Back in 2004, my brother and I, just as a goof, decided to create a bit of socio-political satire poking fun at online conspiracy theorists and post it on a friend's blog. The gag was to instruct people how to properly make and use a tin foil hat.
Along with detailed instructions, we took a series of pictures showing me actually making a tin foil hat. I dressed up in a bright yellow sweatshirt and was standing in front of a cinder block wall. My hair looked like it hadn't been combed for weeks and I looked like an inmate in an insane asylum.
Within a few months, our pictures started showing up all over the place. If you did a Google image search for "tin foil hat", it showed up as almost half of the first few dozen results including all of the top 5 spots.
This was fun for a little while and I even had sone people who new me tell me they had seen it somewhere online.
Of course, interest quickly went away and I stopped seeing my pictures. Google image searches still showed a few results but rarely among the top 50 or so.
I've pretty much forgotten about it since then but in the last few weeks I've had several people contact me to say the've seen a couple of the pictures showing up at various places, usually photoshopped to add a humorous caption.
This has been very weird, for me. I'm usually very careful to keep my personal information offline and I don't post anything about myself on social media, so now I'm randomly seeing pictures of myself, looking like a crazy person, popping up 15 years after posting a few pictures on a private blog, as a joke.
I'm curious if this is a common thing to happen. Anyone else experience something like this?
Along with detailed instructions, we took a series of pictures showing me actually making a tin foil hat. I dressed up in a bright yellow sweatshirt and was standing in front of a cinder block wall. My hair looked like it hadn't been combed for weeks and I looked like an inmate in an insane asylum.
Within a few months, our pictures started showing up all over the place. If you did a Google image search for "tin foil hat", it showed up as almost half of the first few dozen results including all of the top 5 spots.
This was fun for a little while and I even had sone people who new me tell me they had seen it somewhere online.
Of course, interest quickly went away and I stopped seeing my pictures. Google image searches still showed a few results but rarely among the top 50 or so.
I've pretty much forgotten about it since then but in the last few weeks I've had several people contact me to say the've seen a couple of the pictures showing up at various places, usually photoshopped to add a humorous caption.
This has been very weird, for me. I'm usually very careful to keep my personal information offline and I don't post anything about myself on social media, so now I'm randomly seeing pictures of myself, looking like a crazy person, popping up 15 years after posting a few pictures on a private blog, as a joke.
I'm curious if this is a common thing to happen. Anyone else experience something like this?
