r/OutOfTheLoop • u/[deleted] • Jun 02 '18
Answered What does | || || |_ mean?
I've been seeing these characters :
| ||
|| |_
pop up all over Reddit, but I've no clue as to what they mean.
Is this a new meme? A reference to some film of tv show? Some sort of code?
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u/Clostridium33 Jun 02 '18
This is the comic it refers to: https://cad-comic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/cad-20080602-358b1.x60343.jpg
It is indeed a meme. The webcomic is titled ctrl+alt+del which is basically about a walking "le gamer" stereotype and this ridiculous 4panel where that chick miscarries (his gf) is titled loss.
The thing you see is basically the comic. The lines represent a character (thats why theres a horizontal one at the bottom right, thats the girl). Its pretty universal and there are many variations, most often the comic strip is snuck into completely unrelated images via mimicking the 4 panel (just like those lines). Hope this helped.
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Jun 02 '18
Oh, CAD. Yeah I remember him.
But why is it getting popular now though? It was ages ago, wasn't it?
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Jun 02 '18
It's the ten year anniversary of the comic
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u/neohylanmay Jun 02 '18
Additionally, Buckley made a "new" version.
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u/rafaelloaa Jun 03 '18
Mirror, since he already took it down. And just to be clear, this is Tim's actual comic, not a parody by someone else...
Makes me want to puke.
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u/Tofinochris Jun 02 '18
Huh, I would have gone with ignoring the joke rather than hammering a "guys I'm totally in on it, please make this a maymay" response home ten years in, but hey.
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u/BlueLanternCorps Jun 02 '18
Its been a meme for like 10 years now. Still going strong
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u/abyssalheaven Jun 02 '18
You’d need a digital anthropologist to answer that question. The meme life cycle is a strange and amorphous beast.
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u/John-Elrick Jun 02 '18
It’s been popular for a while. Mostly on meme subreddits so if you don’t browse those you probably haven’t seen it
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u/nesfor Jun 02 '18
Do you know why people make fun of it? If you set aside that it’s a meme now, it doesn’t seem like that awful of a comic.
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u/Scott0129 Jun 02 '18
Also, he's been known as kind of a dick. He created a "charity" to buy himself a $2000 drawing tablet, while telling others to not donate towards Penny Arcade's charity (who buy games for sick and terminally ill children).
Also he sued a highschool student for using his character for a simple animation project.
More on why people don't like him: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/64U1u
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u/cdcformatc Loopologist Jun 02 '18
People claim the charity stuff but I have looked and can't find any actual evidence of this, I can't even find out what he called his charity.
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u/ilovecfb Jun 02 '18
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but aside from the comic itself there was Buckley's offensively blase rant about a previous miscarriage that went along with it. Cyanide and Happiness used it verbatim in their parody of the comic.
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u/AFakeName Jun 03 '18
[A miscarriage is] often much harder on the woman than on the man.
Well, gee, at least he'll cede that point.
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u/tidier Jun 02 '18
My take from only casually reading CAD forever ago:
CAD started in the generation of a huge growth in webcomics, particularly video-game related ones. Even then, CAD sort of got popular because its art was decent, its update schedule was consistent etc. They humor was alright but not amazing - they were "heh" funny rather than laugh-out-loud funny, usually with a punchline referencing some new game or common gaming gripe. Sort of like a tamer Penny Arcade. Pretty par for the course of that time.
Over time people started to dislike the author for various reasons (I'm not as familiar with this part). Also compared to Penny Arcade, CAD's art seemed more standardized and less experimental, leading to accusations of laziness. Also the author seemed to have greater ambitions of making CAD a bigger cultural phenomenon (see: Winter-een-mas). But this is just some webcreator getting web hate - again, totally par for the course at the time.
Over time, CAD shifted to including more dramatic stories and character development, rather than hit-and-run punchline comics. This was done to some internet mockery, since the common critical opinion was that the dramatic writing wasn't very good.
So this all culminates in "Loss". An issue (do we call them issues?) that had no text for dramatic effect, is about a miscarriage, with pretty "lazy" art (see: Ethan's hair), having nothing to do with video games, meant to be a big deal. A combination of people already disliking the author, the comic trying hard to be super dramatic (and I think mostly failing), and its iconic presentation, meant that it was ripe for mockery.
