Please Please Please Follow us on Instagram. I am begging. All the other substackers make fun of me for not having as many Instagram followers as them and it’s starting to get to me. It’s worth it I promise.
Nene Running
The Real Housewives have an timeless appeal and even if you don’t watch, the icons have a way of shining through. Teresa Giudice from New Jersey, Countess Luann and Bethenny from New York, LVP from Beverly Hills, and the most Iconic of all, Nene Leakes. Nene is probably the most successful at building a media career outside of the Bravo-verse but she has always been iconic, on or off Bravo. This meme proves it. Years after it originally aired we can still find viral joy from Nene running and screaming down the street in heels. It’s also a great clip because unlike many other Real Housewives gifs it does not leave us to wrestle with the morality of should we be sharing this? It is refreshing to see a clip where even if Nene herself is not privy to this meme right now, were someone to show it to her, she could laugh along. She is not at her lowest or most vulnerable. We are not laughing at her deepest, worst expression of her pain. She’s being funny and we’re still laughing all these years later.
Mike Richards
Twitter did it’s thing. They dug through every minute of this man’s past and got him fired. This one is less a meme and more about the goings on of Twitter. Everyone is in a tizzy and I think is becoming too worked up about this in the aftermath. I’m going to say an unpopular opinion: I liked Mike Richards as the Jeopardy host when I watched him. He filled in the week after Ken Jennings finished guest hosting. He was a breath of fresh air after Ken’s slow, nervous pace. Everyone I talked to about it also liked Mike Richards because everyone I talked to (My parents and my friends Jackie and Isabel) watch Jeopardy regularly, like almost every night, which I think is not true of the people who didn’t want Mike Richards to be the host. Now in the wake of his recent comments coming to light, sure find a new, less problematic host. I would just like to say a few things. First of all, at no point did anyone say that the guest hosts of Jeopardy were auditioning for the job. They were simply guest hosting. Just because people inferred that doesn’t make it correct. Second, Alex Trebek had terminal cancer for twenty months, you don’t think he had a hand in choosing his successor. Third, LeVar Burton did a good job from what I can gather of guest hosting and I would be happy to have him be the new face of Jeopardy. However, to be morbid for a second, Levar Burton is 64 years old. If he lives as long as Alex Trebek he will host Jeopardy for sixteen years. Alex Trebek hosted Jeopardy for 37 years and essentially died doing the job. So there’s that, if you want to think about it that way. From what I can gather about the Host situation right now, Levar doesn’t want to do it or they don’t want him, Mike Richards is out for good, and Mayim Bialik is a disaster waiting to happen with any light googling about her beliefs. In a way we’re back at square one. With Levar gone, people are throwing out some real mask off ideas. Levar was the safe choice to say for who you want to host Jeopardy but now we are trying to find a new fan favorite and it seems some people think there’s no bad ideas at this stage and I just want to say that’s not true.
I personally think a nobody should host. I wasn’t there when Alex Trebek was hired but I’ve never heard anyone talk about his other projects outside of Jeopardy. The man was Jeopardy and whatever his past was before it didn’t matter. The new host should just be the Jeopardy guy, he should not have a prior career that the general public is privy to. He should have a new spin on the old Alex Trebek charm, which everyone is getting wrong. Alex Trebek was not one of our PBS father figures like Bob Ross or Mr. Rogers. First of all he was a republican and often mean to the contestants. Alex Trebek embodied something different than a father who was kind and nice. Alex Trebek was a stoic Republican father who quizzed you at the dinner table but did not engage in your nerd hobbies. He was a man who silently judged when everyone missed a sports category. He was a stern teacher who pushed you to do well. You weren’t rewarded when you did well because that’s your job. The expectation is that you will get the question right. It makes the victory of emotion that much sweeter. You get a rye smile from him when you touch his heart, which is not an easy feat. A kind man who treats everyone well is not what you want. It’s what you think you want. It doesn’t have to be a man either. Remember the really strict teacher everyone hated the first week of school but by the end of the year everyone loved her? That’s what we’re looking for here, people. Some stern tough love. The Host is Don and we’re all Peggy. You don’t get a smile every time you answer a question right, that’s what the money’s for.
Or just get the guy from Lingo or Chain Reaction and call it a day.
