#also the only good part of unholy is the part that is trending on tiktok ;-;

[paleangels13]

On today's episode of guess what I'm writing by the playlist I created

[arty-shadow-morningstar]

Con Man’s daughter (10)

[Masterlist]

(Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4) (Part 5) (Part 6) (Part 7) (Part 7.5)  (Part 8) (Part 9)

------

Anyone else want more Damiraenette content?

Dick live streaming or something on Tiktok to keep up the appearance of not being the Batfam.

Tim drinking an unholy amount of coffee and gaining a lot of respect from college students. Shows them the library and makes small talk with Duke who was there.

Pretends Jason is not there in the corner to troll people into thinking that he is a ghost. Cass doing a short ballet show. You know the Wayne Family’s daily life.

He comments on how Damian is not awake yet which was unusual for him.

So being a big brother, he goes into Damian’s room without knocking to wake him up. Only to find topless Damian sleeping next to Raven in his bed. Damian woke up to Dick’s loud greeting.

#

“GRAYSON, GET THE FUCK OUT.”

“Sorry, lil’D, didn’t know that you had company over. So that’s what those noises from last night were.”

#

The chat is absolutely going crazy at this point.

Damian picked up a pillow to throw at Dick.

Then, Marinette sat up from the other side of Damian, half-asleep and wearing one of Damian’s signature black shirts. She yelled, “I am up. I am up.”

She then sees a shocked Dick.

“Go away, Dick,” she said and pulled Damian down to cuddle.

 Dick closed the door before the pillow Damian threw could hit him

Suffice to say, #likefatherlikeson and #PlayboyIcePrince was trending on Gotham twitter for a while.

Until Damian said in an ‘interview’ that he was in a polymorous relationship with both of them and would kill sue the hell out of anyone who dared to call his girlfriends harlots and other degrading names.

No one ever dares to bring up his relationship ever again.

—---

Raven gets taken to Hell by her father, Trigon.

Marinette is friends with a few demons who know about her relationship with Raven.

So those demons were all too willing to spill the beans about Trigon’s big plans when she came knocking on their doors in fury and a deadly former assassin by her side, asking about where their girlfriend was.

Trigon is talking to Raven about how she was going to be used in his latest plan to take over the world.

Meanwhile, his front door is knocked down/ blown open by one Marinette Dupain-Cheng in her signature red coat.

Trigon grinned as he felt the intruder in his domain, “Well, looks like that Constantine girl of yours came to rescue you. I am going to have so much fun, ripping her head off in front of you.”

“No. Don’t hurt her.” Raven cried as she struggled against her bonds.

“Be patient, dear daughter. You will meet her soon. Maybe with less of her than you remembered.” Trigon vanished with a laugh.

“NO! NO! NO! FATHER!!!” Raven screamed after him.

Marinette is thrashing Trigon’s minions, using every Miraculous she has and every trick she knows when Trigon shows up.

“You are rather good. For a mortal.”

“Why. Thank you.” Marinette cheerily replied while sticking a paper talisman to a demon’s face. Her tired body struggling to keep up against the horde of demons told a different story.

“Well, let me put you out of your misery, pest.” Trigon said as he threw a bolt of lightning at her.

She expertly dodged it and it hit another demon instead. She grinned at him, “I will also take that as a compliment.”

“You are just a foolish child. What makes you think you can defeat me?”

“And you are a piece of shit who just got awarded the worst father of the century.” Marinette retorted before grabbing the demon who was coming behind her, “Of course, I can defeat you. With the power of love. And a shit ton of firepower.”

She sat the demon she was holding on fire and threw it at Trigon

Trigon just batted it away.

Battle continued for a few minutes. Marinette was feeling the effect of using all the Miraculous in her possession. 

“Hah. Give up. It’s only a matter of time before you lose. You are already weakened by the overuse of the Miraculouses.”

Marinette just gave him a smile. She stood where she was and smiled. And it wasn’t just a smile. It was a familiar Constantine smirk that said ‘Shit is about to blow’.

Then, the room they were in started shaking.

“What did you do?”

“I am just the distraction, Trigon.” Her smirk widened into a grin as Raven in rage mode burst into the room. “And you forgot that me and Raven have a wonderful boyfriend.”

Damian showed up besides with a few Miraculous of his own.

Fade to black as Trigon gets his ass kicked by his daughter and her two partners.

-Little Cut scene-

John is just chilling at a bar when the bartender gets possessed by Gowther.

“What do you want?”

“Do you know that your spawn is in hell?”

“I am aware she takes unsupervised visits from time to time but it’s not like I can stop her. She’s too bloody stubborn to let something like being grounded stop her.”

“Yeah, about that. She just lost her shit and is basically going to war against Trigon to get her girlfriend back.”

“She’s WHAT?”

“Thought you might appreciate knowing.”

“You just love being a snitch to get her in trouble since she beat you in every video game.”

“That too.” Gowther cheerfully agreed.

“She’s in bloody trouble, alright. I am telling her mother.”

“Ooooh. Calling in the big guns, are you?”

“Now, shoo before I bring out the Latin and the holy water. I have a child to go save from her own stupidity.”

Bartender put his hands up in surrender. “Okay, John.” Black eyes disappear as the eyes roll to the back of the body’s head.

John leaves a few bills as he went to make a call to Chas.

--- That following summer... ---

Marinette was face down on the couch as her dad stood in the middle of the living room, shirtless and painting some concoction on himself for a ritual.

Marinette groaned for the nth time that day.

John took that as his cue to finally ask what was wrong, “Sweetheart, what are you doing here?”

Marinette slightly turned her face towards him so her voice wasn't muffled.

“Hawkmoth is being a bitch again.”

“Why haven’t you stopped him then? You already know who he is. Get the cops. Knock down his door and arrest him then.”

“You know why. It’s just circumstantial evidence on my part.”

“You don’t have to find a cure for his wife, you know. Take the matter into your own hands if you don’t want cops involved.”

“I am trying to save Emilie for multiple reasons and top of the list is to make sure Adrien has at least one parent when this whole mess is over.”

“I know he is your nemesis’s son but why do you care so much about him?”

“Because he is also Chat Noir.”

John stopped what he was doing. “Say what now?”

Marinette realised that she had given her father more ammo to complain about Master Fu.

“Are you telling me that the old fool gave one of the most important Miraculous to the Butterfly Man’s own son?!”

“To be fair, before he got taken away by the Order, I didn’t know for sure that Hawkmoth was Chat Noir’s dad.”

“How come I didn't know about this until now?!”

“I thought you knew.”

“All you told me was that he was a boy in your class!” John sighed. “Fine. Anything else I need to know about?”

“Nothing I can think of.”

“Then, why are you still here? I have to finish painting over my body for the cleansing ritual and I can’t do that with you around.”

“I am bored. My friends are either out of town or busy with their own thing. Damian and Raven are on that Teen Titans mission in the next galaxy for 10 days. And I hit a dead end on the cure.”

“Then go to hell or something. I am sure you can find something to entertain yourself with down there. That’s what I would do.”

John went back to painting before he realised what he had done when it had gotten too quiet.

He looked up to see his daughter gone from the couch.

He hesitated before deciding that his daughter is a more responsible person than he was and probably won’t get into much trouble.

That was his mistake.

-----5 days later....-----

John was at a Justice League meeting when his phone rang.

The number was 666 which was worrisome because it was Lucifer’s number.

It wouldn’t shut even when he took the battery out.

“Constantine, turn off your phone.” Batman ordered.

“Look, mate, I am trying but the bloody Devil is calling me.” John showed his phone battery out of the phone and the screen that is still showing 666. “He will probably keep ringing until I answer.”

“Then, do it.”

“Hello, your Majesty. Can you hurry up on what you need? Because I am in the middle of something here.” John answered.

“Ah. Constantine Senior. You finally picked up.” Lucifer’s smooth baritone is heard by everyone in the conference room, “You already know who I am so I will keep this short.”

“What do you want?”

“I am calling on behalf of Hell to tell you to come pick your daughter up.”

“What?”

“Your daughter, Lady Rouge. She refuses to give me her name. She is currently in my castle dungeons although I am not sure how long that will be true. She has caused quite a bit of trouble in my realm and well, my subjects are not happy.”

“What did she do?” John sighed, already feeling a headache and dread at what his daughter had done. Damn, he was beginning to understand why Batman sighed so much when his kids are mentioned.

There was a bit of paper rustling from his end. “Oh my me. There is quite a list of complaints but from the paper I am reading from. The gist is that your hellspawn had made a deal with a lot of demons.” Lucifer seemed to be suppressing his laughter.

“She appeared to have found a way to abuse each of those deals and made a deal with another demon to take her place in the deal. There are quite a few loops. Unless the perfect conditions are fulfilled, every demon is stuck trying to hold up their end of the deal. There is an UNO game made up of at least 20 demons and counting that is never going to end because they all made a deal that the game wouldn’t end unless a red Zero is placed down and she appeared have given all of the red zero cards to Mammon who is tasked to guard it with his life unless someone manages to get all the golden bust of the Founding fathers of the United States and exchange them for the cards. Except Alexander Hamilton is being moved every hour and George Washington is part of a prize pool for a Super Smash Bro Tournament where Gowther has to win every game and when he wins the tournament restarts. You get the idea.”

“Can’t they just… stop?”

“They could stop but they would lose the souls they all had collected till now. You know how prideful demons are. At least one third of the demon population is stuck in what they are now calling the Ouroboros deal and the soul stock market crashed 3 times since she arrived. Once literally.”

(Ouroboros is that symbol of the snake eating its own tail. The above idea is from @writing-prompts and I will link that post when I find it.)

John was quiet for a minute and said, “Please tell me that’s it.”

Lucifer laughed. The bastard. “Sorry, Constantine. That would be a lie and you know I don’t lie.”

John groaned. It had been five days since he last saw Marinette. Since Hell ran on a different time, 5 days could be either 5 weeks or 50 years in Hell’s time. Fuck, even Batman was giving him a look of pity. A few other Leaguers had gotten popcorn to watch his hair turn grey in real time.

 “What else?”

“Let’s see. Trigon’s territory is a bit of a mess now but he can’t do anything because most of his minions are part of the Ouroboros deal. There is a pack of hellhounds and wild animals loose in Dis. Your daughter was caught five times and escaped each time. She was last caught because she was waiting in line for boba tea.”

John took a moment to use those calming breathing techniques he heard worked. “You sound too happy for a monarch whose realm got thrown into chaos.”

“This is the most entertained I have been in years. And I also scheduled a vacation in LA for the next year or so. Plenty of time for Beelzebub to get it right. I can always extend my vacation if Hell still isn’t fixed by then.”

“So why are you calling me?”

“Your daughter made a deal with me to get her out of Hell in one piece, mentally unscarred and soul intact in exchange for information on how to break the Ouroboros deal. She is quite the evil mastermind.”

“I suppose it’s not going to be easy and very beneficial for her.”

“The conditions are either to make Emilie Agreste wake up again or make sure Gabriel Agreste isn’t allowed to send out any akumas or amok for 5 years. The problem is that the demon she made this deal to had a third condition to fulfil and because they chose to do the third, the entire Ouroboros deal started.”

“Oh no. What was the third condition?”

“To disguise themselves as any inanimate object. Change location and appearance once every twelve hours and not be found for 10 years in Earth’s time. If they get found, they have to fufil one of the other conditions. If they succeed any of the conditions, they would get a soul from her. The best bit is that it’s not hers.”

“Whose soul did she put down for all this trouble?”

“A girl named Chloe Bourgeosis apparently. Apparently, the demon bought the lie that it was her real name. Essentailly she is inconveniencing nearly half of Hell unless they solve her pest problem or they are stuck in a loop for the next 10 years. And all we would get out of it is some bratty girl’s soul. You see, not everyone is happy with her right now.”

“I reckon. I am coming over as soon as my business up here is done.”

“Sure. But make it fast. Trigon is first in line for her head.”

John put the phone away and turned to Zatanna. “Bottle of the strongest whiskey you can summon.”

She gave him a sympathethic smile and handed him a glass of water. Traitor.

—

Marinette is at the Mystery House to do something and sipping coffee since she didn’t get much sleep last night due to an akuma. She wasn’t paying any attention to her surroundings, too tired to register and walking past the dark haired boy who was nervously sitting on the couch in the living room.

A moment later, she realised that there’s a kid in the house of Mystery.

She backtracked and the kid was now trying to avoid her gaze.

Marinette slapped herself, much to the boy’s confusion, and muttered, “It’s not a dream then.”

The boy nervously looked at her and said, “hey…?”

Marinette blinked and realised that she was supposed to say something.

“Bonjour. I mean, hi. I am Marinette. Sorry, it’s just that we don't get many visitors at the house. Who aren’t demons or other non-human entities. Especially kids cause Dad’s bad around them. And I am a little tired right now and I am babbling like a moron. So what’s your name?”

“Um…”,he hesitated but less apprehensive than before.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me. Fae rules are like that. Are you okay with me calling you kid instead? Or do you prefer something else?”

“No, it’s okay. I am Billy. Billy Batson. It’s just weird since I didn’t think that anyone else lives here besides Mr. Constantine.”

“I don’t. I just pop in from time to time.”

“Oh…But um…how do you know Mr. Constantine?”

“He’s my Dad.”

“He’s married?”

Marinette snorted, “Hell no. I am a product of a one-night stand. My mom and him had a friends-with-benefits kinda deal. My mom is married to someone else. They run a bakery together.”

