Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer / Web Media

On the internet, information is little more than a click away. Unfortunately, so is a sea of misinformation.

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Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends:
  • Back in 2005, one angry parent wrote a letter to The Washington Post to complain about the Subverted Kids' Show nature of Happy Tree Friends. While nothing about the complaint itself is wrong (since it's about how such a cute/silly-looking animation can show extreme violence, which is the point of the show), fans might still shake their heads at how she got some aspects of the show wrong (for context, she was describing the episode "Hide and Seek"). Toothy the purple beaver is mistaken for a badger, blood is said to come out when said "badger" got his neck snapped (mistook the saliva for that), and Petunia the skunk is mistaken for a squirrel. At one point she mentioned "It recently snagged a place on cable TV, while spawning DVDs, trademark mints, T-shirts and, inevitably, a planned video game." While this is largely correct, said "planned video game" is a case of Older Than They Think, as outside of Flash games both official and otherwise, HTF Java games for mobile phones have been released during that timeframe.
  • The blurb on the back of the Swedish release of the "Overkill" DVD box set describes the characters as "nothing but insane psychopaths who brutally murder each other in the most innovative of ways." The only character who fits that description is Flippy's Ax-Crazy Split Personality Fliqpy; the other characters, with a few exceptions, range from generally decent to full-on Nice Guys. The signature gory deaths of the series are mostly accidents caused by stupidity or the universe just being a jerk, rather than intentional murder.
  • Common Sense Media's review of the show claims that it intentionally deceives tweens/teens into watching it.
• In the 2009 edition of the calendar The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said, one contributor attributes the phrase "Your Head A-Splode" to "the video game Homestar Runner". Although there have been video games based on Homestar Runner, the series itself is an online animated show, and the phrase originates from an initially fictional game called "StrongBadZone", which first appeared in Strong Bad E-Mail #94: Video Games, was playable as an Easter Egg in said animated short, and eventually was posted separately in the official website's "games" section. And on top of being from a web cartoon rather than a video game, the silliness of this choice of words was a deliberate parody.
• The videos made by wikia for the RWBY wiki contain several factual errors. One pretty glaring example is in their video for Lie Ren: not only do they pronounce his name wrong, but they also claim he's voiced by "RWBY Chibi voice actor Monty Oum" who died over a year before RWBY Chibi first aired and has since been replaced by his brother Neath as Ren's voice actor.
• Some listings of Pinkfong Baby Shark merchandise, specifically those that are unlicensed, list the other colors of sharks as also being the Baby Shark character. Baby Shark is actually the yellow one, while Mommy Shark is pink, Daddy Shark is blue, Grandma Shark is orange and Grandpa Shark is green.
• Clips from Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy online are frequently labelled as being scenes from Family Guy, owing to the fact that both series are created by the same guy and have an identical artstyle. Family Guy is also far more well-known than the relatively obscure Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, which doesn't help the confusion.
• In its review of The Last of Us II, Zero Punctuation accuses the game of retroactively making Ellie a lesbian. Putting aside the gay erasure and homophobia, Ellie was already established to be queer in the Left Behind DLC of The Last of Us, where she was in a relationship with another girl called Riley.

