Meme Report 5/24

Hats, Hats, and more Hats!

Euphoria

Ok, so nobody cares. It’s week six, and we’ve fully established that this show is not what it used to be. We already knew that, but it’s also not generating content and conversation online like it used to. Everyone still watching is kind of over it. I want to see how Sam Levinson lands the plane. Will it be a spectacular crash, or will it just kind of end the way most middling TV shows do?

Rue’s storyline is quickly becoming her watching Alamo and Laurie go over to each other’s houses with allegedly increasing stakes that can’t matter because they just keep going over there. It’s like how in Big Love, the worst thing that can happen is to have to go to or from the polygamist compound, except it happens 3 times in every episode, so it obviously can’t be that bad.

Jules is doing nothing. Nate is doing nothing. Maddie is human trafficking. Cassie has the most successful storyline on the show in terms of beginning and middle, but let’s see how it ends before we send out any congratulations. Maude Apatow, despite doing basically nothing all season, is probably going to get an episode where her actions completely drive the story AGAIN. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

Notes

• I think LA Nights is a fictionalized version of Vanderpump Rules, which is really funny. That’s the worst part of all of this. Sometimes he’s funny and has good ideas! But never about anything important!

• 

• I love that stupid hat. I love Cassie’s stupid hat.

Twitter

Truman Show

Wow. An honest-to-goodness meme. Spurred by seemingly nothing except perhaps a rewatch of The Truman Show. It’s all well-trod territory about the ironies and unpleasant situations of everyday life, but it’s good to see everyone working again.

John Travolta Hat

Now this? This is a meme. This gets at something new. Every image makes me laugh. “Bon Vivant who is slightly over-selling it” is a good meme to have. It lets us be funny and silly. It also elevates John Travolta, whom I think we have all decided to forgive for... something. The eras of both detachment and sincerity are over. This is something else. It’s openly playing pretend for the purpose of having a good time. John Travolta knows he’s wearing a costume, and he’s having fun with it, the same way everyone has fun throwing on a wig when someone has it at a party. It’s fun to be someone else for a while, especially if you can’t really pull that other person off. John Travolta asks us to consider getting silly with it, and we’re more than willing to meet him there.

The San Francisco Problem

Once a week, someone who lives in San Francisco posts about their social life, either bragging or complaining. The rest of us get mad and spend the week bullying them. These are the people making a lot of money making all of our lives worse and they’re not even a little bit cool. They’re not even having fun correctly! They’ve ruined one of America’s best and most interesting cities for what? To wear Zara to Nobu?

The defining cultural problem of our time is that tech bros refuse to accept that they might not know everything and that there is a portion of society that they cannot become experts in through a cursory Reddit search. The same framework that makes them good engineers and good salesmen cannot be applied to things like art and culture. They need other people to make and decide what culture is, and they have to do what those people say. They refuse to. At least Patrick Bateman didn’t believe he knew what the good restaurants were on his own.

Now that these people are the richest among us, they have nothing to show for it. Everything they like is ugly. They didn’t do the necessary cultural education, and there aren’t enough cool people in San Francisco willing to debase themselves by rubbing elbows with people who “work in tech”. I’m sure there probably are, but not from what we see on Twitter. None of these people are willing to read Martha Stewart or Emily Post, or even Real Simple, to see what goes into hosting a party. They don’t understand that between the pages of a woman’s magazine are the secrets to throwing a good party. They disrupted the industry and ignored the people who made their living making the fun parts of life better and easier, and now they wonder why they can’t meet girls or why New York is more fun. I’m no Nora Ephron, but I could throw together a more enticing tinned fish party with, if nothing else, a more structured table scape. Or I know who the experts are and where to turn if I want to do those things well, rather than pretend I know everything or that everything has to be optimized for cheapness. I don’t even think that table is optimized for ease or expense!

Don’t even get me started on the faux quirkiness of it all. We all like tinned fish now! We have since the pandemic! Don’t make me write a version of the cerulean speech but for, of all things, tinned fish. They have reached the top of the social pyramid, and all the cool people who were supposed to be waiting when they got there got left behind. They must acquiesce and let artists, writers, designers, critics, and socialites back up. Someone at the party has to be fun.

North Carolina Influencer

You guys. Come on. Every so often, for the sake of fairness, everyone pretends like they have no idea why someone would talk shit about the girl from their hometown becoming an influencer. Do you really think Raleigh, North Carolina, has enough infrastructure to support an influencer? Do we have to pretend that every girl who wants to be a local influencer is pursuing some worthwhile cause? I get it, sometimes girls on the internet are too mean to each other. Specifically, girls we assume to be pretty and popular get the brunt of criticism from girls we assume to be friendless losers. It’s all high school. Those of us who have graduated have to meditate and give out points here and there to different sides so that each can understand the struggles of the other. Those of us who have appointed ourselves the moral arbiters of which girls to make fun of need to be honest when chiding these girls. We don’t need to pretend that we can’t fathom why this girl thought people would agree with her when she first posted this.

The Spotify Logo

I like when we can all complain about something for kind of no reason. Spotify changed its logo because they thought it would be fun for the 20th anniversary, and everyone hated it because it made the app look like it was updating. Openly complaining about minor inconveniences while using Spotify feels like complaining that your favorite cigarette has changed its flavor. We all admit we are still indulging in that bad habit, and not only that, we have grievances unrelated to the bad parts of the bad habit.

TikTok

Tomodachi Life

@camarasaurus_I only have like 10 more spots and I have so many more i want to make #tomodachilife #mii #nintendo #nintendoswitch #meme

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https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTBdQoNbx/

We’ve overcomplicated everything to the point that when something simple comes along, it’s a revelation. We never needed anything more than this to entertain us. Sure, we say we want more, and we’ve built this entire online and technological apparatus so we can do more, but I guarantee the most joy I felt looking at TikTok or interacting with any computer at all, really in the past week, was the Todomachi Life video of Lisa Rinna dancing in front of a crying Harry Hamlin. Or the Mii that looks like the Laughing Cow from Laughing Cow cheese. This is not a great human achievement, nor is it an exercise in cruelty or depravity. It’s just fun. Can’t we have a little fun once in a while? Can’t you make a Mii that looks like Poot Lovato?

Dressing like your Venus Sign

@yourbirthchartbestieWhat sign should I cover next? ♎️ #yourbirthchartbestie #venussign #astraapp

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Shopping is already hard enough. I can’t be checking it against my kibbe type and my venus sign. While I might trust “dressing like your Venus sign” as an idea, I’ve never seen a video that makes me understand how to do it. It always takes on the tone of something that the people trying to tell you about it already know how to do and are bad at explaining. It’s the same tactic self-help therapists use to sell you their workbook. “You might be going about this all wrong,” without instructions for how to go about it all right. I know we’re all marks, but the goal of selling something is not to make the people buying it feel like a mark.