"MICHAELSOFT BINBOWS" isn't what you think it is

This video was brought to you by Keep Microsoft Bimbos. This image for decades has basically been the poster child for

what

constitutes bad off-brand, pointed out time and time again as a classic example of a bootleg knockoff. Damn, the subreddit sucks. brands microsoft bimbos is known for being one of the most common repositories in sub history. Now I love this image. I've always loved this image, and as strange as it may be to

think

, I've technically loved this image for most of my life. vida is one of the first funny pictures I remember seeing on the internet and to this day just hearing or seeing the words microsoft bimbos still makes me lose my temper now they say nothing ruins a joke more than explaining it so I'm not even going to try which one It's a relief, I guess, because I don't

think

I can even articulate why Microsoft Bimbos is so funny to me, since on a basic phonetic level the phrase Microsoft Bimbos is, I think, inherently hilarious, just a purely meaningless phrase. , probably the result of a What if Microsoft Bimbos weren't stupid?

What if all the millions of people who have shared and enjoyed this image over the years and ignored it as fun, off-brand trash? What if it was far-fetched, as far-fetched as it may seem, practically everyone on the Internet was wrong and Microsoft's nonsense actually meant something? Hey, while we're throwing out questions, here's one that doesn't get asked enough,

what

the heck were Microsoft's dumbasses? company, a pirated operating system, what specifically it was and last but not least, where was it, where was this huge multi-foot Microsoft bimbos sign and perhaps most crucial of all was this real photo with just a photo of Michael Self Bimbo in stock.

At a certain point, I have to wonder if it ever really existed or was this all just a silly Internet Photoshop job that got out of control. Today I intend to answer each and every one of these questions or die trying. It's the story of Microsoft Bimbos, so let's get straight to my first point, what does Microsoft Bimbos mean, if it means anything. At first glance, you can see how the average English-speaking person, myself included, would automatically assume this is a lazy imitation. of Microsoft Windows with some letters mixed up, you know, the classic changes the task a little, so it is not obvious that you have copied things like brands usually do, but that is not what is happening here, far from it, the Microsoft's fools, in fact, they are.

It's not nonsense, these words were not chosen at random and if you dig a little deeper you will see what I mean, let's quickly dig in and translate some of the Japanese text in this image, the katakana at the top of this banner says chuko. The pasokan and patsu store is basically a used PC and spare parts store, while the huge kanji to the left of the sign says gekiyasu, which means cheap or bargain price, so at this point we have a clearer idea of ​​what it was. , it was a used store that sold PC parts but I heard you yelling why microsoft bimbos so here's my favorite part.

Bimbo is actually a Japanese word that means poor or poverty, so it's actually a bilingual pun. They have combined the English word windows and the Japanese word bimbo to make bimbos 99.9. Of the people who see this image do not understand this, it is not a typo, an imitation or a mistake, it is a play on words, a play on words that suggests, hey, if you are broke, come and check out our pieces of very cheap used PCs, so right now I think the elephant in the room is Microsoft, well this is what I can tell you in Japan.

Microsoft's name is spelled like this, mikurosafuto. Now that name consists of seven katakana. Ma. Now here's where it gets a little speculative. Michael is an incredibly common English name. is one of those names that is so prevalent in Western culture that it has actually seeped into the Japanese lexicon. A great example of what I'm talking about look at the p lander z song so many mike which is literally about how confusing it is that all Americans seem to be called michael, so since michael is such a common name among gaijin, it's a name that the japanese are very familiar with writing in katakana and when you write the name michael in katakana you end up with this now, a big difference between japanese and english is that spoken japanese is incredibly closely related to written japanese and affects the way their Word games.

The reason Microsoft is an effective word game in Japanese is because you only have to change two katakana for it to work. the fact that michael and micro are extremely different words in english, in fact at the bottom of the sign, that's what the katakana says, it says microsoft, so it's two questions down, what does microsoft bimbos mean, it's a pun and what microsoft bimbos was a used computer equipment. buy, but that still leaves one glaring question: where is this place located besides Japan? I mean, if this place exists, where is it still there? Seriously, drop a pin, like I know some melee players who would pay big money. to get your hands on those CRT monitors, so just after researching this for a while, I initially concluded that it would be impossible to answer.

