Lorde album photo
Lorde is releasing a new album! After four long years the patron saint of the class of 2015 is making new music. So far the cover art is… revealing! Her whole pussy is out! We’re going to be in for a lot of annoying content around the album but I don’t care. Just as one must suffer to create great art, we must endure annoying commentary to enjoy great art. I will take the twinks recreating the photo all summer, the Instagram captions, and whatever the tweets are for the next four years if it means I can hear whatever the genius behind 400 Lux and Hard Feelings/Loveless has come up with next.
My parents in their 30s
More proof that no one on Twitter understands class or money or how much their parents make. Every day people on the internet call each other rich trust fund kids as an insult and other people mistakenly call themselves poor thinking their childhood where they had two homes is the norm. We should talk about money more as a society to create transparency and build financial literacy but we should talk about money less because no one knows how to be normal and I don’t want to be around when we all have to learn.
Fake “The Cut” articles
Why and how are people making these. We all love a good New York Magazine expose but ladies we do not need to be making fakes. Too Niche! We want to give ethos to our dumb metropolitan opinions that neither our parents nor our friends care about but whats wrong with a fake New York Times article? The community still reads the styles section, don't we?
Why do you as a man….
The lesser version of calling things straight men do gay. It requires extra steps and is not as funny. To me it will always be funny to call very straight things gay and this doesn’t explicitly do that. This one seems to suggest that men aren’t living up to expectations of their gender role in a more nebulous way. There is not the obvious conclusion that doing or not doing what is expected of them makes the man gay. Just lesser. I say go all the way. No nuance. No personal conclusions. Come right out and say eating dessert is gay.
For the Better, Right?
The internet is a fascinating place. A movie from 2002 that a lot of people don’t like can produce a meme 19 years later. You never know what a rewatch will produce. The screenshot itself feels old but all records seem to indicate that it’s from this year. The classic four panel style also gives a dated feel. I would have said we were all done making those. Or that a new one would only come from a forth coming film or political event. Everything about this meme feels out of place and from a different, simpler time. That’s why I love it. We are still creative in the old ways which can lead to being creative in new ways. We did not have a meme before this to express what Natalie is asking here. Now, from an unlikely place we do. Every time we dig through our past to create new memes we become harder to market to. We must stay unexpected and irreverent.
Tiktok
It’s been mostly Bo Burnham content this week but I will have more to say about that later.
I understand the impulse to make your own adult swim ad. If you work in a creative field we’ve all heard stories of someone making a really cool spec of something and getting a job. Someone being able to funnel their unique point of view into the exact thing the company is looking for and finally breaking through. Doing the work for free in order to get paid to do the work later. But how are you supposed to stand out when literally everyone is doing that? This trend is igniting a lot of discourse because it is basically free advertising and the anti-capitalist warriors simply cannot let you give away your creative talent to a corporation. They’re right but by now we’re well past that. We passed free labor a long time ago because not all of them are good. When people stop doing things to showcase their talent and start doing things for the sake of participation, the trend itself changes. The longer this goes on the less the new “ads” will emulate the old ads. It is now a genre based on different merits than “woah cool”. The standards are now other Tiktokers. How new and interesting can you make something we’ve seen a thousand times rather than how can you emulate something we have a fondness for.
Mostly used to talk about fictional characters. Originally I was not going to include this one but it's grown on me. Some of them have even made me laugh. We can’t avoid people talking about fictional characters on the internet but the best you can hope for is that someone makes a good one about your favorite show or band.
Princess Caroline Look, I Met John Stamos
I thought this one was the computer listening to me because I had just rewatched this episode of Bojack when I first saw this trend. Unfortunately that was not the case and it is just summer again. It’s the cooler, shorter, less Disney channel version of the trend from last year where people would make minute long videos about trying to get their various illnesses diagnosed. The Bojack layer is something I cannot even begin to discuss or else this will become a pages and pages long essay about the state of comedy today. I will spare you and just leave it at, the show is good and the fans are annoying.
Another trend for revealing the most depraved thing you’ve ever done. Is it healthy to share your darkest secret for all your followers plus anyone who comes across the For You page? Probably not. However most people doing this seem to have enough distance to find it funny which is all you can ask for. We’re getting farther from trauma dumping and towards looking back and laughing.