I am calling it the day before and praying that when you are reading this Spotify Wrapped has come out. I don’t care that we’re doing free advertising. I don’t care that its data mining. They’re doing it anyway, they might as well tell me. I can’t wait. It’s the best day of the year. If I’m wrong, which I don’t think I am, we soldier on. It’s coming soon. All we can do is wait. I am on Team Post It. I want to see your most played artist. All of you. Friends, enemies, strangers, Romans, countrymen.
The Bus
The memes from before Thanksgiving carried us through thanksgiving and we had a pretty stagnant weekend. The longer a meme is around it grows and changes. It becomes something different and new. Our opinions sour on it and the target audience grows. This week's bus meme is not last week's bus meme. As someone else said, memes are funny until the mentally ill people get to them. This meme became a lot of gotchas about public transit, grad school, and in general, people's feelings. Not everything needs to be expressed via a meme and not everyone needs to participate. The number one defining factor of a meme should be funny, especially a meme like this. Where we lose people is when they start to get clever. The first one I saw about Plato’s allegory of the cave was funny but we don’t need three different variations on that theme. The shift from funny to clever makes a meme worse. It becomes an arms race to see who can be the most obscure or “challenging” version of the meme. It’s bad for art, it's bad for comedy, and most of all it’s bad for memes.
The Wizard
When all the normies got to the bus meme, the Wizard flourished. The Wizard was used much more infrequently and that made his appearance all the better. Every iteration of the wizard meme felt well thought out and artfully crafted. No one was fast and loose or trying to prove anything. No points were made. We were simply pondering the orb together in whatever new fashion we could think of. Beautiful to witness but let’s not let it get to our heads. There’s still weeks until Christmas and we could get carried away.
Not Every Actor Has
This meme could not be uglier. That's my first note. Edit the text. Spice it up a little bit. We have the technology and yet no one will do it. This meme is far from original but it’s also inoffensive. It’s the least annoying way we’ve found to say we like certain actresses so far. Once a year we have to give the pioneers of white girl cinema their flowers. Elevate the good ones and put the bad ones in their place. I don’t know why we have to do it, but we do. Hopefully this time we get it out of our systems and won’t have to do it anymore.
Pillsbury Doughboy
I cannot make heads or tails of this. It’s just people saying anything. No coherent narrative. No source. I have no thoughts right now. I’m keeping it on my raydar and seeing where it goes. Let me know what you see.
TikTok
Steven, There’s One More Thing
I’ll be DEAD in the ground before I support or endorse a Steven Universe meme. It’s cutesy bullshit nonsense that somehow brings out the worst in everyone. Every time I encounter Steven Universe in the wild on the internet, everyone involved is acting like petulant children. This becoming popular is a bad omen and proof that our society is getting worse and that the pandemic made us dumber and softer.
Where You Get Your Grills From
I love this sound. I am so happy it is finally getting a specific meme associated with it beyond just general lying. The stricter limitations make it more fun. More memes should be hyper specific. We don’t need general memes that everyone can participate in. We need to get more into the specific niches of the human experience. Now we talk about this from time to time —it’s great sleepover talk— that our favorite smells are not the good ones. At some point in childhood, we reveal the deep secret we had been carrying around with us, that we actually enjoyed the smell of gasoline or chlorine. By now we’re all well aware that people feel this way but don’t acknowledge it enough. This meme is a great time to admit that. Re-up our love of gasoline smell, so we can continue to keep this dirty secret with us.
Good. we’re all lying, all the time. We’re all bullshitting our way through. Am I a Nicki fan???? Pull. up. in. the. Sri. Lanka. It’s not convincing but it's enough to prove you know something. We all know something. Keep em coming.
When Do You Feel The Most Beautiful
God. Sometimes the girls really kill it. This trend has really been giving straight sorority girls the opportunity to show off their often underutilized skill: Physical comedy. Watching these girls post videos of themselves dressed to the nines moving their bodies like absolute lunatics kills me every time. Adding a tally in the pro column over the great debate of “are women funny” for this one ladies.