i have a BS in Memeology

one time i made a post explaining a meme about a bird in a chocolate fountain and then people kept asking me to explain memes to them and now i'm a meme scholar i guess i like talking about memes, their sociological/anthropological implications, and meme history.

[meme-scholar]

hi i just want you to know im writing my BA thesis on memes being the new age dada and im using your blog as one of my main sources, thank you for this x

oh my GOD send it to me when ur done please i need it i love being cited in academic meme shit it fuels me 

[meme-scholar]

this is so dumb but theres this meme of like a seal playing a song on a trumpet, and the song is used in other post kinda like the john cena thing where you didnt expect it, and i am dying because i need to know what song that is ahh help me

if ur talking about the one from this really popular vine and that sax solo being used as a meme (which i think is the most likely fit for the description you provided), it’s “run away with me” by carly rae jepsen. 

but i’ve seen the same seal playing sax video set to “careless whisper” by george michael and the Epic Sax Guy solo from Maldova’s Eurovision entry in 2010

hope that helps!

[sarcastic-clapping]

Mid-Year Meme Timeline

so i’ve mentioned a few times that i’ve been keeping a running log of memes in 2016 and briefly documenting them in the interest of meme documentation and shitpost record keeping. 

as promised, here is the mid year update of the memes i’ve noted so far in somewhat chronological order (as in by month, but not necessarily in the order they appeared within that month). 

please feel free to add any that i may have missed, because it’s very possible that i’ve missed some big ones. 

january:

“you fucked up a perfectly good ______ is what you did. look at it. it’s got anxiety.”

cumslutscootaloo

are the a (noun) x or a (other noun) x? (i.e.: are you a turtleneck bisexual or a crew neck bisexual? mostly lgbtq oriented in this iteration)

jared leto joker + director (“jared you’re scaring me” / “i don’t know where the joker ends and jared begins”)

tag yourself

half a-press

a buddy of mine saw kylo ren take his shirt off in the shower and he said that kylo ren had an eight pack. that kylo ren was shredded.

flat earth

february:

fine bros React™

pacha "just right”

“i’m you but stronger”

papaw’s burgers

jeans meme (jants, jorts, etc.)

squidward dab

Bernie vs. Hillary; Issue: ______ (ex-issue: first things first. Bernie-i’ll eat ya brains/ Hillary-i’m the realest)

marge krumping

kazoo kid

damn daniel

if young metro don’t trust you

ted cruz is the zodiac killer

leo won the oscar/death of no oscar for leo meme (which itself becomes a meme)

march

meme history

sausage party

history of japan

fresh avocado (freesh ah—vah-kah-doo)

get a man who can do both

breaking news

boy he bout to do it

april

decision 2016

miitomo

dark [x] show me the forbidden [y] (specific variant of a meme that may have origins as early as 2014, dark net/"dark google/net, show me the illegal [blank]”

he ruined my dream journal

skai jackson

mr. krabs confusion

may

dat boi

say no to hydra cap/cap hydra meme

jojo’s bizarre adventure “to be continued”

june

caveman spongebob

brexit

are you an [x] or a [y] person? (possible simplified variant of earlier meme)

july (as of 7/15)

pokemon go (meme revival)

tumblr fucked up all the themes

👏  SHITPOSTS 👏  WRITTEN 👏  LIKE 👏  THIS 👏 

so that’s what i’ve got so far. feel free to add some i might have missed (as long as they were popular on tumblr beginning this year and they’re not fandom specific memes that never took off outside of that fandom). 

[meme-scholar]

(sorry if you do this already, I'm a recent-ish follower) Can you publish your meme timeline ever? I meant to try to keep one but, uh, I forgot. Thanks either way!

yes!!! that’s 90% of the reason i’m keeping one: public record. lmao. so i’m DEFINITELY going to publish a list by the end of the year, but i’m also thinking about posting a mid-year timeline/review at the end of this month. i want to make sure we get as much organic memeing out of june as possible before i get the ball rolling on some meta meme theory about the year so far. 

[meme-scholar]

Would it be possible to read a complete version of The Great Meme Thesis?

yes definitely thank you for reminding me actually!!! this week is kind of insane for me both in terms of work and social stuff but i will *hopefully* have the chance to read it through and make a few tweaks/edits next week, at which point i’ll probably put it up on a google doc and post the link.

[brainstatic]

They’re pandering to young people by spoofing the meme about pandering to young people. My mind has touched the void.

