Important reaction images

a smorgasbord:

 

terrifying, yet hilarious

 

gratuitous jpegging is to post-millennials what putting X's and Z's in things was to gen x. advertisers are gonna start doing it any minute, i'm kinda braced for it.

 

yeah, way back at the beginning, it was sort of a signal that you were enthusiastic but not taking things seriously. it was self-mocking. kind of like memespeak.

but thanks to the sports stuff, advertisers caught on really fast, so that didn't last long.

 

my experience was that 'extreme sports' was people being stuck up about bouldering, and 'X-TREEM SPORTZ' was stoners hurling themselves downhill on one ski.

then advertisers figured out that kids would buy products associated with stoners hurling themselves downhill on one ski, and the ironic misspelling turned into branding, and now no one remembers when skateboarding belonged to unwashed jackasses, not diet coke. *big slow shrug*

 

i think you probably had to be a teenager or young twentysomething between 1988 and 1992, and also hang out with the kind of people who smoke weed while listening to jane's addiction and drawing anarchy symbols on their shoes.

edit: it also helped to be a self-described 'slacker', physically athletic, and have a bit of a deathwish. these were extremely DISorganized sports.