I have a lot of videos that fizzle out like this when I get halfway through solving a mystery. or answering a question and then surrendering to the fact that it is unknowable inserting Microsoft bimbos into Google Maps results of course in nothing and, on reflection, trying to find information about Microsoft bimbos was complicated for two reasons, I think first, the ubiquity of this image, this image is on the internet has been uploaded to every website with funny images, with its watermark placed over and over again, making it incredibly difficult to trace, which leads me to the second reason why it's almost impossible to research Microsoft's dumbasses from the This Image era, I mean, remember that this photo is older than YouTube, older than Reddit, and frankly, older than a significant portion of people watching this video right now.

It has been republished again and again for two decades, which means that this image has been circulated so much that it has long since been completely separated from its source every time you see the microsoft bimbo image you are looking at a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy every time you see this image it has been republished and rezipped dozens, probably even hundreds many times and you can tell that while working on this video I must have looked at three or four hundred variations of this one single image and the actual underlying content was always exactly the same, it's this specific photo from this specific angle, with almost no clues as to where this was taken other than it was somewhere in Japan, which by the way is a much larger country than what they believe.

I know many of you are probably imagining it like Hawaii, but Japan is huge, like Japan as a whole is 150,000 square miles. The city of Tokyo alone has more than 1.9 million buildings. It is a series of islands, but it is a series of very large islands. I was looking for a Microsoft bimbos needle in a haystack the size of Japan and with no information anywhere on Google and two decades of digital atrophy standing between the bimbos at Microsoft and me, trying to find this specific building was a daunting task, but I kept going and kept looking at this same image over and over again until I finally made an incredible discovery: I found what I believe.

To be the first use of the phrase Microsoft Bimbos in the entire history of the Internet, this is a Japanese website called Alf's Room active since 1997 Alf's Room is a little-known personal blog belonging to a 51-year-old Japanese man. man named dachi yoshinori who has been constantly updating the website since he launched it in 1997 almost 24 years ago. Now there is a lot of personality on this website, not only is it aesthetically lovely with a design deeply reminiscent of the early 90s internet, but the entire site is manned and hosted by alf, a fictional character created by adachi to be the character of website image basically alph is the mascot of this page.

Now, by browsing Elf's room, you learn a lot about Adachi and his hobbies. The man is fascinated with trains, video games, photography, music and For each of these topics, Adachi has created separate pages on the site which he calls rooms. Maybe you can hear it in my voice, but I love this website and I definitely recommend you explore it for yourself at some point, but we're interested. Today, this is a subsection of Alf's room called the showroom. Within this page there is another subpage labeled Kore Nandaro, which I asked my Japanese friend Maru about to gauge the tone and he described it with a meaning like hmm, what is this?

Thank you. maru, so this page is a page where Alph and his friend two fictional characters, as a reminder, discuss a variety of quotes, strange, unusual and mysterious things. This is my favorite section of the site because it reveals that Adachi is an eccentric and deeply annoying man who I traveled all over Japan and beyond, sometimes returning to the same place decades apart and noticing the changes, so, as an example, there is a page here about this monorail station in Kanagawa in 1999. Adachi noticed that for some reason, at the end of this line there are three.

Potted plants placed at the railway terminal, so he took a photo of it. When Adachi got home, he pulled out a video he took at that same Kanagawa station in 1992 and discovered that the flower pots were also in that footage and when he returned. in 2002 he discovered that they were still there, but when he returned in 2007 they were gone, like a really very particular documentation of things that the average person might not notice or care about, so between all these odds and ends on the kore nani page daro is a page titled, you guessed it, microsoft bimbos, so I clicked on this page not really knowing what to expect and what I saw literally made me gasp out loud, there was a never before seen photo of microsoft bimbos, I hope I was indeed. communicate how important this is in all my research on microsoft bimbos.