“I didn’t think that he would be someone’s dad.” Billy said. “He looks so… irresponsible.”

Marinette snorted, “I know, right? He doesn’t strike people like a father figure. So, Billy, what brings you here to this House of Mystery.”

“He’s Captain Marvel.” John’s voice came from the side room and there were sounds of him moving stuff to find something.

“Who?”

“You know, the World’s Mightiest Mortal. Champion of Magic.” Billy explained, finding it weird introducing himself like that.

“Oh. Shazam’s successor. The asshole finally picked someone.” Marinette said.

“You knew the Wizard?”

“I met him once. Wu Kong made a wrong turn and we landed on the Rock of Eternity. Man, it was even more awkward when Tikki came out and basically threw hands with the guy.”

“Who’s Tikki?”

Said Kwami came out from her hiding place in Marinette’s pocket. “Hi, my name is Tikki and I am a kwami. I give Marinette her powers to become Lady Rouge.”

“Isn’t Lady Rouge that Parisian hero that made Green Lantern cry?”

“It wasn’t me. Well, it was partly my fault but having both Wonder Woman and Batman being angry at you would be terrifying for anyone.”  Marinette tapped Tikki’s head. “And Tikki, never seen you this excited to reveal my identity to someone?”

“Marinette, I have to make a good impression on the new Champion. It was a tragedy what happened to the old one.”

“You know about Black Adam?” Billy asked

“Yes. His story is quite a sad one. Teth-Adam was a great Champion and fought alongside one of my holders. Shazam locked him away over a misunderstanding.”

“Ah yes. The classic old tale about foolish old men who dump all of their responsibility on children and can’t even give simple guidance and talk in the vaguest riddles like they know everything because they have lived for so long. I know that Shazam had died but I thought he would have the common sense to have his Champion be someone older.”

“I can take care of myself. I know what I am doing.”

“Billy. I am sure you can but you shouldn’t have too. Those old men were just cowards, afraid of the consequences of their actions, covering up their mistakes as best as they could and when it finally came back to bite them in the ass. They put the task of cleaning up their messes on us. We would have lived normal lives and never have to see the horrors we have seen or make the hard decisions at such a young age when we should have been having fun.”

“Oh. I never thought it was like that. Being Captain Marvel made me believe that someone like me who is just a nobody that I can save the world.”

“You aren’t wrong for thinking like that. Having powers is cool and I have taken that for granted before I got Tikki. You are a better person than me, Billy Batson. But still it was wrong of them to give us the tools that would be bad in the wrong hands and have us fight their war for them.”

“Who was your wizard?”

Marinette laughed before answering Billy, “Have you ever heard of the Miraculous before?”

“A little.”

“Well,...” Marinette told Billy about the situation in Paris and Master Fu.

The two talked about their respective hero work and bond while John searched for whatever he needed to help Billy.

Marinette gave Billy a card with her number and told him to call her if he ever needs help.

“I will come over wherever you are. Immediately. No questions asked.”

“But why?”

“Well, you are a kid and I just emotionally adopted you as my little brother now so you can’t get rid of me. Besides, I am easier to get hold of than my dad if you ever need a bit of expertise on a few magical matters.”

Then, John came in with a thick book in his hands and looked between the two of them, “Found it. Did you two have a nice playdate?”

“Billy is my new brother now.”

“I am not going to adopt him. He already has his own family and one hell spawn is enough for me to deal with.”

“I love you too, dad. Don’t be afraid to ask for a favor, Billy. I have to go. I have school in -like-” She looked at the grandfather clock that showed time in another dimension where time runs backwards, “-an hour.”

“Don’t run just on stamina potions for three days straight again and go to sleep once school is over. I will call your mother to check on you. I know you came here to get your hands on the ingredients for it.” John called after her.

“Okay. Bye. Love you. See ya” Marinette said as she stepped through the portal.

John turns back to Billy, “Kids, amirite? That’s why you have to use protection.”

“I’m twelve.”

“But she’s right, Billy.” John added, “You need someone who’s an expert when you find yourself in a pinch. As much as I hate to say it, she’s good at the family ‘business’. Besides, I might not be available all the time. She can teach you magic too when I can’t be bothered.”

—

First time, Billy called Marinette. She portaled to his location immediately and found Billy as Captain Marvel in the phone booth, awkwardly standing inside as the area they were in was in chaos.

“So what happened?” She asked in her Lady Rouge suit.

“Um, who are you?”

“Whoops. Sorry.” Marinette removed her mask. “It’s me, Marinette. This is my hero costume and the magic makes me unrecognisable by other people. I go by Lady Rouge.”

“Okay.”

“So what’s up? And why is everything on fire?” she asked as she put her mask back on.

Billy explained. There is a demon on the loose. Somebody in Fawcett had the bright idea to sumon one but didn’t do the ritual right. He tried everything but the demon bastard was slippery to catch.

Everytime he is close to catching the demon, there will be people nearby who will be in danger so Billy has to let the demon go in order to save the civillians.

“At this point, I need some help.” He sheepishly ended. “Hope I wasn’t a bother to you.”

Lady Rouge reached up and ruffled his hair, “I made a promise to you,kid. You call for whatever you need and I will come. Now, let’s go catch that bastard.”

They set a trap and Captain Marvel tries to lead the demon towards it. It gets trapped.

Lady Rouge being dramatic steps out the shadow, “Well done, Cap. Just as planned.”

When the demon caught sight of who was helping Captain Marvel, it shrieked, “IT'S YOU!!”

Lady Rouge tilted her head confused, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I have ever met you before.”

“You don’t need to know my name. I am leaving. I swear I will never come to the human side ever again. Please let me go. Please.” It begged.

Lady Rouge just rolled with it. “How can I trust you to keep your promise?”

“I swear on my name. I swear on everything I have. Please. Please let me go.”

Lady Rouge took the demon’s hand, used a sharpie to draw something that looked nearly phallic and chanted a spell that glowed bright. The demon cried louder.

“Don’t be a baby. That was a simple tracking spell. It doesn’t hurt.”

“You used angelic runes!”

“Oops. But now I will know if you come upside again. Oh, by the way, tell all your friends down there that my sentence was lifted.” She said before opening a portal to Hell under the demon.

Captain Marvel stared at her.

“What?”

“Why was that demon so scared of you?”

“Nearly every low-level demon thinks I am a demon. High-ranking ones won’t say shit because they know how much of a headache it would be if it got out that I was just a human or because they think what I do is entertaining.”

“That’s kinda messed up.”

“It’s hell, kiddo. Of course, it’s kinda messed up. I can give you a tour of the place one day.”

“It’s fine.” Billy didn’t want to go to where demons lived willingly. “What did you mean that your sentence was lifted? Are you banned from going to hell or something?”

Marinette looked away and muttered something quickly in French.

“What?” The infinite wisdom of Solomon meant he could understand what she said but he wasn’t sure he heard it right.

“I was grounded because I might have… caused a ruckus down there a while ago.”

“What did you do?” he questioned.

“It’s a long story. You don’t need to know.”

“I heard something about the crashing of the stock market and loopholes.”

“There were a lot of things one after another. First, my girlfriend was taken away by her demon father and he was a high-ranking one so it caused a lot of buzz. For the next few months, I was getting tired of fighting akumas so I caused a lot of... mischief for the denizens of hell as stress-relief and long story short, I fucked over Hell’s governing system and the Devil himself made a deal with my father that I won’t be able to go to Hell for my entire lifetime so they wouldn’t have to deal with me.”

“You… you got a lifetime ban from hell.”

“Yes, when I die, I might go to hell but as long as I am living and breathing, I can’t step foot in there.”

“But you told the demon that you were coming back.”

Lady Rouge’s mask widened and Captain Marvel knew that she was grinning under her mask. “That’s the fun part. They don’t know that. And they are going to send Hell into a frenzy because they are scared of me returning.”

“You are basically Hell’s bogeyman.”

Lady Rouge laughed. “Oh my kwami, that sounds awesome. I am putting that on my business cards.”

-------

Taglist:@vixen-uchiha, @laurcad123, @pale-lady-dreamer, @frieddonutsweets, @demonicbusiness, @iloontjeboontje, @plantsarefun06, @khneltea, @avs17, @imarivers8, @tieronick2411, @bookwalmartav, @intoomanydamnfandoms, @paradoxaloccurance, @its-maemain, @fairlyfatale, @talia-scar123

[biofunmy]

100 Best Memes Of The Decade

Debora Westra for BuzzFeed News

This decade, memes became something not just for a handful of internet nerds who lurked on message boards; memes are now for everyone. The online culture of this decade hasn’t just changed the words we use, it’s changed how we express ourselves. Huge technological shifts of the 2010s led to this: widespread smartphone adoption and the rise of newfangled social media platforms like Vine. Memes also became a business — brands used meme-speak and accounts like @fuckjerry made big bucks by reposting memes.

To determine the ranking of this list, we considered the overall popularity of a meme, its longevity, and historical importance — what kind of impact it had on other memes and internet culture. Here they are:

100.

Yodeling Walmart Kid

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

In 2018, 10-year-old Mason Ramsey sang a Hank Williams song in a Walmart, and the internet went nuts. But this time, the reaction to a precocious kid singing somewhat oddly (a sort of yodeling) was very different than it was in 2011 when Rebecca Black sang “Friday.” Instead of mocking the kid, the internet loved him, declaring the clip a “bop” that “slaps.” This is the change that happened over the decade: Instead of relishing cringe, the more memetic and ironic thing to do is embrace and love something like a child yodeling in a big-box store. Ramsey has gone on to have some version of mainstream success, performing country music to live crowds, and, well, good for him. —K.N.

99.

Moth Memes

Twitter: @thebobpalmer

Much like a moth is drawn to a flame, we were drawn to memes about moths and their unquenchable thirst for lamps in summer 2018. They got their start with a Reddit post that July, a close-up photo someone took of a moth, which people soon began captioning and photoshopping until it took on a life of its own as a meme. There’s really not much you can say about moth memes, besides that they are funny and good and I will love them until I die. —J.R.

Every generation has its subcultures, and in 2019, Gen Z’s was undoubtedly VSCO girls. The aesthetic comes with a number of signifiers: scrunchies (piled high on the wrist), Hydro Flask water bottles (covered in stickers), puka shell necklaces, oversized T-shirts, Crocs, Fjällräven backpacks, metal straws (save the turtles!), Carmex lip balm, and the ubiquitous catchphrases, “sksksk — and I oop.” The easy-breezy look, named for the photo editing app VSCO, was essentially “Tumblr girl” meets “basic white girl.” Though the style became trendy in earnest through Instagram and internet stars like Emma Chamberlain, it catapulted to popularity (and mockery) on TikTok. —J.R.

97.

Duck Army

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Kevin Innes, a Norwegian twentysomething, was in a store with his girlfriend one day when they came across a bin of squeaking duck-shaped (technically, the toy is a pelican) dog toys. To embarrass his girlfriend, he pressed down on the whole bin, and an unholy cacophony that sounds like the wheezing sum total of human misery was released. Innes posted to Facebook, then YouTube, and then someone else ripped his YouTube video and posted it to Vine, where it went viral. The beauty of this 2015 meme was a perfect Vine: absurd, easy to understand, surprising, and based on something that happened in real life. —K.N.

96.

Deep-Fried Memes

reddit.com

You might not even know what they’re called if you saw them, but a deep-fried meme is one of those pictures that has been screenshotted, edited, and reuploaded across Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit so many times that has started to degrade in quality. At first this deep-frying process was largely genuine, kids refiltering and remixing each other’s images. But as the phenomenon became more known, a second wave of ironically deep-fried images started to appear. It’s a fairly silly thing on its surface, but it also speaks to the innate desire for people to share stuff online. If Instagram had a share button, there’s a good chance this sort of thing would have never started happening in the first place. The walled culs-de-sac of proprietary platforms will never be able to stop the world’s teens from sharing a picture of Peter Griffin from Family Guy smoking a huge blunt. —R.B.

95.

Twitter Sign Bunny

|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣| vaccines save lives you stupid motherfucker |＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿| (__/) || (•ㅅ•) || / 　 づ

02:12 PM – 01 Dec 2019

A series of ASCII image memes popped up on Twitter this decade: “Howdy, I’m the sheriff of,” “In this house we…” “got dat” cat, a stick figure falling off a building, or even the simple ¯_(ツ)_/¯ or (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. These work in part because they visually take up a lot of space on the Twitter timeline, making them stick out and be more likely to be interacted with or remembered. Plus, there implies some element that the poster has some technical abilities to be able to summon the ASCII. But it’s the bunny that’s had staying power over those other ones. —K.N.

94.

Doggos and Puppers

This is Rey. She’s a very puptective doggo mommo. Will grrbork bork at any potential threat. 13/10 heartwarming as h*ck

12:00 AM – 20 Oct 2017

Dogs have been man’s best friend for thousands of years, but only around 2015 did they evolve into “doggos” and “puppers.” “Doggo-speak,” as NPR called it, arose in Facebook groups like “Dogspotting” before exploding on Twitter with the @dog_rates Twitter account. The lingo is characterized by cutesy nicknames for dogs (Samoyeds are “floofs” or “clouds,” corgis are “loaves,” any huge fluffy dog is a big boofin’ woofer) and onomatopoeia (a doggo can “bork,” or stick their tongues out and do a “blep” or “mlem”). To me, it’s a fascinating as “h*ck” thing that an entire dialect, with all its own grammar and syntax and vocabulary rules, could spring up in an organic way online. —J.R.

