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In 2000,??? ?????? ??????? ???????? ?? ????? at the back of my high school physics classroom, there was a computer with access to the internet, and for me, a whole new network of friends.

I was one of the very few people who had access to the password and knew how to navigate a little program we called "America Online." Sure, plenty of my fellow students knew how to set up a personal AIM account. But I was the only one who actually knew how to use a search engine (thank you, Yahoo! and WebCrawler) to explore a kewl new phenomenon: viral videos.

It was these profoundly useless, morbidly stupid videos -- of babies getting attackedby cats, of people getting hit (gently) by motorbikes-- that brought me out of isolation and helped me discover community.

To the deeply corny, pre-YouTube era videos of the early '00s, thank you.

The Pre-YouTube era

Viral videos existed well before the 2000s and YouTube, which was launched in 2005. Perhaps the most well known viral video of the early internet was the animated "Dancing Baby," which was made by the creators of Character Studio, an animation software. The clip was first popularized by an email chain in 1996, before reaching national prominence with television show Ally McBeal. Though created and popularized in the '90s, the video is still circulated today.

There were other videos from that time period that weren't popular in digital spaces but whose structure remains similar to the viral videos we see on social platforms today. America's Funniest Home Videos, which featured short, charmingly dumb, homemade videos was perhaps the best example of that. The show (practically) invented the video where the kid falls off the trampoline or someone uses fake birthday candles. Even though America's Funniest Home Videoswas featured on broadcast television, the format of these videos became the de facto viral video formatfor the videos of today.

Together, these extremely wholesome, playfully violent videos brought the country together.

Fast forward to 2000, when I, Queen of the Northern Highlands Regional High School Science League, had decided to take on an additional job title: Chief Viral Video Curator of fifth period physics.

One community, united by silly videos

As someone who loved taking long standardized examinations in high school, was queer, and spent their Saturday nights in the Barnes & Noble puzzle section, I surprisingly wasn't the most popular person in high school. I had a bully, who was and remains a moron, and who enjoyed extremely conventional bullying tactics: pushing me into lockers, taking my lunch money (sooo bully-normative!) and accusing me of loving science (I loved English, asshole!).

I wasn't good at anything people in high school were supposed to be good at. I hated sports, enjoying parties, or talking to other humans in general. But because I had an "in" with my high school physics teacher, I was good at spending entire lab periods finding the best viral videos in between half-assedly performing experiments.

My physics teacher was fully checked out, like any good high school teacher in a New Jersey public school. So, while he did crossword puzzles in the front of the room, I spent my days looking up viral videos and encouraging everyone in the room to join me in watching them on the video hosting site ShareYourWorld.com or more commonly, on random people's webpages. I had a similarly nerdy boyfriend in New York who would also email me deeply random videos.

I didn't have any "real" friends in my physics class. But I had more than enough who were willing to come to the back of the room to watch "All Your Base Are Belong to Us," a video compilation based on a mistranslation from the 1989 video game, Zero Wing. Together, we whispered every dumb line of the video.

The emo drama kids were more than willing to come to the back of the room to watch Don Hertzfeldt's"Rejected" with me, which was released in 2000 and nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards in 2001. It included some of the best banana-spoon content in internet humor history.

The following video of a cat attacking a baby pales in comparison to the cat attack compilationsof today, but in the early '00s it was seen as a viral video masterpiece among my "friends" in my informal viral video club. Every time I played it, all the cruel jocks came to my computer to watch along. We didn't become full-on friends, but we could all share this beautiful, just-on-the-edge-of-cruel, viral moment together.

There were others. I'm not proud of liking videos that feature physical harm, but this video of reporter Anthea Turner getting hit by a motorbike (and surviving! She's totally fine!) brought all my fellow students to my side of the classroom. Turner was a reporter for a Saturday morning television show, UP2U, and covering a motorbike display at a 1988 tournament when she was accidentally hit by a bike. This unfortunate moment was the kind of harmless sadism we could all get behind.

For the public policy nerds in the classroom, I had this video of MTA subway ads from the '80s, where no actor featured could say anything positive about the trains themselves, but instead just expressed vague hope for the future.

After months of regular "screenings" of these viral videos, I started to detect a real shift in my personal life. I finally had "friends." Or something close to friends. The people who were coming to my viral video screenings now actually wanted to talk to me in the hallway. They were interested in acting out the scene of the tiny toddler getting assaulted by the cat (sorry toddler) during study hall. They wanted to research what the physical consequences of getting hit by a motorbike were. The captain of the soccer team (OK, the JV captain) would see me at my locker and scream "All my base are belong to us!" as if he … actually wanted to talk to me.

To be fair, only a few of my new viral video friends wanted to hang out with me after school. But they formed a protective circle -- even if they weren't fully conscious of it -- every day I was in school. Each time my high school bully cornered me in the hallway to take my money so he could buy some Doritos (so conventional, bro), someone from my informal viral video fan club would approach me to reenact their favorite banana-spoon interactions from the Hertzfeldt video. People hovered around me during lunch in the physics classroom so I could find and show them the best cat attack videos on the internet. My bully couldn't find me there. I was surrounded by people who wanted to watch non-deadly car crash videos on the internet.

In their own, completely dumb, borderline cruel, but sometimes very weird way, viral videos protected me in high school. Cat attacks were my security blanket. There are so many moments of my high school experience I never want to relive again, but this period -- the time I became Chief Viral Video Curator of fifth period physics -- I'll rewatch, on loop, like a dumb viral video itself.