#I'm referring to 2011-2014 ish

[roboticutie]

is your post about the origin of “i like your shoelaces” a joke? i’ve been on tumblr since 2011 and iirc the chat log demo always said “tourist: can you give me directions to an olive garden? new yorker: no but i can give you directions to a real italian restaurant”

obviously you could be right, but i don’t remember the chat log ever reading that way and i do very clearly remember people riffing on the olive garden demo text for years afterward (especially when the steal your breadsticks meme came about) always referencing where it came from. the earliest mention i can find of “i like your shoelaces” is the infamous post from 2012. there’s no reference to it any earlier, which you would think there would be given how off the wall that question/answer set is.

anyway, did you just make up your reply to that post? i feel like maybe you made it up (all in good jest)

lol honestly no!!! I've been under that impression for... Fuck. I guess 8 years now? Since 2014-ish, I must've been 13 or 14, I've legit thought it must have been demo text at some point and some others were just as confused as I was. We probably were not like, a majority of tumblr users thinking this, by any means. It was just a genuine mistake that's turned out I guess kind of funny now?

No one has been mean about it either, all the corrections I've gotten are along the lines of your ask here of like. Firmly remembering but not with any cruel intention while telling me so, and I think you are (and others who have brought it to my attention) correct! At this point I'm not sure where the misunderstanding on my part came from either. Thanks for being straight forward and clear that this was lighthearted, it helped me understand your tone better, btw!

I've tried looking back at it to figure out where that thought process kinda formed from... and I think it had something to do with how Sure the addition of "remember, the response is Thanks I stole them from the President." was. Like I could not comprehend that someone else just made it up bc it was so weird and flowed too naturally and the phrasing made it sound like it was coming from somewhere well known to tumblr users, that I assumed it really must have come somewhere from tumblr itself. I do remember seeing chat posts formatted as I did in the post you're referring to, also. Those two things must have come together to just... Make sense to me, so I remembered wrong, and I never had reason to question it until now!

Also I miss the breadsticks memes. Those were fun