I don’t understand the image, please explain it.
Appears to be a form of sockpuppetry fail.
I think the recent overexposure of this term may be from the famous Sickie Woo! incident.
Slate article from October about fail.
what 9000?!?
lol wut?
1 and 2 are only about /b/, not 4chan itself. Total failcomplete. 
Note to Dopers who do not know what 4chan is: Do not go to 4chan. Seriously. It’s the antithesis of the Dope and your heads will asplode.
That’s only if you don’t have a 4chan diamond account: the hardest metal known to man
I think thats why it has become more common in recent years but I was certainly using it before the days of WOW.
When you see it, you’ll shit bricks.
I’m curious about this as well.
I prefer the Failroad (now that is a picture I wanna know the story behind), even more than the Failboat.
My favorite Fail was seen on the Dope recently, with a link to this picture (but not this blog in particular): Biblical Fail.
A train arriving at speed into a terminal station lost its Westinghouse brake (which applies the brakes throughout the whole train), leaving only the brakes on the locomotive operable - which is worth pretty much jack with a heavy train. The train crashed through the buffers at the end of the platform, and shot across the station’s main pedestrian concourse and through the wall on the other side. One person in the street was killed.
I’m fairly certain I saw the Failboat picture (minus added text) in a Car and Driver article about lost shipments of cars. I’m not certain, but I believe the boat in question is a Hyundai-owned freighter. My memory might be off on the details as I was only casually reading the article in my optometrist’s waiting area.
This should explain everything.
It was actually Mazda. Wikipedia has an article on it.
As an aside, this should shed some light on the “sinister conspiracy” as to why GM pulled the EV-1 electric car. Mazda had 4700 new autos on their hands, most of which were still in showroom condition after the accident, had people lining up to buy them, but instead scrapped and crushed every single one of them for liability reasons.
I will now save you a trip to /b/, because you do not want to go there. It is the upper colon of the internet. It is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. If you are thinking to yourself “ah, it can’t be that bad,” don’t go there. Anyway, here it is.
The Astronomical Fail (pictured above) has several memes hiding in it. First of all, it’s a Motivator poster, which means you need to evaluate the stuff in the picture carefully to figure out what the caption is about: in this case, it’s about a very big fail. The picture in the frame is a screencap of a thread at 4chan’s /b/ board. The text associated with the original post (OP) is a picture of a guy hiding in a box. He starts the thread with the half-sentence “When you see it…” which is usually finished “…you’ll shit bricks”; the last half of the sentence is routinely changed for comic effect. The OP then posts again with the last half of the sentence. No big deal, except that 4chan defaults to naming everyone “Anonymous” (green text in last two posts). The OP picked a name, and so when he responded to his own joke by delivering the (video-game themed) punchline, and then laughing at it, and then piling on with praise for the “Epic win”, it was painfully obvious to everyone that he was a sock puppet (aka “samefag”). The fifth poster is deriding him for not understanding the consequences of choosing to be a named entity (“namefag”). The sixth poster has no words, and posted a picture of Samus Aran holding her head in disbelief and despair for the depths of human stupidity.
For what it’s worth, “fag” can be substituted with “guy” for no loss of meaning on 4chan’s /b/ board. In fact, most of /b/ can be deleted from 4chan with no loss of meaning. The signal-to-noise ratio on /b/ can’t even be calculated on 16-bit computers.
Yes, I broke rules 1 and 2. No, I am not Anonymous.
Fix’d
It started with EverQuest. Each class has an epic weapon, which involves an extemely long, often painfully complicated series of quests to get. EQ players coined the term AFAIK and it spread like wildfire once WoW was up and running. I know that we were saying it on EQ as far back as 2000.