All Hail Lukket, You Gullible Fools!

Of the millions of web sites that are out there, I can say with pride that I’ve been an active member for 2 over years at one that has been instrumental in fooling a lot of people, as well as melting servers by giving them more traffic than they can handle.

Fark.com is not your ordinary place on the web. It’s humor, politics, and Photoshop contests all rolled into one. Users submit stories from various online sources and, if lucky, they get approved for the main board – sort of a gold star on their user profile. Speaking of which, here’s mine.

The Power of Fark has duped many people, including those bought the story of the Kenny Rogers riot, and those of you who may have gotten this image e-mailed to them recently:



It may have come with some text about how “this is how scientists in 1954 envisioned the computer of the future! OMG!!! LOL!!! ROTFLMAO!!!!111!” or something like that. But this image was actually created for a Fark Photoshop contest back in September, 2004. While us Farkers knew it was a fake and never meant it to become a hoax, it got into the hands of someone who thought it was real – obviously a non-Farker. Well, that or it was a lurker who thought it would be funny to start something.

So it made the rounds. Maybe you even got it in your inbox. And it eventually made its way to Snopes.com, where it was debunked 19 days after being posted on Fark. Since the debunking, various outlets such as Popular Mechanics, About.com, and a host of other web sites have been examining the image. Even uber-dork Moby posted the image on his web site's main page, and Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy also fell victim to the image.

While technogeeks on message boards and English majors around the world are always quick to point out the technical inaccuracies and grammatical errors of the image, one thing is clear: It fooled one hell of a lot of people.

And while all websites are quick to dismiss it is a hoax, most never mention the creator. All hail Farker Lukket, who was the genius behind the image.

So to the technogeeks who bitched about how inaccurate the image was: The joke’s on you. It was never intended to be accurate, or to become a hoax. It’s a submarine, for God’s sake! It’s got a freakin’ steering wheel! The contest was called "Photoshop this mock-up of a submarine's maneuvering Room", not "Let's start a new urban legend by Photoshopping this submarine room into a computer". If you can’t tell a "1954 computer" from a submarine control panel, you need help. That, and you're pissed because you probably thought it was real or meant to be real at first. Bow the the mind of Lukket, infidels!

To those picking on the grammar: Fark off. English is not Lukket’s native language but it was still good enough for people around the world to believe for it, making it an urban legend in no time flat.

And to those of you who fell for it and forwarded this to as many people you could: Behold, the Power of Fark.