An urban legend is a genre of folklore comprising claims or stories circulated as true, especially as having happened to a "friend of a friend" or a family member, often with horrifying, humorous, or cautionary elements. These legends can be entertaining but often concern mysterious peril or troubling events, such as disappearances and strange objects or entities. Urban legends may confirm moral standards, reflect prejudices, or be a way to make sense of societal anxieties. In the past, urban legends were most often circulated orally, at gatherings and around the campfire for instance. Now, they can be spread by any media, including newspapers, mobile news apps, e-mail, and most often, social media. Some urban legends have passed through the years/decades with only minor changes, in where the time period takes place. Generic urban legends are often altered to suit regional variations, but the lesson or moral generally remains the same.
A Photoshop contest, or sometimes Photoshop battle, is an online game, in which a website or user of an Internet forum will post a starting image — usually a photograph — and ask others to manipulate the image using some kind of graphics editing software, usually Adobe Photoshop, however other editors are commonly allowed, such as Corel Photo-Paint, GIMP, PaintShop Pro, Paint.NET or even Microsoft Paint. People can also use video editing software to create these images, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Kdenlive, OpenShot, or NCH VideoPad.
Photograph manipulation involves the transformation or alteration of a photograph. Some photograph manipulations are considered to be skillful artwork, while others are considered to be unethical practices, especially when used to deceive. Photographs may be manipulated for political propaganda, to improve the appearance of a subject, for entertainment, or as humor.
Faxlore is a sort of folklore: humorous texts, folk poetry, folk art, and urban legends that are circulated, not by word of mouth, but by fax machine. Xeroxlore or photocopylore is similar material circulated by photocopying; compare samizdat in Soviet-bloc countries.
Bonsai Kitten was a hoax website that claimed to instruct readers how to raise a kitten in a jar, so as to mold the bones of the kitten into the shape of the jar as the cat grows in the same way as a bonsai plant. It was made by an MIT student going by the alias of Dr. Michael Wong Chang. The website generated fury with many people taking it as serious and complaining to animal rights organizations. The Michigan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) stated that "while the site's content may be faked, the issue it is campaigning for may create violence towards animals". Although the website is now shut down, petitions are still circulated to shut down the site or complain to its ISP. The website has been debunked by several organizations including Snopes.com and the Humane Society of the United States.
The "tourist guy" was an internet phenomenon that featured a photograph of a tourist on the observation deck of the World Trade Center digitally altered to show a plane about to hit the tower in the background during the September 11 attacks. The photo went viral in the days after the attacks as many manipulated pictures spread online. The man in the photograph was identified as Hungarian Péter Guzli, who took the photo in 1997. Guzli said he edited the photo as a joke for his friends and did not intend for it to spread across the internet.
Adobe Lightroom is a piece of image organization and image processing software developed by Adobe Inc. as part of the Creative Cloud subscription family. It is supported on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and tvOS. Its primary uses include importing, saving, viewing, organizing, tagging, editing, and sharing large numbers of digital images. Lightroom's editing functions include white balance, presence, tone, tone curve, HSL, color grading, detail, lens corrections, and calibration manipulation, as well as transformation, spot removal, red eye correction, graduated filters, radial filters, and adjustment brushing. The name of the software is based on darkrooms used for processing light-sensitive photographic materials.
The Batcopter is the fictional personal helicopter of the DC Comics superhero Batman.
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.
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".
Peter Joseph Souza is an American photojournalist, the former chief official White House photographer for Presidents of the United States Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama and the former director of the White House Photography Office. He was a photographer with The Chicago Tribune, stationed at the Washington, D.C., bureau from 1998 to 2007; during this period he also followed the rise of then-Senator Obama to the presidency.
FreakingNews was a news-oriented Photoshop contest website that came online August 2, 2002 and officially opened on October 23, 2003, as a sister site of Worth1000. The virtual community of 17,000+ digital artists and members featured free daily Photoshop contests that were fueled by global news and events. FreakingNews was featured on television shows, magazines and newspapers, including Comedy Central, MTV, Weekly World News, Glenn Beck Show, Stern Magazine, The Guardian, The Daily News, The Dallas Morning News, and the Los Angeles Times. The site closed in 2020.
There have been various accounts of persons who allegedly travelled through time reported by the press or circulated on the Internet. These reports have turned out either to be hoaxes or to be based on incorrect assumptions, incomplete information, or interpretation of fiction as fact, many being now recognized as urban legends.
A selfie is a self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a digital camera or smartphone, which may be held in the hand or supported by a selfie stick. Selfies are often shared on social media, via social networking services such as Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and Snapchat.
Representations of the shark are common in popular culture in the Western world, with a range of media generally portraying them of eating machines and threats. In some media, however, comedy is drawn from portrayals of sharks running counter to their popular image, with shark characters being portrayed as unexpectedly friendly or otherwise comical. The lists below give an approximate sample of the many forms of representation of the shark in popular culture.
Hurricane Shark and Street Shark are nicknames for several claimed instances of a live shark swimming in a flooded urban area, typically in the aftermath of a hurricane. For more than a decade, all media purporting to document such claims—most notably an image of a shark swimming on a flooded freeway—were debunked as fabrications. However, during Hurricane Ian in 2022, the Associated Press verified a video taken by Dominic Cameratta of a shark or other large fish swimming in flooded Fort Myers, Florida; one consulted expert concluded that the fish was "a juvenile shark" while another was unable to determine whether it was a shark. Both the re-emergence of the hoax in hurricane after hurricane and the eventual appearance of a plausible claim have been the subject of commentary and amusement; Daniel Victor of The New York Times described the Associated Press's findings as "like discovering Bigfoot is real".
Mayoreo, or Mayoreo Sauce, is a food product created by the Instagram account Doctor Photograph and originally posted on June 23, 2021. It was then shared on various social media platforms before being fact-checked by the website Snopes two days later. Since then, the story has been covered by a number of media outlets, including a local news station in Houston. Mayoreo is a portmanteau of mayonnaise and Oreos.
