Meme Report 11/15
#PEETAMALLARK4EVA
Minnesota State Flag
This is going to sound insane if you don’t know what I’m talking about, but in recent years a lot of people have picked up some vexillology knowledge and love to flex it as their “niche” “interest.” However, I would say it is neither niche nor an interest if you’ve seen four YouTube videos about an entire field of study. By now, most of us greenbelts in web surfing have acquired knowledge of the common rules of flag design. Three colors, so simple a child could draw it from memory, no words or seals, and meaningful symbolism. It’s an easy thing to become an armchair expert because there are not that many rules and they mostly involve judging by simplicity.
Now we all get to join in on the fun because Minnesota is redesigning its state flag and the submissions are public. We can all look, and judge, by vexillological aptitude and overall jpeg quality. I’m not above judging flags. If nothing else, I can say when shapes and colors have been put together poorly. The other part of this I am judging, the part that has no winners, is who is too online, who secretly wants to go viral. People are submitting, who are just waiting for all of us to see their plausibly deniable joke. The Dollarita Steves making a mockery of the Minnesota state flag contest. This kind of thing is rife for that kind of loser. The person who lacks the ability to try their best and make a flag or the true prankster’s spirit to enter something heinous, just the coward’s inside joke. They are polluting something that could have had a genuine silliness with a cheap inside joke for nerds.
Trust men or…
We’re on week 2 of this and I don’t think I get it. Obviously, I get it because there’s never really much to get, but I don’t get how all these people bought into the same prompt. That’s kind of the whole game of memes but I think Twitter might be running out of juice. We’ve been lazy and simple before. This is different. We’re combining multiple abstract ideas to barely get one thing off the ground. It’s a basic photo prompt but now that requires someone else to prompt the first version so someone else can add various pictures of RuPaul. It’s not a good meme, it’s a bad omen.
TikTok
Josh Hutcherson 2014 Edit
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The Hunger Games is in the news again and I couldn’t be happier. Who could have guessed the book about the dangers of teenage icons in a society that glamorizes violence is the absolute best franchise from my adolescent years? It’s aging better than Twilight because we don’t have to pretend it’s a fake camp classic. It’s aging better than Harry Potter because it’s for middle-grade readers and I don’t know or care to know anything about Suzanne Collins’s political views. Every piece of nostalgia is somewhat genuine, even the ones that are semi-ironic. We’re making fun of the edit itself but not the emotion behind it, mostly because we’re still watching edits to this day. We never gave up on Josh Hutcherson, or Peeta, we just got better at video editing.
I Want Something I Want
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Silly! It’s fun to be silly in real life. I know there’s been a lot of conversation about concert etiquette post-pandemic but I think anything we can do to encourage people online to go out in the real world and participate in it, is good. This is good for all it can contribute. It’s silly to watch Drake dance like that and it’s good that you have to go all the way to the front row of the Drake concert to get that video. Also love anything from my fellow Vermont girlie Grace Potter