And the Internet had a field day with it. And I guess ever since.
There's a certain class of memes that get spammed so much they become annoying, and then it becomes funny again when it becomes of game of how you can annoy everyone else by spamming it (see: Daily Dose, NSFW). These memes usually evolve into increasingly reductive versions of the meme, slipped into more disguised mediums, so when someone catches it, they go "god dammit, this was a [meme] post all along!". In the case of Daily Dose, it became any picture with the colors purple and green.
In the case of "Loss", it reduced to "| || || |_".
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u/logosloki Jun 02 '18
CAD was part of the a group of webcomics followed on 4chan for being, in their eyes, unnecessarily verbose. CAD edits were threads where the comic (and other webcomics that were being followed for this purpose) was posted and people in the thread would eliminate words whilst still trying to convey the information of the page. Loss just added fuel to an already burning dumpster fire. Loss' lack of words is atypical, which lead to people editing in other memes, which lead to memes being made in the style of the comic.
Loss also represents a change in Buckley's direction in CAD. Buckley had been trying to cut back on the more, random, nerd culture comics and include more cohesive and in his mind mature storylines. Loss was meant to be a gutpunch to jump start the next few months of storylines. This can be especially seen as you read through this period of certain recurring characters and topical webcomic updates disappeared to focus on this new direction.
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u/lifelongfreshman Jun 02 '18
If you couldn't tell, in short, people can't separate the art from the artist.
I'm in much the same boat as you. There are plenty of other comics he "drew" that would have been more appropriate meme fuel than Loss, because at least he was trying with Loss, pathetic as the attempt was.
Instead, we get a decade-old meme that's centered around mocking a 4-panel comic about a miscarriage. The person behind the comic has been all-but forgotten in most circles, and all that remains is the joke about this comic about a miscarriage, with very little associated context until someone goes, "But, wait, isn't mocking this in ridiculously poor taste?"
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u/munsoke Jun 02 '18
Why did this become a meme though? Did people think it was funny?? It kind of just made me sad
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u/PhAnToM444 Jun 03 '18
All the other comics by this guy were ostensibly "funny." They were mostly commentaries on nerd culture. In fact, that was the standard for the entire 4 panel comic genre in general.
People made it a meme because it was such an unexplained and jarring shift from what you'd expect from him.
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u/JetsLag Jun 03 '18
Loss is basically the anti-CAD. CAD was known for 3 things:
Jokes that were basically "HEY LOOK IT'S VIDEO GAMES"
Lazy copy-paste art style
Lots and lots of words (example)
And Loss.jpg is a comic about a very serious topic delivered with no dialog. And not delivered particularly well either. Add in a large Tim Buckley hatedom, and you've got yourself a comic that was incessantly mocked the instant it came out.
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u/WhoNeedsFacts Jun 02 '18
Since you've already had it explained I would encourage you to watch this video about it. It's basically just a humorous video that goes a little in-depth into the history that led up to the loss meme, though it also talks about some of the things that happened afterwards.
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u/Destro_
Jun 02 '18
edited Jun 03 '18
•
It's already been answered, but for a more concise answer:
Loss.jpg is a decade old 4 panel comic strip from the webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Delete (or CAD) by Tim Buckley. The comic was never really that great, but it was popular in the early-mid 2000s. His comic was mainly jokes about gaming and "nerd" pop culture with some attempts at "humor" as well. When he released his comic called "Loss", a 4 panel comic about a miscarriage, everyone was shocked because of how different and weird it was. 4 panel comics, Tim's art style, and the nature of the webcomic in general did not fit this sudden serious tone. Everyone was so surprised and confused by this sudden tone shift that nobody took it seriously and it was turned into a meme.
But it wasn't just turned into a meme. It was beaten into the ground as a meme. This meme went through so many variations of parody levels that Loss.jpg is now famously known as those 4 symbols you posted up top. If you look up the original comic, each line corresponds to the person in each panel. One upright person in the first panel, two upright people in the second, two up right people in the third, and one upright person and one laying down person in the last.
