Huh. I actually remember going onto Wikipedia several years back and typing in "Cake is a lie" as the article title to try to understand the meme (someone on another board had suggested "Cake is a lie" as the motto of the Millennial Generation when we were coming up with mottos for different generations), and being taken to an article about a video game. I didn't remember the title of the video game, though. I do remember that it was a puzzle-solving video game whose main character was a black-haired girl named Chell or Chelle or Chellz or something like that, and that the protagonist was praised for being a female video game character who wasn't made to look Stacy-sexy to appeal to straight gamer boys.LinguistCat wrote: ↑30 Mar 2021 04:11A lot of memes were started by Portal, like "The cake is a lie" and a few others. There's even a song, "Still Alive" that was fairly popular online for a while after 2007. Probably just not your time?Khemehekis wrote: ↑29 Mar 2021 23:30 All you guys keep name-dropping video games and animes I've never even heard of, and then once one of you have mentioned it, all these other people join in the conversation as if they've heard of it too! Huh.
I don't recall seeing the word GLADOS, though.
While I do recall a lot of pop culture from 2007 (Colbie Caillat, Taylor Swift, Ingrid Michaelson, and similar artists first became popular around this time), I stopped playing video games around the time I was 15, and for the next several years knew about video games (Pokémon, Star Fox, Banjo-kazooie, etc.) mostly through my brother, who still plays them to this day. Then I moved out and I mostly heard of the big-name video games like GTA, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Fortnite that people were referencing all over the Internet. I befriended Tyler Thunder, a teen-age gamer from the National Youth Rights Association, a few years back over our shared interest in youth rights and now I also hear of the video games he likes, such as No Man's Sky (though their conlangs are literally ciphers! ), Shenmue, and Red Dead Redemption.
As for anime, I mostly know the animes that my brother would watch on Cartoon Network -- Pokémon, Sailor Moon, Yu-gi-oh!, Sakura: Card Captor, and the like. I've heard of Naruto and even reference it in a song in my rock musical, but I've never seen it. And the movie Unico, since my sister and I would watch it as children.
I get the feeling that my preferred popular culture is not the culture that is popular on this board (here there's a lot of nerd and geek culture like video games and anime, and a lot of heavy metal). I don't see Ingrid Michaelson, Third Eye Blind, Nirvana, Muse, Bastille, or Colbie Caillat referenced here too much (although once eldin raigmore referenced a KT Tunstall song when discussing Tunstall's Scottish pronunciation of "calm" and "palm", which I thought was awesome), and I don't really see people discussing Beavis and Butt-head or Daria (although Elemtilas and I have mentioned The Simpsons a few times).