#anglosphere memes

[azeerunbound]

George Chadington American Revolution meme

Template creator: Noonenator on CapCut

Music:

[araiz-zaria]

kinda. sorta. more or less 🤪

[newnitz]

Ashkenormativity

Ashkenormativity is the assumption that the default Jew is the Ashkenazi one. It is a term coined by Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews to explain our alienation from the rest of the Jewish community, from my lived experience specifically from the Diaspora Jewish community.

I'm half-Ashkenazi, but that half is pretty secular. When it comes to major Jewish holidays, I've always done them with my maternal grandparents, who, despite being secularized, still respect their cantor roots to the point of not wanting to skip on a holiday or even shorten the Seder(until one hilariously bad one). So the only minhag I've known was the Sephardi one.

In Israel, this was a non-issue.

The most I heard about differences is how Sephardim and Mizrahim emphasize table manners because unlike Ashkenazim, they actually eat on the table.

When I left Israel and moved to a place hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest Jewish community, I finally realized how much I need our community. So like everyone on lockdown, I sought it online, where Jewish cultures is bagels and casual use of Yiddish, two things completely foreign to me. I mean we have bagels in Israel, but they're not the meme they are among US Jews. They're nowhere near as popular as a pita. So when I had to look up what "davening", "shul" and "shanda" meant, I first got the sense I don't actually belong.

But the people using those terms as a day to day weren't the ones who actively made me feel unwelcome. In fact, those were more likely to acknowledge my confusion and explain. The ones who alienated me are the antizionist Jews from the Anglosphere, who ignore and revise non-Ashkenazi history and even history of Ashkenazim outside the Global North, who blame modern Hebrew for the decline of Yiddish which they frame as the traditional Jewish language, ignoring how that pushes down communities that traditionally spoke Ladino, Juddeo-Arabic, Amharic and more, and overall infantilize and dismiss families like mine who built a good life for ourselves in Israel and rose to the position to actively combat Ashkenazi hegemony, and remove the agency of my former classmates who take a stand against it, all in favor of superimposing the race politics of the Anglosphere onto Israel.

So the Columbia university definition of singling out "white Jews" is quite inaccurate. Under ashkenormativity, an Ashkenazi JoC would find themselves better represented than the white-presenting members of my Sephardi(or raised according to that half) family. It's another reductivist attempt to superimpose European guilt onto Jews by erasing half of us. Specifically, the half that lives in Israel.

Goyim, ashkenormativity doesn't belong to you. Stop using it as a shield to be antisemitic. Stop using it as anything regarding inter-community issues, it's our term to use within our community.

[toskarin]

it wasn't as popular as wow or ffxiv or the division in the anglosphere (at least when this was the case) so it makes sense that it's not a meme, but real ones remember that one boss on the tutorial island in TERA who you had to queue up in a polite line to get a chance to kill

[dasha-aibo]

Why is British food meme'd more than German: Anglosphere. Easier to talk and meme about when the people you make fun of actually know what you say and vice versa.

Eh, probably

[machinespirited]

Honestly, GW may 'say' that Emps is from asia minor but it will always be an arbitrary nerd detail that means nothing if GW does not support it practically and risk alienating (racist) people to commit to it. Like making it a critical part of his character or experience, visual design, etc. The anglosphere is still very racist in favor of white supremacy, so if Emps The Ultimate Man of All Time is not explicitly depicted as a contradiction he simply won't land as anything BUT the epitome of whiteness. Proof: God Emperor Trump memes effortlessly intuit how 'the Emperor' depicts whiteness and do not care about the nerd detail that the 'actual' Emperor is not of european descent. They are not 'getting the lore/nerd details wrong,' they have received and are repeating a comprehensible communication.

Like I will fess up to having forgotten the lore tidbit abt him being from the SWANA region of the world (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and I've been wrong abt lore plenty of times because I don't have the mental bandwidth to sit down and read like 600 pages of lore but at the same time it's like guys...... this is a game....... please calm down...... i said i didnt like a thing about the way the game is made.....

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Rupa Subramanya

Published: Mar 6, 2024

One of the first things you learn—or should learn—in Civics 101 is that there is no freedom at all without freedom of expression. Free speech is the essential freedom from which our other rights flow. It’s a right that we have taken for granted in the West. 

But a new wave of hate speech laws has changed that. In English-speaking countries with long traditions of free expression—countries like Canada, Britain, and Ireland—this most basic freedom is under attack. 