93.

Planking

CC BY-SA 3.0 / Donkey100 / Via commons.wikimedia.org

In 2011, everyone was taking pictures lying facedown on the ground, rigid as a board. It was a thing, and that thing was called planking. Plankers would assume the pose in unexpected places — atop a car, inside a supermarket freezer, even across two camels — then get a buddy to snap a picture. The trend got so big The Office even did a cold open about it. Soon, it spun off into other photo pose trends, including owling and leisure diving, but it also sadly led to at least one death.

Eight years later, these photo memes can feel a bit old-school, but they represent a key moment when ready access to cameras (both the digital kind and iPhones, which were still pretty new) was still a novelty, and people were leaning into ways to use it creatively. —J.R.

The point of bros icing bros was simple: At any point during the day, present a warm bottle of Smirnoff Ice to your bro, and he has to get down on one knee and chug the cursed beverage. However, if he produces his own bottle immediately, he is exempted, and it is you who must chug. This prank was the peak of IRL-memeing in 2011. Smirnoff denied any sort of marketing stunt, which makes sense if you consider that the central conceit is that being forced to drink a Smirnoff Ice is a form of punishment. The meme threatened a resurgence in 2017, but never really caught on again. —K.N.

91.

Bone App The Teeth

In 2016, someone posted a pic of white bread just absolutely smothered in corn and captioned it with a phrase that ignited a million memes: “bone app the teeth.” Those four words — sometimes edited to “bone apple tea,” “bone ape tit,” or even more bonkers iterations — became the battle cry for shitty food porn posters everywhere. It’s a pretty simple meme, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a picture of Goldfish sushi or a chicken noodle watermelon without completely losing it. —J.R.

90.

Clowns

Instagram: @davie_dave

Remember that brief moment in fall 2016 when towns around the US were overtaken by mass hysteria over scary clowns being spotted in the woods (which then immediately stopped being a concern when Trump got elected and everyone suddenly had other stuff to worry about)? Yeah, that was a thing that happened. Clowns had quite a ~moment~ in the latter half of the 2010s. Less than a year after the clown sightings, a remake of the horror movie It came out, prompting a ton of memes of Pennywise in the sewer and dancing (and, of course, people wanting to fuck the It clown). The clown memes just kept going from there, with clown photos being used as reaction images to illustrate our most dumbass moments. Sometimes I wonder if those clowns are still in the woods. I hope they’re happy. —J.R.

89.

Kim Kardashian Breaks the Internet

Jean-Paul Goude / papermag.com

In November 2014, Kim Kardashian appeared on the cover of Paper magazine bearing her whole entire ass. It went massively viral, and people immediately got to work photoshopping it into a centaur, Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” (which had just come out), the turkey in a Norman Rockwell painting, you name it. The phrase on the cover “break the internet,” would go on to become timeworn, but it all started with Kim K and her big, glossy butt. —J.R.

88.

Bed Intruder

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

In July 2010, Antoine Dodson appeared on the local news in Alabama after a home invader attempted to assault his sister, saying: “He’s climbin’ in your windows, he’s snatchin’ your people up… So y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife…” The news clip went viral, and a few days later, Dodson’s words were remixed into the Auto-Tuned “Bed Intruder Song,” which made it onto the Billboard 100 charts and become the most-viewed YouTube video of 2010.

“Bed Intruder Song” captured two powerful vectors that would come to define the rest of the decade: a normal person being propelled to some sort of viral fame, and a critical backlash over the exploitative race, gender, and class dynamics. At the time, some people pointed out that turning a video of poor black man expressing anguish over the attempted sexual assault of his sister was problematic. Years later, this feels even more true. Dodson went on to a strange post-virality career, with a reality show that never got off the ground, celebrity boxing matches, controversial statements about being gay, and a Trump endorsement. —K.N.

87.

Alex From Target

Alex LeBoeuf / Twitter: @auscalum (deleted)

In November 2014, a young woman tweeted a photo of a teenage checkout clerk at Target with Alex on the nametag. Her tweet was simply, “YOOOOOOOO,” signaling that, well, this teen boy was cute. The tweet went viral, and people fell in love with this mysterious Alex from Target, creating memes and tributes in his image, leading anyone over the age of 23 to wonder: What the fuck is happening here?

There was some legitimate confusion over how and why Alex’s photo blew up. An internet marketing company stepped forward, claiming that it had gotten the original girl to tweet the photo of Alex as a viral marketing stunt, and seeded the meme with inorganic retweets and promotion. But the woman who made the tweet (whose Twitter account is now suspended) said she had never heard of the marketing company, and that she just randomly found the photo on Tumblr and tweeted it out, and it seems that the marketing company was trying to claim stolen viral valor.

But the ending wasn’t so great for the guy at the center of it. Alex LaBeouf, who went by Alex Lee as a stage name, eventually dropped out of high school because he had missed so many days to fly to Los Angeles for appearances on talk shows. He was homeschooled and joined the 2015 DigiTour, a tour for social media stars, mainly Vine stars at the time. In a 2017 video, he said that his managers at the time had stolen $30,000 from him, and since then he’s abandoned his public social media accounts. —K.N.

86.

Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

The music video for “Miracles” debuted in April 2010. The song had been kicking around since 2009, but the video is what really did it. It’s been viewed 18 million times — and watching it back in 2019, it is still just as deranged as it was when it debuted. A lot of the meme songs on this list exist in that uncanny valley of like “misunderstood banger.” I want to be clear: “Miracles” is not that. It is a nonsense song. And while it’s best remembered for its “fuckin’ magnets, how do they work” and “Magic everywhere in this bitch” lines, I would argue the best part is the line about pelicans: “I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco Bay / It tried to eat my cellphone, he ran away / And music is magic, pure and clean / You can feel it and hear it but it can’t be seen.” Damn, that’s real. —R.B.

85.

First-World Problems

Thinkstock / Twitter: @ughshaye

When you’re eating nachos and one stabs the roof of your mouth, when one pillow is too low but two pillows is too high; these sorts of issues — annoying, but generally indicating your life is pretty easy and privileged — were best summarized by the early-2010s macro image “First-World Problems.” A lot of things feel dated about “first-world problems” memes, ranging from the style of the image all the way to the use of the concept of countries being first world vs. third world. But the meme was also one of the first concerning social privilege, which many people would learn about for the first time in the 2010s. —J.R.

84.

Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge

vine.co

Kylie Jenner dominated the 2010s, particularly with the launch of her Kylie Lip Kits in 2015. The now-billionaire’s lips had been the subject of gossip and envy that year when she suddenly debuted thick, pillowy lips (the result of lip fillers, though she denied it until two years later). The star kicked off something of a lip-plumping craze, and teens starting trying to plump their own lips by sticking them in shot glasses and sucking till they swelled up. Needless to say, it did not come doctor-recommended.

The rise in popularity of injectable fillers and the instabaddie takeover are inextricably linked to the Kardashian/Jenner family’s influence. Each trend made way for the other, clearing the way for a bunch of teens to damage their faces to score Kylie-level lips. —J.R.

83.

Sad Keanu

nerdlikeyou.com

Keanu Reeves kickstarted the decade as a meme after a paparazzi photo of him eating a sandwich on a park bench was shared on 4chan. “Instead of Chuck Norris, let’s make Keanu Reeves a meme,” one redditor wrote as the image started to spread. Which is interesting to think about — that this particular decade, one so heavily shaped by increasingly radicalized social media platforms, began with users of heavily male communities like 4chan and Reddit deciding to abandon an aggressively masculine meme like Chuck Norris and instead embrace a picture of disheveled loneliness. Splash News, the agency behind the photo, has attempted to remove the picture from the internet via DMCA takedowns, but Reeves and his sandwich have proved too popular (and photoshoppable) to really scrub away. As for how Reeves feels about the whole thing, at the time he told the BBC, “Do I wish that I didn’t get my picture taken while I was eating a sandwich on the streets of New York? Yeah.” —R.B.

82.

“Haven’t Heard That Name in Years”

Twitter: @goIfkart

As you read this list, you’re probably at various points looking at a meme, taking a drag on a cigarette, and saying, “Gangnam Style? Haven’t heard that name in years.” —K.N.

If you dumped a bucket of ice over your head in summer 2014, it was probably to raise money for ALS research in the Ice Bucket Challenge. The challenge involved participants dousing themselves in ice water on video, then nominating others to either do the same or make a donation to fund ALS research. Many did both, using the viral videos to promote the cause, and the ALS Association wound up raising more than $100 million in a month. The rare meme that did demonstrable good. Sadly, the man who inspired the meme died in December 2019. —J.R.

80.

“I’m in Me Mum’s Car, Broom Broom”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

A Vine of a British girl in her mum’s car (broom broom) was a perfect Vine: It makes no sense, it doesn’t follow any known comedy format, it’s vaguely cringe, and yet it’s so silly it’s guaranteed to make you laugh. The brief and glorious life of Vine thrived on these moments of surprising and unexpected humor. TikTok is the closest thing we have now to Vine, and yet it requires a certain knowledge of its memes and tropes to “get” it. “I’m in me mum’s car, broom broom” only requires you to be a human with a pulse to find Tish Simmonds’ 2014 masterpiece funny. —K.N.

79.

The Rent Is Too Damn High

Kathy Kmonicek / AP

The thing about Jimmy McMillan’s slogan for the 2010 New York gubernatorial campaign is that he’s absolutely correct: The rent IS too damn high, and he was accurately predicting the coming housing market crisis in New York City. McMillan was a minor local politics figure, having run for mayor a few years earlier. But it was the televised debates for the governor’s race in 2010 that brought him national fame for his flamboyant facial hair, gloves, and his one-issue campaign platform. He was parodied on Saturday Night Live, and a meme was born. —K.N.

78.

“What Does the Fox Say?”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Few music videos of 2010s hit it bigger than one by Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis, as they tried to answer a perplexing question: What does the fox say? The video — which featured a cast of people dressed up in animal costumes and a whole slew of sounds a fox might purportedly say — was named the top trending video on YouTube in 2013. It’s a video that feels definitively old, and it’s hard to imagine it coming out now and being earnestly enjoyed, but we were doing lots of things more earnestly back then. And I’d bet you anything you still know the words. —J.R.

77.

Hot Dogs or Legs

times-new-romann.tumblr.com

Showing off your tan in 2013? The trendiest vacation humblebrag in 2013 was snapping a pic of your thighs and captioning it “hot dogs or legs.” The meme first went viral on Tumblr but had a long life on Instagram afterward. This was mostly annoying, unless it was actually hot dogs, which was pretty funny. –J.R.

76.

Darude’s “Sandstorm”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

One of the bright spots about the 2010s is the way that young people immediately understood and identified the parts of shit culture of the ’90s and ’00s, and mercilessly mocked it. Guy Fieri, Shrek, Bee Movie, and the hit 1999 techno song “Sandstorm” by Darude. To be fair, “Sandstorm” is probably the best and most well-known trance song, but still, it’s incredible silly. It also became a huge meme to namedrop the song in the comment sections of random YouTube videos. What’s silliest about it is the idea that it has lyrics (it does not), and they’re simply dun dun dun dun dun dun DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN dun dun dun dun. —K.N.

75.

*Record Scratch*

*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.

03:44 PM – 25 Aug 2016

*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup, that’s me. I’m a meme you could not stop seeing all over your feed in 2016. The meme was based on the clichéd movie trope in which a protagonist would begin to explain how they got themself into a ~wacky situation~. The meme spread quickly, with Twitter users aligning the text with all sorts of images. This was not the first text-based Twitter meme, nor would it be the last, but its takeover was so big it eventually became a Twitter trope in and of itself. —J.R.

74.

Double Rainbow

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

What makes Paul Vasquez’s effusive awe at seeing a double rainbow distinctly from 2010 as opposed to 2019 is how it’s barely what we’d call a “meme” now. It’s a viral video, sure, and it was one of the first truly huge and popular ones. In many ways, even though it happened in 2010, it resembled the memes of the 2000s more: It went viral after Jimmy Kimmel’s show account tweeted it, and it spread over email and Gchat from person to person.

The things we think of as memes now are mostly defined by being iterative: a photo you can write new captions over and over ad nauseum and can mean a million different things. But “Double Rainbow” is just a funny video – you watch it once, you laugh, and that’s it. It’s more of the Tosh.0 version of the internet where there are funny things to be found than the Distracted Boyfriend or Pepe the frog version where there are existing memes that we make our own meaning out of. The monetization of the video was also (by current standards) primitive: He appeared in a Microsoft ad. —K.N.

73.

Mannequin Challenge

There were a lot of dance crazes and video fads in the 2010s — the suddenly widespread use of phones with cameras made it possible — but few grew as big as the Mannequin Challenge of 2016. The videos involved standing as still as a statue, usually with the song “Black Beatles” by Rae Sremmurd playing. The meme’s origins lie with a group of Florida high schoolers, and within just a few weeks there were Mannequin Challenge videos from pro sports teams, then– presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and quite possibly your family on Thanksgiving. The Mannequin Challenge went viral because it was the stationary dance craze version of the “Cha Cha Slide” — it was family-friendly, everyone could catch on pretty quickly, and it was something that could bring everyone together. —J.R.

72.