Web Comics

• Is Oasis lying to Sluggy? As the article is attributed to the author, it has to be parody.
• One website describing Homestuck early into the comic's run referred to the post-apocalyptic nomad advising John as the Wandering Vagrant. At that point in time, the comic had exclusively called him the Wayward Vagabond; he later gained some alternate names, but "Wandering Vagrant" was not among them. ^note Technically the comic has also referred to him as Warweary Villein, Wizardly Vassal, and Wastelandic Vindicator, but only one of those has been used more than once, and none of these terms had been used at the time, since the character had hardly debuted.
  • A NY Daily News article put the trolls as the main characters when describing Homestuck. While minor, long-time fans of the series' hearts will skip approx 6-12 beats after reading it. Although those characters are significant and popular, they are not exactly the main characters. It's nearly impossible to label any specific group as being the "main" characters, but the most likely candidates are John, Rose, Jade, and Dave, all of whom are very much human.
  • There was also an article in which the author interviewed a Homestuck cosplayer. When they said that they were cosplaying Eridan Ampora, the interviewer took that to mean that all of the trolls were named Eridan Ampora.
  • Strangely, while the Know Your Meme article for Homestuck is pretty good, edited by actual fans, the official explanatory video was...well, not. It showed a page of fantrolls when describing the trolls, implying that they were also canonical^note the author did once declare all fantrolls to be canon, but this was likely a joke and the characters shown did not actually appear anywhere in the comic or other official media, stated that Dante Basco was a recurring character instead of Rufio, a character he played in Hook;, and, at one point, showed a panel of Problem Sleuth instead. This combined with the extremely basic plot summary and lack of explanation of any of the memes - which was, y'know, theoretically the whole point of the video - leads one to the very tempting conclusion that the writers hadn't actually read the comic.
  • Then there was a short newspaper article that seemed to imply that you could finish Homestuck in only half an hour. This is impossible. The comic is infamously long. Even if you ignored the 450,000+ words of text and only watched the flash animations, that would still take you well over 30 minutes to get through. Hell, the end of act 5 animation would take nearly half of that by itself!
• This article profiling notable self-sufficient web-cartoonists falls into this trap more than a few times. Marten has never worked at a coffee shop, and Pintsize can't really be considered a pet. Jeph Jacques later joked about making Marten work at Coffee of Doom to make the article accurate. Mistaking MS Paint Adventures as being made in MS Paint is a more understandable mistake, but MS Paint hasn't been used for it at all since the very first page in 2006, and the site's FAQ makes that quite clear.
• Intentionally used by David Willis for an official t-shirt design, as most of the characters on it don't appear in the strip advertised.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent:
  • The comic's Encyclopedia Exposita includes a language tree that has gone viral due to being based on real data. However, proper context is rarely given for its other features, with the most frequent mistake being either claiming or implying that it shows how all languages are related. In reality, it's technically a Fictional Document for an After the End story in which the survivors of the Nordics have lost contact with the entire rest of the world for the better part of a century. This results in it actually only showing language families that include at least one Nordic language, namely the Indo-European and Uralic families. The story also has a Hit So Hard, the Calendar Felt It element to it, resulting in the year 0 mentioned in the document actually being an unspecified year in the 21st century and not year 0 A.D., which it can be very easily mistaken for by someone looking at the tree while unfamiliar with the comic.
  • The above leads to making it look like the comic itself is a case of this trope to people who actually have knowledge about the Nordic countries and/or worldwide languages. For instance, Iceland wasn't settled until the 9th century A.D., making the fact that Icelandic is treated as its own laguage in the "before year 0" tree an easy "mistake" to point out, alongside the absence of any language that isn't Indo-European or Uralic (the list of which unfortunately includes African, Middle Eastern and Asian languages).

