PicoBlog

By the time this reaches you, I pray that this is the first instance of you reading the phrases “spoopy” or “spooky season”. I hope that we have killed that part of our vocabulary.

Twitter

Kevin James

Kevin James continues to repulse and delight. I’m surprised it took us two weeks to add boobs but this is a process of the collective conscious, not a sprint. It’s getting weirder and more off-putting so that points to a kind of staying power that I would not have said this meme has. Although often memes are about finding new ways to express ourselves. We don’t have a meme yet that portrays the mood of a childish coy smile that one might be too old to pull off. We’ve dug through the King of Queens promotional image archive and while some of them are fun, none of them prove to be the blank canvas the original is.  We must endure… so I guess Kevin James gets to stay.

Kid Cudi If He Was…

This one is kind of always going in the background. It's a low-effort parody of Kid Cudi’s “Day and Night”. Twitter is less and less reliable for a good joke these days. Most tweets are more fraught and prone to discourse than they have been in the past. It’s a desolate world with little to rely on in terms of funny and creatively inspired tweets. “Day and Night” parodies are the only thing we seem to be able to rely on these days. It’s good for a laugh if there’s nothing better. In a day of scrolling, it might be the only crafted joke one reads. When the joke economy is devalued this is what passes for exceptional. 

Microsoft AI 

The better these get the less funny they are. While I decried Dall-e mini at the time, I had no idea what we had. They looked bad and weird and there was something interesting there. AI recreations of our silly ideas were these bizarre objects that no human would want to create and no machine would come up with on its own. A meeting of the creative minds. This… this is nothing—a slightly shiny photorealistic version of all that’s left of our ideas. People are using these to fantasize about actresses winning awards and that’s about all we’ve got. It’s funny but not as funny as it was a year ago. It’s also not as useful a tool as promised. When the fad has passed and it’s no longer a meme to create these, we’ll point and laugh at the loser trying to use AI art to tell a joke on the internet. 

Kill Them With Kindness

This meme is not necessarily good, interesting, or groundbreaking. It doesn’t say anything about culture right now or require clever ideas to participate. However, it reminds me of a simpler time when we were still fascinated with the emoji. We still had love for our little cartoons which are now a necessary part of language on the internet. Over time we’ve lost our sense of wonder, like a child who takes their once-new toy for granted. Every once in a while we need a reminder of how amazing it is that we have this little dictionary of images that we can use at any time. Each one carries its own intrinsic beauty and we limit ourselves to necessity. For what reason? Send an email or a text with an extra emoji this week. See what it does for your demeanor and/or joi de vivre.

TikTok

My Name is Lewis

I love Lewis. I love it when things become memes because real life is weird or off or genuinely funny in an unexpected way. If this were from something, it would be so much less interesting and funny. A reference is just a reference. Lewis the Pumpkin Man is the result of countless meetings pitches and emails. 100 people with 100 different jobs probably had a hand in making Lewis and not one part of it makes sense to me. I love that. I love that our world is not fully corporatized and scrubbed clean of work-appropriate personalities that an idea like Lewis can still be made. There are still creative people in the world and they made Lewis. 

To Be Loved is To Be Changed

People mistake this for just growing up, and while it is true that the experience of love will change us as we grow up, the visual metaphor does not work the same as with a stuffed animal. With people (and to some extent animals), we were going to grow no matter what. We will change, with or without the love. That’s kind of the human burden to bear. However, the stuffed animal, the inanimate object, will not age the same with or without the love. The phrase only works as a visual metaphor with something that would not change, had we not loved it. It’s true about people even if the visual metaphor isn’t there, but that doesn’t necessitate a TikTok. The stuffed toy would remain in pristine condition if it had no one to love it but because it spends every moment in the arms of a child, it gets dirty and smaller and there are rips in the fabric that there weren’t before. These marks are proof of the years spent being held close. While we understand this metaphor for people and pets, it does not come through in the pictures the same way it does with the Garfield toy. 

October 3rd

We have to move past this. As a society, we need to get over this.

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