“Harlem Shake”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

In early 2013, a dance meme was born. Set to the techno song “Harlem Shake” by Baauer, the premise was to start off dancing very mildly, and when the beat drops, all hell breaks loose and a large group of people dance wildly. It’s stupid, I know. As quickly as the meme came to life, it died: A few days after the first few videos went viral, BuzzFeed’s office did a version (Ryan is in the horse mask; I run and hide into a conference room), and six days after that, the Today show anchors did one, which seemed to everyone to signal the end of the meme. But the real nail in the coffin was in 2017 when FCC chair Ajit Pai did a video to help explain the end of Net Neutrality. —K.N.

71.

Bottle Flipping

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

If you were a teen in 2016, you probably flipped a bottle or two. The trend really took off when high school student Mike Senatore executed a flawless flip at his school talent show to rapturous applause. After that, everyone was flipping bottles, and a “replica bottle” signed by Senatore himself fetched over $11,000 on eBay. Teens do all sorts of kooky things, but to this day, it’s hard to watch a video of a perfect bottle flip and NOT feel unbridled joy and triumph. —J.R.

70.

Bronies

Katie Notopoulos / BuzzFeed News

The world first learned of bronies when in 2011 Wired wrote about the adult men who loved the rebooted My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic show. For the next five years, bronies seemed to dominate every aspect of internet culture — they were rampant on Reddit, 4chan, DeviantArt, Twitter, Tumblr, and even IRL conventions (and of course, horrible, horrible version of pony porn, known as “clop”). The fandom morphed through every phase of an online community, including a small faction of fascist bronies, creating fan art of the colorful horses in Nazi uniforms.

No group since furries has been as routinely mocked as the bronies. And yet, now that they’ve sort of faded away slightly, we sort of miss them. —K.N.

68.

Bee Movie

quilavastudy.tumblr.com

According to all known laws of memes, there is no way Bee Movie should have been able to go viral. And yet, posting the entire script to the 2007 movie somehow became a big Tumblr meme. The reasons for this semi-flop movie becoming a meme aren’t totally clear. Perhaps it was the realization of how grotesque the plot is (a bee and a human woman fall in love), perhaps it was that star Jerry Seinfeld was having a moment. Or maybe because it was just because it’s random and shitty movie, which is inherently funny. Unlike beloved childhood characters Shrek or SpongeBob, Bee Movie’s mediocrity is what makes it memeable. The crummier, the more nonsensical the meme, the better. The layers of ironic detachment have to be so thick that to pretend to love Bee Movie and post its entire script is something only someone with a truly online brain in 2015 could be capable of. —K.N.

67.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ (Shruggie)

Fun fact: The symbol in the center of the shruggie is a Japanese Katakana character called “Tsu.” It’s commonly used in Japanese fiction to represent the end of a line of dialogue. Kind of perfect right? Nothing left to say? Shruggie time. The shruggie was the perfect emoticon of the Obama era: a slightly worried-looking, yet pleasantly numb smirk, throwing its hands up at everything’s lack of meaning. Also, it just looks really cool! Things are going to probably only get worse over the next decade, so I say we bring the shruggie back. Let’s all really get into casual nihilism. I mean, everything’s fucked, so why not, right? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ —R.B.

66.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

The infectious pop song became a hit in early 2012, and by late spring, the distinctive rhyme scheme of the chorus had become a meme. Example: This still of Marty McFly and his mom in Back to the Future: “Hey I just met you / and this is crazy / but I’m from the future / and I’m your baby.” Or a tweet by @jwherrman: “HEY, I JUST MET YOU / AND MY DOG IS CRAZY / WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF / HE HAS RABIES.” —K.N.

65.

Dashcon

notsafeforweabs.tumblr.com

There was a time right around the middle of this last decade where the internet was a largely more innocent place. Nerdy fandom subcultures built around TV shows like My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Sherlock, Doctor Who, and Supernatural weren’t quite in the mainstream yet, nor did people fully understand the realities of what happens when you bring a bunch of people from the internet together in real life. That giddy naivete died with Dashcon. The unofficial Tumblr-based convention wasn’t quite a Fyre Festival–level disaster, but the level of secondhand embarrassment it generated seems to have killed an entire mode of internet use. One could even argue that Tumblr — the little social network that could — lost its last bit of grip on the larger culture of the internet. From the sad photos of cosplayers sitting in a weird ball pit to the haunting photos of empty of showrooms to accusations later of fraud, for fandom internet there was a before and after Dashcon. Based on things like Tanacon and Fyre Festival, though, it seems like those who do not learn from Dashcon are doomed to repeat Dashcon. —R.B.

64.

Galaxy Brain

reddit.com

This 2017 meme has staying power because it’s so simple and applies to so many things. The format shows several different concepts in increasing order of brainpower, culminating with something ridiculous. It speaks so perfectly to how we argue and discuss any topic online: a basic idea, a smarter take, slowly devolving into anarchy. —K.N.

63.

Loss.JPG

cad-comic.com

There’s really no way to sugarcoat what loss.JPG is. It’s a four-panel web comic about a miscarriage that has evolved into some weird Where’s Waldo? game played on social media. The story behind the infamous comic is that Ctrl-Alt-Del creator Tim Buckley wanted to make his series more mature. His audience recoiled at the mature storyline and found the whole thing incredibly lame. To make matters worse, the text-less comic was uploaded to the site with the filename loss.JPG. There’s a good chance you’ve come across loss.JPG parodies and never even realized that’s what they were. Buckley has spoken a bit about the meme over the years. “Perhaps I had miscalculated my demographic’s ability/willingness to approach such a sensitive subject matter,” he said. “As much as I hate to admit it because I certainly don’t want to make light of the subject matter itself, I found them quite amusing.”

But still the meme remains. And there’s a good possibility it will continue to stick around well into the next decade, if only because it’s too tasteless to ever really address directly. —R.B.

62.

Baby Shark

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

The origins of why a techno version of a public domain campfire song became accurately described as “‘Sicko Mode’ for babies” isn’t totally clear. Normally, internet culture has no interest in what the parents of young infants and toddlers are doing (gross, old people). And yet somehow the catchy story of a multigenerational shark family (doo doo doo doo) meant for babies became inescapable. In a review for the live stage show of Baby Shark, the New Yorker wrote, “It wasn’t Disney or Nickelodeon executives who plucked it from among the millions of other videos on YouTube. Instead, babies themselves made it a juggernaut, by relentlessly clicking Play on their parents’ phones. It might be the first genuine example of baby pop culture.” —K.N.

61.

Infinity War Memes

yoongis-home-moved.tumblr.com

TV shows and movies that become their own sort of visual meme language all tend to come from the same place emotionally. There seems to be a certain secret sauce for cracking through the zeitgeist, and it largely comes down to particular kind of glee people get from taking the piss out of something serious. Avengers: Infinity War wasn’t the first Marvel film to get memed (Bruce Banner’s “That’s my secret, Cap” line from The Avengers was the first big one), but Infinity War hit in a big way. I’d argue that all came down to its shocking ending where literally half of everyone’s favorite superheroes all died horribly. First were the Infinity War spoilers-without-context posts, followed by the “I don’t feel so good, Mr. Stark” memes, and then there were even thicc Thanos memes. Ultimately, Infinity War memes didn’t have a huge staying power, but it seems to have rewired the way audiences digest big blockbuster movies; if you jump on Twitter right as you get out of the theater and start retweeting memes, you suddenly don’t feel so silly for crying when Spider-Man dies. To be honest, thicc Thanos is much more traumatizing. —R.B.

60.

Binders Full of Women

bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com

Mitt Romney made a truly weird gaffe in a 2012 debate when he answered a question about pay equality — describing how, as governor, he asked to see more women candidates for Cabinet positions and was shown “binders full of women.” Twitter, in peak parody account mode, immediately latched onto this weird and vaguely sexist turn of phrase. A parody Tumblr was made that posted photos of binders. People flocked to Amazon listings of binders to write funny reviews.

Now it seems laughable that this was the biggest gaffe of the election, the most shocking thing a politician said. Yet in the 2012 internet ecosystem, this perfectly played out a cycle of political memes that we don’t really have the stomach for anymore. No one’s making a “grab them by the pussy” Tumblr. —K.N.

59.

“Gangnam Style”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Here’s the thing about Psy’s 2012 hit: It’s extremely good. The song is catchy, but it’s the visuals in the music video that propelled it to an international hit and the most-viewed YouTube video for years. It’s a video you want to watch more than once, one you want to show it to your friends. The fact that it was by an artist unfamiliar to most people outside of South Korea didn’t matter. The videos that would later best its YouTube record — “Despacito,” “See You Again” — did so more because of how long their respective songs stayed at the top of music charts than the nature of the video itself.

But “Gangnam Style” is a wildly entertaining as a video. The sets and backup characters change constantly, Psy’s style of deadpan serious rapping while lying on an elevator floor with a man in a cowboy hate gyrating over him is funny. Psy’s pony-riding dance is funny. It was the dance, of course, that people did at weddings and high school dances and flash mobs. —K.N.

58.

Forever Alone

knowyourmeme.com

Constructing a linear narrative out of internet content is extremely complicated — things connect across time and space in ways that make a traditional retelling almost impossible. That said, if there is a story of the internet in the 2010s, I’d argue it’s about loneliness and the bizarre and surreal ways people try to overcome it. So perhaps it’s fitting that this decade started with FunnyJunk user Azuul’s May 2010 rage comic “April Fools” — the first appearance of the phrase “forever alone.” Azuul’s swollen-faced character has more or less gone extinct, but the phrase, and more importantly, the meaning behind the phrase, have gone on to define the core irony of the internet: We are deeply isolated, yet connected enough to each other to commiserate about it. —R.B.

57.

Wholesome Memes

Twitter: @tenderfiresign

Ah, wholesome memes. In a decade in which things online (and offline!) tended to be pretty bleak, wholesome memes were a salve. In these memes, the punchline lies in the genuine surprise of an online joke actually being pure and good — particularly about “loving and supporting” one’s friends, significant other, or yourself. —J.R.

56.

There’s Always a @dril Tweet

Without a doubt, @dril is the most important person on Twitter of the 2010s. He has a specific absurdist take on living in some modern digital hellworld where his boss doesn’t let him kiss his ferrets at work, people keep asking him about fucking the Betsy Ross flag, and his candle budget is out of control. He never breaks character — there’s never a “but seriously folks, I’m sorry about that last tweet” — and has, miraculously, nearly maintained his anonymity.

@dril’s fans have taken some of his tweets and turned them into specific terms for online existence: “Corncobbing” is when someone has been owned and refuses to admit it; “help my family is dying” is a reference to the candle budget tweet.

During and after the election, people noticed that often there was an old Trump tweet that said something almost the opposite of what he had just said, coining the phrase “there’s always a tweet.” Soon people started to notice that Trump’s tweets had an odd similarity to @dril tweets and that you could often find an old @dril tweet with a parallel message. —K.N.

55.

Game of Thrones Memes

reddit.com

Like Infinity War, Game of Thrones became its own genre of meme. It wasn’t the first peak TV drama to do so — I’d argue Breaking Bad set the stage for it — but GoT did something both Breaking Bad and movies like Infinity War didn’t: It got much worse over time. Game of Thrones, especially in its early seasons, was an outrageously grim, dark show full of sex and violence, which made the memes it generated feel even more fun and risqué to share. But as the show’s ratings increased and its digital footprint became nearly unavoidable, it also became a much stupider show. Somewhere in that uncanny valley of extremely serious and incredibly stupid was the perfect breeding ground for memes. Much like the army of White Walkers pouring into Winterfell in an episode shot so dark people had to desperately try to readjust their TV settings, once internet users smell blood in the water, they’re going to swarm. —R.B.

54.

You Know I Had to Do It to Em

Twitter: @LuckyLuciano17k (deleted)

There’s something so visceral about the YKIHTDITE photo. You either get why it’s funny, or it’s just a random photo. I also think people notice things about this photo in different orders. For instance, I notice the sock tan lines and the diamond earrings first. The tweet also begs us to answer the question of what exactly “it” is that he had to do to ‘em. Luciano’s pose — hand in hand, loafered power stance — has evolved into something akin to an internet-wide Where’s Waldo? with people photoshopping him into anything they can. People even go on pilgrimages to where the photo was taken (it’s in Florida, obviously). Like I said, I can’t explain why it’s funny, but it is. Maybe that’s the “it” that he’s doing to ‘em. —R.B.

For a brief time in early 2017, people were transfixed by Turkish chef Nusret Gökçe, who would slice steak and sprinkle salt on it, but, like, in a sexy way? (See #13) A still image of “Salt Bae” tossing on the salt like it’s fairy dust became a meme representing any time we’re being our most extra selves. (Oh yeah, and then he hugged Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at his restaurant and Marco Rubio doxed him for it. Becoming a meme is a rich tapestry.) —J.R.

52.

Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams

timmie-cee.tumblr.com

The theory that 9/11 was an inside job, as evidenced by the fact that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, was floated in the 2005 documentary Loose Change, which, despite being Alex Jones–level conspiracy theory, became incredibly popular on YouTube. It takes countless levels of irony to use the phrase (along with “Bush did 9/11”) as a joke. On some level, it’s not unlikely that a young person has been exposed to Loose Change or some other truther and perhaps believes it a little bit. On another level, they’re making fun of boomers and truthers who actually believe it. And then there’s the gallows humor of laughing at a tragic event that only those too young to remember could exhibit. It’s not callousness that made this a meme; it’s a reaction to the noxious conspiracy theories that flourish online and the disillusionment of an event that led to a war that’s lasted the entire lifetime of the young people who make the joke. —K.N.

