#Germany is ran by a Dragon called Steve

[missiletainnyt]

Me and my DnD and tabletop friend group have been talking and returning back to our old Villain game we ran, and now have a google doc with a file named “Hero World Lore” which is about 3 pages long already as a group world building project and it is the most thrilling thing I’ve done in my free time the last three weeks.

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: These Are the Best Memes of 2019 So Far

Memes are hard to quantify, hard to define, even harder to predict. But for citizens of the online world, they drive and organize conversation. They’re jokes; they’re language; they’re ways to make friends, tell stories and explain (or criticize, or satirize) society. Lucky for us, then, that 2019 has given us no shortage of meme material and plenty of memes that have trended virally, infiltrating the way we communicate and becoming part of our contemporary slang.

Here’s our take on the best memes of 2019 so far, from those associated with celebrities to the viral videos and moments that have sparked so much joy.

Read TIME’s picks for the best movies of 2019 — so far.

Celebrities as things

In the spring, Twitter started to become populated with threads that showed a popular celebrity compared to a thing in an associated color. (Think: Tyler, The Creator as different Yankee candles.) The “celebrities as things… a thread” meme can be traced back to one user who put together a thread of Beyoncé and sea sponges. One thread, of Ben Affleck and Dunkin Donuts beverages, was particularly popular. Mariah Carey even retweeted a thread of herself and… whisks. It turned out to be one of the more creative (and nonsensical) memes to take over Twitter of the year so far.

Beyoncé as Sea Sponges, a thread pic.twitter.com/8Wy6uonkOy

— eric (@BeyStillCares) March 30, 2019

Ben Affleck as beverages from Dunkin Donuts pic.twitter.com/87orSgdzFI

— amelia wedemeyer (@ameliadeew) April 13, 2019

Some of you… and it shows

Consider this meme the ultimate sub-tweet. Early in the year, Twitter denizens began to dunk on other users by using the construction “some of you _____, and it shows,” pointing out certain life experiences that set them apart. (Often, it was used to identify particular privileges or very specific phases or sub-cultural trends.) The meme continued apace through the spring, too, with plenty variations catching on.

some of y'all were raised in homes with those granite islands in the kitchen and it shows

— cersei lannister updates (@ammascrelln) December 27, 2018

some of y’all didn’t have an emo phase and it shows

— ༺✩༻ (@wrathspit) December 31, 2018

So, Twitter, meet my dad

In late March, one proud son shared a set of photos of his dad, a former pastor named Clint Hayslett, who had decided to take a career pivot. “My dad is 45, pursuing a modeling career, and I’ve never seen him happier. He told me he’s just waiting for a chance to blow up. So, Twitter, meet my dad,” he shared. The tweet rapidly went viral — and Haylsett did indeed blow up, with his son updating that he booked gigs after the tweet’s success. But it had an even bigger impact beyond Hayslett and his family: people began sharing attractive photos of any number of famous people and family members (from Steve Carrell to Lin Manuel Miranda’s dad) who fit the caption, “introducing” them to Twitter. What did he make of all that attention? “I’m wiped out. I’m worn out. I’ve never held my phone for so many hours. It’s very humbling and inspiring,” he told TIME.

My dad is 45, pursuing a modeling career, and I’ve never seen him happier. He told me he’s just waiting for a chance to blow up. So, Twitter, meet my dad. pic.twitter.com/zYSmZGbPCn

— Collin (@coolcat_collin) March 28, 2019

My dad is 45, pursuing a modeling career, and I’ve never seen him happier. He told me he’s just waiting for a chance to blow up. So, Twitter, meet my dad. pic.twitter.com/xbW9PXtmHw

— tony (@tttonyy) March 29, 2019

Film studies

“This shot was brilliant and should be shown in any film study class,” one person wrote on Twitter following the Game of Thrones finale episode in May, sharing a photo of Daenerys Targaryen facing her troops after the battle of King’s Landing. Behind her, her dragon Drogon is spreading his wings dramatically in preparation to take flight; it looks as though Daenerys herself has sprouted wings. (The tweet has since been deleted.) In the wake of the episode, everyone latched on to this effusive praise to share their own versions of shots that should be studied in film class — from funny moments on the set of Thrones to other scenes in iconic franchises that don’t quite measure up.

