barbecue, business, and bygones

“well-known” has no keepers, nor is it a particularly interesting frame for me when performing an inquiry of digital cultures. common cultural touchpoints haven’t been shred entirely at this point, but they have in recent history become more atomized to expressions like memes. it could be useful to probe the dwindling monoculture as a byproduct of influencers and now generative content, and this is likely to be a reality you’re already familiar with if you’ve ever tried to intersect your youtube subscriptions with someone else, but the longing for a monoculture now being imagined by video summary youtubers is flimsy with even slightly critical generational and regional examinations. unfortunately, I do not make money off of longing for the monoculture, so I have no need for the security blanket. when you take a permissive approach to culture, you also gain the convenient power to meditate on decades-old copypasta and subcultures, probably so that this wisdom can be ingested as truth into the elitist superstructure of tomorrow measured in flattened gains today.

the point at which personal fixation graduates into subculture is, exactly, one person. this is probably an unacceptable criteria if you’ve been tasked with organizing tags for metadata, where it’s common to mull whether a meme is legitimate or notable enough for category, but it’s the only acceptable leniency that I want to have applied to my anthropological studies. humans are not neat categories. our subcultures, maybe at their purest concentration, constitute a fractal dimension of expression and are often only observable when measured with an instrument sensitive enough to observe them at their weakest signal. judging whether the angry video game nerd, or the nostalgia critic, or king of the hill satisfy a legitimate japanese subculture, whatever we decide constitutes such, is not a useful questioning not because there are no registrable ways to measure fandom for them, but because subculture has always been hyperlocalized and never always searchable, even in digital contexts. bulletin boards and tweets expire, archives waste away, and the utility of search engines wither as they butt against walled gardens and spam. yes, it’s probably bullshit that king of the hill has ever engendered subs versus dubs debates, even if it had most of its first two seasons dubbed and was the only other animated series besides the simpsons to air on fox japan. mike judge has otherwise enjoyed modest success in japan, with a mintia tie-up and a japan exclusive PSX port dubbed by a manzai duo. even without having fan art of beavis ogling rias gremory to point to while chuckling myself, an absence of evidence does not nullify that passive consumption is a default and that any remaining observable expression, however small or without a trend throughline, remains extraordinary. the expectation of constant engagement through free promotion by fans, one forged by digital marketers combing analytics to explain why promotional budgets must be branched to influencers with sponsorship deals, remains as much of a foolish superlative today as it was before fan fiction was popularized by trekkies.

categorizing subcultures, at least when allowed a loose definition as I have prescribed them, tends to trend towards chaos. they do not always follow a strict hierarchy, or a chronology, or flow into neat bins. this, however, does not suggest an atmospheric noise to their cultures that escapes observation. the bridges a subculture connects with other subcultures are what provide a useful anchoring context that allows us to establish them with a relational definition, while also preserving the flexibility to recognize categories that do not flow with strict ancestors. when you trust the experts, even dewey’s own eponymous decimal system has undergone numerous revisions to better communicate this type of faceted classification. subculture when studied under this pretense, by attempting to put a lid on galaxies of expression, will appear to interact with their environments in as many unique ways as water can flow, crash, and destroy.

nico’s open tagging, a loosely organic attempt limited to 10 attachments per video, is a shrewd way of signaling what users find important as classification. whether full episodes of king of the hill broadcast rips posted to nico constitute a subculture or more of an opportune skirt of copyright should be questioned, but a layering of nico comments already provides a more convincing case that overrides a passive consumption. the fansubs for numerous AVGN episodes, sprouting great colloquialisms like the angry video game nyard, is an organic import that could only be teed up by game center CX and numerous kusoge playthroughs. the intersection of these preceding facets, serialized online video at the interstate artery of american personalities and gratuitous barbecue, along with faceless food preparation performed now most prominently by commandeered vocal synths, places the BBQ pit boys as a landmark. hank hill may be disturbed to know they only appreciate the rich, smoky flavor of charcoal.

