Sorry for the double issues so close together. I was trapped in the woods last week, but I have successfully made my way back to civilization.
The Big Thing
This week has been a one-way ticket to bummer city. I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s not fun for me, and my newsletter is first and foremost about what I want. This is an analysis of things I find interesting and relevant in culture, so it is first and foremost about me. I don’t have a take that feels coherent enough for me to write down. I also am not a journalist and have no ethical responsibility to write or explain anything. This is not the place to learn what a groyper is.
Normally, something like this would fall under my purview, but I’ve long tapped out on how the socially inept men of our day chose to divide themselves and spend their time. I see no value in making myself a Jane Goodall figure for disaffected men on the internet. There’s not an absence of them, and many other people have taken that on. I prefer to embed myself with the Swifties and dark Romantasy people. If we must look at the way the internet gnarls the psyche, I want to do it with people who are similar to myself rather than people who would only seek to hurt me. A woman knows when she's not wanted. I was never on the path to becoming that kind of person, so I'm not interested in what wrong turns they took. If you were or are, maybe that's your job. I'm also not getting paid, and it scares me more than it interests me. Which is where I tap out on morbid curiosity.
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If you want an insightful take, my friend Aidan Walker went viral over the weekend for explaining it better than I ever could. If you’re not already following him and reading How to Do Things with Memes, start now! He’s a professional!
Gay Football Players
If it weren't for the players and the coaches and most of the fans, I think the NFL would be the cradle of American socialism. Here is yet another example of the world moving faster than football fans can handle. On college football Twitter, this image was met with “playful” homophobia that would not have been allowed 6 months ago. There are two Americas, and I have to live in both of them in order to get the word out about this moment of sportsmanship. I couldn’t be happier for these boys, and I found every “don’t kiss!” post worse than the last. I love them and their Obama Era bravery.
Veronika_iscool
One of the new SNL cast members is from TikTok, which means we need to examine her videos under a microscope on Twitter. She’s a woman doing mostly physical comedy, so it was never going to go well. I have never truly loved any of her work, but I like her. A bizarre divide I can’t reconcile when someone who really only has their work to show for themselves. She seems to me a good vessel for comedy. A true comedic actress in every sense of the word. We’re used to the women of SNL being witty writerly types, and Veronika is not a joke writer per se, but she has incredible physicality and a willingness to humiliate herself, which is 85% of comedy. With someone else writing for her and with her, I think she’ll find a way to shine. But I’m an optimist where most of the internet isn’t.
I Can’t Make The Header Fit
This is an old meme. We’ve done this before. It wasn’t funny then, and it isn’t funny now. It reveals that standom is one of the lowest forms of culture. When left with nothing to stan or no product from their fave, they canibalize themselves and waste the rest of our time with this nonsense. If you were seeking a respite from everyone’s thoughts on free speech and political violence, these posts were not helping.
TikTok
Double Entendres
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This is a meme for stupid people. There is a line, and everyone who participates in this meme is below it. Double Entendre is the most pretentious thing you can think of? We are in so much intellectual decline as a country that I’m writing off anyone who participates in this meme as one of the lost. We can get more faux intellectual and even more regular intellectual. We have to. We have to raise the bar for what we consider “too smart,” and double entendre can’t be below it.
Chopped and Skrewed
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People make this look easy. It should be simple. It doesn’t even have to rhyme. And yet after the first wave, no one seemed to be able to get it right. Sure, there’s room for a poorly executed one if it’s funny. But if you can’t keep time and can’t sing on key, what is the audience supposed to get from your video? It makes the good ones so much better because we realize how deceptively simple it was. We didn’t notice all the things they got right because we didn’t know one could get them wrong.
I Might Slide Up To Your Block With Intelligence
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It’s an old kind of joke, but nerdy rapper still works. If it ain’t broke. Also, the songs are getting better. It’s not just lackluster parody music anymore. There’s effort her,e and yet it feels almost effortless. Everyone who brings their own admitted nerdiness to this meme is in on the joke together.
Andrew in Drag
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It always amazes me what the baseline normal is in fandom spaces. How quickly anyone who makes or consumes edits will agree to a premise. “The only girl I ever loved was Andrew in Drag” seems like a premise that would only exist in a handful of shows and movies, or at least only be thematically relevant sometimes. Instead, it’s actually thematically relevant all the time in every story ever put on screen. I knew these girls could do queer readings, but I didn’t know how good they were at it. They’re very convincing, too. Once you’ve seen 10 Andrew in Drag edits, you would think it would be harder to pull off a good one. Instead, they’re getting better. I’m seeing gay subtext in everything now.
first tweet has me dying