I didn't see this photo once this was a never seen angle of the microsoft

binbows

building giving us a much better look at the building itself including the signs and the triangular green. awning on the front and while I'm sure someone somewhere on the internet has seen this photo before, it still completely blew me away that this existed, it seemed like almost no one was aware of it, let's see what Adachi has to say about this image . spoken indirectly through his ocs, courtesy of google translate, used pc and parts store, microsoft bimbos, it's a suspicious name of course, it's a parody of microsoft windows, it's a used pc and parts store, right is that so?

In other words, it's a hardware store, true, true, but the name is Microsoft, okay with that name, the logo is just the reverse of the Windows logo. I think Microsoft will complain, it wouldn't be strange if it came, however it seems that the store closed at the end of 2002. The line is fascinating because it means that, according to Adachi, the store disappeared almost 20 years ago and, as interesting as it is That trivia, still not my favorite thing on this page, see at the top of each of Nandoro's pages. adachi has meticulously recorded two pieces of information: first, the date he took the photo in question and, second, the location of the shot, the dates of this July 20, 2001 and the location of the shot somewhere called kawaiigi machi, Now chances are you haven't heard of it. kawaiigimachi, I certainly hadn't, is a small city, actually more of a neighborhood located about two hours from Tokyo, within the city of Meibashi, with a population of just over a thousand households and without a train station from which to talk now, of course, after reading adachi's blog post, I went.

I looked on Google Maps, searched for Koigimachi, and saw this, and while it's still a pretty big stretch of land, finding Microsoft bimbos was starting to seem like a possibility, even with no clues as to where within this maze the remains of Microsoft's bimbos might be found. Microsoft. It felt daunting and with the pandemic in Japan still ongoing, booking a ticket and taking a flight to Tokyo is still not an option for me, so I racked my brain about what would be the best option after going there in person, a of the first ideas. What I had was just to contact Adachi directly after all, Adachi is the only guy on earth I know who saw the Microsoft bimbos with his own eyes, maybe remembered where exactly I was or could help point me in the right direction.

Now Adachi has a disclaimer on their website that says they don't respond to emails or languages ​​other than Japanese, but I thought I should at least give it a try so hastily I sent a message to adachi, popped it into Google Translate, and I sent it andAs expected, I didn't hear it. When I came back from it I kept thinking how can I go to Japan without going to Japan and then it hit me so I opened Steam and downloaded Google Earth VR looking for answers. I see that anyone who has clicked aimlessly on Google Street View for a while knows this.

It can get quite disorienting pretty quickly. My hope here was that the VR component of Google Earth VR would help me on some level establish a sense of direction of familiarity to help me better connect and capture the feeling of wandering around taking in the sights. Believe it or not, I've actually been missing quite a bit since the start of the pandemic, so at 1:30 a.m. m. Last Friday I went under, so before I went into the ground I had one last thing to do, I had to arm myself. The only two Microsoft bimbo photos in existence, the legendary original and the newly discovered one that Adachi provided, were placed on my left arm and I began my descent, it was time for the hunt to begin, I'm still not sure how it happened but I was somehow able to break through the surface of the earth, a deep feeling of dread formed in the pit of my stomach and I couldn't shake the feeling that some kind of supernatural horrors were waiting for me on the other side of this.

Luckily none of that happened and I had a great time in Google Earth VR floating over hundreds and hundreds of houses and buildings with no clear idea of ​​where to start, it was pretty daunting so I picked a random spot in Kawagiemachi and started exploring . So I don't know if you've used Google Earth VR before, but many people, including myself, find it to be a pretty incredible, emotional and transporting experience. One of my favorite things to do when I show someone virtual reality for the first time is to drop them into this game and take them to some of their favorite places their childhood home their favorite vacation spot to the right person taken to the right place damn I mean, I sound like the g-man, the right person in the right place can do everything differently, no, but really putting the right person in Google Earth VR can have quite emotional results.

It's like this isn't the perspective I knew I wanted, but it's as entertaining as it gets and I'll be damned. If my visit to Quagi Kwagimachi didn't perfectly fit that description, and I can't really put my finger on what it was, maybe it was the stillness of these Street View images, maybe it was the ambient music, maybe it was the truly amazing quality photography. that Google Japan uses in its Street View, but all of these elements came together to really give me the feeling that I was wandering through a quiet Japanese neighborhood. I walked slowly around Koagi Machi and just enjoyed the views.

