Tuesday, June 29, 2010

ytmnd, the blender of culture

Most people have never heard of ytmnd, or "You're the Man Now, Dog!"

It more or less started out as a place where people would post mini-sites consisting only of a tiled picture, an endlessly looping sound and zooming text. All this in theory serves to capture a brief snippet of something good, and beat you over the head with it.

The first site I ever made, back in 2004, reflected this trend pretty well. I basically just photoshopped two things together to fit the sound clip. I wasn't a regular on the site at the time, but when I logged in a year later the thing had accumulated a couple thousand hits.

Things started getting more complicated on ytmnd as time went on though. Animated gifs became popular, and sites started turning into fads as their content was recycled repeatedly, and fads eventually started getting all mixed up as folks would jam images and sound clips from different sites together, in effect taking some of the best and most memorable moments from film and media, grinding them up and turning them into something entirely new.

Making a ytmnd is simple enough to allow for a lot of creative freedom, as you can really roll out just about anything if you have a couple hours, a good idea and some photoshop knowledge. Around 2006, however, when I was probably most involved with the site, ytmnds began getting a lot more elaborate.

The tiled image and zooming text started to go out of style, pretty much everything was animated, and the standards for quality went way up. They even thought up a whole alternate universe where the fads are slightly different.


This one was from 2006 is still my most popular ytmnd, with 26,000 hits to date and a pretty decent rating. It's nothing compared to the best ones out there, but I enjoyed my brief internet success. All it took was a few screenshots/audio from a DVD, knowledge of the "one man star wars" guy and a pretty good idea.

I haven't really been following the fads much since I left high school, but I like coming back to the site now and then whenever I get a good ytmnd idea or feel like some mindless entertainment.

Now they even have a nifty feature where you can have a background image and.. a foreground image! You're going to have to humor me, it was exciting. I used it to decent effect in my last ytmnd outing.

Anyway, that's just a little background on an obscure site I'm into. Maybe sometime I'll post a quick guide to creating ytmnds.

--D Ham

1 comment:

  1. I am commenting in a convoluted process to figure out the name of my blog

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