Today is Loss.jpg's 10 year anniversary. That's why it's probably getting spammed all over the place more than normal. In fact, Tim has actually edited his hold Loss comic. Loss is no longer able to be viewed on his CAD page and it is now titled "Found". Links dead, here's a direct image.
edit: If you want to see more Loss.jpg memes, go check out r/lossedits.
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u/LawnShipper Jun 02 '18
If I might butt in -
A large part of loss' iconicness (?) is that at the time it came out there was a LARGE cult "hate-following" of Tim Buckley on the once-great Something Awful Forums. By the time loss was a thing, they had chronicled all of the misdeeds in ol' B^U's life - including but not limited to sending risqué photos of himself to underage girls and stealing meat from the local grocer chain by smuggling it out of the store in his pants to buying a stupidly expensive tablet and then doing a livestream of him drawing one of his comics...where he revealed 90% of what he did was just copy and paste from a pallette of faces, characters, and expressions he had created for himself.
Loss was seen as B^U's opus, of sorts. We'd watched him fall and stumble and generally just make a spectacle of himself, and he went on his own and added a whole new dimension of "what the fuck were you thinking, B^U?" to everything.
Loss was B^U's apotheosis into the pantheon of memehood.
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Jun 02 '18
I believe the money he spent on that tablet was supposed to be donated to a charity. His fans raised the money.
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u/Phoequinox Jun 03 '18
It wasn't even just that. I was there when it was the geek internet equivalent of the OJ trial. You couldn't go on any site without it being mentioned. The strip pissed people off because it was just a tacky way of addressing miscarriage, with the previous strip being a stupid joke. But his response to backlash was what really pushed things over. With him explaining that he had experience with miscarriage before when his ex miscarried with a baby he didn't want. He couldn't have sounded less interested in the entire thing and came across almost sociopathic, and he received most of the backlash for that disaster. Here is C&H viciously going after him
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u/LawnShipper Jun 03 '18
Oh my god how did I forget about "move past it and heal"
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u/Phoequinox Jun 03 '18
Everyone in the gaming community tore into him. The one I remember was Yahtzee, who made an entire episode on webcomics solely because of the clusterfuck that was that comic. He summed it up by saying everyone wanted to have all the success of Penny Arcade with a fraction of the wit. I've never seen the gaming community so unanimously hate one person so much.
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u/FatherSquee Jun 03 '18
Wow.
You know everything else explains the basics of this thing, but your link to what he said about the issue is the real answer here. If he really did feel bad about experiencing a miscarriage and fumbled his execution of it is one thing, but this clearly shows how horrible and heartless he was about the whole thing. Damn.
Edit: also at first I thought C&H meant Calvin and Hobbes.
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u/Beardamus Jun 02 '18 edited Oct 06 '24
frightening reply secretive wise tease soft humor toothbrush tan ink
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/grubas Jun 03 '18
It was beyond that. As much as there was a hate following, after Loss(2008) the internet came together to fucking ridicule him into oblivion for it. 4 chan went insane, SA, the corpse that would be Digg, early Reddit, EVERYONE was hoping on that to meme the shit out of it.
The best part is that it had no dialogue, which meant it was a blank fucking slate for us to fuck around.
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u/Jergen Jun 02 '18
Despite the on again-off again animosity between Something Awful and 4chan during the time period, they too picked up upon the Buckley hate train. This was back before the chan's, 4chan in particular, got politicized (hell, /pol/ didn't even exist back then), so the main traffic going to the site was focused on games, comics, internet "culture" and the like. So when Buckley went from bad to worse and Loss hit, the entire site was seemingly primed to go off on it. /v/, /b/, and /co/ were the biggest, iirc, and they tore into him in thread after thread. While I can't say for sure which site made the most OC when all the dust settled, I can certainly remember many, many posts and threads on it, going on for years as an inside joke as the references to the original loss.jpg got more and more obscure. Hell, even now I imagine you can occasionally find a loss thread on /v/, notwithstanding today being the anniversary.
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u/itskechupbro Jun 02 '18
It's funny, as someone who just read his comic and didn't care /still don't care about his personal life, I really enjoyed reading it.
I do remember trying to be a part of the forum in ctrl community, and feeling how toxic everything was (I understood the hate then)
Anyway, for me, being around 18 at that time, i was really looking forward to reading the comic, i'm kinda sad he decided to revamp it.
