Meme Report 2/8
Yo What's Up Fuzz Nut
Tumblr
Vanilla Extract
Even as the tumbleweeds roll, Tumblr continues to create new features, and people continue to use them. It is nice to know that people on the internet will still break in a new feature with a meme, especially on Tumblr. To understand this meme, all you need to know is Tumblr introduced polls, yada yada yada; next thing you know, no matter what the question in a poll is, the most popular answer is vanilla extract. It’s classic Tumblr. It’s silly, it revolves around an unremarkable household item, and it’s only losing in a poll about gay sex. The old girl still has it in her.
Personally, I love polls. I love any form of gathering useless data, like which Workaholic is “the hot one” or “should I go to grad school?” I’m excited to see where we go with this on Tumblr. Twitter users have never really made anything of their polls feature, but I believe Tumblr will enjoy the full silly potential.
Lemon Loaf
We could talk about food and the internet, or fast food and the internet. We could analyze the way we attach ourselves to certain items because they are inherently iconic, like the Baja Blast, or disgusting, like anything from Carl’s Jr. But Starbucks food is not food. It is not something you seek out or stop to indulge in. It is a lucky treat. When stopping to get something necessary like a coffee, one might realize they are also hungry and get something to eat. At Starbucks, these foods are bizarre and taste like no other foods on earth. They are a version of astronaut ice cream but for the proverbial girl on the go.
The lemon loaf captures our imagination as we sing the praises of Starbucks food because it is so simple in its construction and composition; it’s almost elegant. In a place that has long lost its European and bohemian roots in favor of a suburban American sameness, the lemon loaf reminds us that there was once beauty and simplicity.
As we celebrate the lemon loaf, we must also remember the supporting cast. Not the lackluster pastries but the sandwiches. Each one is unique in flavor and texture. Facsimiles of English muffins and croissants and meat. We all have a favorite that informs something about our personalities, but only as a Starbucks customer. For the time when someone eats Starbucks food is their lowest. Their happiest but their lowest.
As for myself, I do not indulge in lemon loaf. I prefer the sausage egg and cheddar or a bacon gouda. If I’m feeling genuinely luxurious, the double-smoked bacon. I prefer grease over sugar in situations like this, but I cannot fault the lemon loaf on anything else. Aside from flavor, it’s a perfect food.
Ben Affleck Miserable at the Grammys
I would also be making those faces if I were Ben Affleck and I just watched the Grammys. If I had to listen to Trevor Noah speak for close to four hours in downtown Los Angeles, I would want nothing more than to go home. It may be music’s biggest night, but he’s an actor and has no place there. He just wants to go home, and can you blame him? He had to go through all that just to watch Beyonce lose.
This is Who You’re Being Mean To
While there are far too many people, women especially, who infantilize themselves on the internet, this meme sometimes hits the spot. We’ve gone beyond the initial premise of a baby or a cute animal, and we’re ready to get a little off-putting. We can’t all be cute little animals. Some of us are feral kittens or an old tree. Sometimes we must acknowledge how weird we are and trade on that instead of trying to be a harmless baby animal.
TikTok
One Kiss Is All It Takes
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
We are living in the CapCut age. Why make something funny or original when you can use a CapCut template? Content on the For You page is dictated by what’s trending there. Originality and creativity can still exist within the formats, but the quintessential internet weirdness is usually taken care of by the template itself. We’ve offloaded the work of weirdness to someone else. Or we’re trying to get away with their weirdness. Pretending to be weird because of a weird capcut template is stolen valor. No one is weird for using a template. It’s what one does with the template that matters. This allows the truly weird to shine through. They have the ability to truly make it weird on top of or in addition to a template. It is what we need and what only few can achieve.
Dancing Dogs
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
The dancing dogs are cut from the same CapCut cloth, but they inspire me. They are but a muse for what we can create further. There is more to be seen and done with the dancing dogs. CapCut is where they started, but now there is no end. They can go farther than we ever thought if we let them breathe. I hope to see them more in my scrolling.
Sometimes All You Need is Your Sister
This trend satisfies my need to read others people’s texts. Obviously, I hate it when they’re sappy and love when they’re funny and mundane. None have really wowed me, but I know there’s a limit here. This content can only be so good. Hopefully, next week we will have traded it in for something else with a little bit of a kick. For now, I don’t hate it, and I see its slight potential but I will not be disappointed if we don’t reach it.
Bad Hair Day
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
From what I can gather from the For You page, this song is sung in elementary schools in New Zealand. It started as a group of people saying, “remember this?” from their younger days. The song is fun and cute, and the dance is good. We need a good dance every once in a while.
I wanted to listen to the original version. The version they sang as kids. Surely it wasn’t this produced. It didn’t sound this good when they were singing it in schools. What we sang in school or at camp in America did not have an original recording that we were going off of. Even if it did, the recordings sounded nothing like the “live” version. Then I realized this was probably true of them as well. When they heard this song originally, it probably had no key or instruments. It was just other elementary school kids singing or, more aptly, screaming. The reason I can’t find a recording that sounds right is the same reason I can’t find a recording that sounds right for Wheels on the Bus or Rattlin Bog. There is no recording by any professional that will sound the way it did when we were 8. Understanding this gap made me appreciate the song. I imagined how it should sound once I knew no recording could capture the magic of being a child and singing with other children.