flash

An audition tape in which a man in an afro attempts a backflip, lands on his head, staggers to his feet and swings nunchucks anyway — filmed in 2004, viral in September 2005. The record's entry for the first great fall of the video era, and for finishing the routine regardless.

A mistranslated line from a forgotten shoot-'em-up, and the first thing the entire web laughed at simultaneously. The proof of concept for everything else in this dictionary.

A 2006 video of a German teenager smashing his keyboard and screaming at a slow-loading Unreal Tournament, subtitled and remixed into everything from Hitler parodies to lip-syncs. Was staged, which took years to be widely believed. The record's entry for the tantrum that toured the world in a hundred edits.

Badgers, a mushroom, a snake, on a loop. Ran uninterrupted for seventeen years and then stopped on the same afternoon as everything else made in the same program.

A loop of two anime girls waving their hands over their heads, set to a sped-up 2001 Swedish pop song, that spread from Japanese and 4chan boards in 2006 to every fandom's animation by 2008. Faded, then came back around 2021 when sped-up songs became a whole genre. The record's entry for the dance that every fandom has drawn.

Two English brothers and a bitten finger, viewed nearly nine hundred million times. Deleted from YouTube in 2021 after being sold as an NFT, making it the first meme to be bought out of public life.

Jason Steele's 2005 Flash cartoon in which two manic unicorns drag a grumpy one to Candy Mountain, where he loses a kidney. Went viral on YouTube in 2006 and gave a generation the phrase 'Shun the non-believer'. The record's entry for the first cartoon everyone could quote and nobody could explain.

A baritone leaving the microphone to breathe. Died when Dr Pepper hired him to sing about a soft drink, which was the point at which sincerity became inventory.