Hello. I’ve returned from an unexpected, and unannounced vacation. I went out for fireworks and didn’t come back for two weeks. Sorry. So you don’t get blindsided next time I suddenly decide I’d rather drink beer by a lake on a federal holiday, I would suggest following the official Memeforum Instagram. Now, onto business. Some new Twitter competitors have shown up and we have to discuss some things.
Bluesky
Posting Bluesky screenshots on Twitter is bad etiquette. I don’t want to know what’s happening at a party I’m not invited to. Mostly because I’m hearing about it because it’s not fun. It’s like when someone posts too much from vacation. They’re trying to fill the emptiness in their heart they thought the vacation would fix, by posting. Clearly, Bluesky is where we all want to be and while some of us are already there, it’s just not the same without friends. Or loyal followers. Or the insane people that make Twitter fun. If Bluesky were the salve we wouldn’t be seeing so many screenshots from it on Twitter. Twitter is still the town square. I’ve yet to see news that the gossip, people-watching, and general chatter in the other town square is better.
Threads
Screenshots from threads serve a different purpose. We’re pointing and laughing. We all went to the other town square to see what it had to offer and it was all doofuses and people we wouldn’t make eye contact with if we saw them in public. Screenshots are playing by cool kid rules. It’s ok to make fun of people but it’s lame to brag about nothing.
Jonah Hill's Texts
Jonah Hill was revealed to be a scumbag manipulative boyfriend via text message last week. Sometimes delusional losers craft incredible turns of phrase in their deranged screeds about “boundaries”. Usually, these kinds of situations spark a lot of uncomfortable jokes that are hard to stomach or defend. However, in this instance, the ravings of a madman about what not to do spoke to all of us as a fun time. Nothing sounds better than friendships with women who are in unstable places and from your wild recent past beyond getting a lunch of coffee or something respectful. Everything this man hates and prescribes as bad sounds awesome and fun.
Goat Story pt. 2
The girl from Goat Story started getting pop-star edits. One would think this makes her more iconic and worthy of staying power than I previously predicted. One would be wrong. Even as I write this now, she is probably fading from the collective memory. She will not make it to the end of August. Just another kooky blonde girl with big boobs. She’s a dime a dozen on the internet and will be forgotten on gay Twitter once the next kooky girl comes along. She’ll be nothing but a distant memory by the time we hear the last padam.
The Bear
Everyone’s favorite summer show is back. Lip Gallagher is back as our conduit for talking about either how bad we all are as home cooks or how we used to work in a restaurant and he reminds us of the line cooks. These memes are the same as last year. There’s nothing exciting or interesting about them but that doesn’t mean they're bad. It’s nice to have a tv show that we’re all talking about. The Bear memes are good because they’re being kept at a low simmer (😏). They’re not at the boiling point (😏) of Succession memes nor are they informing how I watch or understand the show. They may be annoying on principle but it doesn’t spill (😏) over into the show itself. They’re not about the show enough to inform it. They’re just about cooking in general or working in restaurants. As long as they stay that way the meme and the show can coexist in peaceful harmony.
Rate Limit
Twitter is now a slumlord apartment. We have to turn off the lights three times to make them work. The wifi comes on if you hit the walls just right. Sometimes the power just goes out. Sometimes you can only look at 600 tweets a day and the reason changes every time you ask. The lease never ends and we won’t move out. Eventually, we can see more tweets again and we move on to the next pressing issue when it comes up. We’ll forget about this, just like we forgot about the one before it. What are we gonna do? Leave? All of our stuff is already here.
The Girl with The Bad Haircut
Our internet archivist found a gem for us to dissect and reevaluate in the light. Someone who was once a one-off victim of Abby Lee Miller’s cruelty can be given a second life as a brief icon. She gets her moment in the sun where we can say “Doesn’t that girl kind of look like Taylor Swift?” Maybe she deserves more kindness or appreciation or a settlement from a lawsuit but the best we can give her ten years later is a moment to say that maybe she ate that. Perhaps she slayed. It’s the best we’ve got.
Fake Elf Bars
We are in a golden age of the artificial. From Juuls to Flums to finally Elf Bars we have seen the vape brand du jour perfect their flavors and then become obsolete. In our golden age, we can only see what we don’t have. If the vape can taste like anything, why not make it savory? If it is truly a symbol of American innovation and excess, why doesn’t it taste like Cool Ranch? If nothing is real here, why are we beholden to any kind of logic? It’s already poisonous, make it taste like anything. Make it taste good.
Mouse Trap
I love how pathetic this one is. I love admitting what would get us in a trap designed for a much dumber animal. A brief moment to say yes I’m stupid and yes I’ll admit it. Oftentimes on the internet, we are accusatory in memes like this. Pointing fingers at the stupidity of others. This meme is admitting what we all know to be true. Some of us would die for the promise of a McDonald's hash brown.