[tunte]

This is respectable meme usage

[sarcastic-clapping]

so here are the majority of the slides from the presentation on The Great Meme Thesis, plus some of the main survey results

DISCLAIMER: please keep in mind that this was meant to explain a 60+ page study in 5-8 minutes, so obviously, i didn’t go into detail on a lot of things here that i expanded upon in the final essay. 

it also comes off as more reductionist than the essay, because it posits these opinions as coming from “4chan” and “tumblr” as if they are monolithic entities–something i address and complicate in the essay. most of the political opinions from “4chan” came from /pol/, because /pol/ was the most interested in the subject matter of the survey (for obvious reasons.) so keep that in mind. 

4chan is not a monolith any more than tumblr is a monolith.

bonus meme slides:

(i basically couldn’t find any 4chan ted cruz memes except some early off-hand jokes about him being the zodiac killer on like /b/ and shit so i admittedly pulled that one out of my ass lbh)

DOUBLE BONUS:

(obviously “donald trump’s existence” content warning on the video–which is actually how i introduced 4chan trump memes)

[figglypuff]

Source of the meme

[fayling-guardian-angel]

@sarcastic-clapping

[prokopetz]

At some point, the Dark X, Show Me The Y meme evolved from “dark [information source], show me the [absurd thing that no reasonable person would ever actually want]” to “dark [information source], show me the [completely reasonable thing whose inaccessibility is, itself, the absurdity]”, and that’s really depressing if you think about it.

[littledivathatyouown]

dark meme meta show me the happy memes thats are not sad when you think about it

[yiffmaster]

can someone tell me what the difference between these two memes are

because I’m pretty certain they convey the exact same sentiment

[alittlebitnerdy]

No! @nintendette explained this to me the other day!

- Caveman Spongebob (SpongeGar) is when your primal instincts kick in - for example, this image has been used with the title “when you get up in the middle of the night to get food and you hear someone coming” KnowYourMeme page here - Mr Krabs conveys realization and panic - for example, this image has been paired with the title “when you turn in an exam and your classmates start talking and none of your answers match” KnowYourMeme page here

[toytowns]

unga bunga vs whaddafuck

[pepereviews]

Meme 101

[meme-scholar]

Do you remember this

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yes of course but a better question is do you remember this

 0      0 0

0 0    0 1

[meme-scholar]

dat boi signifies the end of the meme recession he is meme jesus bringing back what once was great

hmmm imo as much as i would like to credit dat boi with ending The Meme Recession bc he is pure and good and i believe in him and wish him nothing but success....

i would actually argue “tag yourself” in january marked the end of the meme recession. based on what i’ve documented (i have a pretty comprehensive meme timeline going), january was a steady month for memeing following “tag yourself,” but february was even more active--the most active Meme Month since summer 2k15. 

it seemed like almost immediately after tag yourself, the Meme Dam broke and all the memes in the Meme Reserve spilled out. like that scene in fury road where Immortan Joe releases the aqua cola to the dehydrated and filthy masses, who begin to weep and scramble and fight each other in pursuit of fleeting relief from their suffering. except in this case, aqua cola is memes, and instead of purifying and cleansing us they only serve to make us filthier.

[meme-scholar]

Are we in a meme recession? Or am I just not up with the times? Because things like 'Damn Daniel' are questioning my meme sensibilities. What makes a meme, a meme? Does a meme need to be created by a certain shitposting farmer in order to be organic? Can something like damn Daniel be a meme even though corporations like Ellen got their money mits on it even going so far as to feature the creator on their show? Or does doing so invalidate a meme from ever being a meme? What is going on? Hulp.

i’m not sure if we’re in a meme recession right now. the memeing has, of course, been slower in the past....well, almost a year now, than it was the previous year (The Golden Meme Age, late 2013--summer 2015), but i don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

for the sake of Discoursing, let’s consider this the “post-recession era.” i’m going to say this post-recession era began with “tag yourself” in january--the first true, organic meme since the recession (beginning around August 2015). 

since tag yourself, i personally have noted at least 20 memes--most of which were fairly significant in size and spread. i would say that indicates that we are not in a recession. we are on a steady incline. and personally, i would hope that it doesn’t get much more productive than this. overproduction is what launched us into the recession, after all. as fun as the chaos of The Roaring Memes was, there is such a thing as “too much of  a good thing.”

the issue with ellen and other non-internet/corprorate/capitalist sources killing memes is a continuing one, but i don’t think it reflects on the stability of the memeconomy. i think it reflects more on the failures of capitalism and a corporate world full of boomers trying desperately to court the attention of godless millennials. 

[meme-scholar]

I'm very confused and scared nothing makes sense and I'm too deep into tumblr, you'll have to kill me because I can't escape from this hell. Why do I find simple phrases and shittily drawn pictures so funny, what even is 4chan anymore, why do people treat tumblr like some living, breathing entity of a single subject, WHAT ARE CRACK SHIPS AND WHY DO THEY FILL UP MY DASH

i can tell from your alarm in this message that you could still save yourself. if you were really in too deep you would be dead inside and just accept the hell that you find yourself stranded in, as i have. 