fansubs for niche content are an interesting metacontext, as while they can be stewarded by dedicated individuals, a clamor for them suggests a previously unmet need. one million views on a BBQ pit boys video, still an achievement on nicodou, would earn it admission into the hall of legends. with preparations of spare ribs and huge honking steaks, gratuitousness is clearly the driving novelty to japanese audiences drawn more to the methodology of the pitmaster manning the grill, affectionately ダディ (daddy) to fans, than the total bombast of an epic meal time. most of the analog in this respect are the comments responding raucously to bacon being used as seasoning. even more express culture shock at the portion sizes and the complete disregard for cutting board hygiene. the だっかーん (dakkan) danmaku that swarm the screen during the pitmaster’s recitation of the URL in each intro, a correct soramimi, is an emergent jargon. many of the quotables and interjections are likely too lofty and tone dependent to christen as proper slang, though we would be remiss not to mention how much “pitmaster’s privilege” appears to align philosophically with food terrorism (飯テロ), perhaps an american exceptionalism of our god-given right to euphemistically stir up international conflict. with fan art that leans more directly into secondary contents¹, these are all the bona fides of a healthy subculture. hank hill and his propane fixation may meanwhile earn passing mention with CM collectors and a loose fandom interested in the revival, but he does not notably present with most common expressions of online japanese subculture like fan art, at least among those that are now observable.

although I stress again that any subculture should not require registration to earn this title, it may instead be appropriate to frame that subcultures can be graded on their health by some assembled measure of these expressions, such that we can process and communicate them as categories. bright minds that have mused long on tagging before seem to contemporarily flirt most prominently with GPT. while I may return one day to draft the perfect subculture category system, the observant truth more enshrined than ever by numbers-chasing on socials is that metadata is the マッサージ. the north star for nico, its user-managed tags, signals an escape of jargon into slang by sliding us “daddy cool” (ダディクール) across the picnic table. what about it, daddy cool?

daddy cool, like the branching personalities of the BBQ pit boys, is a mona derivative from a much larger cavalcade roster of AA² characters. the overwhelming canon of these characters originates from 2ch board subcultures and daddy cool is certainly without exception, as his name was christened in reply to a thread on /newsplus/ about a barbecue murder brawl in mississippi. his image, independent of this event, was already a remix of a mona crossed with fish eyes, which may explain why he was so early to wearing cat ears as fashion. the connecting of these two things or why they were crossed is likely to be digital dust. although I entertain some readers may be familiar with him already, I wager it is far more likely you may know him namelessly from a famous tenkomori miku PV, no thank you, popular at the height of youtube reprints. daddy cool unfortunately lacks much of the smooth charm he is known for in this representation, when in reality he is most prominently a fat, happy, family-loving, red meat-eating american. he never cleans his grill, values portion size over tenderness, and will save the trimmings of fat to feed his seethingly polite japanese guests. he is most enigmatic when playing mahjong, where he will declare pon despite being in tenpai for kokushi musou. as a man of, for, and about business, he also wears a suit as leisure and slams back diet cokes, before he could be usurped by another american icon of note. he is lucky, then, that he is most often only invoked at the presentation of plentiful, subpar smoked meats that would require a second mortgage and a well-stocked food lion.

daddy cool is not unusual in that he has a developed japanese fandom, as do many other AA derivatives of mona, though it is still unusual to count not one, but two bulletin boards dedicated to him. he powers his own daddy search engine if you’re feeling daddy, rather than dandy. the matome sites with curated directories of what’s cool present a sprawl of extremely focused personal sites, a friction overcome to exhibit a mountain of salvation. the catalog of these expressions is mostly a tour of artifacts that were rarely if ever invoked in their time and, in most cases, were likely forgotten the moment after they were first posted. low brow and often pointlessly crass as they are, they are the constituents of VIP quality. no one can ascribe a rubric to VIP quality, except for perhaps daddy cool. daddy cool would know if you were VIP quality.

most of these elements have been discarded from the surviving daddy cool, at least to the locales where he does survive. the most effective way to verify the authenticity of this claim, rather than wrap ourselves in the comfort of old matome sites or pretend nico is representative of anything more primary than decay, is to venture into the collapsing twitter mines. by any standard, daddy cool is slang with some modern endurance. there is nothing I would attribute considerably to this, except that saying “daddy cool” is a very specific activation. daddy cool’s mahjong tirades are more usually directly translated visually to new characters for parody, but daddy cool as an atomic value of language is almost exclusively invoked referencing his experience with gratuitous meat. closed incantations like thisーhighly referential, only lightly remixedーmake “daddy cool” operate both temporally and functionally like saying wassup to your millennial friend, or laying up NEDM to their horror.

