The 150th Wing: Medium Quality Screen Captures

by Michael Anthony Farley on June 17, 2016 The 150th Wing

libertarian

We at AFC decided to start exploring the 150th Wing of the Internet to assuage concerns that the internet was becoming increasingly more horrible and less weird. But weird and horrible don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and there’s a Facebook community to prove it.

Last year, someone added me to the Facebook group Medium Quality Screen Captures. Suddenly, my newsfeed was full of even more inane or absurd content, cheesy viral marketing, and clickbait than I was accustomed to filtering out. Or rather, documentation of the above net detritus. In screen capture format, the viral videos don’t play, the outrageous headlines can’t be clicked on, and the maddening ill-informed political rants can’t be replied to. These base junk-products of the endless stream of web content are reduced to a neutered archive through the miracle of “post-photography”. In a sense, the informal collective performs a similar function to the VHS-remixing art group Everything is Terrible—skimming the surface of the media we’re semi-non-consentually bombarded with daily online rather than mining the bowels of late-night infomericals and low-budget religious films. In either case, the results are hilarious.

fox news

Virtual Reality

The group is the brainchild of Dylan Going, who is working on a grayscale print publication of the best screen-grabs, organized thematically. The first will be “Romance.” Expect plenty of tender moments like the one above. When I asked Dylan why he started the group, he described it as such:

“The general goal of group is to gather the unintentionally interesting imagery of the Internet; ‘medium quality’ referring to the way they don’t ~deliver~ in the way that memes or clever link bait articles, etc… try to. [A] celebration of gray areas or whatever.”

But “medium quality” also applies to the image resolution of screen captures, an aesthetic Brian Feldman describes as “the Shitpic.” As such, we’re treated to plenty of stills from streaming news reports using crappy cell phone footage, thumbnails enlarged beyond their creators’ intent, and text that bleeds jagged junks of grey into the background. It’s the favorite font style of pop-up spam chat bots everywhere:

wanna fuck

And even creeps into screen captures of corporations trying to use social media to be more relatable:

exxon

The internet, much like the real world, is full of corporations’ junk:

peppers

And celebrities trying to prove they’re “just like us”:

mariah carey

Gucci Mane

But more often than not, the internet reminds us that the world is a terrible, terrible place:

mexico will pay

bushwick gentrification

paris

blindmystic

The best Medium Quality Screen Captures just allow us to bask in the weirdness of the web:

plane

lashes god love

satanic power meditation

suicide

And way more user-generated content involving a combination of vaping and nudity than I can understand:

vape

But to ensure that the forum’s appropriated content remains of a sufficiently medium quality, there are of course rules:

This is a forum for posting Medium Quality Screen Captures. No context, no memes, very little recursion.

In order to provide assuredly medium content to our users, consider the following prior to posting:

Style Guide

1. SCREENCAPS ONLY. It is an image taken from a screen; computer preferred, tv screen sometimes ok.

2. NO MEMES. Ideally you took the capture yourself but if not, it cannot be something already in wide circulation. Is your screencap notable or is your screencap a picture of something that is notable? You might have a jpg. Please post to a jpg forum.

3. NO CONTEXT. Don’t say where the image came from. If someone ~really~ wants to know then tell them, idc

4. VERY LITTLE RECURSION. Ah, a screen cap of a screen cap of a comment on mqsc-WE GET IT

5. QUALITATIVE REINFORCEMENT. MQSC does not support a like-based economy. Consider a sticker, comment, or screen capture to show your appreciation

6. EASE UP ON WACKY HEADLINES If we wanted to just post articles then we’d hang out everywhere else on the internet.

However, Dylan Going lets us bend the rules for special circumstances:

HOT DAD

 

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