[meme-scholar]

Sometimes I read your blog and I'm like "woah this is actually super interesting and informative I think I could do a thesis on this" and then I remember that the subject is some bread with beef on the left side or the face of a grown man literally everywhere

your reaction is literally my exact goal with this blog. blurring the lines between shitposting and academia until we reach the point of mutually assured destruction.

it’s also why i’m literally writing my bachelor’s thesis on memes. don’t get me wrong, i am ashamed. but not ashamed enough to stop. 

[meme-scholar]

Can you explain one of tumblr's earliest memes?

i can’t really speak to the earliest tumblr memes because im sure there were memes of some sort on this site between its launch in 2007 and when i joined in 2010.  i can speak to Ancient Tumblr Memes (c. 2010-2012) but i cannot speak to Prehistoric Tumblr Memes. bc like for real tho those memes are literally prehistoric i can’t find any record of a tumblr meme that predates 2010.

but as far as Ancient Memes go, i’ve joked in the past about 5t4s being the first tumblr meme that i experienced from beginning to end, and it was…….but there was one meme that started about a month before i began using tumblr actively, and it was truly the first tumblr memes that i witnessed.

get ready to cringe so hard that you hurt yourself, because im talking about “what is air?”

this post isn’t just going to be a “long ride. ”it’s gonna be a fuckin road trip so go empty your bladder, grab a snack, and buckle the heck up. ur gonna be here a while.

whether you’ve been on tumblr for a month or five years, i’m pretty sure we’ve all witnessed some form of tumblr slang become way too overused, resulting in that phrase gradually being phased out of the vernacular.

“what is air?” ultimately became one of the most infamous examples of this linguistic pattern. in a case of tragic irony, it originated in august or september of 2010 as the “trendy” alternative to an even older overused tumblr phrase, “i can’t breathe.” 

people typically added “what is air?” to humorous posts to illustrate that they were laughing so hard that they couldn’t breathe–that their laughter had left them so breathless they had forgotten what air even was. 

by november, the phrase was so widespread that it had reached urban dictionary, and people were asking what it meant on yahoo answers. so “what is air” was at Peak Meme when i joined around mid-october.

during the first week of november, a user made a post suggesting that people from tumblr could find each other on omegle by saying “what is air” to the person they were chatting with to see if they would understand. that post became extremely popular and tumblr users started descending upon omegle en masse.

and now, in the interest of honesty, i must confess one of my most shameful Ancient Sins………i was one of them. like im pretty sure i met some people who are mutuals to this day through the omegle invasion. 

this screenshot pretty succinctly summarizes all of my internet mistakes that gave life to the horrors buried in my Shame Vaults (aka my archive c. 2010-2011).

i hope u enjoy my pain and embarrassment because im fucking Suffering.

but anyway back 2 our story: people outside the tumblr community were not generally pleased by what was often referred to as tumblr’s “invasion” of omegle. 4chan was particularly displeased. 

in fact, they found “what is air?” so annoying that it played a large part in /b/’s decision to raid tumblr in november of 2010, which they referred to as “Operation Overlord.” 

/b/ claimed that tumblr had a history of stealing 4chan memes (which honestly is 100% tru) and that the “omegle invasion” proved that tumblr was also beginning to copy their infamous raids. 

so they declared war. and yes. it was literally widely referred to as a war. and some people took it as seriously as one would take an actual real life war. i wish i was being hyperbolic about this y’all. but im not. 

……..and then someone decided that both sides should lay down their weapons and start drawing personifications of 4chan and tumblr fucking each other. 

………….but 4chumblr and Operation Overlord are meme history lessons for another day. they’re too good to play a supporting role in a post about another meme………let’s just say that i have very special plans 4 them……..

but in summary: basically the first meme i ever witnessed on tumblr started an actual fkcng war with another garbage website and paved the way for some of the most infamous ancient memes in tumblr history. 

i should have taken all of this as a sign to delete while i still had the chance but i missed the opportunity and now im resigned to the fact that im trapped in this Meme Hell forever. 

[meme-scholar]

2008-2011: the meme renaissance

2012-2013: meme shaming, memeing not condoned by the public and is considered unforgivable

2014-: the second meme renaissance, memeing is once again in style , the world is at peace

2015: The meme industrial era. Business is booming with the recent implementation of the new, globally accepted currency, the crisp meme buck. Pepes, which were previously considered to be rare commodities are now being manufactured and distributed at astonishing rates.

2016-???? Predictions: according to this logic, the great meme depression is just around the corner with this mass production of pepes and pepes being bought and traded on margin, economic downfall is imminent. i'd recommend storing your memes in a safe place and stockpiling them. Soon rare pepes will loose all their rarity and the GMD will start