Ask Lemmy

I've posted this on reddit back in the day, both on r/tipofmytongue and r/tipofmyjoystick.

There was a free indie game that I installed on my Windows PC back in the 2000s. I don't know where I got it, but I don't think it was Steam. The game was a 2D platformer where the main character was I think a red cat. I remember it being kind of fast paced, and you had a sword, and at one point can shoot lasers or something which played into the platforming (I think charging it and shooting it downwards gave you like a double jump? I'm not 100% sure if this is accurate).

I've tried so hard to find this game again, but time and time again I've come up empty.

Some more details, though it's very foggy at this point:

• I think there was a level select screen, kinda similar to like Mario 3
• There is the typical friendly village level where you can talk to NPCs
• I think one level was on top of a train.
• It may not even be a cat, but I always thought it looked like one.
• The game was a digital download, pretty sure I got it from an indie game dev's website showcasing his games and projects, and I'm not 100% sure the game was finished.

A YouTube mixtape found after searching “Madagascar Music” that had a smattering of wonderful folk music from, ostensibly, Madagascar. It must’ve been dmca’d years ago or something ‘cause I’ve not been able to find it since c. 2013.

Oh! I have one. And it's actually very white.

Back on ebaumsworld circa 2003 there was this flash interactive thing. It wasn't quite a game, it wasn't quite a video because it required interaction to progress. It involved men in suits doing strange things. Boxing, one would yell into a bullhorn if you clicked on him, had a drum beat behind it, black and I think red line art on a white background.

Exactly the kind of thing search engines are bad at finding, and I've even looked on the wayback machine and no dice.

Sexy Losers by clay is the origin of the word "fap"

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.

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.

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

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.

We all have that one porn video.

one of mine is an old flash video that i think i remember was on newgrounds, that had a black guy and a white guy talking to each other.

the only things i can remember is the black guy saying, "i feel ashamed and neglected," and white guy saying "I WILL NOT STOP UNTIL I GET THE ANSWERS THAT I CRAVE"

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 !gameart@sopuli.xyz:

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.

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 :)

There was a browser game I remember playing in ~2010 that was basically a zoo tycoon game where you unlocked new animals over time

Nostalgically, I wanted to play it a little while bac,k but I'm sure you can imagine why searching "browser zoo game" didn't exactly help me much

2 psa's that ran on cable on the early 90's.

Both had some dumb tag ling like "would you risk your life to save them?" Dramatic music and snap cuts.

One had a little girl in a petal car on a road with an oncomming semi truck.

The second was a toddler walking away from it's mother into a busy city street with oncomming traffic, and the mother (who was trying to unlock her car) freaking out once she noticed the kid was missing.

These have to exist somewhere.

There's a a conspiracy theory involving a relatively popular celebrity from the early 2000s and some guy in Brazil takes full credit for the entire conspiracy theory and says he made it up just to prove how easy it would be to do. He's even credited in the wikipedia article for it.

I've seen proof that he's wrong, I've had bookmarks that would show he wasn't the originator of the theory, but all the forums and sources that would be able to prove him wrong are defunct and offline. The timeline doesn't even make sense for it to have originated when he said he came up with it, but I can't prove it. He was like 6 years late. Every once in awhile, I still go searching to see if I can find something old enough to prove it.

Like others, I actually managed to find it thanks to this thread by double-checking before posting.

It's a sketch/short film(?) called A Reasonable Request. It will stick with you, if you watch it, I promise.

There are several online tools that will try to name tracks based on sample audio.

Scottish comedian, TV/internet personality Limmy used to have a lot of Flash stuff on his website. I had it all saved but, for whatever reason, it went missing years ago. His website has been gone for a long time. Internet Archive has some of them but not a bunch of them. So much Flash stuff has been archived to no end but this stuff is just forgotten to the world.

There was... I think it was an archive of old forum threads from a forum I don't remember what it's called. I stumbled onto it googling for DS action replay codes waaay back on the late 2000s. I remember a thread with a bunch of animal cross wild world codes, including one that supposedly let you walk on water. And codes for sm64 DS. One of which I remember was supposed to set your star count to 255 but using it permanently crashed the game when launching the save file.

There were also different threads such as a general one on things in games that scared you. There were some obvious things like the piano from sm64 and I thiiiink someone mentioned the redead from ocarina of time.

