Meme Report 2/21
My Web Connects Them All
The Cut Scam Article
Twitter is at its best when it’s a book club for a New York Magazine article. Those people are heroes and almost single-handedly keep fun magazine journalism alive in this country. This and Emily Gould's Valentine’s Day divorce article kept Twitter chugging along this past week. What made the scam article so incredibly fun was it was the Twitter intelligentsia’s favorite kind of article, where someone of high status and wealth reveals that they don’t know what they’re talking about. It makes the rest of us low-status geniuses feel better about our low status. We may not be able to feel better about much but at the very least we know that we can’t be scammed out of our spare $50,000 by a phone call from “Amazon” who then connects us to “the CIA”. The memes are a necessary part of a good New York Magazine Book Club. They’re never better than the story itself but they help round out the discourse.
Madame Web
The mid-winter Sony flop is here and we couldn’t be happier. Two years ago we had Morbius which we all made memes about but no one saw. This year we have Madame Web which seems to be so dense with content that everyone has to go see it to more accurately make memes about it. I don’t know what this says about the future of cinema, or superhero movies or memes but it’s nice to have something to talk about. Everyone seems excited about something for the first time in a while. Sometimes stupid and cute are enough.
TikTok
Perhaps it’s because I had the stomach flu this week and did nothing but watch TikToks but there’s more than ever going on there. (Not Really, I’ve made it all the way back to Superbowl content) We could also be reaching an apex of boredom and comfort. By February everyone has settled into their winter routines and is comfortable enough to spend hours a day on TikTok.
You Should Know This Too
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I can’t tell if this comes from a love of Pedro Pascal or we’ve just never had a meme with these exact words before. It’s not much but it is a part of the human experience. We’ve all been in a situation where someone has said “You should know this too”. I don’t know that we needed a meme for it though. This feels like checking off a box. We need a meme for every situation and now we have one for this situation. There’s not much more commentary happening here.
No Glue No Borax
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This meme marks a generation younger than myself growing up and reflecting on their time on the internet. Glue and Borax are the necessary ingredients to make slime but if you are a child those ingredients aren’t necessarily available to you, especially in the quantities you want. So the children turn to YouTube and the internet and ask “how to make slime no glue no borax” an impossible task. Those kids grow up and are now faced with the hardships of life. They are reminded of the phrases of their youth. No Glue No Borax is about acknowledging there is no solution to your problem, or at least not an easy one. You must endure or get over it, whatever it is, and there is no easy way out. No Glue. No Borax.
Fifth Harmony Renaissance
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Harmonizers!!! Our time has come!! Fifth Harmony is a band that can only be appreciated after the fact. They were disastrous together as a group and may have been overappreciated in their time but that doesn’t mean we can’t fondly remember them. They seem to be gone from the conversation of the pop music landscape, which may be accurate but can’t we have fun? Whatever happened to fun music? Whatever happened to girl groups that hate each other? Maybe we shouldn’t bring it back but we can remember what we had.
"no glue no borax" hits hard even though i wasn't in that generational experience. Gonna think about it pretty hard for like a week