I invented naked girls back when I was like 12, so…
Every item’s instructions ending with “WEAR WITH PRIDE!!!” made me smile for some reason.
Hmmmm… I suppose I could dig back a bit further… In the early nineties, I made some FRACTINT (remember FRACTINT?) parameter files which used to be hosted at TRIUMF, the foremost Western-Canadian particle physics lab. Apparently they’ve a different sort of nerd as a site administrator in the new millennium, but the file is still mirrored elsewhere. I am still rather pleased with “lion” and “eve,” which are surprising and atypical fractal images.
Also, some collaborative fiction from the glory days of the mid-eighties local Vancouver BBS culture persists on the WWW. (I was “Thomas Covenant.” The user so nice they named him twice!)
Twenty years ago I devoted considerable effort to prepare a written article. I did nothing with it except e-mail it to one friend and, due to my carefree/careless life style, lose my own copy.
Some years later I noticed my friend had placed the article (with attribution) on his website; other copies had appeared on the 'Net; eventually I was solicited to expand it into a book. Although the book went far beyond the original article, I doubt I’d have had the confidence to pursue the book without that headstart.
In about 1996, I did a phone interview about a product I had used, which I thought had performed well. The company used it as a promotion for the product. If I do a vanity name search on Google, the article pops up.
I am the author the spurious Bill Ruger quote “No honest man needs a handgun smaller than a canned ham.” I originally posted it as a joke on a gun board around 200-ish. It still turns up years later on boards of which I am not a member and on blogs I don’t read, often presented as a genuine quote.
I made a 4-frame comic strip once and posted it to a forum asking “is this funny?” The overwhelming consensus was that no, it was not funny.
About 4 years later someone posted it on a different website in a thread I was involved in. I got all excited and was like “I made that comic!” Nobody believed me. It had 3 different image farm watermarks on it, so it had obviously made the rounds without me knowing.
Someone seems to have adopted my old sig line: “Of course,” said my grandfather, pulling a gun from his belt as he stepped from the time machine, "There’s no paradox if I shoot * you!"*
Aw, it’s not there any more.
Once upon a time, I sold a limerick to Dragon Magazine. The letter they sent accepting it warned me that they do not buy limericks. They only made the purchase because: 1) knowing that they didn’t buy limericks, I had drawn it up as a calligraphed scroll, and 2) their October issue always had a Halloween theme and they expected to have trouble filling out their comic pages at that time. So I got twenty bucks and a Dragon Magazine byline.
Later, some random person started a fan of vampires site, back before blogs, and they collected a bunch of vampire related jokes - including my limerick (with attribution! cool!). For about a year, if I self-googled, that site would be on the first page. Now the site appears to be no more. I can only hope that they went on to better things.
Let us have a moment of silence for the fallen limerick.
Oh well. It was derivative anyway.
A sorcerous vampire, Thume,
Took a succubus up to his room
Where they argued all night
Over who had the right
To drain away what, and from whom.
My one and only original joke is still kicking around in a couple places, I originally posted it on ruminate.com. Whenever someone sends me a dollar I will be a professional comedy writer.
It wasn’t “years” later (eh, maybe two), but I posted some unflattering comments about an obscure (and long since deceased) child actor from the 1930s on a message board. Some time after that (18-24 months, maybe), his daughter found it, and she gave me a relatively polite finger-wagging.
I haven’t had anything of mine surface in third-party places like, say, the pic of the liquor or the cat, but I can find archives of stuff I posted in newsgroups back in 1995!
A Doper once posted something here about waxing “down there”… that became an internet forward (and which I’ve had sent to me several times). Kinda cool being at the initial birth of such a thing :D.
Hey! I remember that limerick!
Cool.
a friend and I, a while back, tried to put together a humorous little website that in retrospect was more than a little overly racist against our Islamic brothers. Every now and again, I’ll come across one of the pics I made with Paint.
I also made a “Motivational” poster for a rather off color message board I frequent (again, kind of racist in nature, but aware of it) that I have seen a few times.
Note: I am not a racist. But racism is funny.
In 1992-1994 while at university, I used to post daily Major League Baseball standings and scores on the newsgroup rec.sport.baseball. It was picked up by a number of other online services, BBBs and mailing lists. As far as I knew, it was one of the very few online services of its kind for years. During the same time, I also ran a weekly trivia quiz on various rec.puzzle groups with thousands of entrants.
Doing a quick Google Groups search, most of my posts are still viewable. I wonder how I had enough time to do this back then while being a full-time student. Go figure.
One of the first times I did a Google search or it might have been Altavista I came across something I posted on comp.risks in 1985. I posted in a lot of newsgroups back in the eighties, but it looks like only the moderated groups still show up.
This happens to me on other boards and places. I’ll be like “wow, this person really gets me! I like his/her writing style… oh, it’s just me.”
I’ve found posts by myself come up in search engine results that are relatively unrelated to my search terms. I like to think it’s something to do with my history/cache and not somehow that google can find me coincidentally, because that would freak me out too much.
Accidentally did an image search, while looking for something under my name, and was shocked to find a photo of hubby and me:eek:. Having never, ever posted a photo of myself, I was stunned. Turns out it was a photo of us receiving an award, a photo which only appeared in an industry newsletter, which we would never have seen. I believe it’s gone now, thank heaven, and was only online during the year it was taken, though, I could be mistaken about that too!
Yup. Good to know you still agree with yourself, anyway. 
That’s what I was thinking about, too - I forget who posted it originally.
That is hilarious.