Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Meme Day 1: Rickrolling

The first meme of February (also known as Febtober by Sean Connery...at least according to SNL's rendition of Celebrity Jeopardy) - Rickrolling!

A Rickroll is when someone pulls a bait and switch on you on the Internet, making you think that you're going somewhere, but you end up seeing a video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video.  So for instance, I might say something along the lines of, "Here's the awesome trailer for this new movie that everyone's been waiting for!"  You click on the link, expecting to see a trailer for that new movie.  Instead, you get a video to Rick Astley's music video.

Many variants of this have been spotted in the wild.  There's that time in 2008 that fans of Rickrolling flooded the European MTV music awards and got him the title of Best Act Ever.  If you happened to click on any links on YouTube's main page on April Fool's day 2008, you would have been Rickrolled - every front page video redirected to the Rickroll video.  Then there's that time that Rick was himself Rickrolled.

I've recently been made aware of the Russian Rickroll.  It's also the theme song of trolling (hence the "trolololo").  We might get into that another time.

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