memes

Back in the day, I drew this image in whatever the MS Paint equivalent was in KDE:

https://boingboing.net/2006/11/02/hilarious-piechartvi.html

And posted it to the Awful Forums in a thread about funny charts. It blew up and I didn’t notice for years. The joke itself came from something I found in an issue of Toro, which was a sort of Maxim-style men’s magazine that was published in Toronto for a few years. If anyone could ever track down some issues of that magazine they might find the original joke, or at least my original discovery of said joke. The joke itself is probably even older. All I did was draw that exact image, and then a zillion imitators were spawned, but like I say, I was oblivious until like 5 years later when it showed up in an actual presentation I was attending.

Memes spread differently back then, as stuff like Reddit and 4chan were just getting their footing. Email was still a primary carrier, along with a handful of popular sites like Boing Boing and maybe Slashdot.

I think my favourite outcomes from this image were

• seeing the chart appear in the documentation for Google Charts where it was used as an example of some advanced features of the pie charts modules. Edited to add: actually it wasn’t Google’s documentation proper, it was a blog post by Matt Cutts who was a Google dev for years. That’s at https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pacman-graph-in-google-chart-api/. I was thinking it was the actual docs.
• an ironic copy of the chart where the data is represented as a bar chart instead of a pie chart.
• just seeing all the stuff that came out of it, like the alternative drawings, the t-shirts, the posters, all the merchandising, merchandising, merchandising. The image has also literally appeared in print in at least another magazine, in a Finnish newspaper. Just do a Google image search for “Pac-Man pie chart” and you’ll see all kinds of nonsense.

All from a little image I did for the Awful Forums nearly 20 years ago based on a little image from a flash in the pan men’s magazine from Toronto.

That’s my claim to internet fame. But… ironically, I have like no proof. You can find the thread that the original image appears in, but for some reason the specific page that it appears on and the specific comment is missing, along with like a few dozen other comments from that thread. You can see the comments leading up to the image and the comments afterwards talking about how it has been picked up by Boing Boing and some other sites and has effectively become a meme, but the actual comment itself is missing. This wasn’t all that uncommon back then — the Awful Forums had their share of technical mishaps, and data went missing from time to time, so it’s not all that unexpected.

Boing Boing and Wil Wheaton are perhaps the two most responsible for its spread, and a few years ago I had a chance to talk to a Cory Doctorow at a tech conference and we spoke about the image and I confessed that I hadn’t been quite the comedic genius that could come up with that ironic chart, but that I did draw the actual image itself. I just wanted to get that out there I guess.