in 1995. It hosts user-generated content such as games, films, audio, and artwork. Fulp produces in-house content at the headquarters and offices in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
A stick figure, or stick man, is a very simple drawing of a person composed of a few lines and a circle. Often drawn by children, stick figures are known for their simplistic style. The head is most often represented by a circle, which can be a solid color or embellished with details such as eyes, a mouth, or hair. The arms, legs, torso, and abdomen are usually represented with straight lines. Details such as hands, feet, and a neck may be present or absent; simpler stick figures often display an ambiguous emotional expression or disproportionate limbs.
Albino Blacksheep (ABS) is an animation website made by Steven Lerner in Toronto, Ontario on January 4, 1999. It publishes member submitted digital media made with Adobe Flash. The website also features image galleries, audio files, and text files, along with a mobile section that provided ring tones, screensavers, and wallpaper for mobile phones.
Break.com is an entertainment and humor website founded in 1998 that featured comedy videos, flash games, and pictures among other material. The website's target audience was men aged 18–35.
YTMND, an initialism for "You're the Man Now, Dog", is an online community centered on the creation of hosted memetic web pages featuring a juxtaposition of an image centered or tiled along with optional large zooming text and a looping sound file. Images and sound files used in YTMNDs are usually either created or edited by users. YTMND is generally considered to be a humor website, owing its tone and culture to the original YTMND and its early imitators.
"The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny", often shortened to "The Ultimate Showdown", is a comical song and video released on December 22, 2005. The song was written and performed by Neil Cicierega under the pseudonym "Lemon Demon", with art and Flash animation by Shawn Vulliez/altffour.
A viral video is a video that becomes popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email. For a video to be shareable or spreadable, it must focus on the social logics and cultural practices that have enabled and popularized these new platforms.
Cracked.com is a website that was based on Cracked magazine. It was founded in 2005 by Jack O'Brien.
Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. The site receives many story submissions per day and approximately 100 of them are publicly displayed on the site, spread out over the main page as well as topical tabs that are organized as entertainment, sports, geek, politics and business). Curtis says the stories are selected without intentional political bias, but that he tries to run both far-left and far-right articles.
A lolcat, or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images' idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak.
I Can Has Cheezburger? is a blog-format website featuring videos and image macros. It was created in 2007 by Eric Nakagawa (Cheezburger), from Hawaii, and his friend Kari Unebasami (Tofuburger). The website was one of the most popular Internet sites of its kind receiving as many as 1,500,000 hits per day at its peak in May 2007. ICHC was instrumental in bringing animal-based image macros and lolspeak into mainstream usage and making Internet memes profitable.
Something Awful (SA) is an American comedy website hosting content including blog entries, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. It was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but as it grew, so did its contributors and content. The website has helped to perpetuate various Internet phenomena, and it has been cited as an influence on Internet culture. In 2018, Gizmodo placed it as 89th on their list of "100 Websites That Shaped the Internet as We Know It".
Fun Little Movies (FLM) is a production and distribution company of short films intended for the internet and mobile devices. It was founded in 1988 by Frank Chindamo, currently an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California. Based in Burbank, California, Fun Little Movies was the first U.S. company to produce comedic films for mobile phones worldwide. By the time the company was in development of Psyche 101 in 2004, they had already begun producing shorts promoting internet dating services. In 2007, ROK Entertainment bought controlling interest in FLM, although in 2008 ROK defaulted on their agreement.
Know Your Meme (KYM) is a website and video series which uses wiki software to document various Internet memes and other online phenomena, such as viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, Internet celebrities and more. It also investigates new and changing memes through research, as it commercializes on the culture. Originally produced by Rocketboom, the website was acquired in March 2011 by Cheezburger Network, which, in 2016, was acquired by Literally Media. Know Your Meme includes sections for confirmed, submitted, deadpooled, researching, and popular memes.
Vyond is an American cloud-based animated video creation platform created by Alvin Hung in 2007 and developed by the San Mateo, California-based GoAnimate, Inc.
Alan Becker is an American online animator, YouTube personality and artist, best known for creating the Animator vs. Animation web series and the spin-off Animation vs. franchise, in particular the web series Animation vs. Minecraft Shorts and Animation vs. Education.
The End of the World was a Flash animated viral video created by Jason Windsor of Albino Blacksheep in 2003. A copy of the animation uploaded by Albino Blacksheep to YouTube in 2008 had approximately 14 million views before being abandoned in favor of a higher-resolution version.