Take Canada. Civil liberties groups north of the border are warning a new bill put forward by Justin Trudeau’s government will introduce “draconian penalties” that risk chilling free speech. How draconian? The law would allow authorities to place a Canadian citizen under house arrest if that person is suspected to commit a future hate crime—even if they have not already done so. The legislation also increases the maximum penalty for advocating genocide from five years to life.

These punishments depend on a hazy definition of hate that Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, executive director and general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has warned could blur the line between “political activism, passionate debate, and offensive speech.” 

The proposed law is in keeping with the Trudeau government’s broader hostility to free expression. I’ve reported before for The Free Press on this censorious turn in my country, from the crackdown on the trucker protesters to the backdoor regulation of online speech. And, testifying before the U.S. Congress in November, I urged Americans to treat Canada’s war on free expression as a cautionary tale. Increasingly, though, what’s true of Canada is true across the English-speaking world. 

In Ireland, the government is pressing ahead with controversial new restrictions of online speech that, if passed, would be among the most stringent in the Western world. 

The proposed legislation would criminalize the act of “inciting hatred” against individuals or groups based on specified “protected characteristics” like race, nationality, religion, and sexual orientation. The definition of incitement is so broad as to include “recklessly encouraging” other people to hate or cause harm “because of your views” or opinions. In other words, intent doesn’t matter. Nor would it matter if you actually posted the “reckless” content. Merely being in possession of that content—say, in a text message, or in a meme stored on your iPhone—could land you a fine of as much as €5,000 ($5,422) or up to 12 months in prison, or both. 

As with Canada’s proposed law, the Irish legislation rests on a murky definition of hate. But Ireland’s Justice Minister Helen McEntee sees this lack of clarity as a strength. “On the strong advice of the Office of the Attorney General, we have not sought to limit the definition of the widely understood concept of ‘hatred’ beyond its ordinary and everyday meaning,” she explained. “I am advised that defining it further at this juncture could risk prosecutions collapsing and victims being denied justice.” 

In Britain, existing online harm legislation means that tweeting “transwomen are men” can lead to a knock on the door from the cops. Now the governing Conservative Party is under pressure to adopt a broad definition of Islamophobia as a “type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” 

Other parties have adopted this definition, and free-speech advocates in Britain worry that it is only a matter of time until a Labour-run government codifies the definition into legislation. To do so, they argue, would mean the introduction of a de facto blasphemy law in Britain. 

These growing restrictions on speech across the Anglosphere are making the United States, with its robust First Amendment protection of speech, an outlier—though not for the Biden administration’s lack of trying. 

In April 2022, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.” There was an immediate pushback from free-speech advocates, who pointed to the obvious fact that this new body would necessarily impinge on protected First Amendment rights. The administration dropped the idea a few months later. 

Then, in September 2023, a federal court ruled that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment when they “coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content” during the pandemic. 

Jay Bhattacharya was one of the scientists on the winning side of that case. Writing in The Free Press after the ruling, he recalled being grilled on the First Amendment during his citizenship test when he was nineteen. “The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy,” he wrote. “I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target.” 

The trouble isn’t just the Biden administration. 

Listen to Barbara McQuade, an MSNBC legal analyst and professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Her new book, Attack from Within, details “how disinformation is sabotaging America.” America’s “deep commitment to free speech in our First Amendment. . . makes us vulnerable to claims [that] anything we want to do related to speech is censorship,” said McQuade in an interview with Rachel Maddow last week. 

A worrying number of Americans appear to be sympathetic to McQuade’s argument. A 2023 Pew survey found that just 42 percent of voters agreed that “freedom of information should be protected, even if it means false information can be published.” 

McQuade has it backward. The First Amendment is a feature, not a bug; a strength, not a vulnerability; and the bedrock of American freedom and flourishing. 

Across the English-speaking world, we once took our civil liberties for granted. Freedom of speech was understood as a blessing of democracy, not something that needed to be fought for every day. We thought that opaque and vague laws were used by those in power to punish their political or ideological opponents only in illiberal autocracies such as Russia or China. But we were wrong. And those now fighting censorship in Canada, or Britain, or Ireland, wish they had a First Amendment of their own to fall back on. 

==

Calls for censorship always come from those in power to silence dissent.