copypasta being an authority for characters like daddy cool is largely a japanese phenomenon, mostly credited to an enduring text culture that is much stronger than whatever is hanging on in other online locales. his origin story, to my knowledge, never earned a translation on contemporary harbors like everything shii knows and tanasinn, with it only more recently being outlined by nameless rumia. as the atkins fad was well on the way out for americans by the aughts, daddy cool had to abandon his carnivore when he did remigrate back to texas. english VIPPERs, performing a soft reenactment of /news4vip/ and related hubs for the secret area of VIP quality (SAoVQ), wisely hired him primarily as their CEO, allowing him to hawk access to VIP quality text discussion and cool free ringtones. while such recontextualizations are not unusual in the import of japanese AA iconography, daddy cool’s popularity on english textboards is an absurdist stretch that leans more towards a reconstitution where he becomes appropriated as a full-blown mascot. daddy cool here is pronounced to be not only the guard of the board itself, but also ends up puppeted by individual users that stretch his archetype. while there is certainly a voice ascribed to daddy cool, often of hopeless capitalist wanting and a mocking camel case that somehow hedges on CAPS lock being cruise control for cool, these representations are mostly the result of a convergence of traits driven by a niche textboard, hyperlocalized itself that they have probably had very minimal japanese contact. there is no central authority on the daddy, only a meaty, wet mass of participants. every participant, born from a daddy, is also born with access to the tools of man to deliver and assess VIP quality.

value judgements of subculture communities are mired by bad faith reads that I often prefer to steer away from, but it has mostly held that a high-churn original content (OC) culture that allows for this type of winding absurdity delivers at least, if nothing else, entertaining outcomes. many of the emergent properties to this approach were felt in the loose weird twitter collective, itself seeded from FYAD users that would rather piss on the label, that gave personalities like dril a sardonic and detached edge that have been able to pollute their language into the web at large. SAoVQ, now bunkered in a refuge board on world2ch after its most recent domain stopped resolving, straddles its own insular roleplay of personalities. the trajectories of english textboards, something awful (SA), and weird twitter, where dril quotes were already considered lazily stale by 2017, all aligning with decay is a good proof that it is a reliable signal for identifying whatever we consider to be an online subculture. retrospect will continue to be the best advantage available when making this call.

daddy cool’s brightest star, at least as a cogent personality, very directly found habitat as a tweeter in the soup of weird twitter before it had earned the name³. english VIPPERs were otherwise early adopters of what could be considered weird twitter, with the tweets4vip aggregator and the very tasteful cum bot. from the surviving archives of this daddy, there is a kernel of creative genius visible, the stupidly absurd, that gives it good harbor to the label. while many common elements of daddy cool have been transposed, there is a stretching in having him steered with one voice that makes him feel less disposable and transactional to the joke being told. sagas and callbacks, like the commandeering of an oil rig to install disco lights, are able to invent and control the character’s own destiny more than they are allowed to be on open bulletin boards. that realization may be why reading these tweets back now has the free trial spirit of a longmont potion castle, now that I am caught up on tasmanian syrup and the clown motel. they are, of course, absent the improv and pedal effects, but the sprinkled mentions of exotic places and slightly off-kilter word jumbles is a match. the self-certainty I find they share, always spiraling into the discovery of strangely memetic phrasings, is a badge of pride for any great genius idiot.

i aM wRItInG a sOnG abOuT sOUTh AmEIRcAN pArrOt'S iN rUSsiA iN tHE 16Th cENtURy i Am nOT suRE, WHErE tO bEIng. PaRROt rHyMEs w/: caRrOt

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Dec 8, 2012

sup. im damian. well i was. certified cisco network associate. u got a question? fyi i died in 2008 & didnt keep up w/ router tech

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Oct 14, 2012

[4]

aNy nEwsPaPeR wAnTs tO bUY, mY bAD nEWS?

