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Sorry I’m late, I needed more time to think after Memorial Day. My thinking time is very precious to me and while I was jotting from fabulous destination to fabulous destination, I did not have a moment to mull! Well now I’ve taken my time and I’ve surveyed all the internet has to offer. Here’s what I think!
This week's Mean Girl Moment will instead be a farewell to Succession memes with the best ones I’ve collected over the past few days and deep dive into what makes the good ones so good.
The image meme has returned to Twitter. It was always there but we’ve gotten lazy in recent years. We’ve been using unedited photos of celebrities and easy Instagram edits to make our memes. No one wants to open Photoshop to make an unappealing image anymore. There has been a return to ugliness on Twitter this week and I can’t get enough of it. We need to go back to our meme roots every so often. These are not pretty images. They are not for the faint of heart or the aesthetically inclined. They are to express emotion in specific scenarios or make us laugh and unfortunately, red-carpet photos aren’t doing it anymore. We need to remember who we are and how we got here. It wasn’t professional photography. It was clip art.
Calling
Pure ridiculous random humor from a bygone era. A cousin of the anxiety and depression texts meme. Do you answer when Spongebob is calling? It’s not complex or smart or even particularly noteworthy, except as part of the great image revival.
Bottle Sections
This is the same as the sections of the joint or wine bottle meme except no one was ever being serious. No one was ever trying to dissect their behaviors after ingesting a whole bottle of nondescript unlabeled brown liquor—pure silliness, distilled. We need more jokes and everyone needs to lighten the hell up.
Ant
We have needed an image like the ant for some time now. We need an object so filled with pity to represent ourselves that it almost reaches the point of embarrassment. We’ve gone too babygirl with it. If we’re going to keep complaining on the internet we should at least be a little more like clowns and a little less like cry babies. I understand the need to be a 23-year-old teenage girl but some of us need to grow up and use an avatar for our suffering that illustrates how pathetic we are, even just a little bit. We’re too old to be acting cute.
Good Will Hunting
I love this meme but I wish we were having more fun. For many, it’s too much of a chance to show off how much they know about their profession and the theory of the thing they like. That’s boring. It’s too real. It’s not funny. Suddenly I’m reading a 13-tweet thread about screenwriting and waiting for the punchline but it never comes. The one that sets the standard that all others should be held to, is the example above. Too many people are quoting real ideas and not just making shit up. They’ve forgotten a central tenet of the internet, making stuff up for no reason.
Nerd Emoji
Every emoji has their time in the spotlight. This is the moment for the nerd emoji. It’s her time to shine.
AI
We need to stop giving these losers attention, positive or negative.
TikTok
Give Me One Margarita
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Guys… I think I found the song of the summer. Not really but definitely the bachelorette/pride/girls trip song of the summer. Any time a group of gals are having fun in close proximity to alcohol they will probably scream “We should make a TikTok!” at each other and fire up a draft with this song. It’s fun, it’s silly, and there’s a part for everyone. It may not end up being the song of the summer but it’s definitely the inaugural sound of summer. We’re post-Memorial Day weekend and we’ve arrived. Why not ring it in with one margarita, and whatever else happens afterward.
Mexican Radio
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This is a classic type of TikTok meme. I thought my life would be one way but it’s actually another way. Life usually works out nothing like we planned and it makes good fodder for TikToks. This trend has plenty from my favorite subgenre of this style, high schoolers who try to sound grown up in their videos but immediately give themselves away in their language. They begin the normal way but when they say what they are now, they immediately reveal how little life experience they do have. They say when they grow up they want to be a teacher or a lawyer or a cop, normal jobs kids understand. However now that they have grown up and experienced the twists and turns we call life they want to be a pharmacist/mechanic, as a singular job. It is so sweet and funny to me to see kids equating the natural changes of growing up with the extenuating circumstances that brought most people to their current situations. They’re so cute for thinking they understand and not noticing that the adults in the room can tell that their answers sound different.