51.

Cringe

knowyourmeme.com

True cringe is something posted in earnest, and being earnest is the enemy of internet culture in the 2010s. Irony is the online currency. Cringe as a concept started on Reddit, where r/cringepics and a YouTube-focused version posted awkward and embarrassing earnest photos and videos taken from social media. R/CringeAnarchy, a more cruel board that tended to make fun of women and minorities, was banned in 2019 by Reddit (other forms of cringe boards are still active).

“Cringe” became a catchall for something embarrassing and uncool. Hillary Clinton tweeting in meme-speak was cringe. Your old LiveJournal is cringe. BuzzFeed is cringe. Everyone has posted cringe; it’s universal, and that’s why we’re so obsessed with it. —K.N.

49.

Drake/”Hotline Bling”

imgflip.com

Drake has been a massively popular and famous rapper for the entire decade, and there’s always been memes about pop stars. But Drake has managed to be more memeable than his musical peers, except for maybe Kanye West. There’s been the “In My Feelings” dance challenge, where people dance out the side of a moving car to his 2018 hit, the “hope no one heard that” lyric from “Marvins Room,” Drake’s myriad of faces and expressions while he watches basketball games, images of his character from Degrassi: The Next Generation, and the handwritten scrawl of the cover art for his album If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.

But it’s the video for “Hotline Bling” that was memed a million times. The Day-Glo colors and goofy dancing made for perfect GIFable moments. The meme was nearly killed when Donald Trump danced to it on Saturday Night Live, but a version managed to live on: Drake shaking his finger to one thing, and smiling in acceptance to another thing. —K.N.

48.

Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

“Bring Me to Life” is like the goth cousin of “All Star.” It works for the same reason. It’s from that ridiculous Ben Affleck Daredevil movie. It has a call and response. Its sadder lyrics definitely fit my general mood about all of life right now. Also, Amy Lee can sing! This song is a genuine banger. When is the Evanescaissance coming? —R.B.

47.

Ryan Gosling

feministryangosling.tumblr.com

Hey, girl. Ryan Gosling was more than just a Hollywood heartthrob in the 2010s — he was also the basis of multiple memes. First came the Tumblr “Feminist Ryan Gosling,” in which photos of the actor were superimposed with quotes that mixed feminist texts with shit your imaginary hot-yet-sensitive boyfriend might say (this was 2011, so the sheer concept of a man openly calling himself a feminist was still a Big Deal and kind of a pantydropper, which is bleak in retrospect!!).

On a completely different note, the actor became an online sensation again in 2013. In the Vine series “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal,” creator Ryan McHenry would feed real-life spoonfuls of cereal to an onscreen Gosling, who would “reject” the bite by turning away or appearing to slap away the spoon during intense movie moments. In 2015, McHenry died of cancer when he was just 27 — and in his memory, Gosling made a Vine of himself actually eating cereal. —J.R.

46.

ASMR

me drinking iced coffee on an empty stomach knowing it’s going to make me feel like shit

05:00 PM – 11 Aug 2018

One of the decade’s hottest trends was getting a bunch of tingles down your spine. Among the biggest genres on Youtube, “autonomous sensory meridian response” videos usually involve people whispering, tapping on a glass, or even crunching on pickles straight from the jar. For some, the sounds provoke a sensory response that feels extremely calming and euphoric, and may help listeners go to sleep. Though many had long experienced the strange tingly feeling, it wasn’t until recently that people knew what to call it. Following conversations on message boards about the nameless sensation, a woman named Jennifer Allen coined the term in 2010 and made a Facebook group in its name.

From there, it entered the popular consciousness, becoming gradually more well-known over the decade. Many enjoyed it in earnest, but it also was widely parodied. There were celebrity ASMR videos, and ASMR creators became YouTube celebs in their own right. One of the biggest ones, a teen girl named Makenna Kelly, became the basis for a ton of memes. Some of these YouTubers became famous for their funnier themed ASMR videos, such as “1300s A.D. ASMR: Nun Takes Care of You in Bed (You Have the Plague).”

Self-care and wellness were major buzzwords in the 2010s, which helped popularize the relaxing videos. But perhaps the most interesting part is how social media helped many people name the bizarre neurological phenomenon they’d experienced their whole lives and find out they weren’t alone. —J.R.

45.

Cropped Gay Porn

Instagram: @http://bit.ly/2ElyLuw

Porn! It’s the central driving force of the internet (see #13). So much of the web culture created in this last decade has been defined by an explosion of diverse and global points of view suddenly entering the mainstream (and the conflicts that sometimes rise up when that happens). So it makes sense that most defining porn meme of the 2010s is cropped gay porn. It’s cheeky, it’s wildly inappropriate, and, fuck, it was so big. The meme really climaxed with the “Right in front of my salad” clip, where two adult film actors interrupt a woman peacefully eating her salad by having sex behind the kitchen counter. It’s sort of nice to think that no matter how crazy things get, there’s one thing that can still bring us all together online, and that’s porn. —R.B.

44.

Cash Me Ousside

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Imagine you’re Dr. Phil. Having helped families and individuals through countless crises on your television show, you’re feeling pretty good about your abilities. There is nothing you, a couch, and a camera can’t fix. Then one day, a 13-year-old Floridian named Danielle Bregoli comes on set and rocks your world. After she calls your audience a bunch of hoes, you repeat the accusation, just making sure you heard right. When she confirms, the audience goes berserk, and Bregoli gets upset. You hear her say “Cash me ousside, howbow dah?” five magical words used to challenge the audience to a fight. The phrase lives on in infamy. And now you, Dr. Phil, are part of one of the decade’s greatest memes. —Alex Kantrowitz

43.

Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man

ABC / MARVEL

It’s simple: Spider-Man points at another Spider-Man. What’s not to get. It’s us, looking at ourselves. Iconic. —K.N.

42.

Nickelback

youtube.com

The Canadian band has miraculously remained untouched by the trend of critical reassessment and appreciation of pop music. They occupy an uncanny valley of being wildly popular AND wildly reviled by anyone who considers themselves a person of taste. For a while, they occupied a space as the punchline to something bad (there was a time in 2014 where you could use a Facebook graph search to find which of your friends “liked” Nickelback and unfriend them).

But it was the still from the video for “Photograph” where singer Chad Kroeger holds up a photo, along with the memorable lyric “look at this photograph,” that blew up in the second half of the decade. The meme ultimately died when President Donald Trump tweeted a version where the photo Kroeger holds is of Joe Biden golfing with his son and another American who also served on the board of a Ukrainian company at the center of the impeachment inquiry. Nickelback’s label filed a copyright claim, and the video has been removed from Trump’s tweet. —K.N.

41.

Rebecca Black

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday! In 2011, then–13-year-old Rebecca Black made her debut with “Friday,” and looking forward to the weekend was never again the same. The music video went enormously viral, but it was widely dubbed the “worst song ever.”

Still, it was also a hit, and the song debuted at No. 72 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was covered on Glee, and Black even appeared as herself in Katy Perry’s music video for “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.).” Two years later, Black got in on the joke, releasing a sequel to “Friday” — named, of course, “Saturday.” Whether you think “Friday” slaps or is a nightmare, I’d bet you anything you’ll know all the words until you die. —J.R.

40.

“Come to Brazil”

diorc.tumblr.com

If you’ve ever clicked through on a tweet from any sort of celebrity, chances are you’ve seen the phrase “come to Brazil” written over and over in the replies. According to Know Your Meme, the first time the phrase was tweeted at a celebrity was April 2008. Then, when Justin Beieber joined Twitter in 2009, it exploded in popularity. I once asked some members of BuzzFeed Brazil why exactly it was such a common occurrence among Brazilian internet users. I was told the answer is actually pretty simple — American musicians rarely tour Brazil. But to really best understand why Brazilians mass-send it though, on a deeper level, you probably need to know the concept of “zuera,” Brazilian slang for “zoeira” which means “heavy fun.” It basically means that moment when a meme becomes a meme and spirals completely out of control. COME TO BRAZIL, MIGAAA. —R.B.

Guns or glitter? Touchdowns or tutus? One of the most inescapable party themes of the 2010s was that of the gender reveal. At gender-reveal parties, expecting parents and their loved ones gather to find out what kind of genitals their unborn child will have. This is often accomplished by cutting a cake, with pink or blue frosting revealing whether it was a boy or a girl.

Party planners tried to one-up each other, sometimes executing the big reveal using explosives — which, as you might guess, often had disastrous results. In 2018, a father-to-be accidentally ignited a wildfire in Arizona. The following year, a grandmother was killed in an explosion, and there was even a gender-reveal plane crash.

As our understanding of gender (and how it was not the same thing as sex) evolved over the decade, so did criticism and mockery of gender-reveal parties. And some people had changes of heart; in 2019, Jenna Karvunidis, the lifestyle blogger who had the first viral gender reveal in 2008, criticized the parties, which she said put “more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby.” She added, “PLOT TWIST, the world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!” —J.R.

38.

*tips fedora*

Twitter: @MoonOverlord

One of the most magical things about the internet is when we all collectively realize something is a thing. For instance, sometime between 2010 and 2012, everyone on the internet realized that every town has a couple weird guys who wear fedoras, trench coats, fingerless gloves, have terrible facial hair, and talk to women like they’re 12th-century knights. Long before these dudes turned into violent incels, there was just a really nice moment where we could all agree that these dudes were goofy and awful and fun to rag on. Swag is for boys; class is for gentlesirs, m’lady. —R.B.

37.

This Is the Future Liberals Want

36.

Ted Cruz, the Zodiac Killer

During his run for president in 2015 and 2016, a widely circulated, joking conspiracy theory accused Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of being the Zodiac Killer, the unidentified serial killer who murdered at least seven people in California between the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Cruz was born in 1970 — after the first killings — so he is probably not the Zodiac Killer, in my expert journalistic opinion. But for many people he just…seems like kind of a weird dude, right? He pretty much made the perfect candidate for a bonkers conspiracy theory about a decades-old serial killer.

It seems like Cruz got a kick out of it eventually, though. He later acknowledged the meme, tweeting an image of the Zodiac Killer’s cypher on two separate occasions. —J.R.

35.

Confused Math Lady

TV Globo

If there was one dominant theme in the 2010s, it was “I have no idea what’s going on right now.” This was expressed in a bunch of different ways, from the fact that teens and the internet curled up with increasingly obscure memes and terms meant to confuse the Olds (the boomers don’t know what “sksksksk” is) to the rise of explainer journalism like Vox or email newsletters/catch-you-up-quick news like the Skimm. We are all confused. We have no idea what’s going on. If you take the time to catch up on one story, you’ll miss what’s happening elsewhere.

Hence, Confused Math Lady, a meme featuring an actor in a Brazilan soap opera looking confused, spread on Brazilian internet. By 2016, the GIF of the confused woman became a four-panel comic with various math symbols over it, suggesting she’s trying to solve some complex calculus problem. Confused Math Lady is us, trying to understand it all. —K.N.

34.

“Old Town Road”

youtube.com

Country music fandom went mainstream in the 2010s, and with it came the rise of the “yeehaw agenda” at the end of the decade. The term described a reclamation of country aesthetics among black Americans, who have long been erased from extremely white cultural depictions of the Wild West (despite the fact that 1 in 4 cowboys were black).

The concept exploded in popularity at the end of 2018 when rapper Lil Nas X released his breakout hit “Old Town Road,” a country rap song that became one of the biggest singles of the year — only getting bigger after being disqualified from the Billboard Hot Country chart over claims that it did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music.” In response, the artist released a remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, practically daring critics to say it wasn’t country enough.

The song was a viral hit, and videos featuring it — particularly one of Lil Nas X surprising a bunch of elementary school superfans, and countless transformation TikToks — only boosted it more. The song broke records as the longest-running No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100, and Lil Nas X became the first openly gay black artist to win at the Country Music Awards. —J.R.

33.

American Chopper Yelling

vox.com

Paul Teutul Sr. and his son, Paulie, were the stars of American Chopper, a 2000s reality show about their custom motorcycle shop. Not infrequently, they argued. The show was popular at the time, but not particularly cool or internet-y during its run. So it was slightly surprising when in 2018, stills of a scene of an argument between father and son became a meme. The more esoteric the argument — the role of media communication in science, Lord of the Rings plot holes, linguistics — the better. Part of the joy of the meme was seeing macho men argue about anime, but also acknowledging that a lot of our online lives is over-the-top screaming arguments about trivial things. —K.N.

32.

Brands Acting Like People

At the end of the day, consumers are people. And people crave authenticity. It’s what they look for in their relationships, their entertainment, and, yes, their brands. Which is why the orange juice account pretends to have depression now, and everyone likes it, and it’s good.

05:06 PM – 04 Feb 2019

Largely inspired by the Denny’s Tumblr in 2013, brands’ tweets over the decade have steadily grown to become surreal, humanoid, and Extremely Online. As the companies tried to figure out how to navigate their role in online spaces, there were missteps (who could forget the SpaghettiOs tweet about Pearl Harbor, or the time DiGiorno used a hashtag about domestic violence to make a pizza joke?). Eventually, many came into their own with genuinely fun and bonkers tweets, with MoonPie, Steak-umm, and Wendy’s being standouts. But in early 2019, things kind of jumped the shark when SunnyD just really went for it with a full-on depression tweet.