Milk Crate Challenge
We have not had a good challenge in a while and this scratches that itch. This one feels like it’s from the days of planking and the cinnamon challenge. A perfect blend of irl and url. Without the internet this would still be confined to about 30 kids in a neighborhood somewhere trying to enjoy their last days of summer. Now everybody has seen it and is trying to do it. We all are kids in the neighborhood watching each consecutive person try their hand at this challenge. I love stuff like this because it feels like this is what humans were meant to do, feats of strength and using something in a way it wasn’t designed for. Every video is the same and yet every video is so different. Where will the milk crate fall this time? When does it start to go bad for the person doing it? In a world where nothing is free and pure organic fun is hard to come by, the milk crate challenge is a reminder that all you need is you, your friends, a flat patch of land, and industrial supplies you can misappropriate. Of course like most good fun things on the internet, it was started and popularized by Black people, and white people have already started ruining it. White people are doing it in gyms and making it ultra competitive which is not in the backyard spirit of the challenge. If white people want to do this challenge I suggest they only post it if they fuck up really bad and they way they fall is super funny. No one wants to see a jacked crossfit weirdo do this really well.
Tiktok
We do this one a lot and I don’t like it because no one knows how to read the room but also reading the room is nearly impossible. The topics range from people battling addiction to people choosing which sorority to go to. There’s no accepted level of trauma at which we’re talking about this. Personally I don’t like it because I could make one about my own experiences. It would be a real tear jerker and it would get me thousands of likes but thats cheap and stupid. We all grieve and process in different ways but as someone who could make one and chooses not to, I’m going to go ahead and say no one has ever successfully processed trauma through a tiktok, they’ve just exploited it for likes which may feel the same in the moment but it’s not.
I don’t understand this one. Is the point that someone that someone did say that to you and you internalized it or no one said it to you and you internalized a belief based on your own negative self talk? Either way? Keep it to yourself. The internet can be a really useful tool for dealing with issues in your life but it can also create this false idea that if you aren’t talking about something, you haven’t dealt with it. That we all have to be open and honest about everything that’s ever happened to us or we aren’t healed. What if we all tried being a little bit more precious and private with our trauma? Not only in the name of good content, but in the name of protecting ourselves. Some people are not ready for the full extent of what you have been through and unleashing it on the whole internet, especially Tiktok, which thrives in randomness rather than brand loyalty, will not do you any favors. Some people shouldn’t get to know the full extent of what you’re feeling. There is a difference between not telling your friends because you’re ashamed and not making a trauma meme Tiktok because you don’t want your experiences to be made worse by thousands of idiots. But what do I know? I’m just a childhood cancer survivor who spent my younger years talking about what happened to me for charities and writing a million essays about it for scholarships. I don’t know anything about exploiting trauma for your own gain and the difference between public and private discussions of horrific past life experiences. (Me bringing this up now is different because I’m doing to prove a point and win an argument, which is always allowed)
Smack My Ass Like A Drum Remixes
My hope for this meme is we never settle on a single version. We run through every song we can and no one agrees on the best version. I want playlist after playlist of attempts. New ideas every day of new places where “smack my ass like a drum” can fit. I want different versions of the same song. Variety is the spice of life and here I want variety in the songs and nothing else. I hope it never dies.
That Little Kid is Hardcore Goth
No one can agree on what they want this sound to mean. What I like the best is when someone really thinks they’re goth and they aren’t. I love when people look back on their childhood and realize they’re very dumb. It’s always funny to me. I also think it is a wake up call for people, wearing black does not a goth make. It’s less amusing to me to see goth little kids that aren’t even that goth. However it’s very amusing to me to see little kids that are very goth. The worst is people projecting and saying that other people think they’re goth. We all know what real goths look like. Your sorority sisters did not think you were goth because they may be judgemental and weird but they have the internet and were born after 1980. They know what a goth is. “Omg people probably thought I was goth” is an idea only people who nobody thought was goth have.
Clocking In to Play [x] Simulator
I don’t like videos where the whole point is reading the text. I like this example because I would LOVE to play Unemployment simulator.
Notes
I’ll Be Fucked Up (Stay by Justin Bieber and the kid LAROI) is the new What You Know Bout Rolling Down in The Deep (Astronaut in the Ocean by who cares I’m not looking that up). I will keep you updated when that changes but I’m enjoying this for now.
WHO at Louis’s Primos estate has an in at Tiktok. Four (4) Songs by this Man have been associated with four different trends in the past year and a half. He’s been DEAD since 1978. NINETEEN SEVENTY EIGHT. How. How does this keep happening.
i do read the subject lines and i look forward to them!
I had never seen an episode of jeopardy until last year and was appalled when Alex Trebek openly started bullying a contestant. “Republican stoicism” is so apt. Even someone as sheltered as me could instantly see that was the whole appeal of his persona. Felt like another big meme week, needed this walkthrough.