This shot is beautiful and should be taught in any film studies class. pic.twitter.com/1zd4mZfEXp

— Alex Goldschmidt (@alexandergold) May 21, 2019

This shot is beautiful and should be taught in any film studies class. pic.twitter.com/r41WnNIXuK

— Zach Braff (@zachbraff) May 20, 2019

“Act My Age”

In 2014, a choreographer mom, Willona Za’Vier, and her two sons Aspect and Dexter, recorded a video of the trio dancing in a circle, their moves perfectly synchronized. According to Buzzfeed, originally they were dancing to a song called “Drop” by Freco and Merloa. But in 2017, after the video had morphed into a Vine, it was shared on Twitter and set to the One Direction song “Act My Age.” It was a hit, and Twitter ran away with it, captioning it with all kinds of funny descriptions about people, characters or things banding together to celebrate.

germany italy and japan after signing the berlin pact and forming the axis powers

pic.twitter.com/cPdxGrnMiY

— jaboukie (@jaboukie) February 17, 2019

The last three dollars in my bank account that survived the weekend pic.twitter.com/HsVgLrEJkz

— Shabba Ranks stan account (@WavyUltima) February 17, 2019

Black hole

In April, researchers with the Event Horizon Telescope team announced they had successfully constructed the first image of a black hole. The photo — of an expanse of blackness, lit by a circular, orange, slightly blurry ring — was widely circulated online with excitement. And then, the inevitable: the memes.

NSF: Amazing first photo of black hole! This changes everything!

Sauron: Mother? pic.twitter.com/4ML5ytcZuX

— Sarah Parcak (@indyfromspace) April 10, 2019

This photo of the black hole is awesome, but wait… Enhance! Hmm, enhance! One more time, enhance! Whoa. The biggest Cinnamon Raisin Bagel in the world, and it's still hot! #EHT #EventHorizonTelescope pic.twitter.com/aPDVtLHF2u

— Gabor Heja (@gheja_) April 10, 2019

I’m baby

Who knows what it means? Who cares? When sometimes life seems overwhelming, and being a grown-up is getting you down, the internet has an answer: just say “I’m baby.” (That said, KnowYourMeme traces the phrase’s roots back to an AutoCorrect of a text message between a mother and daughter in 2017, although its popularity as a meme didn’t really take off until this year.)

Me explaining to my boyfriend why he can’t scold me: pic.twitter.com/hYR0ucimnv

— 𝓶𝓸𝓮𝓼𝓱𝓪 🐻✨🍒 (@Moeshayan) February 22, 2019

Leave it to Archie Comics to capitalize on royal baby mania when Meghan Markle’s first son was born.

i'm baby

— Archie Comics (@ArchieComics) May 8, 2019

“I love mess”

Marie Kondo is the undisputed queen of tidying up — she literally wrote the book on it, and the joy it sparks. After the Japanese cleanliness guru’s show debuted on Netflix, viewers were drawn to her calm, methodical approach to cleaning up people’s homes (and, thereby, lives). But one line from the show, which shows Kondo saying “I love mess” in Japanese with English subtitles, has taken on a life of its own as a meme. After all, who doesn’t love a little mess — in the form of online drama, anyway?

Ah sh-t here we go again

Way back in 2004, the Playstation 2 video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas opens with a scene of main character Carl “CJ” Johnson walking through hostile territory. Strutting down a dusty road, he proclaims: “Ah sh-t, here we go again.” Cut to today, when this scene has resurfaced as a much-used GIF to describe exasperation and frustration. History repeats itself, and CJ is everyone’s avatar in that moment.

This could be interesting from MemeEconomy

this december pic.twitter.com/xgFIR2sLNL

— Rebel Scum Finn (@realtraitorfinn) April 11, 2019

‘Passive-aggressive’ Daenerys

In the second episode of the eighth season of Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen has a private sit-down chat with Sansa Stark to see if they can get over their differences. (Mainly, Sansa doesn’t want to bend the knee to Queen Daenerys; Dany, for her part, will not take no for an answer.) It’s a battle of wills that see the two find some common ground in their shared love of Jon Snow, but towards the end of the talk, it’s clear they have irreconcilable differences. At one point, a shot of actress Emilia Clarke shows her in a clenched-lip smize — the kind of patronizing look we deliver when we’re trying to be nice, but struggling. Naturally, it’s a relatable meme. Thrones may be over, but the memes live on.

I’d like to speak with your supervisor. https://t.co/gsakC2grdu

— johnny urie (@Iceman81X) April 23, 2019

Per my last email face https://t.co/xKjuwR94u8

— Matthew A. Cherry 🏁 (@MatthewACherry) April 23, 2019

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[richmeganews]

Songs of Ice and Fire

John Cuneo

The arsenal of instruments Ramin Djawadi has used to score Game of Thrones includes mournful strings, mighty horns, and the Armenian double-reed woodwind known as a duduk. During the series’ first five seasons, however, he left one common weapon untouched: the piano. Early on, the showrunners, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, decided that the ivories were too delicate for the show’s brutal realms, where even weddings tend to involve some stabbing. They also banned the flute, for fear that Thrones would sound like a Renaissance fair.