You're not supposed to notice that although they're doing it in the name of - and using the language of - "victimhood," those calling for censorship and restriction of speech are the ones who hold power from that claim to victimhood.

[ritornello]

Current manga publishers in America: We need to license these completely indistinguishable isekai series because they are getting a 12 episode anime streaming on Crunchyroll. Social media influencers can make memes

DC Comics in 2005: We need to license an ongoing, 30+ volume shojo manga from the 1970s that mocks english spy novels and international relationships during the Cold War. The protagonists are Robert Plant and a West German NATO major that sexually harass each other while crossing paths around the globe. Literally no one in the Anglosphere has heard of this series besides some women in California xeroxing booklets of their favorite chapters during the eighties

[lovejustforaday]

2023 Year End List - #11

El Diablo En El Cuerpo - Álex Anwandter

Main Genres: Synth Pop, Dance Pop

A decent sampling of: Electro-Disco, Synth Funk, Electro Pop

Yet another entry on the list that I discovered this year while looking for records from outside the Anglosphere. And again, it's another artist from Latino-America.

I already said this in an old review, so I'm just gonna reiterate my stance briefly again - the 21st century 80s synth pop revivalism wave has been very hit or miss. And I'm mostly talking about the stuff that very clearly is actually paying homage to 80s music, not just any artist who happens to make bleeps and bloops.

But yeah, hit or miss. Some of it is frankly very dull and uninspired, and makes me wanna just put on some classic Depeche Mode or Strawberry Switchblade instead.

But when it hits, it hits hard, somehow managing to justify this ""trend"" that's been going on far too long to even be considered a trend anymore. Let's face it - the whole 80s synth pop / synth funk / sophistopop sound is here to stay forever, and I think that's for the best, even if occasionally I get a little exhausted from the over-saturation.

Anyways, moving on to the artist.

Álex Andwandter is a queer Chilean alternative pop artist and director based out of Santiago. He's collaborated with one of my own favourites, fellow Chilean indie/alt pop artist Javiera Mena (who makes a guest appearance on this record!). The dude has been active for over a decade now, so again, I'm a bit late to the party. Cut me some slack; I'm a gringo.

Álex himself sings in a bright, chipper, falsetto-y tenor full of sunshine and rainbows, sounding every bit as colourful as the classic synthesizer sounds that he incorporates into his music, though he also has a more dark and seductive register that he often injects into his steamier dance songs.

El Diablo En El Cuerpo ("The Devil in the Body"), his latest offering and my first introduction to his discography, is classic dancey, funky synth pop with a lot of sincerity and a few pinches of homoerotic mystique sprinkled in here and there. A very indulgent record for you to just lose yourself in the glitter and glam of it all. Basically, this is some utopian gay space shit (shout out to those who get the meme) and I am here for it.

Nothing could prepare me for the tantalizing and straight-up badass electro-disco thunderstorm that is "Qué piensas hacer sin mi amor?" ("What do you think you will do without my love?"). Anwandter channels Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, and Donna Summer all at once on this fierce juggernaut that's absolutely soaking with erotic tension. Puts me right in the middle of the dimmest, sweatiest fucking over-crowded dancefloor in some sleazy ass gay bar on a goth night at 1:00 am, and I'm too drunk to feel anything except the pounding pulse of the rhythm and the arousal of strangers rubbing up against me....ahem, is it hot in here? Anyways, eat your heart out Troye Sivan ("Rush" is great too, I'm mostly just memeing).

In contrast, the following track "Precipicio" ("Precipice") gives off a very 'classy' vibe - more cocktail dresses and glowing white LED dancefloors, less BDSM goth fetish gear and sweaty dankness. Some nice, sexy funky horns on this one that really brings the whole thing together. I also LIVE for Álex's sassy twink diva vibes all over this track; gets me almost as h-word as the previous track.

"Toda la noche" ("All Night") is anthemic synth funk that's giving a little bit of INXS. Groovy and life-affirming feel good shit that I would snort if I could. I want this to be the soundtrack of my own silly little 80s romance that's all about being young in the big city.

"Vamos de nuevo" ("Let's Go Again") is less of a nocturnal dancefloor number, and more something you might skip along to down the sidewalk on a sun shower summer's day with your hot pink Sony Walkman. Gorgeous upbeat vibraphone and detuned synth keys providing a backdrop for foolishly lovesick lyrics. My other favourite cut off the album, after the obvious one.

