I have way too many of these and have lost count over time. Porn/porn games, old flash games/animations from Newgrounds, classic memes that only I seem to remember, stuff I saw for sale once upon a time that are sold out and can’t be found anywhere anymore, esoteric collectibles, comments I made on videos or posts literal decades ago, old websites long since defunct and so far lost that even wayback machine doesn’t have them on record, underground/indie music recordings that I definitely had at one point and then lost when switching hard drives out. The list definitely goes on but those are the ones off the top of my head.

Years after it was a meme, I had the Harlem shake voice line into music in my head, but no idea from where, and trying to remember or find the song. It took months, until I stumbled upon it eventually.

Due to this post I just found mine.

For the longest time I’ve been trying to find a video that featured someone copying a VHS recording over and over again, each time loosing a little bit of quality.

The specific video featured a catchy song, but I couldn’t remember the song or any of the words. I’ve found a few different videos over the years but every time I found a video the song was wrong.

Every few years it’s jumped into my head and I’ve gone off looking for it, but could never quite figure it out.

This time I either put in just the right terms or the magic algorithm has moved it around,

https://youtu.be/mES3CHEnVyI

We all have that one porn video.

Back around 1991 or so, I saw a promotional piece of art in a centerfold in a Nintendo Power magazine, which was a high-resolution and not-cropped version of the artwork that appears on the Secret of Mana title screen. I really liked the image, and wished that I could get a copy. I thought that someone must have scanned the art at some point, but couldn’t find it anywhere online. Back around 2023 — 32 years later — after repeated, sporadic hunts — I finally found a high-quality scan, and uploaded it to [email protected]:

https://lemmy.world/post/18353742

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/4f16e6c1-2174-45fa-b9e9-c8ae6e1a3f7d.png

I promptly ran into another Threadiverse user in that thread who had been saying that he had been looking for the same thing for ages.

EDIT: Based on this Reddit post of a lower-quality version, the artist is Hiro Isono.

There was a Tetris type game, with falling pieces you had to rotate and line up, but the pieces were men and women. When they fit together in sex positions, they moaned.

I was 14 and it was hilarious.

For years, mine was this gif I saw on UsVsTh3m in 2013. It had no context, and the only hint to its origin was the barely legible “29. 暑〜い!” overlay. I had a guess that this was from a Japanese TV talent show. I wanted to find the original video, but the trail went cold.

Years later, I don’t know how, I heard of a series of Japanese TV specials called Kesou Taishou, known overseas as Masquerade. UsVsTh3m got bought by the Mirror and their post was taken down, but I still had the gif. My Google Translate research skills had improved, so I looked up Masquerade on Japanese Wikipedia and searched all the episode guides for 暑〜い!, and in the shows from 2007, I found it! It was entry 29 in the 78th special, and it won third place there.

I try not to post things that don’t have a legal source, so I quietly updated my blog post and didn’t mention it anywhere else. Until…

Three months ago, my partner started getting YouTube recommendations for this show. I checked, and the show’s new official YouTube channel had just uploaded this performance a few days earlier. I made a better gif of it and posted it to [email protected] , and they liked it!

Relevant community: [email protected]

Mine is a youtube video where girl shares that she used to do extreme self deprecating humor like “oh, i dropped this thing, i should just kill myself” but tried flipping completely to “oh, i dropped this thing, guess it’s the price of having such nice skin and grace.” She noticed how it helped her improve her relation with her friends and weed out the bad ones. This video was profoundly influential to me but i didn’t realize until later so i didn’t save it at the time.

One time in the early 2000s, I saw a commercial during Adult Swim on Cartoons Network and I’ve wanted to see it again ever since. It was for Virgin Mobile and it featured Ode to Joy or 1812 Overture plating over quick cuts of mundane objects which turn out to be innuendo… for body parts. I know it wasn’t delusion because I was at a friends house and also though it was epic.

When I was a young teen, I loved collecting MIDIs because I didn’t have a good way of getting music in other formats–I still had dial up, and didn’t know about other methods. Plus I mostly enjoyed songs from video games. There was one I found that had a very enchanting melody and I loved it to death. Kept it on its own special floppy disk. Inevitably, it got lost and I never could remember the name of the song or what game it came from. I did search but not knowing either of those things, and it being only a melody with no lyrics, made it difficult to find. Then, one day, while listening on Spotify, it just magically appeared.

Sora from Escaflowne :)

In the BBC news many years ago I remember Peter Sissons calling the reporter John Pienaar John Penis and then quickly correcting himself. None of my friends or family actually heard or acknowledged it. And for years i couldn’t find anything on the internet until recently I found this one radio clip.

At long last I have proof that I’m more observant than everyone else, not crazy. Although that being said, I did spend an unhealthy amount of time looking.

Two things:

An article about a blockade of kayaks that were in an Eastern US port preventing warships from leaving the country to go to the war in Iraq. It was spearheaded by Quakers and was part of the impetus the Bush admin wanted to use to charge Quakers as terrorists. Quakers are one of the few religious groups that are by default conscientious objectors and cannot be drafted into the military due to the non-violence aspects of their religion. I have been able to find evidence that the Bush admin was toying with prosecuting Quakers, but not this specific event.

An article about musicians suing their record company for money made from suing individuals for file sharing. The record companies always argued that the people doing music piracy were stealing from the musicians, but the musicians had to sue their record company to see a penny of that money.

All together I have literally spent days and days over the years trying to find these. I have a fairly good memory and everything else I remember from that period of time I have been able to dig to find the source. These two elude me and it kills me.

Sometime between 2005 and 2008, someone from explosm (the cyanide and happiness guys) did a thing in the forums where they’d draw a comic panel and the forum decided what happened next by voting in the thread. It’d go on for a few days, and by the end the stories were always wildly off the rails. They did it ~3 times. Sometime later, they lost all of their forums, which included these threads. I’ve always wondered if there’s an archive of those things somewhere. They were absolutely legendary.

Some late 90’s or early 2000’s time travel movie. If I describe the plot, you will tell me it is The Butterfly Effect. But it isn’t. I was trying to figure out what it was several years ago, tried watching The Butterfly Effect, and it was not the movie I was remembering, but it was similar enough in enough ways that I can’t find anything else. It feels kinda like how we had multiples sets of similar movies released in that time - Bug’s Life and Ants. Mission to Mars and Red Planet. Deep Impact and Armageddon. Dante’s Peak and Volcano. etc. (I sweat there was another tornado movie around the time of Twister but can’t find it so maybe I just regularly hallucinate movies?)