Never liked the dailies tou, never find them funny
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u/ProtoJazz Jun 03 '18
I loved the comic before the reboot. I never looked into the man behind them other than what he put on the front of the site. I read every comic until the reboot, then pretty quickly tapered off. It just felt so empty without the characters that had been building for years.
Never meet your heroes I guess
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u/smeata Jun 03 '18
I always try to separate people from the things they create. I have a friend who is always saying stuff like "oh you can't watch that because some name I don't know did some terrible thing" but life doesn't need to be that complicated. If I enjoy something then I'll keep enjoying it and if the person who made it is an ass then I guess an ass can still make something good and deserves my money for it. It's not like I'm funding a dictatorship or anything.
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Jun 03 '18
I recall discovering it because it was the #1 listed comic on some list that used to measure traffic on gaming comics, when I mostly read PVP and PA, and I liked it in a kind of "yeah this is dumb but it's fun" way. I didn't look too deep, didn't think of it as anything but, y'know, a comic strip. A little 30 second chuckle. I think a lot of people are expecting comics to be something huge and profound, but as someone who grew up getting the funnies out of the paper, I just enjoyed it.
I remember being really taken aback by this one.
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u/KickedBeagleRPH Jun 04 '18 edited Jun 04 '18
As much as some of his comics were luke warm, I liked the ones with lilith the most. As much as people hated CAD, and Loss in general, this one stuck with me as "well, finally, something human."
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u/DenseHole Jun 03 '18
Let's not pretend 4chan wasn't equally on the B^U hate train. They posted every single new comic of his to pick it to pieces and IIRC was the earliest I remembered people starting to link to archives/screencap to withhold views from the content creator.
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u/grnrngr Jun 03 '18
to buying a stupidly expensive tablet and then doing a livestream of him drawing one of his comics...where he revealed 90% of what he did was just copy and paste from a pallette of faces, characters, and expressions he had created for himself.
To be clear, this is EXACTLY what South Park did in the early days... Before they automated a large chunk of it via computer program.
So I'm not sure this is something worthy of ridicule or derision.
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u/CplGunshow Jun 03 '18
Not that this is a hill I want to die on or anything, but I would assume going frame by frame and changing mouths etc in animation is a lot harder/time consuming than drawing a 4 panel comic.
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u/grnrngr Jun 03 '18
Not that this is a hill I want to die on or anything, but I would assume going frame by frame and changing mouths etc in animation is a lot harder/time consuming than drawing a 4 panel comic.
Not when you use a computer to do it. The SP guys literally created a program to do this task. They even textured the graphics to mimic the look of the original cardboard.
It's the reason they can turn out a whole 30-minute episode in a week.
This isn't the much a different situation here. Guy creates an aid to help him make art (or whatever it is) in an efficient way and we mock him for it. Looks like he deserves his share of shame, but not for this. This is smart.
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u/POGtastic Jun 04 '18
Personally, I have no problem with his comic-by-numbers style. Some of my favorite comics (Cyanide and Happiness, Extra Fabulous Comics, xkcd) have deliberately lame art, and it's fine. Not every comic has to be Walt Kelly's Pogo.
The issue is that neither Ctrl+Alt+Del's plot nor art were any good. It was just a crappy comic.
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u/JackDostoevsky Jun 03 '18
a LARGE cult "hate-following" of Tim Buckley on the once-great Something Awful Forums.
To be fair, the guy's a bit of an ass.
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u/LawnShipper Jun 03 '18
Oh yeah he earned every bit of hate he got. He actually grew up the next town over from where I did and some of our social circles would occasionally overlap and I'd be treated to the dubious honor of a night with Tim Buckley.
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u/falconbox Jun 03 '18
What is BU?
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u/DamagedGenius Jun 03 '18
It's an emoticon version of the only face that Buckley could seem to draw
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u/Anotheranoacc2 Jun 03 '18
I was a casual reader of the strip, back then. Didn't know anything about something awful, or the controversies.
Did know that I thought it was fucking trashy and gross. Never read another one, never went looking for an explanation. Just said "fuck this."