Is Now A Member Of The Academy
This one just feels like basic pattern recognition. I read the name of a celebrity so now I say the name of a celebrity or fictional character. You say something, I say something. That is the building block of conversation. After we get this down, we’ll move on to the next step where things have to be substantively connected. For those of us just starting to learn how to contribute to the online conversation this is a good first step. For the rest of us, too far below our weight class.
TikTok
Miranda Sings Apology
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For the next ten years, we are going to reap the consequences of making untalented people famous on Youtube because we gave children unlimited access to the computer. There will be other consequences for iPad babies and their unlimited screen time but this one is about making up for lost time. Obviously, we couldn’t have known that Miranda Sings was a predator at the time but we never investigated the nature of Youtube fame and what it indicated about the people we were making famous. I never watched Youtubers so I have no nostalgia or sympathy for this time and these people. I thought it was bad and stupid at the time and I continue to be proven right. This isn’t the same as “always thinking he was a bad guy” when it happens to actors or musicians. These scandals keep happening because Youtube fandom necessarily crosses the parasocial line. These people grew a following by being available and overreaching with their fans. They are famous because they wanted to be and they had nothing else to offer. They were available and accessible. They wanted adoring fans and would bend over backward to get them. Now we have to live with the consequences. 10-minute ukelele apologies/denials so they can be copyrighted and monetized.
Flyana Boss
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It is exciting to find music on TikTok that is interesting, creative, and unique. In a sea of singer-songwriters who keep claiming to write the song of the summer, it is nice to find someone who actually has a point of view and makes music that is fun to listen to. I understand that feeling, that jolt of energy that all hope might not be lost. TikTok’s contributions to the music industry might not all be garbage that melts our brains. I do think this tends to make us exaggerate the talent we’re seeing. I get that we’re excited but I don’t know how many times we can see the same clip over and over again. I like these girls a lot but I want more. I need a second verse. I need another song. Another gimmick besides the running. It’s a good verse. But we need more than a verse.
Age Filter
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We’re all scared of aging and AI and the future. It’s refreshing to watch people enact those fears honestly without any deeper self-reflection. They’re trying to have takes and give it a spin but at the end of the day the thesis of a lot of the videos with the aging filter is just “I am scared of getting older and what I will look like.” It’s one of the most basic thoughts a human can have and now we have new ways to get to that thought. Unfortunately, this thought is really boring and embarrassing to post. It’s embarrassing to cry about how you’re scared of what a robot said you would look like when you’re older. Sorry, a robot tricked you into thinking about mortality. Get over it. Hopefully, when you actually do look like that you’ll be smarter.
Girl Dinner
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Since we last spoke, a trend has driven the people of the internet insane. On May 11th, my fellow Burlington High School Graduate and older sister of Olympian/my Algebra two classmate Ilona Maher, Olivia Maher posted about her “Girl Dinner.” I understood it instinctively. It’s when you eat a lot of disparate pieces to constitute a full meal. It appeals to the same fantasy of going to the market and getting a baguette and cheese and prosciutto and eating it in the countryside. It’s not that complicated. However, some clever anorexics thought they could muscle their way in and use this trend to normalize disordered eating habits and we have to have discourse about it.
In appearance, Girl Dinner looks like it’s not that much food. I think people are misunderstanding. To me, a Girl Dinner simulates the experience of when you go to an event (your friend’s house) and eat only canapes (Trader Joe’s appetizers) and think you won’t get full and will eat something at home after. Instead, you eat a lot of them and you feel kind of sick because you only ate mini samosas and cheese and crackers. Girl dinner is doing that on purpose by yourself because you’re too tired to cook. However, because it looks like not that much food, one can fall under the radar posting half a piece of bread and a bite of cheese and act like they’re just participating in a trend. Those of us with watchful eyes know what we’re seeing and we’ve got Bella Hadid on speed dial. Girl dinner is about eating loose ingredients, not eating as little as possible.
It’s not surprising that people are mad about this because though everyone on the internet wants to be a trend reporter no one can recognize a pattern or a plan to save their lives. Between Twitter and TikTok, we’ve created a whole class of cultural critics who can’t define and describe a trend. No one can extrapolate from a single example or create a rigid definition anymore. Girl Dinner used to mean something. Now it’s just any dinner a girl eats. We already had a word for that. Dinner.
Boy Dinner
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Unfortunately, the boys won. The boys figured out the syllables are the same as Moon River. Girl Dinner drove us into distracting discourse about food and eating and gender, meanwhile, the boys were having fun. Feminism in action. Maybe if we weren’t so busy trying to figure out how to navigate everything we could have seen what was staring us directly in the face the whole time. Girl Dinner. Wider than a mile.
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