It’s the week of Thanksgiving and everyone is really putting their all in. This is one of our most phone heavy holidays and everyone needs a respite from their families in a fun silly way. Over the next few days, internet use will ramp up and people will be tweeting up a storm. Thank god we have a big chunk of memes, both good and bad to help us keep posting through it.
Twitter Spaces
Twitter introduced, or popularized, a new feature this week where people talk and we listen. Every day there are at least two spaces where almost everyone I follow is listening in. This feature could be useful or fun but right now it’s neither. There are two jokes and I see them both every day. Those jokes are: religious study hall and live dick sucking. I see potential for spaces. Not much, but more than fleets and less than TikTok. The internet is ever innovating and the second we dismiss something on the spot as useless and stupid is the second we damn ourselves to be forgotten and left behind.
Harry Styles Grinch Sweater
How many more Harry Styles editorials will we have to suffer through before they fix mens fashion. Stop putting him in ugly unstyled women's wear for the sake of… breaking gender barriers? No one is doing anything to break barriers if they’re rich and ugly. I feel like we’ve all lost the thread here and if we’re going to keep putting Harry in these dresses and skirts, we should at least take the time to style him. The memes were mostly an expression of how fed up we were. Celebrities are supposed to be beautiful and fun to look at. He can do that, break gender barriers or whatever, and not wear the ugliest sweater known to man.
Bus
The Bus is another choice meme. It’s disapproving Drake with extra steps but what I like about this one is the emphasis on perspective. If Drake could see both sides of the issue, would he still choose his desired option? There is no galaxy brain take to have here, there is only the world in front of us. It suggests the possibility of movement. We need only move from the downtrodden Reese’s pieces side of the bus with the bad view, to the joyful beautiful side of the bus, the Reesees peeces side, and our world changes. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
Wizard Pondering His Orb
There is no purer better meme than one where it is a picture of a wizard doing random wizard stuff. Dredging up a new one of these paintings every six months is good and necessary for our imaginations to develop. We need to look at real artistry and see how many silly things we can do with it away from the news and away from our shared internet language. Throw us a wizard with an orb and see what we can do with it.
Crypto
This is attempt to normalize crypto which we should not, under absolutely no circumstances, do. Crypto is bad. It’s bad for the environment, it’s stupid, and the only people that like it are tech bros which tells me enough to know that I absolutely cannot endorse it, or anything related to it. The memes may be correct. We may have the collective cultural knowledge to know whether or not Ross from Friends would invest in crypto but we can’t let the crypto guys win. I already know too much about something I never ever wanted to know about.
Texting Couple
We already have this meme? Like we have a meme with a boy and a girl texting each other? I wrote about it back in March. Sure, we have a lot of duplicate style memes, but this one just truly already exists. The only difference is the horizontal composition rather than vertical. The art style is different and this one is more expressive as well. We get the panels of the people smiling after they send their texts but I personally don’t think that adds enough to warrant an entirely different meme.
Tiktok
We are in the grips of a cultural moment. Coney Island talk back videos are more than a meme. It is not one single sound or one single video. Every person who speaks in one of these videos is instantly memorialized. Each line is a meme unto itself. Bing Bong, Ariana Grande wassup, Take me out to dinner. What’s even better is they are all coexisting at the same time which means we will get tired of them all at the same time. It will not drag on as each new part is discovered. This phenomenon hits on a classic thing we all love: New York accents. We will always love them and they will always be funny. These people have the added benefit of being funny on top of being blessed by God with accents from the greatest city on earth: Coney Island.
Everyone on the internet is constantly trying to make everyone else look like an idiot. A major problem with this is when people are wrong about who they call an idiot. We all know how deep dish pizza works, or we should at this point. To claim not to because you are “Italian” only makes you look even dumber. This meme is good mostly because it spreads the word about deep dish pizza, which of the things the internet fights about is one of the dumbest. The people of Chicago need their pizza to be cooked like that so they can survive the winter. It all makes sense when we think about climate.
TikTok has been under the spell of manifestation before. We all remember when august 27th was going to change our lives and nothing happened. I get it, manifestation can work and the idea of it is enticing. Far be it for me to spoil anyone’s fun with magic. However what I absolutely cannot stand is people saying that because of the sound, a thing that was always going to work out, worked out. Lie better or believe in yourself. Tell me you did the sound and you got a free tesla. Not that you passed the test that you studied for.
This sound has a lot of Thanksgiving potential. It's great for cousins and aunts and friends from home to do together. It’s wholesome and easy. It’s a meme that’s essentially saying “I like hanging out with these people and we’re about to have a good time.” It breaks up the other content on the app and requires a little bit of skill to make. I’m excited to see everyone’s attempts.
This is the worst and dumbest version of manifestation. We’re leaving it up to pens and cups and luck now? Also for some reason, it is attracting the most boring and uncharismatic people in the world, making the videos unwatchable. This trend while boring and bad on its own, has sparked a new trend that, at the very least, is worth noting.
This trend is sparked by a woman who’s cat took the pen out of the cup when it landed in the mug on the question, should I get a dog? Someone responded “that cats like oh no no girl, you are not getting a dog.” This meme is noteworthy to me because everyone involved is getting made fun of. If this happens to a video, it means the original post is stupid and also the way they are making fun of it, is making fun of the original girl. No one is safe. Nor should they be.
Not often I disagree with the Memeforum consensus, but this week has some outliers! Can’t stand bus meme, but the new iteration of girl and guy texting consistently surprises and delights me with its loopiness and interrogation of form. Wizard memes are great, of course.