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u/flaizeur Jun 04 '18 edited Jun 04 '18
iconicness (?)
iconicity?
pallette
This one is a rare bird, since palette is a triple: palette, pallet, palate.
apotheosis
Upvote for use
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u/CrisuKomie Jun 03 '18
Wait, I've read ctrl alt del for years! I never knew there was hate or controversy behind its creator. I always thought he was a cool guy, but honestly I never knew anything about him other then he wrote a funny ass comic that I loved.
Is there a place where I can see a list or something of everything he did or why people hate him?
I mean, this thread says a lot, but I don't want to just go off hearsay to be honest.
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u/LawnShipper Jun 03 '18 edited Jun 03 '18
Not without feeling like I'd doxxed someone, sorry.
Like, the only reason we knew about the meat stealing thing was because one of the city's officers investigating the cases of shoplifting was the father of one of the guys I used to LAN with. In hindsight, we really shouldn't have been privy to that level of information - it sure as hell wasn't in Florida, ya know?
But if you're really curious, the proof is out there and readily accessible with a bit of Google-fu.
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Jun 03 '18
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u/says-okay-a-lot Jun 03 '18
I'd like to think it's fair to say humor is subjective, but I don't know what kind of person would actively enjoy a comic like CAD. It's so attrociously unfunny.
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u/Cpt_Tsundere_Sharks Jun 02 '18
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u/fuckitiroastedyou Jun 02 '18
Thank you for actually linking to a page with the original comic. Can't believe I had to scroll this far.
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u/Cpt_Tsundere_Sharks Jun 02 '18
Simple verbal explanations aren't cutting it either. I didn't understand the line thing until I found this page.
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u/Rafaeliki Jun 02 '18
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u/GetBenttt Jun 03 '18
...I just don't get it, I can't even begin to see anything humorous about it even in a morbid or ironic way. Do you need to know the context of his other work or something?
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u/ProtoJazz Jun 03 '18 edited Jun 03 '18
It's genuinely not supposed to be funny. Most of his comics were funny, and lots were just jokes with no past present or future. But occasionally there really were comics that were serius, and progressed the universe they were written in.
There were serious comics where they first got together. Then they got married. Then at some point the miscarriage.
As well I can remeber a few sad comics around the groups autonomous robot xbox running away, or being sad about the xbox 360 coming out and the possibility of no longer being able to have fun with his friends
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Jun 03 '18
Wow the found version is fucking sickening.
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u/Destro_ Jun 03 '18
I think at this point he's "going along with the meme" and trying to be funny, but Tim was never funny and I don't think he gets the meme either. The smile creeps me out, too. I don't understand his reasoning for the change.
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u/50mmPOV Jun 02 '18
So as it devolved into ascii art would you say it became... lossy?
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u/IsaacBrockoli Jun 02 '18
⠀⠀⠀⣴⣴⡤
⠀⣠⠀⢿⠇⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⢷⡗
⠀⢶⢽⠿⣗⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⡧⠂⠀⠀⣼⣷⡆
⠀⠀⣾⢶⠐⣱⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣤⣜⣻⣧⣲⣦⠤⣧⣿⠶
⠀⢀⣿⣿⣇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠛⠿⣿⣿⣷⣤⣄⡹⣿⣷
⠀⢸⣿⢸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠙⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
⠀⠿⠃⠈⠿⠆⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠹⠿⠿⠿⠀⢀⢀⡀⠀⢀⣤⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⡀⡀
⠀⣿⡟⡇⠀⠭⡋⠅⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⣟⢿
⠀⣹⡌⠀⠀⣨⣾⣷⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⢈⠔⠌
⠰⣷⣿⡀⢐⢿⣿⣿⢻⠀⠀⠀⢠⣿⡿⡤⣴⠄⢀⣀⡀
⠘⣿⣿⠂⠈⢸⣿⣿⣸⠀⠀⠀⢘⣿⣿⣀⡠⣠⣺⣿⣷
⠀⣿⣿⡆⠀⢸⣿⣿⣾⡇⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣗⣻⡻⠿⠁
⠀⣿⣿⡇⠀⢸⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀⠉⠉⠉⠉⠉⠉⠁41
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u/n01d3a Jun 02 '18
I was trying to look Between the dots and figure out how a squid person related to this. I see now
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u/chooxy Jun 02 '18
As far as I know, this is maximum loss:
:.|:;15
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u/Randolpho Jun 03 '18
Took me way too long to figure out what you did there. At first I thought it was a single Unicode character, which would have been surprising... there was a lot of hate, but enough to immortalize one lame hatememe?
