#meme culture

[siliquasquama]

So when Elon Musk bought Twitter and basically chopped it at the knees, I was a little worried for Tumblr as well as the rest of Internet meme culture, because a huge number of the ha ha funny pictures people post are tweets. I thought, oh no, a large part of meme culture is dying.

Little did I know that Elon Musk allowing anyone to buy a blue check would make Twitter go out in a blaze of beauty and glory not unlike a sugar maple in October.

[continuants]

happy tenth birthday to a real one

[nando161mando]

Who ya gonna call?

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Do you have facts on memes

I saw one, once. Right here on tumblr. Pixelated and blurry with jpeg compression, it scrolled by so fast I wasn't even sure at first that I'd really seen it. I had to click through a few pages to find it again once I realized what I'd seen.

When I found it again, I immediately made a screencap for proof. There I could see it, small at 540 pixels wide but unquestionably a meme. I was unable to catch it as reblogs had been turned off but don't regret this, a meme is a strange and wild thing and should not be owned by an individual like myself, it belongs on the dashboards of all, in its natural habitat. I let it go.

I never saw it or any other meme again but I will always remember that day and the rare opportunity to see a genuine meme. I think it was rage guy angry that he stepped in poop.

[maihonhassan]

Itna dard toh mere dil main bhi nahi hai jitna mere kamar mai hai.

[exlibrisfangirl]

LIBERTY LATHER I'M SCREAMINGGG

*Steve Rogers voice* Fellas, do you ever find yourself wishing you had America's Ass™? Well, you're in luck! For a limited time only, wash with LIBERTY LATHER from Dr. Squatch... and you, too, can smell like freedom, non-toxic masculinity, and justice for all! Buy your bar today, boys, and show us just how true-blue your blood - and bathwater - runs!

[romandaandromeda]

How Azumanga Daioh tells the difference between the "Old Web" and "Modern Internet"

a content warning for mentions of rape, pedophilia, and ableism (well, better safe than sorry!)

i had an entire thing written before this, but i decided to scrap it for when spacehey comes back online

so, the old web. we know what it is, we know how we see it, geocities, crunchy gifs, flashes and whatever. but have you ever seen the difference between its societies scattered across websites whether it be an imageboard, geocity, or forum against our discorded societies on major social media platforms?

a while back, i had begun watching azumanga daioh as a result of a sudden reinterest in the anime in this decade. this reminded me of how prevalent anime was on the internet as a whole 2 decades ago (and more or less, azumanga's iron grip on anons and lurkers alike), which led me to searching for how different this era was with memes.

memes, or a fad, wasn't very accessible as they are today, while some could be laughed at as an outsider (think awesome face, shoop da whoop, nyan cat, impact font memes), memes outside of the public conscious were mostly inside jokes spawned from forums like something awful or imageboards like 2chan or 4chan.

out of those many, azumanga was one of the more popular ones. think about it, funny teenagers do funny things and combine that with a major love from anime communities, you get things like these:

now what i've noticed about these memes from pre-2010 is their inside joke nature. ask the modern user what a sticky is or why they think osaka is pretending to be a nazi, they wouldn't know or be a bit offput. plus using kaorin's little lesbian crushing on sakaki to project their straight love for sakaki would probably be looked down upon now but that was just normal. if you couldn't handle it then it was either hit the road or deal with it.

you can probably guess that kimura was probably the most relatable character ever in those days, don't even get me started on the normalization of pedophile/rape jokes back then.

now that's fun and all, but how about nowadays? we no longer have a scattered culture, everyone is using one single site for entertainment and posting, and all of the forums and imageboards have been designated a hazard zone as their users have mutated into despicable folks that have been shunned away to the point where they seem more depraved than their past. AKA, they no longer care for relating over a character or talking about a show, they'd rather argue about their nitpicks of a specific character or show and just skulk on what used to be a thriving community. well, nowadays it seems you don't need to be part of a specific community anymore, just see a meme and laugh without any context. with azumanga's revival in interest, this has sort of spawned what i like to call "azumanga autism memes" (TO CLARIFY: I AM AUTISTIC, FEEL FREE TO MAKE UP YOUR OWN NAME IF MINE DOESN'T SOUND RIGHT!). as they've mostly just become the most nonsensical and silly images ever, you practically don't need to watch the show to understand because its so disconnected from the source material it's like a cup of coffee, just pick it up and have a taste.