Web Original

• Parodied with the pretty cool guy meme, which is known for intentionally confusing the main character of a franchise with the title of the franchise itself for comedic/trolling purposes. As demonstrated by the original:
  i think Halo is a pretty cool guy. eh kills aleins and doesn't afraid of anything.
• This article discussing issues with YouTube's content filtering seems to be under the impression that all YouTube Poop must be either violent or sexual, that the editor "record[s] a new soundtrack" for the source material, and that it'll corrupt the kiddies. While violence and sexuality are common in such videos, they're by no means required, and plenty of YTP videos include little to none of both (for instance, Daffy Makes a Poop is almost entirely clean). Nor is a "new soundtrack" always recorded; the videos are often made using the source material's original audio, which may or may not be manipulated to make the characters say new dialogue by rearranging words and/or syllables. The article also initially describes YTP as being made using cartoon footage, although it does go on to provide examples made using other sources.
• In this blog post, baby-name expert Laura Wittenberg explains how distracting names that reveal that authors failed to check their work (e.g., a Work Com with an entire office full of men in their 30s who have names that are popular now but not so much thirty years ago) have become to her, the point being that one or two characters having names that seem out of place for their age or demographic is fine but it's implausible when the whole cast do.
• Women's wrestling website Diva Dirt:
  • Writer Jack is prone to research mistakes, often getting the names of moves wrong (one infamous instance was where he thought a clear TKO was "some kind of botched back body drop"). This is especially glaring, as he replaced writer Bobby - who was famed for having very well-researched write-ups.
  • Erin is not as bad as Jack but she frequently can't tell the difference between a headscissors, hurricanrana and Frankensteiner. She notably will call any hurricanrana variant a Frankensteiner - when the latter is only ever done from the top rope. She also has been known to call the Victory Roll a "reverse Frankensteiner".
  • One of the History Lesson posts regarding the Judgement Day PPV mistakenly listed the Torrie Wilson vs Dawn Marie match from the 2004 show as being a grudge match for the stepmother storyline. That storyline's blow-off match happened at the 2003 Royal Rumble. Their match at Judgement Day 2004 was actually one where Torrie's career was on the line.
• When The Nostalgia Critic announced his appearance in Entrepreneur magazine, we all went straight to or searched for the article online! But here's the thing: Mike Ellis and Mike Michaud have been mislabeled in the article.
  • Plus, Doug and the Mikes are listed as co-founders and runners of Channel Awesome...but not even a mention of Bhargav?
  • Moreover, the article actually goes into detail in another Channel Awesome website, the much less popular Chicago nightlife review site Barfiesta instead of mentioning Bhargav, when that site is actually Bhargav's pet project. Weird, huh?
• Headline on AOL's welcome page: "Actor, 87, Suffers Stroke." The "actor": Elmore Leonard. OK, he's appeared in a few documentaries, but he's NEVER been an actor. Since it was a link to an article on the Moviefone website, obviously someone just figured "Moviefone article=actors & actresses."
• Invoked for humor in one online video, where an exasperated Samuel L. Jackson is harassed by a bunch of overly touchy parents, with one of them saying her son wound up in jail because he saw him act in The Shawshank Redemption, to which Jackson incredulously shouts "That was Morgan Freeman!"
• After the August 2014 celebrity nudes leak that was sourced from a 4chan user, CNN reporters thought "4chan" was the name of the hacker itself.
• This article in on Men's Journal's website described the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota as "A small town in the middle of a metro area of 2,000,00". Small problem. As of the writing of the article on MJ.com, the city of Saint Paul had a population of nearly 300,000. Or about the size of Cincinnati, St. Louis, or Pittsburgh. And the Twin Cities metro itself has a population of 3.5 million people as of the writing of the article. Or the same size as Seattle and a bit larger than San Diego.
• GameChap infamously got into a spat with Marc Watson of Mojang AB, claiming that the company was trying to cover up 500,000 Minecraft accounts being hacked. Marc was quick to correct them, pointing out that it was actually 1,800 accounts temporarily not working and that the source came from a kid online, who claimed to have killed 2 FBI agents. This did not stop Gamechap accusing Marc of lying, causing him to quite understandably declare that he was through with them.
• Deliberately parodied with Sips' miniseries featuring "Chet Williams" reviewing games such as FIFA or Minecraft. Throughout the videos, Chet constantly makes mistakes about the genre of games, such as claiming that FIFA 15 is about a female football (soccer for North Americans) team when in reality that's not true, or claiming that Minecraft is an open-world simulator (not necessarily wrong, but the picture Sips uses it that of a car driving along a highway).
• A staple of the infamous Keemstar's content for "#DramaAlert" is that he tends to not do the research on topics he makes videos on, most infamously with his attempted coverage of the controversy surrounding Bashur. He claimed that Bashur had sexually assaulted a 13-year old when there had been a seven year age gap; while Bashur had held her hand in a way that was deemed inappropriate, that's nowhere in the same league.
• The YouTube video Top 10 DEADLIEST Roller Coasters YOU WON'T BELIEVE EXIST! has as its thumbnail a "coaster" which doesn't and indeed cannot exist (a common and often deplored YouTube practice called clickbait). Also the coasters depicted are not in any way "deadly" (if they were they wouldn't be allowed), the title is a reference to the prejudices of the video compiler; and one of them isn't even a coaster (it's a slingshot). The comments section is full of people claiming (with much emotion and name-calling) that the coaster in the thumbnail both can/does exist and that it cannot exist — and both sides cite Newton's First Law Of Motion as "proof" of their "case", showing that the ones in the first camp (if not both camps) are unaware of what that Law actually states, and possibly also of coaster physics, particularly the speed at which a coaster train needs to be going in order to make it through a loop. At such a speed, in the absence of a constraining track, what is supposed to prevent the train continuing to travel in the direction it was going when it left the track?