At the end of the day, the record is definitely a bit frontloaded, and it wears me out a little bit with its sixteen tracks in total. I understand this is probably meant to be the kind of record you play late at night when you're ready to get wasted and dance your heart out until you pass out; I just think it could be sequenced to have more of the outright bangers towards the end. But putting that aside, this was my second favourite dance record in a very stacked year for dance records, and it's certainly my favourite on the more disco/house/funky/electro-y end of the spectrum. El Diablo En El Cuerpo is simple, hot, memorable fun with a lot of exquisite taste. I can't imagine anyone in my own life that I couldn't successfully recommend this album to. So go on, embrace your inner gay synth pop twink.

8/10

Highlights: "Qué piensas hacer sin mi amor?", "Vamos de nuevo", "Precipicio", "Toda la noche", "Tienes una idea muy antigua del amor", "prediciendo la runa", "Unx de nosotrxs (feat. Javiera Mena)"

[lurkingteapot]

I saw you posted the ask game!

💎

(show you wish people talked about more)

?

Thank you for the ask! <3 <3 <3

This is tough – I think my main contenders are Triage and He's Coming To Me. Both of them kind of got the short stick, at least in the Anglosphere – Triage due to AISplay's chosen distribution model of "up on youtube for about 2hrs per ep only", He's Coming To Me due to fandom politics at the time of release. They're both really smart, plotty shows with interesting characters beyond just the main ship, and I adore them.

BL ask meme

[icedteadrinker]

Frankly no one irl understands my position of having in my teenage years internalized a mindset that privileges media and knowledge produced in the anglosphere, and now resenting this mindset but also being unable to lose it entirely. Yesterday I was with some classmates (all German speakers) who would randomly start speaking English - not just using English words needlessly but just starting to say full English sentences to each other for no reason. It was sso painful and I couldn't stop making faces. I want to yell at them that repeating English meme phrases from the internet does not make them better or interesting or funny or smart. They really think they are interesting people but they have nothing of substance to say, nothing that anyone else who is moderately online hasn't read a million times, they drive me crazyy. Ah man sory I just broke my balcony door haha fuck

[perryhedge]

what the hell is going on with japanese memes

i realize this is exactly the kind of thing I usually dump about on discord or something, so why not here? this is an example of the kind of rabbit hole searching that i love to do, and one of the reasons why I love language learning -- it's advanced eavesdropping!

So it all started when I came across this tweet of the vtuber Houshou Marine singing...something in karaoke. The backing instrumental sounds familiar, but the lyrics seem to be completely made up. What she's singing can be loosely translated to:

Teikyou Heisei University! You can learn a wide arrange of disciplines, including Confucianism! This place is amazing! Teikyou Heisei University! I want to live! Take me with you!

Of course, any self-respecting One Piece fan will instantly recognize that last bit, which is all the more impressive given how quickly Marine is able to shift into a really spot-on impression of the famous line by Nico Robin during the Enies Lobby arc. I thought this was really fun, but the lyrics seemed a bit too random to be made up on the spot, with the smooth transition and everything. So I looked it up on Youtube and here it is, a meme from November with 5 million views:

This is an 音MAD, or "sound MAD". MAD is sort of the Japanese word for AMV, but you can see in this video that it encompasses something much wider to that, maybe comparable to a Youtube poop or some other kind of meme. It seems the 音 (sound) qualifier, as far as I can tell, refers to an edit that chops up dialogue in such a way that new words can be heard. We've all seen those videos of like, Barack Obama singing an Ed Sheeran song or whatever -- it's kind of like that.

This one is particularly impressive, at least to me, because the cuts between the natural dialogue and the made up dialogue are really smooth, and the made up dialogue sounds pretty good. The idea is basically that it's an ad for Tokyo Heisei University to the tune of the ED of the 2022 Urusei Yatsura series -- presumably because the phrase "Teikyou Heisei Daigaku" matches well with the melody and lyrics of "Tokyo Shandy Rendezvous", as well as the fact that the monologue at the beginning of the One Piece openings refers to a Great Age of Pirates (dai kaizoku jidai) which is easily modifiable to Great Age of Universities (dai daigaku jidai).

The dialogue is mostly taken from Japanese commercials for One Piece Red (at least, I believe) which are much memed upon in Japan. They're modified to be testimonials of the Straw Hat crew talking about how great it is to enroll. In the middle, there is an extended clip of Chopper's dialogue from the Drum Island arc with the caption 2 years ago: "I have a horn, and hooves...I want to learn a variety of disciplines, but...." and the Nico Robin bit just caps it all off.

