GAME #9
This was actually planned to have been the final
Where is Ronald photoshop. About 14 years ago I was a member of a fansite for a popular raunchy radio personality who had just made the move to Satellite. Despite not being the only fansite for this celebrity, it still had thousands of members, most who spent a lot of time on the website's forums. Much like the forums here, that website didn't just discus the shock jock l, but had forums for other topics, such as sports, movies, television, general off topic, etc. One forum added was called "Photoshop". And you can imagine what threads the fans of this radio star started. Let me just give you an example of the tamer threads. There was one called
Mary Poppins where participants were asked to photoshop Mary into stills from hardcore porn movies. Another called
Family Circus had the family friendly captions under the cartoons replaced with offensive captions. And then there was the
Where's Waldo thread, where the person who started it asked participants to photoshop Waldo into photos of horrific scenes, usually the aftermath of battles or disasters where hundreds of dead bodies were lying on the ground. About a few days into the thread, someone posted a photo entitled "Where is the Cookie Monster" with the muppet hidden on an average street scene. This suddenly lead to the thread going way off topic with everyone posting their own "Where is..." photoshops with different characters. For example, one member made a bunch of
Where's Dart Vader photoshops. Another did a lot of
Where is Spock photoshops. And another a bunch of
Where's Dr. House photoshops, and so on. Once the thread morphed, I was inspired to make my own "Where is" photoshop, and made the one with the parade. It was initially supposed to be a one time thing, but then came the positive comments. They liked how no one noticed Ronald Reagan was in the photo until someone pointed it out the next day, which was exactly what I was trying for. So naturally I did what anyone else would do, I posted more
Where is Ronald photoshops, getting a lot more positive responses for the football one.
A few weeks later whatever novelty the thread had wore off. The thread had fallen off the first page a few times. I hadn't made a photoshop in over a week, and only went back because the idea of both Ronalds in the Sgt. Pepper album cover popped into my head. But it was supposed to have been my final one. I was busy on other threads. What I didn't count on was the new guy who took over moderating the forums, and had decided to go through all the trouble of fixing the hijacked threads. I wanted to see if anyone commented on the Sgt. Pepper photoshop, only to find when I got to the Photoshop Forums that the moderator had removed every photoshop from the thread that didn't have Waldo, including the one with Cookie Monster. He had gone through all the trouble of putting each into it's own new thread. So without me asking, all of my
Where is Ronald photoshops were in it's own thread, along with every comment on it and a lot of new comments. Even Cookie Monster had it's own thread, even though only one photoshop with Cookie Monster had been made. I guess if you have a lot of spare time on your hands and you are a forum member, you waste it making photoshops. And I guess if you are a board moderator you waste your time splitting the threads up. Once
Where is Ronald was suddenly on it's own, and suddenly getting brand new positive comments, I felt a bit obligated to make a few more photoshops. Next thing I knew I was making a new one every Sunday. The Darth Vader, Spock, House, and other threads were also active with new photoshops being made. Before I knew it, I had been posting weekly photoshops for a couple of years. By the time I reached the 200th photoshop I decided what I should stop. Not only had all the other Where Are threads stopped by then, but the membership on the forums itself had drifted off to almost no one. There were still a few active members left who were sort of friends, and occasionally commented on the photoshops, but except for it being a habit to make an post a new photoshop every Sunday at 11pm, there was no sane reason for that thread to still be there.
But back to the Sgt Peppers photoshop. Once I began posting a new
Where is Ronald every weekend, I started getting more elaborate, because I felt the Sgt. Pepper photoshop had raised the bar and I had to top it. I also decided I had to actually HIDE one or more of the Ronalds in the photo so it would be an actual challenge to find both. Part of that was because of the then recent death of Paul Rigby, the editorial cartoonist who was famous for hiding a tiny drawing of himself and his dog in his cartoons. I had remembered how in grade school a friend would bring in day old copies of
The Post and we would search for Rigby and his dog in the cartoons, sometimes taking the entire lunch period to find them. I had always considered
Where is Waldo a blatant rip-off of Rigby's idea. So, whenever I could, I made the Ronalds very hard to find. Of course, some weeks I didn't feel like going through that much trouble and slapped together a photoshop within a few minutes where the Ronalds were easy to spot. But basically, from this point on the games actually get harder to near impossible.
Topic: Where is Ronald? (Read 8943 times)