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Sep 6, 2012

hOrSe rEfUTed dOStOYevSkI & rENOUncEd suIciDE & sToPPed sMOkINg & stArTEd plAYiNG KoOl & tHE gANG vIA mOuTh & bLUEtOOth & sCroBbLEd IT

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Jul 20, 2012

hORsE iS noW sEedEd w/ issUEs oF lE mOnDe DIplomATiquE, B. RuSseL's hIStORY oF wEsTErn PHiLOsoPHy, EPiSodEs oF mY lIttLE pOny, dISco ALbuMS

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Jul 20, 2012

iT wIll pROvE, pOPulAR iN deMOgRApHICs tHAT eNJoy mEAT & wHAT iS pOPUlAR w/ oThER pEOplE

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Sep 4, 2012

if we were to put a pin on this daddy cool, however, it may mostly be one of a simple convenience. like a geriatric thinking about those beans, or a conservative wearing sunglasses, he has a stock character appeal that doesn’t especially depend on remaining married to his initial context. it is not to be suggested that this profile was ever an authoritative representation, or even one that has surviving reverence, other than that it is one of his more complete representations. the synthesis of an AA character is a fairly mild completion, though one that I treat as incompatible with modern socials. so-called main characters of the day that dominate these platforms, now almost universally actual villains and not shoestring wimps or simple editorial failures⁵, are a fatigue that has stripped socials of an overarching whimsy washed by the strange from independent sites like SAoVQ and SA. somewhere in the years since the runoff from gamergate, it feels forgotten that twitter was only ever good for useless murmurs and confusing support agents. now that it’s possible to scrape pennies off the floor by posting as badly as possible, the theatre of the absurd is always broadcasting beyond any convincing parody, and the jokesters don’t have much oxygen left to shout the worst actors out of the room.

the diffusion of daddy cool into different online spaces would suggest more of a memetic influence than being a subculture to itself. the degree to which we ascribe differences to memes and subculture as community, though, seems a useless pedantry as they often fold on each other. memes in the way dawkins identifies them are very much a transmission unit that must have a surviving longevity and fidelity to succeed, yet humans are the means by which memes are able to propogate at all. memes do feel to be the overriding concern as they use humans and culture as their hosts, while subcultures with secondary contents, particularly those that exist primarily online, become entirely dependent on their templating. daddy cool at times expresses as a sardonic component device, much like a template reached for in MLG montages, though he has also become a personality unto himself with dedicated fan sites, boards, and profiles with a quite literal following. grading on the value of expressions again proves troublesome in identifying subcultures: absolutely recognized subcultures like talkloid videos may not gather in physical space, preferring digital festivals, but a jokey facebook event meme will swarm to area 51. one of these expressions would certainly be considered to have a more regular cadence and longevity than the other, but to attribute particular notability to either is a wasted effort when you can, instead, admire the tablecloth tapestry of two cakes⁶.

text has seen a diminished relevance in an increasingly visual culture. while text has been a great high order bit for 2ch’s creative output, it is also dense and immovable. AA character representations like daddy cool exist in an awkward medium between text and pictogram, sharing qualities from image macros like an easy transposition that allow for context collapse, but are also exact about their form due to specific font and presentation requirements. when operating at his strongest, he should be inseparable from his dialog, and yet his strongest representations flow not from a clear waterfall, but a diffusion of his form being regaled by cycling audiences. everything I have imposed on the daddy for this post is a falsehood only a fool would take as fact. his twitter ghostwriter generations removed from his original representation, offering a rare peek behind the curtain by breaking character for one final sign-off, is likely to agree as much.

“Many of you won't know much about the origins of this character as a piece of text art on anonymous Japanese discussion boards. Neither do I. I appropriated him from a site that appropriated him and made up details as I went along.”
_{— dADDd YcOol' S ghOStwrITer}

1. if you haven’t been roped off by the nico seiga geofence, then I recommend yuyuko and mystia as barbecue pit girls, which doesn't involve arms behind the head ↩

2. more typically referred to as ASCII art (AA) despite almost never being to that limitation, which makes it only another wasei-eigo loanword. tell your friends: it’s shift JIS! ↩

3. the core “weird twitter” experience to me was dogboner, a name I have probably not thought about for close to decade, and seemingly someone that got out before the stink of socials became unwashable. daddy cool as twitterati may have occupied this same twittersphere-shape-thing more than conceptually, but I don’t really remember that being the case when I followed him ↩

4. how it must feel to interact with a cisco network associate that has a training cutoff ↩

5. adrian chiles has never missed once: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/24/if-dishwasher-loading-was-a-sport-my-dad-would-be-world-champion ↩

6. with a flood of generative content online, I do wonder what validity this meme may continue to communicate. it has always expressed content gluttony in a very literal sense, but with 20 million cakes being put in the window every day on youtube alone, window shopping seems more and more like relying on the all-mighty tangle of algorithms to put out the cakes it thinks you might like best. ↩