It's oddly specific but I would love to go back and read through these again for nostalgia purposes. But I haven't been able to find it.

This one porn where there was like three girls sitting next to each other with their legs spread over each other.

Think I saw it when I was like 14-16. I'm pretty sure it was little caprice too but honestly idk

i forgot what it was, and now i dont even know what to search for but i knew i wanted to find a very specific thing online which i couldn't, oh well.

So I remember coming across this basic webpage that was just a song playing on loop with an animation in the center.

The song was this weird electronic loop with samples on top: baby coos, a few lines from some female rapper, various bloopy sounds. It changed a bunch.

The animation looked like old 90s 3d web animations, very pixelated. The object would rock back and forth, and periodically changed into a different object: an old CRT monitor, a dolphin, just random stuff.

The whole thing had a very Windows 98 sorta vibe, I think the name looked like a file name. That was the whole thing though, just this animation and music loop.

It was maybe 15 years ago. The song was pretty catchy, so every once in a while I try to find it, but I can't even begin to think of how to search this.

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 !gifs@lemmy.world , and they liked it!

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?)

There used to be a parody of "The real Slim Shady" video about Mitt Romney. About 3 years ago I went searching for it to show my partner and it does not exist anymore. Copyright claimed into oblivion. Seems stupid, but I'd really like to watch it again.

Reading thru the comments and I've been reminded of a fan-made DnD 5e book that focused on a number of bdsm kinks, a lot of it relating to latex, so obviously NSFW, adding "races" like "headless body made of rubber", "torso with legs", "just the torso", plus several magical items that were effectively other bdsm stuff, though I remember one of the items was a "limb portal", which allowed you to attach to any one limb and separate it from the body. I don't remember a single unique or almost unique name from the supplement.

The art was very furry-oriented and had plenty of black and white images - I recall one of them was of fully latex-bound adventurers aiming a bow, using only the legs/feet. This was probably released around 2016 as a free pdf

Off the top of my head I'd say a poem called "an ode to what is now, effectively, stairs" about shutdown escalators in an abandoned mall. I've had a search around for it a couple of times, including on the forum that I'm pretty sure I saw it on - the Agora Road Macintosh Cafe (I think this has since become a right-wing cesspool, it was last time I was there, so not a recommendation), but no luck :/ This was only like 7 years ago, so I'm almost impressed at how quickly it's disappeared.

Relevant community: !tipofmytongue@lemmy.world

At a certain point, I forgot the name of an online store that sold a lot of cool modding gear. It was impossible to find with searches without the name, but I found an old tour of the warehouse in my very old files one day and it was called Lik-Sang. It's so old, I probably don't even have access to the email I used for those purchases anymore.

Not internet, but I a certain scene in an anime on Scifi channel always stuck with me. Eventually, I figured out it was Zeiram the Animation, but the scene had a different dub. That was the era when shows would sometimes have more then one English dub for one reason or another.

I also remember seeing an episode of Max Steel in the hotel room while on a family trip to Canada which had a different opening with a different explanation to how the MC got his powers. Chalking it up to some BS&P issue.

There was some AMVs I saw at Otakon that never got released online. A really good Kino's Journey one, but I don't remember the song at the moment.

Now I'm digging up obscure media from my brain. Apparently, it's not lost media or even good, but I remember watching a prerelease of Game Over at a gaming con once. I guess one episode is lost media.

Shame Welcome to Eltingville never got a full series. CN sure got a lot of mileage out of playing the pilot for a show they opted not to continue.

edit: oh for fun. A friend of mine has been on the hunt for a version of Zorro he saw bits of as a kid. He's never been able to figure out what version of it it was, even though every time he brings it up, we tell him it was actually The Princess Bride. Seriously, he wont watch The Princess Bride, but is convinced that it's not what he saw.

Oh, and there's allegedly a Japanese show that's allegedly streaming on Japanese Amazon called Space Jobs. This is the trailer I found on a fansub torrent site.

A few years back I found a video of Seattle public access televangelist/cult leader Rev Bruce Howard in China singing a song in Chinese, apparently there on a TEFL programme or something. In line with his usual Bowie-like reinventions he now had a beret and moustache. I have a screen grab for avatar use but I’ve never found the video again!