  • Similarly, a certain video of a fake roller-coaster crash (seen in a compilation of mysterious videos purpotedly filmed at Disney theme parks) appears to be manipulated footage of a ride at the Lagoon amusement park in Farmington, Utah, however not only have people looked past it, believed it to be authentic and constantly put it in list videos of ride crashes, but the laws of physics are definitely being broken here, as the car stays at a constant speed throughout the video, even when falling. Additionally, the car looks nothing like the one in the actual ride, and is travelling in the opposite direction.
  • Speaking of laws of physics being broken, this video purpotedly shows footage of the Gyro Drop at Lotte World in Seoul, South Korea, which seems real at first... until it starts doubling in size and ejecting the riders' seats, something which is physically impossible to achieve in real life. This hasn't stopped people from falling for it, though.
• In early 2017, an alleged news story about Whoopi Goldberg insulting a Navy SEAL widow was being shared online by various conservatives on social media as though it were truth. Apparently, the story spread so fast that this information ended up being caught by fact-checking websites Snopes and Politifact, both of whom deemed it to be bogus. Goldberg even threatened to sue the website hosting the story, UndergroundNewsNet. Politifact ultimately caught up with the writer of this story and revealed him to be Jason McDaniel, an American expatriate in Costa Rica. McDaniel created UndergroundNewsNet as a satirical website to share parody news stories (with conveniently-placed disclaimers stating that they were fiction) about left-wing politicians and pundits and shared them on a Trump-themed Facebook page to see if people would actually buy the stories. A lot of them did.
• YouTube channel Everyone Is Gay has recurring "advice episodes" which include segues where the hosts lip-sync to popular songs, always including a disclaimer that states that they don't own the rights to the music and encourages the listener to listen to the original performer. "Being Awkward + Sex Before Marriage" is one such episode, and includes text telling the viewer to listen to Little Talks "because they rule"... "Little Talks" is the name of the song, performed by the band Of Monsters and Men, and evidently the creators realized their mistake: The video remains unedited, but the video description includes the text "We have no rights to any music, but you should totally check out (Of Monsters and Men who sing the song) Little Talks"
• Referenced in the Bogleech Jojo's Bizarre Halloween reviews, when Bog lampshades the fact that he's about to review designs from a series he's never watched nor read.
  I'm sure the main character, Jojo Bizarre At His Computer, would have wanted it that way.
• In 2017, the program 13 Investigates from Indianapolis TV station WTHR showed a report about how "revenge porn" is sold on imageboards in exchange for money and drugs. This was "evidenced" by showing a random forum thread with a blurred-out photo, followed by a handful of replies consisting of the word "bump", supposedly a code word for cocaine. Anyone who's ever used a forum likely knows that a "bump" is simply a post which brings a forum thread back to the top of the list of recent threads; in other words, said posts not only had nothing to do with drugs, but also held next to no meaning whatsoever.
• Happened to the Numberphile video "The Scientific Way to Cut a Cake" after it went viral (pointed out in Hello Internet episode 15):
  "It's ABC News, and they're talking about your video. And they start it by saying, 'A team of mathematicians and scientists at Numberphile have been working on the solution for how to cut a cake.' Now, what I love about this, is every part of that sentence is wrong. Nothing is correct! 'A team of mathematicians and scientists'? No. First of all, there's one guy in the video [who's not a mathematician or scientist]. 'At Numberphile' — Numberphile, at least as of now, is not some kind of great mathematical scientific institution. It's a YouTube channel. … And then, 'have discovered' — this is, what, it's a hundred years old?"
  • Later in the episode, another instance is mentioned: "They [MailOnline] said the article was all about Alex Bellos, 'who calls himself Numberphile on YouTube.'"
  • Also on Hello Internet, CGP Grey says that in his experience, if you do even a trivial amount of research into almost any news story, it will turn out to have this problem. Based on this and his knowledge of how news production works, his argument is that the news in general inevitably suffers from this problem across the board, and that there's usually no point in consuming it at all because it's just too unreliable and inaccurate.
• In 2004 a child on a tabloid TV show claimed that Neopets required its users to gamble to earn enough Neopoints to feed their pets or else they would be sent to the pound. Pets are not automatically sent to the pound under any circumstance (pets only go to the pound if their owners voluntarily send them there), the only penalty for leaving your pet unfed is that you can't use certain site features until you feed it, and although a few of the available activities on the site are based on real-world gambling, they are all completely optional and there are are a wide variety of other things which players can do to earn Neopoints.
• The implementation of COPPA on YouTube has had this effect on specific videos. Since the system is automatic, most videos that feature animated characters and puppets, regardless of if it's aimed at adults or is a parody of the show in question, will get flagged as being "for kids". And sometimes, certain keywords in video title that relate to topics specific to kids will cause weird events to happen. One particular instance happened with an upload of a clip from the Animaniacs episode "Potty Emergency". The show is for children in the first place, so the clip being flagged was understandable. But since the video had the word "potty" in the title, most of the related videos were kids' videos about toilet training, despite the episode being about Wakko trying to find a place to pee when he really needs to go, not him learning to use the bathroom.
• The WrestleCrap "Headlies" article "Cody Rhodes Responds to Sporticus, Stephanie" routinely mispells LazyTown main character Sportacus' name as "Sporticus". It's clear the writer didn't bother spending five seconds searching to check that Sportacus' name is spelt correctly.
• SuperMarioLogan:
  • Common Sense Media's negative review of the series described a rape scene that is obviously from a YouTube Poop and not the original show. This might be partially why the review is no longer on the site.
  • One of its IMDb pages claims that Williams Street and Columbia Pictures Television co-produce SML, and that it has aired on [adult swim].
• A video about animating on two's and talking about framerate on animation accidentally puts Eadweard Muybridge's photographs made in 1985, when they're actually made between the 1870s and 1880s.

Fan Fiction

• Parodied in Justice Society of Japan, specifically in the Omake story "Justice Substitutes of Japan". The Big Bad turns out to be an OC named "Cowboy Bebop", and he specifically notes that he is at his computer. He then gets shot in the head by Spike.

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