Yik Yak
It’s back. The app that is mostly for bullying college freshmen has returned in full force. At first I thought we were not all going to use it and that it would go the way of byte (Vine 2 for the uninformed). But! Much to my surprise people are on it. I did my due diligence as a nosy critical bitch and downloaded the app. I perused it yesterday afternoon and didn’t find much. However, I see potential. It’s like nextdoor but without all the homeowners. It’s only the first week but anyone who’s anyone now knows about the two guys who won’t stop fucking in the Erewhon juice aisle. (I won’t say which Erewhon, thats for my LA Yik Yak girlies only) It’s deuxmoi for the everyday, gossip girl for not necessarily the elite but for the people in your radius. I don’t have high hopes, I know there’s a world where it never gets better than the Erewhon Glory hole, but I do have hopes. We could have fun with this.
I hate the new font, we all hate the new font, nothing to discuss there.
My Fall Plans/The Delta Variant
This meme sucked. It was so boring. It killed me to see every uninteresting and unfunny person on the TL posting this meme. There’s so many things wrong with this meme. It’s a Covid meme and the only people who like and make Covid memes are the media class. It’s once again the dreaded blue checks. They are the teachers' pets of the website, the goody-two-shoes who tell the teacher they forgot to assign homework types are making this meme. They are trying so hard to be funny and chill, when they simply are not the type. These people didn’t have fall plans in the first place. It does beg the question: What are fall plans? I certainly don’t have any and I don’t know anyone that does. But even if I did, and that was a thing most of us had, the people making this meme would not have them. All in all: None of them were funny. None of them were clever. Most were just reciting the plot of a movie.
The only one worth talking about was the one where the fall plans were Jeffrey Epstein. It was so misguided and stupid. The person who posted it probably thought all the leftists would laugh with them not at them. It is widely accepted, or at the very least not sacrilege, to believe Hillary Clinton killed Jeffrey Epstein. An Epstein Joke kills, you’re guaranteed 3k likes at least. Unless…. Unless. There’s seemingly one rule with Epstein and one rule only, don’t identify yourself with Epstein. They were ripped apart for days, as they should have been, and, at least for me, that was the last I saw of the meme. The death knell of the meme was its worst form. I can only hope we all learn from this and either never make a covid meme again or, when the worst version of a meme comes along, we stop.
So a quick Review:
[X] McDonalds meal
This one is so insufferably bad. Name a pop star, give them a catch phrase, it doesn’t even have to be their most popular one, have them say Welcome to McDonalds. It’s so fucking stupid. I know the geniuses at stan twitter can come up with something better. It is not even using the full potential of the McDonalds Meal. What does the Wendy Williams meal have in it? It’s not enough to say Vroom Vroom, I’m Charli XCX, here’s my meal. Tell me it’s one Chicken Nugget, a bump of K, and a hit of poppers. Make an edit. I need the brains behind the Ariana Grande Frappuccino scam to put in the effort.
It also reuses the “[X] if they never [x]” edits people already made earlier this summer. It was a meme I never covered because I was waiting for it to reach its zenith and it never did. It simply wasn’t that good. By extension, this meme using, or reusing, the refuse of that meme makes it even worse.
Citizen Kane Minimalist Criterion
Film Twitter is a collection of the most miserable people you’ve ever encountered who’s sole tie to each other is a shared appreciation for movies. They hate everything and they love jokes regardless of whether or not they love the movie. The citizens of film twitter live in open rebellion of all the major studios, every decision they make one step closer to ending this whole industry. No Gods, No Masters on film twitter, except for one. Criterion. They wait with baited breath for news from those mysterious bastards. If there’s black smoke they added Happy Feet 2 to the collection AND there’s gonna be a blu ray re-release. The people of film twitter only revile Criterion for one thing and one thing only, their horrible graphic design choices. This time they made the cover for Citizen Kane just the letter K. Not great but the people this matters to care. Let them have their fun. They get off on being angry.
Tiktok
#BamaRushTok wrap up
I already wrote a eulogy for #BamaRushTok on Instagram and I just want to say the words the internet is never ready to hear. It was fun while it lasted, but we have to be done. I don’t care about rush at the other SEC schools and I especially don’t care about rush at Non SEC schools. I don’t care what graduated sorority girls have to say. I don’t care about RAs, Girls who dropped because their sorority sucked, girls who dropped because they’re goth now, and certainly not girls who’s whole schtick is how did they let a queer leftist into a sorority? The answer is always they either weren’t a queer leftist at the time or they don’t go to a big sorority school so rush is not the insane process it is everywhere else. I’m never impressed when someone’s thing is that they were at one point in a sorority but they’re so different now. Those people are not chameleons, they lack basic self knowledge. Someday we will have the fateful reckoning of what to do about Sororities and Fraternities but the revolution will not be on Tiktok and it will not be from people who just learned the words “bid day” and “standards chair”. Study up for next rush and maybe we can have a nuanced conversation about how to fix this whole thing or get rid of it, or do nothing,
I know I say all the time that wholesome and positive content instead of a joke, is not my bag and I, at times, actively hate it. However, I am not a monster. I like cat videos as much as the next person. I like it when dogs and cats are friends. I have a heart. This sound on Tiktok can sometimes provide me with what I am looking for, but it is also sometimes the bane of my existence. Dumb shit that makes other people happy often does not make me happy (case in point:this whole newsletter) It also makes me annoyed when the point of a joke is that something is better than sex or relationships, and the idiots among us feel the need to reiterate that actually sex or some guy you’re texting is good, like the best thing ever. Better than when a dog and a cat are friends? I don’t think so.
Smile Filter Making You British
Why does the smile filter have such an airtight grip on all of us. Why does it amuse and delight every single time? For me, personally it’s gotten old but then I have a discerning eye. This time though, I love it. I love it when we innovate. Smile filter? No, British Filter. We didn’t have one before and no one was ever going to make it for us. Instead of using the same thing we’ve been presented with multiple times on multiple apps the exact same way we’ve used it before, we did something different and gained something no coder in their right mind would ever give us.
My Pronouns Are He and Not Him
This meme is a double whammy. It combines my two least favorite things, propping up the men you personally like as one of the good ones and weird jokes about pronouns that seem designed to make everyone feel a little uneasy in a way that doesn’t make you laugh. Very similar to the “I’m not racist but” and then saying something unrelated genre. You made a joke and now no one can tell where you stand and also no one really laughed. I don’t want to call them offensive but they just leave a weird taste. A joke that makes you go hmmm. The example I included is the only one worth watching. Jeffrey Garten is the standard for a perfect husband. Rich, Only around when you need him, Served in Nixon administration, Married to the woman who wrote the nuclear energy budget. The example is right. You will never be Jeffrey. He’s the standard. After him, and this Tiktok, why bother?
Second “is it legal to own human bones” controversy started by a social media app in my lifetime. Hell it’s the second one since I’ve lived in Los Angeles. The answer is still no. It’s still not ethical to own another human being's bones. Just because a company tells you that their process of selling human bones is ethical, does not make it true. A good way to know if owning parts of another human being is ethical is to answer one question: did they personally give me this piece of their body? If the answer is no, it is not ethical to own that person's bones, or anything. Hope this helps!