$WALRUSE

anonymous@s4s:~$ cat 1397193.txt ## needs moar videos edition Sun 15 Dec 2013 08:20:33 — Thread No.1397193 opens on 4chan's /s4s/ ("Sh*t 4chan Says") with a single word: walruse. Within hours the board is flooded. A half-seal, half-walrus mascot spreads through hundreds of replies. Somebody declares it outright: "walruse is the current #1 meme" — hollywood ass, 15 Dec 2013 This was not some retrospective joke. This was happening in real time, at the exact moment Doge was becoming the biggest animal meme on the internet. Two templates, one thread of history, only one of them got remembered. Walruse came with its own language: > "walruse" sounds like "what a ruse" > getting tricked = getting "walrused" > "am I being walrused?" became a running paranoia > "WE MUST WALRUSE DEEPER" — anon, deep in the thread > every dubs, trips and quads got "checked" in its honor > "moar" was the eternal battle cry It leaked onto Reddit, where refugees posted "walruse > doge" while everyone else complained doge had gone mainstream. For one bright December, it looked like the seal might actually take the crown. It didn't. Doge became a global phenomenon, a Super Bowl ad, a Dogecoin. Walruse sank back into the archives — thirteen years of silence, one dusty 4plebs page, and a single tweet that dug it back up. anonymous@s4s:~$ echo "the ruse was never finished." the ruse was never finished. anonymous@s4s:~$