But when Djawadi sat down to soundtrack a pivotal sequence in Season 6—the slow reveal that the embattled royal mother, Cersei Lannister, was about to bomb her own kingdom’s cathedral, incinerating half a dozen regular characters in the process—none of the instruments he tried seemed right. “I played the whole scene with harp, and everyone was shaking heads,” he told me. “There’s a warmth to it that the colder piano doesn’t have.”

So Djawadi finally brought the piano to Westeros. As one of Cersei’s minions skulked through the sewers below the cathedral, lighting fuses, the score reverberated with haunting piano arpeggios. The heretofore unheard instrument suggested, however subtly, that one of the series’ signature plot twists was in the making. But the elegiac mood of the composition, called “Light of the Seven,” conveyed more: Cersei’s violent act wasn’t just a game-board-upending coup; it was a tragedy born of malice and desperation. “It doesn’t accompany the scene,” Benioff and Weiss told me via email. “It shapes the scene, as much if not more than any other creative element.”

When Thrones leaves the air this year, its cultural legacy will include—and has been enabled by—Djawadi’s richly textured music. The 44-year-old German Iranian composer cemented the series’ iconic status back in 2011 with a theme song whose relentless thrum of strings catchily embodied the roiling intrigue to come. Since then, he’s created a sprawling sonic landscape befitting the show’s apocalyptic refrain: Winter is coming. Even Djawadi’s most valiant melodies carry a whiff of the ominous.

I visited Djawadi in his Santa Monica studio recently, and he broke down for me how he’d written “Light of the Seven” to draw out the scene’s themes. He punctuated his piano chords with unsettling silence, employed a church organ to evoke Cersei’s torturous past with the religious cult she was attacking, and instructed two boys to sing together in such a way that they were “not out of tune, but you get that feeling of Something’s wrong.”

Thrones fans thrilled to the scene, and to its sound. Shortly after the episode aired, “Light of the Seven” landed at No. 1 on the Spotify Viral 50, displacing the soon-to-be-ubiquitous pop of Maggie Rogers’s “Alaska”—an impressive feat for a 10-minute instrumental, and evidence of one of the more surprising twists in the Thrones saga to date: It’s made a rock star of its composer.

Orchestral composition has long competed with another of Djawadi’s musical obsessions. As a teenager in Duisburg, Germany, he headbanged at Anthrax concerts, shredded guitars in bands with names like Antagonist, and worshipped Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen, two of the most fire-fingered technicians to ever wear leather pants. Walking through his studio, I admired the lutes and djembes on display, but Djawadi was most excited to show off a seven-string electric guitar from Vai’s early-1990s line of instruments, patterned with psychedelic flames. “Good memories,” he said, holding it in a mildly heroic pose.

Growing up in the Rhineland, however, classical music was unavoidable. “In kindergarten, they teach you about canons,” Djawadi told me. “They put a Mozart piece in front of you and explain how the counterpoint is working.”

Fluency in the work of both Eddie Van Halen and Ludwig van Beethoven helped Djawadi develop a sound that is at once complex and crowd-pleasing. That unlikely combination is especially evident in his compositions for HBO’s other sexy-gory fantasia, Westworld, about artificially intelligent theme-park cowboys gaining consciousness. For that series, he regularly arranges contemporary-pop classics into saloon player-piano ditties that feel native to the show’s world. For the series premiere, Djawadi remade the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” to resemble Rossini’s “William Tell Overture.” The stylish action scene that resulted was very Djawadi: emotionally large and sneakily intricate.

Djawadi honed his sensibility at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions, where he still rents a studio today. Zimmer, of course, is the visionary German composer responsible for an outsize number of the past three decades’ trends in film music, with breakthroughs like the all-synth score for 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy and the pulsating orchestration of Christopher Nolan’s 2000s oeuvre.

[Read: How Hans Zimmer became a rock star]

Back when Djawadi worked at the studio as an assistant, Zimmer and his team of composers were agonizing over 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean. Specifically, they were stumped by Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom’s first duel, which was, for some reason, spectated by a donkey.

“If you don’t get the sword fight with the donkey right, you might as well bury the movie,” Zimmer told me recently. “Very quietly, the guy who was making the coffee, who I didn’t think played a musical instrument, said, ‘When you go home tonight, do you mind if I have a go at it?’ ”

The guy was Djawadi, and the treatment he came up with was “staggeringly brilliant,” Zimmer said. “He made it look as if it was a ballet. As if the music had been written first. You could tell it wasn’t just a good musician at work, but a really good brain at work.”