That's pretty much it. There's not a lot of irony or metacommentary or anything. Even the comments seem to be surprised at how old school it is -- reminiscent of memes on Nico Nico Douga back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which often consisted of silly, absurd, creative fan edits like this. Again, this is somewhat like the Youtube Poops that we had in the anglosphere.

Anyway, that's as much as I was able to piece together from the meme, just thought it was neat to go on a detective journey like this. A lot of the thrill of language learning, for me, comes from these kinds of situations. People are talking to each other, making in-jokes, and I just like to figure it all out.

[peysk]

It's weird how "ironic memes" as such are not nearly as much of a thing in japanese popular web culture. memes that are sarcastically making fun of something, yes, purposely badly drawn image memes, yes, internet memes that are deadpan, surealist, nonsensical, yes. But the medium itself of "the meme" is not put into question basically at all. the anglosphere's use of "top text bottom text" , how that evolved through all of its phases, and doge and what that did to memes, and demotivational posters. I get the impression that those memes way more significantly affected chinese meme culture than japanese. It's also interesting how in japan old media and new media have always had a fuzzy boundary. it feels like old media can easily appropriate or reference new media culture without much issue. old media personalities doing new media things is not seen as cringe or tryharding nearly as much. Stories of youtuber drama and tv personality drama are not that different, it's all kind of 芸能界.

All of this to say i saw a tiktok which i think was originally from douyin of a lady doing man on the street interviews with invariably attractive people and at one point there's a "sigma bale" meme reference and i realized the shorthand of "we're referencing the idea of as a joke treating the ideals people project onto patrick bateman as good advice and showing two seconds of american psycho footage with the words 'don't fall into the woman trap' to punctuate humorously the fact that this interviewee said he doesn't care that much about going on dates with women" is just not a thing you see in popular japanese tiktoks and shorts. in general foreign memes don't penetrate japan's borders nearly as much

[mariacallous]

A couple of weeks ago, at a moment of huge frustration over Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s foot-dragging on allowing Europe’s German-made Leopard tanks to go to Ukraine, a Ukrainian friend WhatsApped me a satirical mockup on “Scholzing”. Next to a photograph of the chancellor, it defined Scholzing, dictionary-style, as: “verb: communicating good intentions only to use/find/invent any reason imaginable to delay these and/or prevent them from happening”. I found this sharp and amusing, quickly retweeted it, and thought no more about it. My Twitter account seemed to be buzzing, but then I’d been writing a lot about the issue myself.

Six days later, I was watching an interview with Scholz on Germany’s ZDF television channel when the interviewer confronted him with “Scholzing”, attributing the coinage to “a British historian”. I went back to my Twitter feed to find that this one quick tweet had been viewed 1.1m times. In German and international media, the definition was being widely quoted as mine. Since, as we all know, the internet never lies, it has now become a historical fact that I thus defined “Scholzing”. (I had incautiously tweeted the meme directly from WhatsApp, so it didn’t show up as something sent from Ukraine. I subsequently clarified this on Twitter, but of course no one reads the clarification.)

I asked my Ukrainian friend if he knew who was actually behind this satirical mockup. He didn’t, but Ukrainians have been using the word for months. Already last June, a tweet from @biz_ukraine_mag reported that “to ‘Scholz’ is now an accepted term in Ukraine meaning to continually promise something without ever actually having any intention of doing it”.

Still and all, the reactions have been interesting. One of the editors of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s leading conservative paper, wrote a semi-humorous editorial commentary in which he said that “our English-speaking friends” would be better advised to reflect first on “Bidening, Trumping, Trussing and Johnsoning, not to mention Harrying and Meghaning”. The clear implication, albeit lightly expressed, was that we Anglo-Saxons should mind our own business. (By contrast, I would welcome any German satirical swipe at Johnsoning, although support for Ukraine happens to be the one and only issue on which Boris Johnson deserves respect.) Since, however, the coinage comes from Ukraine, not the UK, this little German-Anglosphere sideswipe need bother us no longer.