I passed an elementary school decorated with the the children's superhero anpanman passes by an old boarded up and overgrown bicycle shop a surprisingly large games room ooh, they have tuna, there they have the initial d there was as much life in these still photographs as an old man wandering around or some kids on their way to school, even silly and unexpected things like a Hello Kitty branded storage facility, it all brought me back to that feeling of being in Japan again and as a kid who's been to Japan several times, I don't think I fully understood how therapeutic and important those trips to Japan have been for me until this strange free software from 2016 brought me back there.

It was like suddenly the severity of the emotional impact that not being able to go to Japan had had on me and the weight and importance that I had placed on these trips like everything hit me at once and um like, okay, I'll put it So. I had gotten into koagi machi expecting it to be like this. this tedious maze into an experience where I'm wandering around getting lost and confused and quickly get frustrated and bored and instead this beautiful, nostalgic and surprisingly powerful experience took me completely by surprise. Don't know. what else to call it, it legitimately hit me on the butt a little bit.

At one point I realized that I had actually gotten so immersed in the atmosphere of being back in Japan that I had accidentally wandered about a full mile outside of Kwaghimachi and had to turn around and go back, so I kept walking, I walked leisurely. Through this city I'd never been to in a country I'd been to many times, I occasionally looked at my wrist when I came across a building that looked like the one Michael's fools were in. and for the next hour, that happened much like I lost count of how many times I approached a building, like I felt a jolt of excitement knowing it might be the right one and then looked back and forth at the buildings. photos in my I put it together a couple of times and realized I was wrong, the brick work was slightly different or the windows weren't quite aligned and after a while that cycle started to wear on me a little, like It became a little exhausting to feel this spark of I hope I found Microsoft Bimbos and then the gradual realization that this wasn't actually Microsoft Bimbos started to wear on me a little and as always I knew that this was a long shot, as if somewhere very I knew inside me that there was a very real chance that nothing recognizable remained of the original building, that maybe it had been re-tiled or repainted or that the distinctive green awning you see in the photo of the dachi had been torn down or, heck, perhaps the entire building had been demolished, that is, none of these. were off the table, it had been 20 years since the tragic closure of microsoft bimbos, meaning there was no trace of that building left anywhere, but I also didn't want to ruin the feeling this gave me, I knew that the more time I spent Wandering aimlessly around this town, plus the magic I was feeling, the magic of this experience was starting to dissipate and that's not what I wanted to happen, so I decided to throw in the towel, after spending an hour there, it was a nice I tried , but the chances of me somehow stumbling upon the right building seemed pretty low to the naked eye if that building existed, so I gave up or rather I was about to give up and then this happened no way, no way , no way.

Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute, no dude, I found it, yeah, the windows match perfectly. What was really scaring me was the awning over there, which is exactly the same. No way, no way, no way, oh my God, I want to go. in the parking lot so bad i found it i found it in virtual reality that's so amazing oh my god i had done it through a combination of diligence and sheer luck i had found it no way man bro if i take off this headset and it's still no I'm recording, I'm going to commit suicide.

I looked back and forth between the photos and this building and I can't describe how good it felt when everything fell into place, as if everything was aligned with the triangular awning in the adachi photo that after decades of exposure to The elements had faded to a very faint green color, the pillar that lined it and of course, that same dusty set of four Microsoft bimbos that hadn't changed one bit, I couldn't stop smiling, not even telling the story Now I can't stop. smiling, it was a crazy feeling to be there or practically be there in the exact same place adachi had been 20 years earlier, in the exact spot of one of the most beloved and misunderstood images on the entire internet, that's exactly where I was and thanks in advance.