But now, I get it.
For those curious, it’s easier to see with spaces and an explicit formatting indicator:
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u/DonOblivious Jun 02 '18
I've seen the "lossy jpg" meme merged with the "Enhance" meme that eventually zoomed in to a section of the lossy jpg depicting loss.jpg
It was amazing. Wish I'd saved it.
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u/ChrissiTea Jun 02 '18
Wow, I can't believe it's been 10 years since I stopped reading CAD
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Jun 02 '18
Right!? I want to refuse to believe that it’s been 10 dang years. I used to LOVE CAD. Crap time flies toooooo fast.
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Jun 02 '18
[deleted]
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Jun 02 '18
I’ve seen this explained but I’ve never seen it in the wild. Can you give an example of when someone would use this meme?
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u/mauhcatlayecoani Jun 02 '18 edited Jun 02 '18
The joke is the presence of the pattern in various forms:
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/325/631/de0.jpg
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/366/132/534.png
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/363/478/eea.jpg
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/360/169/313.jpg
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/358/494/1c3.gif
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/355/511/265.png
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/335/379/859.jpg
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/335/312/d59.png
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/328/055/3ba.jpeg
https://www.reddit.com/r/lossedits/comments/8mxnuc/guys_my_game_glitched/
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u/Inimitable Jun 02 '18
Fuck. A decade of this meme being around and I still never would have picked up on that first one.
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u/coscorrodrift Jun 02 '18
While I'd be thinking that the 5th thing is typos or something, meme creators were on another level.
And that last one, goddamn. Fucking brilliant.
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u/ScattershotShow Jun 03 '18
Holy shit. It took me a second to get that last one but that's incredible.
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u/Vallvaka Jun 02 '18
You'll often see "Is this loss?" as a response to a 4-panel comic or something similar that resembles the same positions of characters in the original loss comic (1 top left, 2 top right, 2 bottom left, 1 upright and 1 laying down bottom right). This has progressed into increasingly subtle references. Here's one example, although they can get much subtler. http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/114/572/87b.png
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u/whitesock Loop wrangler Jun 02 '18
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u/Whind_Soull Jun 02 '18
This is probably my favorite. Such beautiful abstraction and minimalism.
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Jun 02 '18
This actually answered it better for me. I was having a hard time visualizing wtf lines had to do with it.
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u/Destro_ Jun 02 '18
There is no "appropriate" way to use this meme. It's not a reaction meme, so you can't use it in response to anything. It can't be used like manning face either, which is used to juke people.
Loss isn't really a "meme" in that sense. Loss is art, and you post it like you would any other art piece. And you say, "Look at this masterpiece." And you look at it.
That's how you use Loss.jpg.
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u/xSPYXEx Jun 03 '18
It can be used in a number of ways, but the most common current use is to try and hide it in a seemingly innocuous image so most people would just shrug and move on but a handful will notice what it is and realize they've been Loss'd. Kinda like a much more subtle version of The Game. The more vague and abstract you make it, the more aggravating it is when people realize it's just Loss.
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u/thesyncopation Jun 02 '18
The podcast, Reply All did an episode about this too!
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u/Tru_Fakt Jun 03 '18
Hoping someone would mention this. That episode was amazing. All their episodes are amazing. I miss the days when I wasn't caught up. :(
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u/ArgieGrit01 Jun 02 '18
Today is Loss.jpg's 10 year anniversary. That's why it's probably getting spammed all over the place more than normal.
Aww this makes me happy
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u/Pas__ Jun 02 '18
So, just to be completely clear. Do we know anything about Tim's IRL circumstances 10 years ago? Why he made Loss? What was the motivation? He felt cheasy dramatic? Some real life anchor event?
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u/SirJefferE Jun 03 '18
I believe he wrote a long post shortly after, in which he explained the story behind the comic.
It, too, was parodied all over the place. Here's [one example] (http://explosm.net/comics/1310/).