“I can’t do this anymore,” SunnyD tweeted in February. Immediately, all the other memey brand accounts got in on it, basically staging an intervention for the orange drink brand in crisis. “Hey sunny can I please offer you a hug we are gonna get through this together my friend,” Pop-Tarts tweeted. “Buddy come hangout,” tweeted Corn Nuts. It was pretty bleak, and many saw it as making light of mental illness and suicide. Most recently, brands started, uh, acting horny, in a nightmare Twitter thread started by Netflix. Who knows what other horros we’ll see in 2020? Brands! —J.R.

31.

Arthur’s Fist

The children’s show Arthur turned 20 in 2016, and with it came a ton of Arthur memes. But none had nearly as much staying power as a still image of Arthur’s clenched fist. Just a flat cartoon image of an aardvark’s curled-up hand, it somehow embodied such passion, such fury, that the meme became instantly relatable. —J.R.

30.

Florida Man

Florid Man Charged With Assault With a Deadly Weapon After Throwing Alligator Through Wendy’s Drive-Thru Window http://bit.ly/2Ppcn9P

11:48 PM – 08 Feb 2016

A meme that mocks someone’s shoes might seem to be more mean-spirited than other memes of the decade. It’s a catchphrase to laugh at someone for wearing ugly footwear, after all. But the most effective examples of the meme, including the Instagram video (and then Vine) that started it all, are always about punching up — taking a small shot at someone more powerful, like a teacher, a celebrity, or even Jesus.

But like “on fleek” and other viral catchphrases and memes, the “what are those” meme spread without any control from its creator, Brandon Moore. In a 2018 interview with HuffPost, Moore said that he “felt sick” when he heard his catchphrase in the movie Black Panther, because it was a reminder of how he had missed a chance to copyright or watermark his video and had seen his creative work monetized by others without him benefitting at all. Six months after the interview, Moore died in his sleep at age 31. —K.N.

28.

Kanye West

Twitter: @kanyewest (deleted)

Is Kanye West a meme? Is he a collection of memes? Is he the original material that gets remixed into memes? Is he all of these things? Perhaps. Kanye’s “Imma Let You Finish” moment happened in September 2009, but was still humming along by the time the decade started (the internet was slower then). For a while, his Twitter account was an endless source of internet content: “I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle.” Damn. Huge mood. And then, of course, like many memes, he went full MAGA after the election of Donald Trump. For much of the decade, it seemed like all of culture either flowed from or through West. Based on the reviews for his newest album, Jesus Is King, and the general lack of buzz around his Sunday Service project, that might be something we’re leaving in 2010s. Although, he did just bless us with Silver Kanye, so who knows really. —R.B.

27.

Dat Boi

ppt.wz51z.com

In the same way that a bunch of the X-Men are all blue for some reason, the internet really likes green frogs. Sadly for Dat Boi, he hasn’t had the same staying power as Pepe or Kermit. The version of Dat Boi that we all know was first posted in April 2016. In many ways, he’s the last meme specifically from Tumblr — a nice, wholesome shitpost featuring a picture stolen from an AP physics textbook that doesn’t really make any sense but is just kind of funny. Dat Boi, in my opinion, is the platonic ideal of a meme: It’s funny, it works as a cute little wink for superusers, it doesn’t make a lot sense, and it disappears before getting turned into some dumb brand tweet. —R.B.

26.

Harambe

On May 28, 2016, a gorilla who went by Harambe was fatally shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after attacking a 3-year-old boy who had climbed into the enclosure.

The incident absolutely dominated the news cycle, and it quickly spawned a ton of memes. People made videos of Harambe’s banger of a funeral, paid homage in their yearbook photos, and even painted street art in his memory. All across the land, dicks were out for Harambe.

It’s more than a little dark for a dead gorilla and an injured toddler to become meme fodder, but that’s exactly what happened. Harambe memes should not be funny, which means they totally, always will be. —J.R.

25.

Damn Daniel

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

High schooler Josh Holz loved taunting his friend Daniel Lara by following him around, filming him, and commenting on his sneakers. When he compiled the videos and tweeted it, the world loved hearing a creepy voice saying “Damn, Daniel, back at it again with the white Vans.” The teens boys went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and received a lifetime supply of Vans. In 2019, both Daniel and Josh are in college. Josh is studying fashion and works for, you guessed it, Vans. —K.N.

24.

Tiffany Pollard

Vh1

A still of Tiffany Pollard, best known as New York from the VH1 dating show Flavor of Love, lying on a bed in her clothes, hands folded in her lap, sunglasses on, seeming to stew in quiet anger, became a meme in 2015 and continued for the rest of the decade. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Pollard described what she was actually feeling in that moment: “I just remember being so alone, so pissed off; I wanted to get away from those girls … I was really having a rough time in that moment and I think me sitting there was actually me just trying to center myself, centering myself through this bad energy I was dealing with.”

Pollard’s memeability goes beyond that one image of her lying on the bed. Her over-the-top personality is what made her a standout reality star in the ’00s, and that same quality made her perfect for reaction GIFs in the ’10s. —K.N.

22.

Blinking White Guy

Drew Scalon / giantbomb.com

One of the biggest reaction memes of the decade, the “blinking white guy” perfectly summed up when you truly just could not believe what you were seeing. The man is Drew Scanlon, and the specific blink came from a gaming video he appeared in in 2013, though it wouldn’t become a meme until early 2017. It’s a simple reaction, but it seemed to say it all at a time when the world was a confusing mess and people were feeling pretty dang incredulous a lot of the time.

“As long as they’re not mean, I don’t have a problem with the tweets,” Scanlon told BuzzFeed News in 2017. “I think we need more positivity on the internet these days.” —J.R.

21.

Minions

Universal Pictures

Ah, yes, the official mascots of every boomer’s divorce announcement Facebook post. These little bastards took over the internet with a speed that was honestly unparalleled. Their disgusting yellow bodies flooded news feeds like a DDoS attack. I think to understand exactly how the great Minionfication of the internet happened you have to separate it out into two movements. First, there were people genuinely posting Minion memes. Then came the second wave, where people started using Minion memes to make fun of the people who posted Minion memes. I’d love to say that we’re in the clear now and we can leave these beasts in the 2010s, but Minions: The Rise of Gru is coming out on July 3, 2020, so get ready, everyone. —R.B.

20.

Milkshake Duck

The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist

08:07 AM – 12 Jun 2016

Coined by @pixelatedboat, a milkshake duck is some person or entity that enjoys a viral moment and then is swiftly exposed as problematic. The ultimate example was Ken Bone, a man in a distinctive red sweater and mustache who asked a question during a presidential town hall debate in 2016 — who after becoming the meme of the night, was discovered to have a spicy sexual Reddit user history. Cancel culture may not be real, but milkshake ducking certainly is. —K.N.

19.

Gavin

Twitter: @gavinthomas

There’s a good chance you know Gavin’s face even if you don’t know Gavin’s name. It’s sort of incredible to include Gavin Thomas on this list because he was literally born in 2010 at the start of the decade. He first went viral when his uncle Nick Mastodon started putting him in Vines. Gavin really solidified himself as a meme when he turned 5 years old. Suddenly, he was everywhere. He had this extremely relatable confused grimace that really seemed to capture the zeitgeist in 2015 and 2016 (not totally sure what was going on at the time that would explain why). He’s 9 years old now and has a million followers on Instagram. For all the cautionary tales out there about what life after being a meme is like, so far it seems like Gavin’s doing all right. His family seems to be looking after him and, more bizarrely, it also feels like the internet at large is looking after him. He grew up on social media, and it does feel like we’re all invested in making sure he ends up OK. —R.B.

18.

Shrek

Dreamworks / reddit.com

Even though the first Shrek came out in 2001, it took a few years for the internet to really embrace the green Scottish ogre. Ever since, it feels like he’s buzzed just below the surface of mainstream internet culture — always there, always talking about onions. My theory as to why he’s stayed so popular? Aside from maybe a postmodern riff on the extreme overcommercialization of children’s entertainment (see Minions), I think there’s actually something really relatable about a big, fat ogre who doesn’t want to leave his swamp. It’s the perfect metaphor for being online. —R.B.

17.

“Do It for the Vine”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Vine shut down on my birthday, and because of that, I’ve always felt a weirdly intimate connection to Vine. A good friend once told me he thought of a Vine as one sentence in the visual grammar of video. Everything you need to convey one idea in a video you could do in a six-second Vine. It was a revolution and you could argue it has had a more profound legacy on how we create and share videos than bigger platforms like YouTube or Netflix. For a long time, I, like many people, believed that Vine was shut down too soon. Now, I think it actually shut down exactly when it should. Social networks probably shouldn’t last! It’s weird that we still use Twitter.

The phrase “do it for the Vine” comes from a song created by YouTuber Kaye Trill and it immediately became the anthem of a summer full of people doing extremely outrageous things. Many of the original great “do it for the Vine” posts have been deleted, sadly. But, luckily, we’ll always have the YouTube compilations. —R.B.

16.

Real Housewives

Bravo / Instagram: @smudge_lord

Memes are often tied to some technological advance, such as the six-second looping video or the quote-tweet format. At the start of the decade, animated GIFs were actually hard to make. You needed Photoshop, which is expensive and hard to use. Sourcing high-quality video to turn into a GIF was also harder. In a pre-Giphy world, truly good animated GIFs were prized and hoarded, saved in folders on a desktop to use in reactions. On Tumblr, the main source of GIFs, there was a vast gulf between the number of users actually making GIFs and the amount of people reposting them. One of the early and prolific makers of high-quality reaction GIFs was the RealityTVGIFS.tumblr.com, made by a man named T. Kyle McMahon (who now works for Bravo), who pumped out GIF after GIF from the Bravo universe, particularly the Real Housewives series. Because of the format of the show, where the women were literally asked to react directly to the camera, the Housewives were perfect for emotional reaction GIFs.

The enduring power of the Real Housewives through the decades was proven in 2019 by the popularity of an image of an early season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, where one Housewife is yelling while another holds her back, juxtaposed with a white cat named Smudge scowling at a dinner table. —K.N.

15.

The Joker

The Joker obviously existed long before social media, but the character’s glee-filled take on chaotic nihilism has, for better or worse, become inseparable from how we imagine a very specific kind of kind internet user: angry, insular, often violent, male.

Over the last decade, a symbiotic relationship has evolved between new Hollywood iterations of the Joker and the internet’s digital underbelly. Starting in 2008, Heath Ledger’s anarchist, anti-capitalist Joker became the unofficial mascot of 4chan’s Anonymous hacktivist movement. The idea of a nameless grungy psychopath burning piles of dirty money, throwing a city into chaos to satisfy his twisted rage, was a perfect avatar for a generation of Occupy-adjacent millennials graduating into a global economic recession and harnessing technology to claw back control of their own lives. Jared Leto’s 2016 take on the Joker, even though none of them would ever admit it, mirrored the rise of Gamergate somewhat perfectly, giving the world a sniveling misogynist covered in face tattoos, singularly focused on controlling the anatomy of Suicide Squad’s standout woman character Harley Quinn. All the clown prince was missing was a vape to better embody late millennial toxic masculinity. So it’s fitting, then, that we close out the decade with Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, a chain-smoking, self-described mentally ill loner who hijacks mainstream media via an act of extreme violence and sets off a reactionary protest movement.

The Joker isn’t always a serious meme, like with the most recent Joker film giving us the scene of Phoenix dancing down a flight of stairs in Harlem. Instead, it’s something closer to SpongeBob, a visual and emotional language we use to express a part of ourselves online. As for whether the Joker will continue to evolve alongside social media, well, there are rumors already circulating of another Phoenix-led Joker film, so it’s likely he’s not going away anytime soon. —R.B.

14.

Why You Lyin’

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

The beauty of Nicholas Fraser’s Vine in his backyard singing “Why you always lyin’” over the music of “Too Close” by Next is that it makes no sense for why it exists. Why is his shirt open? Why is there a toilet in the yard? Who is lying and why is he so seemingly happy about accusing someone of lying? And yet, it turns out 2015 was the right moment for this meme to exist and serve as the perfect totem for the impending post-truth internet. Now, replying with a screenshot of Fraser’s smiling face is internet shorthand for “this is a lie.” —K.N.

13.

Being Horny

.@tedcruz my young daughters and sons follow you for good wholesome content can you please explain this???

04:40 AM – 12 Sep 2017

If you think about it, being horny is like when content trends before it becomes a meme (sex is the meme). And whether it’s Ted Cruz faving a porn tweet on 9/11 or Kurt Eichenwald screenshotting Chrome tabs full of hentai, if someone is online long enough, they will be caught being horny and it will be embarrassing. The only silver lining is that it can happen to any of us. My hope for the next decade is that we all just accept that most of the time people are online, they’re also probably looking at pornography or sexting with each other. That’s what this whole thing was made for! Horny users of the web, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! —R.B.

12.

Distracted Boyfriend

Stock photo memes had a moment in 2017, but none became as big or enduring as the one that became known as “Distracted Boyfriend.” The photo depicted a man checking out a woman while his own girlfriend glared at him with disgust. It quickly became a meme, though photographer Antonio Guillem told the Guardian at the time he “didn’t even know what a meme [was] until recently.” The photo has now been around a few years, but it’s still a classic, popping up as a meme pretty often and perfectly embodying so many emotions: deception, distraction, heartbreak, loss, and hope. —J.R.

