In Retrospect of /b/

Five years later? Six? It seemd like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. /b/ in the middle 00s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe int meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of ED articles or screencaps or archived threads can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the interwebz. Whatever it meant …

Web History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of the outcasts of a generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, wtf happened.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across a raid, then up a caturday or down a gore thread … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a careless universal sense that whatever we were doing was for teh lulz, that we were trolling …

And that, I think, was the handle — that inevitable sense of EPIC WIN over the forces of NORP and fail. Now in any srs or moralfaggotry sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a hasty and reckless wave …

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a thread in 4chanArchive and lurk back, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that post where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

• LURK MOAR
• PRODUCE O.C.
• RULES 1&2
• LURK EVEN MOAR
• ?????
• CHEMO