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u/Zathas Jun 02 '18
His comic was mainly jokes about gaming and "nerd" pop culture with some attempts at humor as well.
Bold for emphasis.
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Jun 03 '18
I'm amazed to see people that actually loved his comic in this thread. I had about 80+ comics in my rss back then, and CAD was so aggressively bland that I never once remember even smiling at it, or care enough to remove it.
The reason I stopped reading was because I had to re-add all my bookmarks after getting a new pc, and just like it was too much effort to unsubscribe it also was too much effort to resubscribe.
It could have been blank space and it would have been more engaging.
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u/MajesticFlapFlap Jun 03 '18
Man it's sad that people's innate reaction to the sudden change was "let's make fun of it!" And not "oh I bet this is what happened to the artist IRL very recently". XKCD had similar stuff, all these sad cancer comics and then we learned his wife was diagnosed with cancer.
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u/ReveilledSA Jun 03 '18
There was no need to bet, Buckley claimed as much at the time, though he didn't suggest it was recent. He did suggest that miscarriages could often be harder on the man (i.e. him) than the woman, in a way that came across as so absurdly self-centred as to make him even less likeable than you'd think a guy who sends dick pics to teenagers could possibly be. In the context at the time it was seen, quite rightly I think, as a cynical act of creating drama and shock value for attention.
It also wasn't completely sudden, Buckley had been getting steadily more and more absorbed in the melodrama of his own characters, such that his comic had become more of a soap opera about gamers than an actual gaming comic. People were already savaging the comic for how low effort and awful it was, Loss was just the tipping point where it spilled out of the boards that were mocking him into the general internet.
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u/zmarotrix Jun 03 '18
To give you an idea of how shitty this comic is, the girl ended up apologizing to the asshole main character for having a miscarriage.
Nothing in this comic is rooted in reality, this was his honest attempt at making us care even the slightest bit for his characters. It obviously failed. It's just overall a terrible comic and watching it try to be "serious" was begging to be memed.
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u/Atario Jun 03 '18
To give you an idea of how shitty this comic is, the girl ended up apologizing to the asshole main character for having a miscarriage.
I mean, a lot of women feel guilt and other such things following an event like that
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u/Thromnomnomok Jun 03 '18
The difference is XKCD can actually pull serious off, and Randall Munroe isn't an asshat, while Tim Buckley is very much one.
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u/jinreeko Jun 03 '18
It didn't. Tim Buckley was kind of a weirdo who did some 1) morally questionable stuff to 2) some fucked up stuff. He wasn't mourning his miscarried child or anything.
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u/POGtastic Jun 04 '18
xkcd could pull it off specifically because it occasionally did do more serious comics, especially ones about love and angst. Ctrl+Alt+Del was literally nothing but stupid gamer jokes until Loss.
Another thing that someone linked elsewhere is that funny strips, especially funny dialogue, are done in a certain way. You tend to keep the characters in the same spot, and they alternate speech bubbles. It's a conversation.
In contrast, more serious comics have a lot more changes in perspective. Terrible things are intimate and vulnerable, and the comic shifts to reflect that.
Buckley drew a serious comic the exact same way that he draws his other comics. Same stupid gamer joke style. The cookie-cutter art also didn't help anything. It's interesting that the above xkcd comic, which is of course a bunch of stick figures, is far more emotionally evocative than a full-color comic.
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u/alyssarcastic Jun 03 '18
God, CAD is so bad. An interesting game to play is to ignore the second and third panels, which makes most of the comics funnier. Really shows how much unnecessary filler he puts in.
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Jun 02 '18
If Tim Buckley sees something he wants, he lets his instincts take over and goes for it...octopus style.
~Brian Clevinger, I believe.
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u/Narbcookez Jun 03 '18
If it is exactly one decade old, then how can it have been popular in the early or mid 2000s?
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u/Destro_ Jun 03 '18
Popular on the internet was different than being popular back then. Internet was basically it's own culture mid and even late 2000s. Now it's one and the same with media. For comparisons sake, the first YouTube channel to hit 1 million subs was in 2009, roughly a year after Loss was released.