11.

Doge

shibaconfessions.tumblr.com

The only meme of the decade to inspire an actually used form of blockchain currency, Doge was a breath of fresh air in 2013 when people were starting to feel burned out about what the first iteration of what “memes” were. “Memes” now means something different — funny tweets screenshotted and posted to Instagram, or absurd teen humor. But in a darker, earlier time, “memes” were something like rage comics or the Forever Alone Guy. They took themselves seriously in a sense, and were the domain of redditors or angry 4chan guys, or something a brand used in a Super Bowl ad to seem relevant. Then, a friendly Shiba Inu appeared with funny language and words around him, just being amused and delighted by the world. This wasn’t FFFFUUUUUUU, it was such wow. Doge was here to make us happy. Of course by now, the phrase “such wow” is cringey and outdated, but it had a good long run. —K.N.

10.

Kermit

Lipton Tea

The lovable green amphibian became one of the most memeable nonhuman characters of the decade, next to perhaps only SpongeBob and Shrek. Two massive memes, Kermit sipping tea and Evil Kermit, earned the Muppet his place in meme Valhalla, and made a bunch of smaller memes (Sad Kermit puppet, Kermit in the car) take off. There’s something deeply funny about children’s characters behaving like naughty adults, by the idea of Kermit having shady opinions about others while he sips his tea or encouraging you to do something dangerous or sexual or drug-related. Part of the joy of Kermit memes is that everyone knows Kermit; he’s not obscure or niche. And yet someone, the official Twitter account for Good Morning America to be precise, called the Kermit-sipping-tea meme “tea lizard.” —K.N.

9.

Reaction GIFs

NBC / Via giphy.com

It’s hard to remember a time when reaction GIFs weren’t ubiquitous, but they really rose to prominence in 2012 with the launch of the Tumblr blog #whatshouldwecallme. The blog posted GIFs paired with ~relatable~ captions — for example, the GIF of Homer Simpson disappearing into the bushes, captioned, “When I’m in an argument with someone and realize I’m completely wrong.” This blog was a huge deal at the time, inspiring countless spinoffs, particularly at colleges. Though it was a pretty fresh meme format at the time, #whatshouldwecallme posts just look a lot like the way we communicate online today. —J.R.

8.

Guy Fieri

Fun fact: Guy Fieri is so ubiquitous and embedded in the language of American social media that we basically got to the very end of making this list and realized he didn’t have his own entry, even though he’s referenced throughout. Becoming a meme these days is pretty easy: You do something or appear in a piece of media, people latch onto it because of some innate and relatable reason, and voilà, you’re viral. But to stay a meme is a much harder feat. Usually it involves a bizarre and inexplicable alchemy of having chaotic high/low culture energy and a total lack of self-awareness. Memes can’t know they’re memes. Guy Fieri is embodiment of this. He looks like a failed ‘90s energy drink marketing campaign, he drives around in convertibles eating absolute garbage (he literally has a recipe for nachos made in a trash can) and seemingly cannot fathom that his entire persona is ridiculous. Even when he does lean into his memeness, he still doesn’t really seem to get it, like with his recent Baby Yoda photoshop. Whether Gen Z continues to latch on to the Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives host is unclear. Only time will tell whether or not Flavortown can survive the ages. —R.B.

7.

The Dress

Cecilia Bleasdale

“Black and blue or white and gold?” was the question that seemingly everyone on earth was asking on one day in early 2015. A woman in Scotland showed her friends a photo her mother took of a dress she planned to wear to a wedding, and a friend of the woman posted it to Tumblr, asking for help — “what colors are this dress?” She submitted it as a question to BuzzFeed’s Tumblr, and former BuzzFeed employee Cates Holderness reposted it to our account. From there, it blew up as a fun visual gag that was infuriating and odd.

The Dress was posted to BuzzFeed the same day two llamas escaped in Arizona, and a live TV police chase of the two animals enthralled the internet as adorable mayhem broke out. In retrospect, that two such happy, carefree, unproblematic things took over the internet on the same day seems like wild serendipity. It also feels like the last day the internet felt purely joyful, before the onslaught of the 2016 election took place and things took a darker turn.

The dress is, indeed, black and blue, even though over two thirds of the millions of BuzzFeed readers who voted said they thought it was white and gold. In 2018, a similar sensory illusion, this time auditory, went viral over whether a voice was saying “yanny” or “laurel.” But somehow, the special feeling just wasn’t there again; it felt like trying to recreate some old magic that was lost, like kids who have graduated hanging back at high school. —K.N.

6.

“This Is Fine” Dog

K.C. Green / Via kcgreendotcom.com

The dog engulfed in flames, denying that anything is wrong, is from a 2013 webcomic Gunshow by K.C. Green. In the full comic, the dog’s face eventually melts, while he continues to drink his coffee and insist he’s OK, but the version that became a symbol of the decade is just the first two panels where he says “this is fine.”

The meme has been used a lot to describe various political situations: The official @GOP Twitter used it once, and a senator even described the comic on the House floor while describing how Russian election interference was not fine. But the staying power of the dog is about how we all grin and bear it through everything that’s happened over this decade that feels like the house is on fire — the climate crisis, elections, the disappointing last season of Game of Thrones. There is nothing that captures the 2010s more than “this is fine” dog. —K.N.

5.

Smash Mouth’s “All Star”

me.me

Like Shrek, Smash Mouth’s “All Star” is another one of those millennial nostalgia points that has evolved into something bigger than itself thanks to the internet. It’s lasted for several reasons: One, it’s just a damn good song; two, the lead singer of Smash Mouth looks like Guy Fieri; three, it was on the Shrek soundtrack; four, it’s a cheery song about how shit everything is — which is exactly how it feels to be online. —R.B.

What makes “on fleek” a crucial meme for understanding the 2010s is not simply why the meme was catchy, but what happened to the meme after it left the hands of its creator and what that says about the commercialization and monetization of memes — i.e., who gets paid and who gets credit. Kayla Newman, who goes by Peaches Monroee online, was a teen when she posted a Vine musing that her eyebrows were “on fleek” because she thought she looked good. The Vine caught on because it’s simple and fun and enjoyable. Soon, brands were using the phrase on their social media. IHOP tweeted “pancakes on fleek.” Denny’s tweeted “Hashbrowns on fleek.” JetBlue and Taco Bell also used it, and the phrase all of a sudden seemed inescapable in marketing. Corporations were using Newman’s invention of a phrase without giving her any credit or compensation.

In the Fader, Doreen St. Félix wrote how “on fleek” is an example of an endless trend of black teenagers creating the memes, lingo, and jokes that make up internet culture, and how those black teens are often uncredited and don’t profit when brands use their creative works. This is in contradiction to a handful of white teens who also went viral around the same time: The “Damn, Daniel” boys got free Vans and appearances on talk shows; the Walmart yodeling boy got a record deal, as did Danielle Bregoli, the “cash me ousside” girl.

In 2017, Newman started a GoFundMe campaign to launch a beauty line, but it only raised around $17,000 of the $100,000 she was hoping for. In a 2017 interview with Teen Vogue, Newman said if she had known the phrase would catch on like it did, she would’ve been more aggressive about it, adding that she was trying to trademark the phrase. —K.N.

3.

Pepe the Frog

Matt Furie

None of us wanted to write about Pepe. What’s even left to be said about him that hasn’t been said already? He started as a chill frog in a 2008 comic by artist Matt Furie. He then became a consistent, but largely forgettable fixture of 4chan in the early part of the decade. The first time I saw him was in a meme that read, “We are the middle children of history. Born too late to explore Earth, born too early to explore space.” I thought it was pretty funny. Sometimes he’d be in memes about blasting the toilet bowl with piss to clean it. He’s something different now — a literal hate symbol that is still being used by far-right extremists and white nationalists.

In the course of his transition from slacker goof to hate symbol, he’s taught us a lot about symbols — not just how the internet works — but he’s also maybe revealed something deeper about how symbols work. Furie has famously tried to litigate Pepe away from fascists, but it hasn’t really worked. Pepe’s effectively theirs now. It’s a grim, but important reminder that all culture can be hacked and warped and poisoned. All speech, online and off, is political. And all symbols, even chill frogs, require protection and upkeep. Feels bad, man. —R.B.

2.

Crying Jordan

Stephan Savoia / AP

Michael Jordan wept during his 2009 induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, but it wasn’t until at least 2012 that the still of his face, red-eyed with tears streaming down both cheeks, became a meme. It started with sports fans but soon spread to become an enduring and universal image for faux sadness. It’s a bit of an anomaly for a celebrity photo meme; Michael Jordan isn’t particularly memey otherwise, and although he was one of the biggest celebrities in the world in the ’90s, he hasn’t been in the spotlight this decade. Perhaps his role in the movie Space Jam has lent him some level of internet irony that makes the meme so satisfying. Jordan has said through a spokesperson that he doesn’t mind the popularity of the meme, so long as it’s not used for commercial purposes. However, his former teammate and friend Charles Oakley did tell TMZ that Jordan actually isn’t amused. That feeling Jordan may have — a moment of vulnerable emotion being plastered all over the internet for laughs — of course would be best depicted by, well, the Crying Jordan meme. —K.N.

1.

SpongeBob

Nickelodeon / dearnville.tumblr.com

Did anything result in as many memes in the 2010s as SpongeBob? The show, which started in 1999 and is still going 20 years later, is so deeply entrenched in pop culture it would be hard to count how many memes have come out of it. But let’s try: There’s been caveman SpongeBob, mocking SpongeBob, tired naked SpongeBob, “ight Imma head out” SpongeBob, traveling SpongeBob, Krusty Krabs vs. Chum Bucket, evil Patrick, blurry Mr. Krabs, sleeping Squidward, and so many more.

The meme’s staying power can be attributed to a few things. It was an enormously popular show with a nearly universal sense of nostalgia for millennials and Gen Z’ers, who are the most prolific of meme creators. The simple art and animation style also beget some of the most instantly understandable reaction memes. May SpongeBob memes continue to prosper until [SpongeBob narrator voice] one eternity later. —J.R.

CORRECTION

Dec. 14, 2019, at 19:59 PM

T. Kyle MacMahon’s name was misstated in an earlier version of this post.

Drake starred in Degrassi: The Next Generation. An earlier version of this post misstated which Degrassi series he was on.

Sahred From Source link Technology

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2PmQBmX via IFTTT

[preciousmetals0]

Lockdown Pastimes; Novavax Big Time; Travel Stocks Climb

Lockdown Pastimes; Novavax Big Time; Travel Stocks Climb:

Stir-Crazy Investors

We’re all itching to get out and participate in the U.S. economy’s “Great Reopening.” If reports from the Memorial Day holiday weekend are any indication, some of us are a lot more eager than others … I’m looking at you Lake of the Ozarks partygoers.

As the country reopens, now is an excellent time to reflect on some of our biggest lockdown pastimes — one of which could have a major impact on your investing future.

First up, we have comfort spending.

Shopping is by far America’s most popular pastime, and the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. It’s good to note that silly little things like travel restrictions and social distancing haven’t slowed down America’s appetite for consumption.

“Surprisingly, Americans are spending more money during this time of social distancing than prior to it,” says WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez. In fact, Gonzalez notes: “Forty-three percent of Americans are participating in what is called comfort buying.”

For investors, that means profitable returns for companies such as Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Shopify Inc. (NYSE: SHOP).

Next up, we have online entertainment. I mean, what else are you gonna do after spending all your money while not going anywhere?

Leading the charge here are video games, which saw sales surge 73% year over year in April. In fact, video game spending hit a record $10.86 billion in the first quarter.

Here, you might want to take a closer look at Activision Blizzard Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI) or Electronic Arts Inc. (Nasdaq: EA).

Also under the heading of online entertainment, we have video streaming and social media. No one benefits more from the unholy union of these two mediums than TikTok.

This China-based social media sensation provides short, user-generated, looping videos and music clips for lip-sync, comedy and talent displays. And if you’re wondering just how popular this seemingly nonsensical idea is … the TikTok app just hit 2 billion downloads during the pandemic.

Unfortunately for investors, TikTok owner ByteDance is a private company. But Great Stuff will keep a close eye on the situation, as the TikTok “fad” isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Finally, we have the most impactful distraction during the COVID-19 quarantine: retail investing.

Yes, dear reader, retail mania is taking over Wall Street, fueled by fractional-share trading, no transaction fees and pandemic stimulus checks. With nowhere to go and nowhere better to spend their money, Americans have funneled a considerable chunk of their stimulus checks into the stock market.

In fact, bank transfers into trading accounts ranked behind only savings and cash withdrawals for Americans with incomes between $35,000 and $75,000.

Now, I have to say that I’m proud of y’all for taking the initiative and jumping into the trading world with both feet.

However, we’ve reached a level of concern when it comes to retail investing. At a time when smart money has almost completely pulled out of the market, y’all lead the charge. And, if you’re not careful, you’ll get burned.

It’s not fearmongering … it’s experience! And why would you want to venture into the market without some experience by your side?

Not in the “Gandalf” kind of way — the “Ian King” way. Ian King stays on top of all tipping-point tech trends, no matter the volatility that gets thrown our way. Plus, the guy started trading mortgage bonds on Wall Street at 21. Where else can you find someone like that?!

Click here to learn more about finding your guide with Ian King.

