ON A BORING FRIDAY night in 2005, Ian Spector was sitting at his computer, unable to get ahold of any of his real-life friends. So, the high school senior eventually got antsy and decided to connect with his virtual friends instead.
What happened next is the internet equivalent of Marie Curie discovering radium, or Thomas Edison inventing the telegraph. Ian Spector was about to become one of the internet's first meme kingmakers.
That night, he logged onto SomethingAwful.com, a kind of pre-Reddit Reddit full of high school and college-aged hell-raisers who'd grown up stealing music on Napster, listening to the Jerky Boys make prank phone calls and matching funny photos with one-liners to goof around.