Much more significant was Scholz’s own response on ZDF’s What now …? programme. Having dilated on the amount of support Germany has given to Ukraine, he said, in what had every appearance of being a line prepared with his spin doctor, “the translation of Scholzing is ‘Germany is doing the most’”. It’s true that German support for Ukraine has indeed been very considerable, as you would hope from the democracy with the biggest economy in the EU and the most extensive ties to eastern Europe. Yet to say “Germany is doing the most” is not merely self-satisfied, even self-righteous, but also self-evidently false.

It’s the United States that has done the most. Indeed, for all the amazing courage and skill of the Ukrainian armed forces, were it not for the scale and speed of US military support much more of Ukraine might today be occupied by Russia. So really we Europeans – all of us, Brits very much included – should be reflecting on why it is that, nearly 80 years after 1945, we still rely on Uncle Sam to defend European soil, European freedom and European security.

Meanwhile, a huge tragedy is unfolding before our eyes. What we – and democratic Germany more than anyone – swore after 1945 would “never again” (Nie Wieder!) happen is happening again: a European country is subjected to a war of terror that has clearly genocidal aspects, including multiple atrocities committed against civilians, dehumanising rhetoric and forced Russification in occupied territories. Some 14 million Ukrainians have fled their homes. I recently attended a funeral of young soldiers in Ukraine, spoke to some of their wounded comrades, heard the wrenching tears of a refugee from Mariupol.

Now a new Russian offensive seems imminent. More people will be killed, maimed, orphaned, marked for an entire lifetime. In such a situation, time is of the essence – and delay makes time work for Putin.

“Scholzing”, in the sense of careful, slow, managerial decision-making, is fine in peacetime economic policymaking, but it gives the other side the advantage in war. (In fairness, one should note that there are a few Scholzers inside the Biden administration, and more in some other European capitals.) It would have been possible to start preparing a European Leopard initiative six months ago. Germany would not have been “going it alone”. It would have been at the heart of a European concert of nations. This would have been true “European sovereignty” in practice – and welcome German leadership.

Nobody knows what will happen on the battlefield this year, but one quite probable result of the slowness and hesitancy exemplified by the German chancellor is a kind of escalating stalemate, with ongoing trench warfare resembling that of the first world war. When the shooting war eventually winds down, there could be a semi-frozen conflict, with Russia hanging on to a significant part of the territory it has occupied by force since 24 February 2022. At home, Putin could then claim a kind of victory, a historic reconquest of at least part of Catherine the Great’s Novorossiya (New Russia), thus also extending the life of his tyranny. His example would encourage Xi Jinping to have a go at Taiwan, driving an even bigger nail into the coffin of a “rules-based international order”. In short, this would be the negation of everything democratic Germany has stood for.

These are the real stakes, the reason “Scholzing” is no laughing matter. I believe passionately that Germany should be in the lead, not the rear, in a shared, Euro-Atlantic effort to end the largest war in Europe since 1945 in the only way that will bring lasting peace. If the term actually came to signify “Germany is doing the most” – meaning also acting fast and decisively – I would be the first to sing hymns of praise to Scholzing. If only it would be true.

[silveretta]

I’ve been active on websites throughout a great exodus before. Was there for moot selling 4chan, several forum endings, the past 10 years of nonsense on tumblr, obviously. I’m an expert at staying the course at this point.

But what’s happening with twitter feels really fucking weird. twitter is, at this point, the instant newsreel for an entire country. (possibly the entire world? almost certainly the entire anglosphere.)

zillions of people, myself included, use twitter as a quick headline check after waking up. Any natural disasters? celebrity deaths? coups? unrest? assassinations? nukes start flying? No? guess i gotta go to work then.

that’s what twitter has been as long as our digitally addled memory goes back. it’s weird to see this destabilize because the richest idiot in the world offered a meme number to twitter and whoever was in charge said “grossly overvalued but as long as i get my parachute.”

i understand that this maybe isn’t how we should be using twitter, but it is. and we should talk about that maybe after we address the de verification of the country’s news aggregate on the day before a national election during the creeping rise of fascism in the country.

don’t really have a solution to this, but it is for sure the most uncomfortable i’ve felt during any website’s Great Exodus i’ve been through.

[norsesuggestions]

Alexander was a twunk! *insert "I'm a twunk" pic*

*nods over getting more of these wise words*

*tries finding a twunk meme pic, but being a lesbian, i do not have a secret stash of this meme. so, reader, must see the meme pic in your mind*

if someone got a good, or want to create one, alexander was a twunk meme pic, please do share. that would be lgbtq solidarity in its finest form, expressed through the art of the meme.