Thanks in large part to the extensive documentation provided by Adachi Yoshinori, we've zeroed in on the hallowed ground where Microsoft's silliness once emerged. I couldn't even look at it without laughing. This creature is, but I'm very happy at 36 degrees 22 minutes 21.7 seconds north. and 139 degrees, 3 minutes and 30.2 seconds east lies this building, the hallowed ground where the Microsoft bimbos once stood. If you wish, you can visit it yourself on Google Maps. There is a link in the description right under the subscribe button or once tourism opens. Maybe even go there in person and pay your respects to this legendary landmark.

I know I will. The experience I've had over the last month researching is why I love the Internet. Here we have this Japanese guy meticulously documenting his entire life online for decades speaking as best I can tell to virtually no one, and yet, years and years and years later, one of this guy's hundreds of blog posts ended up being pivotal to help a guy on the other side of the planet, 20 years in the future, solve a pretty inconsequential problem. mystery without the photo of adachi and the location he posted there is no way I would have found this.

It provided me with the only original writing on the entire internet from someone who actually visited microsoft bimbos in person. I had to tell someone so I reached out to the only friend of mine who I knew would still be awake my Japanese friend maru the morning after going on this little VR adventure I woke up to find I had received an email from adachi this is it what i had to say hello nick sorry for the late reply, the photos on this page were taken by me, however I have never been inside just looking at them from the outside.

I've never bought. Unfortunately, no further information is available. I'm sorry I can't help. Alf's room manager. yoshinori adachi it's funny that I ended it that way by saying I'm sorry I couldn't be of help because I didn't know that I was incredibly helpful in solving this mystery so yoshinori adachi if you're watching this, thank you, um, thank you for keeping The Room of the elves for 33 years. Thank you for your meticulousness in documenting the little things in life that caught your attention. Your unwavering dedication to taking the things you care about and putting them on the Internet.

This led me to one of the highlights of my year and they are all. otherwise, by watching this I know like adachi if there is something interesting for you if there is something that you like if there is something that catches your attention or that you want to share or that you find fascinating just put it on the Internet make the blog or the YouTube video or the song or whatever it is that you've been thinking about doing and then you've talked yourself out of it because you think no one will care or no one will ever see it, please, I'm begging you, do it anyway, do it anyway. anyway and post it. there because you never know who it will reach or how it will help them thanks for watching and have a good weekend.

Hey, one last thing: I'm getting dangerously close to hitting 1 million subscribers, which is crazy if you're watching this. channel and you enjoyed this video and you made it to the end. I would love it if you would consider subscribing. I have a video. I have a video I'm working on for when I hit 1 million. I'm dying to release it and I'm also afraid it won't be ready in time, so I've cleared the rest of this month to finish this. It is a project that has been in development for many years and that is all I am going to say. for now, oh, I've also developed a crippling addiction to streaming on Twitch, I broke the table, the book is on the table, now I stream basically every morning at 10am. m. to play the story track mania track of the day, but if you tune in I'll explain it and it's been incredibly fun, we've got a really great little group of people there, it's a lot more informal, relaxed and conversational than streaming on YouTube so I'll keep going doing it because, frankly, I love it, oh too.

As a direct result of not releasing a big video last month, I also didn't release a bonus video last month, so I apologize for that, you're getting two bonus videos this month. I promise one of them is now available, complete and very lightly edited. Cut to me wandering around Kogimachi, including the moment I stumbled upon the microsoft bimbos site, so that sounds nice to you, it's like a fun, cozy little thing. I thought I might as well give you all that, so yeah, if you click join this. channel, you have access to that and many other bonus videos, including commentary tracks, full interviews and everything, and by the way, the bonus video that will be released along with the million subscriber video is really something, that's all I'm going for to say I received a lot of questions from you about the best way to support this channel, so if you want to support this channel, the best way to do so is by clicking the join button.

I appreciate each and every one of you who have done so. It really allows me to keep making these weird, dense, high-effort videos at exactly the pace I want, so yeah, thank you. Here's an interesting statistic based on YouTube analytics. Two out of every three people who watch this video are guys and here is another statistic that two out of every three men will experience some type of male pattern baldness at some point in their lives before the age of 35. Another fun fact according to YouTube, only 14 of you are subscribed to me so maybe I don't know, consider doing something about it anyway.

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