Everything about Capping totally explained
» for the capping process in biology see 5' cap.
Capping is best to describe the
Internet activity of looking at a
screen capture (or "screengrab") and typing a caption to coincide with the picture. Usually the caption can be of any use, like observation, but generally it's used to make a humorous quip about the screengrab.
History
The beginnings
It began with the popular cult TV show
Mystery Science Theater 3000, whose characters make jokes while watching bad movies. It was a phenomenon of minimal proportions in the eyes of its viewers and fans. When the series moved to the
Sci Fi Channel in the late
1990s, Sci Fi's webmasters at "The Dominion" website created a program on its server called "
Caption This!". The process was simple: they took still pictures from whatever was airing on the Sci Fi channel at the time, to which visitors could add their own humorous captions. The program was created to coincede with the show's debut, and came alongside the Channel's other "game", .
The program had greater longevity than the
Home Game did, as it debuted from
October 30,
1996 and stayed on for several years, allowing users to come in at any time to caption whatever was airing on the channel at the time.
"Caption This!"
While the program remained, fans could sign-in with their Dominion sign-ups and look at the picture to be captioned. New pictures loaded up every minute or so and users could either click on links to see what the gallery had up so far (only a couple recent pictures showed at a time), to refresh the picture if needed, or to make a caption. The program worked well for its time, though had a few snags. One of the common occurrences was a frozen screengrab which stayed on for hours, or when there was no screengrab loaded at all. The latter became a bit of a joke as usually the "broken" screengrab would have a message reading "Sorry. This isn't very interesting without graphics."
The end of "Caption This!"
While
MST3K was finished with producing new shows, "Caption This!" remained online for fans to continue the capping tradition. Activity at the site remained steady until
January 31,
2004 when reruns of
MST3K stopped airing on the Sci Fi Channel. At first, the only change at "Caption This!" was the removal of the
MST3K theme, but the site soon experienced a downturn. Screengrabs were provided in worse quality than before, often looking too dark to see, and the program started to freeze up more frequently. Activity dwindled, until finally in July,
2004, "Caption This!" was quietly removed from SciFi.com, with just an
old hidden note
as a reminder.
The capping adventure continues...
Capping in itself didn't fade away completely, as some communities still exist, and a couple of related websites provide opportunity for people to continue capping. Most well-known of these are Glitter's Cap Page Board and Inventing Situations.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Capping'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://capping.totallyexplained.com">Capping Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
