Thou art the homo sapiens now, canine …

Once upon a time, there was a very bad Sean Connery movie (directed by “the Good Will Hunting guy“). In it, Sean Connery looks at an inner-city African-American teen and says, “Punch the keys, for God’s sake! Yes … yesssss … you’re the man now, dog!” A NYC resident, Max Goldberg, saw this and said, “The world needs to hear that last part on an eternal loop.” From Forrester‘s hammy dialogue was crafted YTMND which, since 2004, has been an online community in which users, armed only with a sound file, an image, and the occasional zooming text, have set loose on the ‘Net fads, remixes of its fads, a strange obsession with a 16-year-old (sometimes becoming profoundly creepy), remixes of a strange obsession with a 16-year-old, another strange obsession with a nursing home resident suffering from Apert’s syndrome (as well as a call for compassion), its own self–analytical wiki, and alternate–universe versions of itself. Never the subject of its own post, the site is often both the birthplace, or feeding ground for, ‘Net memes, a locale of remixes of and commentary on pop culture, and also of stuff that’s just plain weird–funny. It’s not always constrained to humor, however: there’s a little history and science mixed in there. The site’s enemies are as diverse as Eric Bauman, the Church of Scientology, Sonic the Hedgehog, Harry Potter (Book 7 spoilers), and, most dangerously of all … Screech.