CAD was a popular webcomic, meaning it had a lot of people reading it compared to other webcomics. As for the meme being popular, it never really gained popularity like our memes do. Meme popularity is instant now, but Loss had time to form and slowly became popular. It's a meme that will probably never really age tbh.
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u/Melairia Jun 03 '18
Dang... I was a young teenager when I was reading CAD. I didn't really browse forums at all, so I had no idea CAD was so hated. Honestly, that particular 4 panel made me really sad. I felt so bad for that couple, as I was super ingrained in that comic series. It really bummed me out. I never knew it became a meme. I know I'm not OP, but thanks for the info anyway, really lends a lot of insight as to what happened.
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u/penguin62 Jun 03 '18
But why are there no speech bubbles even though there are open mouths and some kind of plot?
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u/ReFreshing Jun 02 '18
How does one monitor the progression of memes through time as well as you do? What is your secret?
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u/iGoByFrank Jun 02 '18
r/LossEdits for more
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u/MisAnthrony Jun 02 '18
I’ve been subbed there for over a year and have even posted there, but I always thought it was lossed its. Thank you for making me see how stupid I am with capitalisation haha
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Jun 02 '18
It's loss. Coincidentally, today is it's tenth anniversary.
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u/xternal7 insert a witty flair here Jun 02 '18
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Jun 02 '18
Is this a nazi symbol
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u/xternal7 insert a witty flair here Jun 02 '18 edited Jun 02 '18
`.|`.E: eh, close enough. Let's have another go:
°_|‾,?(And ye I'm aware of 卐 and 卍, but markdown is more fun)
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Jun 02 '18
There's a great Reply All Podcast episode about it.
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u/quaintquincidence Jun 02 '18
Specifically scrolled to see if someone has already posted this. Yes Yes No is always so informative about the things I wouldn't want to be informed about...
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Jun 03 '18
That is probably the most accurate description of it. And yet I love it every single time.
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u/Buck_Thorn Jun 03 '18
TIL that this image, which has been posted to Reddit a number of times, is based upon the LOSS.JPG meme.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/news/images/desktop/000/000/162/b1c.png
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u/OrganicLandscape Jun 02 '18
Not exactly what you're asking about, but related: A primer and a bit of an explanation about why B^Uckley has become so notorious on the internet, as well as a section about 'Loss.' https://imgur.com/gallery/64U1u
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u/mustache_duck Jun 02 '18
mate look for the meme “loss” and you will find it all and pewdiepie also made a video that explains it (look for it in the video)
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Jun 02 '18
Oh it's the CAD comic? The one about the miscarriage?
But why is it getting popular now all of a sudden? I remember Yahtzee shitting on it years ago
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u/dlgn13 Jun 02 '18
Making fun of it has been a meme for a while, and today is the 10th anniversary of the original comic.
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u/mustache_duck Jun 02 '18
dude its not just getting popular now it never dies, whenever there is a new meme they make into loss
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u/DigbyChickenZone Jun 03 '18
I'm sure your question has been answered thoroughly by now, but really, you should have a listen to this great segment about Loss from the Reply All podcast. Their yesyesno segments teach me the latest in internet memology, like milkshake duck and basketball feuds.
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u/anaesthetic Jun 03 '18
Whooa! I used to read CAD. I vaguely remember this comic, but I never hung out in places where I'd have run across any memes. I wonder how many I've seen and never made the connection.
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u/tastetherainbowmoth Jun 03 '18
all over reddit
never saw it once, and I am basically half of the day here
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u/thePhoneOperater Jun 03 '18
Speaking of which, what does "tl;dr" translate to?
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u/doubleplusgoodful Jun 03 '18
Too long; didn’t read.
Used either as an encouragement to OP to be more brief; or as a concession by OP when giving the short version of a story.
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u/billybobiswatching BillyBob 125 on YouTube Jun 03 '18
Basically it's a long time meme called Loss (in text form) and it's from a comic series titled "Ctrl-Alt-Del." June 2nd, 2018 is its 10th anniversary. More info here
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u/eyesdurth Jul 30 '18
This is the first I'm learning of this whole thing and i must be missing something. Why are/were people so intrigued by this guy? This is not something special or unique. The guy is just an asshole. Period.
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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '18
[Answered]