some examples:

notice anything? suddenly, osaka takes the center stage! with exception to the one chiyo image, osaka has become the face of azumanga as the modern internet knows it. compare that to how every character had about the same love through different edits in the old web, and it seems that most people would think that osaka is the main character of azumanga instead of the multiple characters' stories spread through the series. this has seemed to piss off many a gatekeeper, who are mad that this series is only gaining interest because of one character and her vague memes. to which i believe gatekeeping such a building block of the internet like azumanga is like trying to defend an unstable shack, it's useless.

so, what can we tell from the differences between ye olde and the new? to cut to the chase, the old web's fad culture was built from inside jokes outside of the "webcore/y2k-integrated" memes used for aesthetics. and nowadays people have publicized memes to a point where context is thrown from the picture and anyone can enjoy a meme instead of enjoying its source.

which is better? i can't tell you, you don't see much enjoyability and genuine appreciation in editing in today's memes than you did with old fads (you have to make people laugh, lest you be banished to the "reddit" label hell) but the normalization of taboo topics like racism, rape, and ableism should definitely be left behind in the old. it's just personal preference, really.

that's the end of this post, please enjoy kasuga.swf:

[highlyentropicmind]

A new era for the loss meme

Recently I've seen people using the numbers (1,2,2,50) to represent loss, that's great, but we can go one step further

12250=2*5^3*7^2

That means that we can represent loss with something like

2 125

49

Even better, we can do something like:

2 5 3

7 2

Or something else entirely

By making the loss independent of the shapes and bringing it to the world of numbers we open the doors to endless innovation

I'm looking forward to seeing a bunch of random numbers and finding out, much to my delight, that they multiply to 12250, or add up to 12250 or something like that

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk

[outer-spec]

I know jerma is a real person who is a famous twitch streamer but to me he is just some sort of fictional character invented by the internet, like dril or hatsune miku. you could make up any sort of shit about him and I’d just be like “yeah, of course, that sounds like something jerma would do, what a wacky goofy fella”

[shinekocreator]

You know the drill, reblog for sample size

[jaytheaceenby]

CAPTIONS

"you can't defeat me."

"no, i know... but he can."

*roars in trans ally*

[chaotic-on-main]

I would just like to state that I LOVE your mix of anime (Levi nom nom nom gulp) and chaos. Your meme and such reblogs are gold and though I don’t usually reblog them because they don’t personally fit with my blog, I love it when they grace my dashboard. THAT BEING SAID… could we get a head canon for Levi and meme culture? Like what memes do you think he’d snort at?

Omg thank you so much!! I live up to my handle, I like to think lmao. Only chaos. All the time.

Also absolutely!! I don't know if I characterize Levi well so forgive me if y'all don't agree. 😅

Levi Ackerman and Meme Culture:

I'm gonna be honest and say Levi doesn't understand meme culture very well.

It's not that he doesn't really understand it, actually. He just thinks it's dumb and doesn't care for it lmao.

And he's so behind memes (like I'm talking years because as we all know, some memes are built up on others and you need to really understand some base layers to really get it, yanno?) so when you show him anything, he gets this cute little knot in-between his eyebrows because he's confused and concerned for your well being because you just spent 5 minutes on the sofa crying in laughter over it.

I think he'd get a kick out of political memes, though.

I imagine he's very knowledgeable on today's political climate so he might exhale a small huff or chuckle at something that may grace his one social media app (it's probably Twitter)

He might get shallow memes, especially ones from a movie or show y'all had watched together recently. Like the Adam driver punching a wall from A Marriage Story or something.

But overall, I don't really see Levi Ackerman as someone who really cares for meme culture. And if he did, it's only because of how happy they make you.

He may frown or look disinterested at the things you show him but I think deep down, he's smiling because he loves to hear your laugh and see the way your cheeks flush.

While you're wheezing for air with tears pricking the corners of your eyes (maybe on the floor rolling), he's staring at you with love. And for that, I think Levi won't 100% hate meme culture.

I most definitely did not project myself into this lmao. My husband is very Levi Coded™ and so this is pretty much my life. And I'm okay with it.

[nando161mando]

[bluehawkdustorm]

So, I looked up what skibidi toilet is and uh ... yeah, it looks incomprehensible on the surface

But it starts out with a brand of messed-up-in-the-head humour that's reminiscent of Salad Fingers and the way it escalates from there all makes sense, on a thematic level

But it's exactly the right level of "makes sense if you look at it from the right angle, but incomprehensible and repulsive to outsiders" that even at first glance I would *expect* appreciation of it to become an ingroup signal, a token of selection in itself, like how any successful meme tends to spread

[mentalbarf]

BLINDED BY THE MEME leveraged up like a douche, missing another runnner on dex screen[er] Mental Barf 2024