About
Over X Hours in Ms Paint, sometimes shortened as Over X Hours In Paint, is a catchphrase and snowclone describing, often hyperbolically, the effort and time put into the creation of something, usually a picture made using popular tool Ms Paint. It has then become a typical summarizing sentence in titles and or/descriptions for an image creation.
Origin
While commenting on the time put into any creation is a recurring habit among people both outside of internet, one of the earliest online mentions of anyone genuinely describing the time they took in making a picture using Ms Paint was TRMK forum user Gororules, posting a thread on November 15th 2004 about sprites he made[1]. Then, its first online mention as an hyperbole can be found in a July 2005 thread made on the official Winamp website in which user commented that the image creation of a desktop by another user “[…] must have takenat (sic) least 500 hours in MS Paint”[2].
Spread
On September 4th 2005, “Newgrounds”: user MidnyteRayne sarcastically replied “5,000,000 hours in MS paint.” to a post asking what progams were used to make Canadian tv show ReBoot[3]. As early as 2011, the Lurkmore website began mentioning the usage of the snowclone “x hours in MS Paint” as being commonplace on 4chan’s/b/ (random) board as well as being often mixed with the Over 9000 slang[4]. These common occurances were also reported on TvTropes, naming it “9001 hours in MS Paint” as an example of memetic mutation from 4chan related to the MS Paint software[5].
[WIP]
External References
[1]TRMK forums – My sprite edit Stryker / 11/15/2004
[2]Winamp forums – July 2005 Desktops / 7/4/2005
[3]Newgrounds forums – Program used to make ReBoot
[5]TVTropes – Useful Notes: MS Paint