Good: Get in the Zone

When it comes to car repairs, you’re essentially constrained by two things: money and time. Between the recent economic lockdown and the pandemic stimulus checks, consumers have had plenty of both — much to the benefit of AutoZone Inc. (NYSE: AZO).

The do-it-yourself auto-parts retailer reported fiscal third-quarter earnings of $14.39 per share on revenue of $2.78 billion. Both figures slid easily past Wall Street’s expectations.

But the quarter wasn’t all roses and oil changes. “During the third quarter, we experienced the most extreme fluctuations in sales, both negative and positive, in the Company’s more than 40-year history,” AutoZone said in its earnings press release.

AZO stock initially vaulted more than 5% higher on the news, but uncertainty surrounding the company’s “extreme fluctuations” left some investors leaking coolant. Furthermore, AutoZone said that same-store sales still fell 1% during the quarter.

While the results weren’t as bad as many investors (and Wall Street) feared, there’s still a serious volatility concern lingering over AZO’s head.

Better: Vaccines, Vaccines Everywhere!

Are you ready for another insane vaccine rally?

No? Too bad. Novavax Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX) returned to the headlines this morning, helping to drive optimism that a COVID-19 cure is just around the corner. The biotech announced that it initiated phase 1 and phase 2 trials for its coronavirus vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373.

Phase 1 begins immediately and includes 130 healthy volunteers. If all goes well, Novavax will quickly start phase 2 testing with a much larger patient population.

Honestly, Novavax’s considerable rally today appears a bit overdone. The company is entering phase 1 while both Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Nasdaq: INO) and Moderna Inc. (Nasdaq: MRNA) are already in phase 2 testing.

I still maintain that NVAX is an excellent stock to short, given its lagging position in the vaccine race and the considerable hype in this niche of the biotech sector. That said, if you like backing the underdog, NVAX may be just the play for you.

Best: Blues Traveling

The travel industry went bonkers today. Airlines, cruise lines and you-name-it lines all rallied across the board.

Delta Air Lines Inc. (NYSE: DAL) surged nearly 10%. Carnival Corp. (NYSE: CCL) added almost 12%. Heck, even the pink sheets for German travel company TUI AG (OTC: TUIFF) surged 52%.

Why? Vaccine hopes and reopening dreams.

On Friday, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced that travelers moving through TSA checkpoints last week hit 300,000 for the first time in two months.

While the TSA news was encouraging, this morning’s announcement out of hard-hit Spain was the real spark that ignited the travel sector. The country announced that it will lift its two-week quarantine regulations for foreign travelers starting July 1.

If Spain can start reopening, then the real danger of COVID-19 must be past its peak … right? Combine that with continued progress on the vaccine front and investors surged to get in early on the travel sector’s expected rebound.

The first rule of hustlin’? You either hustle or get hustled.

And you wanna make some big bucks, huh?

That’s right — my mind is still on Main Street’s leap into the retail market for our Quote of the Week. No matter how long you’ve been banking Benjamins in the market, this sudden rush of cash from newbie investors will affect you.

Even Robinhood’s ads are all about the small-stakes hustle these days:

Got .3 shares of tesla stock today. Little by little.

— Robinhood, via Barron’s

Now, I want to be clear here, since a ton of you fine Great Stuff readers out there are the same new investors we’re talking about today. (Welcome to the *$&% show, by the way!)

But … if you’re going to jump into the market, you gotta jump with our jive, right? You gotta pick up some street smarts before wandering the market’s dim back alleys.

Anyway, the point is that no matter if you have 0.3 shares of your favorite stock or 3 million shares … no matter how long you’ve been an investor…

I have just one titanium-plated rule to stick in your trading tool belt. It will separate you from the retail chaff — and give you a leg-up on all those lockdown gamblers-turned-investors: Don’t buy a stock just because everyone else is buying it. You will hear arguments about how “you can’t miss out if you’re ‘in it,’ man!” See the past decade-long bull run for more details.

Now, since the Great Stuff team was in a post-cookout coma yesterday, here’s a bonus Chart of the Week for you that shows my point a bit better.

Thanks to Robintrack.net, you can see the retail investor’s Robinhood revolution for yourself. Right here, you can see the past week’s biggest popularity changes, at least as far as Robinhood stock ownership goes.

Check out the huge spike in Moderna and Delta, with some latecomers to the Aurora Cannabis Inc. (NYSE: ACB) rally not far behind. (Plus, here’s an honorable shout-out to any Luckin owners out there left holding the fraud bag…)

On the right, you can see how Delta’s collapse stacks up to a tsunami of share buying in no time flat:

Now … are these half a million Robinhooders about to bring home the bacon (or tendies) while the smart money sleeps? Is this chart a snapshot right before a “pass the flaming turd” disaster?

Stay tuned; we’ll find out together.

Great Stuff: Let’s Get This Bread!

Before I sign off, I want to say thanks for tuning in to today’s edition of Great Stuff!

We’re only two days away from this week’s installment of Reader Feedback — and we’re calling on you. Bring your rants, raves, crackpot schemes and vaccine dreams — it takes all kinds of greatness to make us Great.

Send us a message at GreatStuffToday@BanyanHill.com with any questions, comments or suggestions you may have. You may just see your email in this week’s Reader Feedback! (Unless you don’t want to share your words with the world, of course … simply let us know.)

Remember that you can always catch up with us on social media: Facebook and Twitter.

Until next time, be Great!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Editor, Great Stuff

[goldira01]

Stir-Crazy Investors

We’re all itching to get out and participate in the U.S. economy’s “Great Reopening.” If reports from the Memorial Day holiday weekend are any indication, some of us are a lot more eager than others … I’m looking at you Lake of the Ozarks partygoers.

As the country reopens, now is an excellent time to reflect on some of our biggest lockdown pastimes — one of which could have a major impact on your investing future.

First up, we have comfort spending.

Shopping is by far America’s most popular pastime, and the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. It’s good to note that silly little things like travel restrictions and social distancing haven’t slowed down America’s appetite for consumption.

“Surprisingly, Americans are spending more money during this time of social distancing than prior to it,” says WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez. In fact, Gonzalez notes: “Forty-three percent of Americans are participating in what is called comfort buying.”

For investors, that means profitable returns for companies such as Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Shopify Inc. (NYSE: SHOP).

Next up, we have online entertainment. I mean, what else are you gonna do after spending all your money while not going anywhere?

Leading the charge here are video games, which saw sales surge 73% year over year in April. In fact, video game spending hit a record $10.86 billion in the first quarter.

Here, you might want to take a closer look at Activision Blizzard Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI) or Electronic Arts Inc. (Nasdaq: EA).

Also under the heading of online entertainment, we have video streaming and social media. No one benefits more from the unholy union of these two mediums than TikTok.

This China-based social media sensation provides short, user-generated, looping videos and music clips for lip-sync, comedy and talent displays. And if you’re wondering just how popular this seemingly nonsensical idea is … the TikTok app just hit 2 billion downloads during the pandemic.

Unfortunately for investors, TikTok owner ByteDance is a private company. But Great Stuff will keep a close eye on the situation, as the TikTok “fad” isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Finally, we have the most impactful distraction during the COVID-19 quarantine: retail investing.

Yes, dear reader, retail mania is taking over Wall Street, fueled by fractional-share trading, no transaction fees and pandemic stimulus checks. With nowhere to go and nowhere better to spend their money, Americans have funneled a considerable chunk of their stimulus checks into the stock market.

In fact, bank transfers into trading accounts ranked behind only savings and cash withdrawals for Americans with incomes between $35,000 and $75,000.

Now, I have to say that I’m proud of y’all for taking the initiative and jumping into the trading world with both feet.

However, we’ve reached a level of concern when it comes to retail investing. At a time when smart money has almost completely pulled out of the market, y’all lead the charge. And, if you’re not careful, you’ll get burned.

It’s not fearmongering … it’s experience! And why would you want to venture into the market without some experience by your side?

Not in the “Gandalf” kind of way — the “Ian King” way. Ian King stays on top of all tipping-point tech trends, no matter the volatility that gets thrown our way. Plus, the guy started trading mortgage bonds on Wall Street at 21. Where else can you find someone like that?!

Click here to learn more about finding your guide with Ian King.

Good: Get in the Zone

When it comes to car repairs, you’re essentially constrained by two things: money and time. Between the recent economic lockdown and the pandemic stimulus checks, consumers have had plenty of both — much to the benefit of AutoZone Inc. (NYSE: AZO).

The do-it-yourself auto-parts retailer reported fiscal third-quarter earnings of $14.39 per share on revenue of $2.78 billion. Both figures slid easily past Wall Street’s expectations.

But the quarter wasn’t all roses and oil changes. “During the third quarter, we experienced the most extreme fluctuations in sales, both negative and positive, in the Company’s more than 40-year history,” AutoZone said in its earnings press release.

AZO stock initially vaulted more than 5% higher on the news, but uncertainty surrounding the company’s “extreme fluctuations” left some investors leaking coolant. Furthermore, AutoZone said that same-store sales still fell 1% during the quarter.

While the results weren’t as bad as many investors (and Wall Street) feared, there’s still a serious volatility concern lingering over AZO’s head.

Better: Vaccines, Vaccines Everywhere!

Are you ready for another insane vaccine rally?

No? Too bad. Novavax Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX) returned to the headlines this morning, helping to drive optimism that a COVID-19 cure is just around the corner. The biotech announced that it initiated phase 1 and phase 2 trials for its coronavirus vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373.

Phase 1 begins immediately and includes 130 healthy volunteers. If all goes well, Novavax will quickly start phase 2 testing with a much larger patient population.

Honestly, Novavax’s considerable rally today appears a bit overdone. The company is entering phase 1 while both Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Nasdaq: INO) and Moderna Inc. (Nasdaq: MRNA) are already in phase 2 testing.

I still maintain that NVAX is an excellent stock to short, given its lagging position in the vaccine race and the considerable hype in this niche of the biotech sector. That said, if you like backing the underdog, NVAX may be just the play for you.

Best: Blues Traveling

The travel industry went bonkers today. Airlines, cruise lines and you-name-it lines all rallied across the board.

Delta Air Lines Inc. (NYSE: DAL) surged nearly 10%. Carnival Corp. (NYSE: CCL) added almost 12%. Heck, even the pink sheets for German travel company TUI AG (OTC: TUIFF) surged 52%.

Why? Vaccine hopes and reopening dreams.

On Friday, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced that travelers moving through TSA checkpoints last week hit 300,000 for the first time in two months.

While the TSA news was encouraging, this morning’s announcement out of hard-hit Spain was the real spark that ignited the travel sector. The country announced that it will lift its two-week quarantine regulations for foreign travelers starting July 1.

If Spain can start reopening, then the real danger of COVID-19 must be past its peak … right? Combine that with continued progress on the vaccine front and investors surged to get in early on the travel sector’s expected rebound.

The first rule of hustlin’? You either hustle or get hustled.

And you wanna make some big bucks, huh?

That’s right — my mind is still on Main Street’s leap into the retail market for our Quote of the Week. No matter how long you’ve been banking Benjamins in the market, this sudden rush of cash from newbie investors will affect you.

Even Robinhood’s ads are all about the small-stakes hustle these days:

Got .3 shares of tesla stock today. Little by little.

— Robinhood, via Barron’s

Now, I want to be clear here, since a ton of you fine Great Stuff readers out there are the same new investors we’re talking about today. (Welcome to the *$&% show, by the way!)

But … if you’re going to jump into the market, you gotta jump with our jive, right? You gotta pick up some street smarts before wandering the market’s dim back alleys.

Anyway, the point is that no matter if you have 0.3 shares of your favorite stock or 3 million shares … no matter how long you’ve been an investor…

I have just one titanium-plated rule to stick in your trading tool belt. It will separate you from the retail chaff — and give you a leg-up on all those lockdown gamblers-turned-investors: Don’t buy a stock just because everyone else is buying it. You will hear arguments about how “you can’t miss out if you’re ‘in it,’ man!” See the past decade-long bull run for more details.

Now, since the Great Stuff team was in a post-cookout coma yesterday, here’s a bonus Chart of the Week for you that shows my point a bit better.

Thanks to Robintrack.net, you can see the retail investor’s Robinhood revolution for yourself. Right here, you can see the past week’s biggest popularity changes, at least as far as Robinhood stock ownership goes.

Check out the huge spike in Moderna and Delta, with some latecomers to the Aurora Cannabis Inc. (NYSE: ACB) rally not far behind. (Plus, here’s an honorable shout-out to any Luckin owners out there left holding the fraud bag���)

On the right, you can see how Delta’s collapse stacks up to a tsunami of share buying in no time flat:

Now … are these half a million Robinhooders about to bring home the bacon (or tendies) while the smart money sleeps? Is this chart a snapshot right before a “pass the flaming turd” disaster?

Stay tuned; we’ll find out together.

Great Stuff: Let’s Get This Bread!

Before I sign off, I want to say thanks for tuning in to today’s edition of Great Stuff!

We’re only two days away from this week’s installment of Reader Feedback — and we’re calling on you. Bring your rants, raves, crackpot schemes and vaccine dreams — it takes all kinds of greatness to make us Great.

Send us a message at GreatStuffToday@BanyanHill.com with any questions, comments or suggestions you may have. You may just see your email in this week’s Reader Feedback! (Unless you don’t want to share your words with the world, of course … simply let us know.)

Remember that you can always catch up with us on social media: Facebook and Twitter.

Until next time, be Great!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Editor, Great Stuff