Gooooood morning, Hank, it's Wednesday.

So listen, I really loved your video about the only time Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alex Trebek,  George Clooney, and Brad Pitt appeared in the same film. And it reminded me of the first  YouTube video I ever saw.

Now, I imagine most people don't remember the first  YouTube video they ever saw, but I do. Let me set the scene for you. The American Library Association,  Chicago, Illinois, mid-2005.

My first novel, Looking for Alaska,  has just been published. I'm working as a production editor at Booklist magazine,  and my friend Carlos comes up to my desk because he has something to show me,  and that something is YouTube. And then I saw my first ever YouTube video,  a collection of memes set to music called All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

But wait, the story does  not actually start in 2005!  It starts in 1991, when the Japanese video game Zero Wing is imported to the United States,  and in the process, some truly terrible translation occurs. So, in the intro to this video  game, the villain, which is a group called CATS, sadly not composed of actual cats,  surprise-attacks our heroes. “What happen?”, our hero asks, only to hear  in return “Somebody set up us the bomb.” And then the villain, CATS, comes on screen  and says, “How are you gentlemen!! All your base are belong   to us.” And then CATS says “You are on your way to destruction.” and our hero  says “What you say!!” and then CATS says “You have no chance to survive make your time”,  which is maybe my favorite run-on sentence in the history of the English language.

Anyway, this whole video is posted on web forums in the 90s and it becomes sort of semi-viral.  Now, Hank, as you pointed out yesterday, meme culture 25 years ago was vastly different  from meme culture today. Back then, the Internet was made primarily of text,  static images, G(J)IFs and GIFs. And like, these days, Hank, if you ask for  Pizzamas memes, even on a dying website like Twitter, you will receive a cornucopia  of wondrous memes in response.

But back in the halcyon days of yore, like,  photographic memes were quite rare because you needed Photoshop or some kind of  editing software. Still, wherever there are Internet points to be won, someone will try  to win them. And so, people began posting memes  about “all your base are belong to us”, especially on The Something Awful Forums.

They would repurpose iconic photos of what was then contemporary culture, but replace  the text with “all your base are belong to us”. Then in 2000, a band called  The Laziest Men on Mars released a song that mixed music from the video game  with a propulsive beat and a synthy voice saying— After that, people made a music video of the song using clips from Zero Wing alongside all of these  memes that had been created on the Something Awful Forum. And that, THAT  was the first video I ever saw on YouTube.

What did I love about All Your Base Are Belong To Us in 2005? I mean, the density of the jokes,  for one thing, the fact that I just had to keep re-watching in order to appreciate each individual  meme, like, straining the American Library Association's Internet servers in the process.  But in the years since, I have to say, I've developed a deeper love for All Your Base  Are Belong To Us, first, because it's such an extensive collaboration.  I love how, on the Internet,  there are still moments  that capitalism just can't capture effectively, like moments where people are mixing stuff  and mashing stuff up and bringing together the work of lots of people across time and space  in order to make one thing that's better than the thing that anyone individually could make.  Even when the intellectual  property can't be, like,  wholly owned or monetized, we will still make stuff together, and I find that quite lovely. But also, and I don't want to take this too deep, Hank, there are the words themselves.

I mean, who  among us doesn't know what it's like to suddenly discover that all your base are belong to us, that  the rug has been pulled out from underneath you? That what you thought were   your life and your world are, in fact, not yours, because all your base  are belong to us. Also, there is, in my opinion, no truer or more beautiful statement than  “you have no chance to survive make your time”.

I just love the idea that  time isn't only something we have or something we spend, it's something  we make, and we make time for ourselves and each other, knowing that time is finite.  I just think that's lovely in  a way no direct translation  ever could have been. And also,  of course, it's hilarious,  especially now that someone has spent several minutes explaining the joke to you! Now, Hank, I don't want to sound overly nostalgic for the Internet that once was.  It had all the same problems as  our current Internet, only on a  smaller scale, and the rate of creative production  these days is just astounding.  All I'm saying is that  weird decades-spanning  collaborative online projects  are my jam, which is why  Pizzamas is my ultimate jam!  I mean, what could be more magical than an annual fever dream where we make too many  videos and sell gibbets  for your crocs for charity?  So what can I say, Hank?

In spite of it all, I do love the Internet, where we have no chance  to survive but still make our time. Hank, I'll see you tomorrow.