Zimmer’s influence on his former protégé can be heard in the throb of the Thrones theme song (shades of Pirates) and the thunderous brass brammm of its battle scenes (Inception-esque). But Djawadi also cites his Iranian-born father as an inspiration, and suspects that the time signatures of the Game of Thrones and Westworld theme songs (6/8 and 12/8, respectively) were unconsciously derived from Middle Eastern music.

Compared with the work of scoring even a long feature film, serialized television demands massive volumes of composition. Consider: The eight Star Wars films that John Williams has overseen total more than 18 hours in running time. That’s not even as long as two seasons of Thrones.

Djawadi’s first hit TV show, Fox’s 2005 thriller Prison Break, ran up to 24 episodes a season. “I had to write 40 minutes in one week, which was insane,” he told me. “I learned how to write fast.” For Thrones, the seasons are shorter and the turnaround time cushier, ranging from weeks to months per episode. But the production process is far more elaborate. His Prison Break scores were made entirely on studio computers; for Thrones, with its cinematic ambitions, Djawadi writes the songs and then sends the notations to an orchestra in Prague.

It’s not just the quantity of the writing that makes TV a distinct challenge. Whereas a film has a clear beginning, middle, and end, a series unfolds over seasons and years, its direction not always clear even to its creators. On Thrones, George R. R. Martin’s unfinished book series provided a road map for the rambling story, but the showrunners had to invent new plot turns as the series began to outpace Martin’s writing. Djawadi needed to write a score capacious enough to evolve over seven seasons, pushing the conceit of “variations on a theme” to the limit. “He can think in large concepts and long arcs, which is really valuable,” Zimmer told me. “He’s thinking nine hours ahead about what is going to happen.”

Take the show’s iconic dragons. A high, whistled melody—like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind—played when Daenerys Targaryen’s baby beasts first showed up in Season 1. “I had to make sure the music can do that tiny little thing,” Djawadi said, playing an eerie jingle on his keyboard, “but also build to that”—a stentorian French-horn version that was heard during a recent battle involving the fire-breathers, who by Season 7 had grown as big as airliners.

As the show hurtles viewers from one intricate story line to another, Djawadi’s musical motifs also illuminate deeper transformations. In the most recent season, the lonely string line that accompanied scenes shared by wary allies Daenerys and Jon Snow got lovey-dovier with each passing week, foreshadowing—and helping to establish—a romance that didn’t blossom until the finale, in a candlelit liaison between the khaleesi and the king in the North.

Today, Djawadi is a jeans-and-T‑shirt-wearing father of 5-year-old twins. But his teen dreams of stage glory never quite went away—and now they’re coming true, if in a fashion the lead guitarist of Antagonist could never have envisioned. For the past three years, fans have flocked to see him in the touring Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience, an arena-scale pageant of fake snowfall, musicians in tunics, and the Iron Throne rotating onstage as if it were a potato in a microwave. Djawadi conducts, plays instruments, and emcees at the extravaganzas. “It’s completely different from recording in a studio,” he said. “I missed having that feeling in your stomach: What’s going to happen tonight?”

I caught the show at the Boston Garden and found it to be a staggering testament to Thrones’s popularity and music’s role in it. An arena where people more frequently cheer for the Ariana Grandes of the world was instead packed with fans in various states of cosplay, rowdily participating in an instrumental-music concert. When huge screens broadcast Cersei Lannister’s walk of penance from Season 5, the crowd imagined they were her bitter subjects, shouting “Shame!” and “Whore!” Later, they hooted as Djawadi performed “Light of the Seven” on the piano and organ amid licks of green flames. (With his gleaming smile and dark curls, Djawadi has become something of a heartthrob—“The Hottest Person in Game of Thrones Is Not Jon Snow,” Refinery29 reported.) For an encore, Djawadi strapped on a guitar and grinningly jammed with other musicians in a rendition of a Westeros drinking song as screens overhead displayed the faces of all the characters who’d died in the series thus far.

[Read: The ‘Game of Thrones’ Live Experience lets fans bask in the highlights]

Djawadi is an attentive front man, taking note of what the audience responds to each night and altering the spectacle to dazzle fans further. In general, he’s found, the crowd loves special effects. On the latest run of the tour, for example, a violinist gets hoisted 30 feet in the air and her draping dress becomes the trunk of a mystical Weirwood tree. Matter-of-factly, Djawadi mentioned another change he’d been working on: “We’ve gotta add more pyro.”

This article appears in the April 2019 print edition with the headline “Songs of Ice and Fire.”

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