What year is it? The ninja behind early 2000s internet video series Ask a Ninja clearly anticipated the reflexive reaction to his first new video in nine years, leading off with an instant parry. "What year isn't it?" he says within the first three seconds.
"If you're still believing in time, my friend, I don't know what to tell you. Have you ever heard of the internet? Everything lasts forever on the internet! Except MySpace photos, or if you had a Flickr Pro account. 2025, I'm still alive!"
I cannot believe that the Ask a Ninja guy looks and sounds exactly the same as he did 20 years ago, when pirates vs. ninjas and the general concept of bacon were the most popular topics on the internet. Ask a Ninja sprang forth from the innocent time when memes lasted for years instead of days and putting on a balaclava, doing a funny voice and uploading 360p videos could get you a book deal and lead to you interviewing Will Ferrell. Seeing him suddenly pop up and do new jokes in 2025 makes me feel incredibly old. That balaclava better be hiding some gray hair.
But I think it's also… making me happy? Maybe confused. Unsettled. Yesterday I was prepared to write the return of Ask a Ninja off as a freak incident, but maybe there's something in the water (or in the tubes), because today Homestar Runner published a new video celebrating its 25th year online. It's a song called "Back to a website," and appropriately celebrates a time when "the whole internet wasn't just on four websites on peoples' phones."
I have some deep, unhealed wounds from being in high school when Homestar Runner was considered peak comedy by 15-year-olds—I would really be okay going the rest of my life without hearing Strong Bad's voice—but this song still speaks to me. As PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens recently advocated, the internet was a richer place to be when it was made up of a million thriving pockets of weirdos with no monolithic social media corralling everyone into the same centralized space.
But I'm actually a little optimistic about what feels to me like a groundswell of interest in rebuilding some version of the 2000s internet with more personal blogs and decentralized social media that values people over platforms. In the last year I've seen more people adopt the concept of "POSSE," or Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere; push back against Substack's attempt to own newsletters in favor of independent publishing; and go all-in on making the fragmented web easier to navigate.
Maybe the Homestar Runner video is simply a cheeky way to celebrate the site's longevity, but "let's go back to a website" manages to feel like quite a timely message to me in 2025. There are some good jokes in there about web rings, guest books and hit counters, quaint fossils of the early internet. Yet Homestarrunner.com still uses Flash courtesy of open source emulator Ruffle, and it's proof the video has a point. Clicking around that website is just fun in a way that most sites today are not.
Ask a Ninja's return video is timely in its own way. "Is the ninja community being affected by tariffs?" he's asked, which gets a smooth pivot to "Ninjas are way more affected by tear-offs—we have to pay an extra duty for every arm that we remove!" I'm not saying that the ninja returned from his long slumber because the state of the world was so bad it awoke him in grand Arthurian tradition just when we needed him most. But his second Return Era video, released three days ago, is titled "Zune vs iPod"—clearly this is a man who knows how to deploy the healing power of Remembering 2009.
I'm not sure two incidents are enough to declare a trend, but be on the lookout for the Potter Puppet Pals or the Peanut Butter Jelly Time banana to reappear at any moment. If this isn't proof enough the early 2000s internet is making a comeback, I don't know what is.
