#presented without caption. two images speak more than a thousand words

[odeandiewut]

[carridine-blog]

The Perfect Stereoscope

This post features a collection of images that I’ve labelled “stereoscopes” over the years.  Some are conventionally, some are unconventionally stereoscopes.  Before jumping in I wanted to offer the chance to appreciate the perfect stereoscope.  This stereoscopic image was constructed of no less than ten individual photographs.  They were combined in photo-editing software and together compose an image both visually pleasing and analogically philosophical.

Stereoscopes:  How to Make a Finger Hotdog

A stereoscope allows the perception of three-dimensions from two dimensional images.  How it works: two images show the same thing from slightly different points of view mimicking binocular vision.  One image for each eye.  The two images unite in the mind and create the perception of depth.  Many people people have difficulty seeing the desired effect.  This most often turns out to be because they have difficulty allowing their eyes to see independently one from the other. If you have trouble see the depth here is a brief how-to do that.

1. 2. 3.

Starting simple:

This shape is excerpted from this larger one.  I like the image because the high contrast makes it almost calligraphic which makes the sudden appearance of three dimensions all the more dramatic.  Calligmagic!

You can make stereoscopic images simply starting with a video clip.  A panning shot traveling roughly 10 centimeters (the space between the eyes) will provide the two images needed.  Take screen captures until you find the ones that work.  Here’s one I did of a bust of Dante I saw in a little cabinet in a big antiques place.

The following caption is a bit repetitive but repetition is good for learning, no?  The difference in the screen grabs in the next one though

  Here is the possibility of seeing William Blake’s life mask in three dimensions without being in its actual presence. I constructed this stereo-image by screen-grabbing two images from a video featuring the mask.  The video camera was moving just enough during the shot to provide these two aspects. The two slightly different aspects simulate views from two different eyes.   The video is for Patti Smith’s cover of “Smells like Teen Spirit.”

  Here is a stereoscope or comic strip I made with  Blake’s Lifemask and two of Messerschmidt’s sculptures.

This is from a post originally named “to stay near the well spring.”

Commenting on an old my post of mine,  Nick Mullins said, “Looking through artists’ websites, I sometimes see a thumbnail that looks really interesting, but when I click on it to get the full-sized image, I find that the real image is nothing like what I thought I was seeing in the thumbnail. Sometimes I have gone back and tried to do a sketch from what I thought I saw in the thumbnail. Your discussion of the fish that became a man in a tarp reminded me of that. Sometimes an accident of vision is more interesting than the reality.”

(Here’s an elaboration of what I replied to him:) Yes my efforts have always included either accident or collaboration — you get to new places faster. Plus, employing accidents it’s easier to appreciate what others might see in my work.  It’s only in recent years that I’ve realized that what I simply straight-forwardly produce is a new place to a person seeing it for the first time. It was the most obvious thing but it hit me like a thunderbolt.

Generally I like to think that the accident or other kind of unexpected input points us to a reality we wouldn’t have conceived without it. I don’t mean that in any mystical way. I mean in just the same way a new sound of music will direct our attention to or express a mood we’ve never heard expressed before. Novelty and re-cognition are wrapped up together. Our ability to invent ways to express our experience, to share our experience, always lags behind experience itself. When someone finds a way to say something new about something true, its like a gift we already possess.

I totally get the thumbnail experience. Very often I screen capture a thumbnail at the resolution I like it and then blow it up in photoshop.   The resolution might be fuzzy but most times it retains the thing I saw in it.

It’s true of my own work. I like to work really small: I tend to make less marks and their interrelations are clearer. Then when I blow it up — used to be on xerox machines or cameras, now it’s scanners mostly — I work to catch the rhythms evident in the little one. Yeah, without projectors, cameras, etc., most of my work would be postage stamp sized.

Speaking of stamp-sized:

The first image in this post, which I’ve renamed “At the Waterfall”  is based on this one here. This one is reproduced at it’s original size.  I got the larger image from this small source by a kind of divination.   I used to use this process all the time.  It combines the two things we just talked about: seeing things in small things and seeing things accidentally. The larger image is a painting mind you: I started with a penciled-in grid and painted all those little dots myself.  So there.  The smaller image is from a photo from a black and white newspaper which I hand-colored and amended with pen. It is hard to tell now but the original photo was of a boy staring at the camera from behind a fence. The fragment I used shows (or used to show) his fingers poking through chain links in the fence.

  Stereoscope: Artaud et le Momo.

  William Blake and Robert Crumb:  Neither Two Nor One

Blake illustrates a passage in Dante’s Inferno, Canto 25 describing a six legged snake attacking a thief,  which Dante modeled after a passage in Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

Inferno XXV 58-69.

“Ivy was never so rooted to a tree as the horrid beast entwined it’s own limbs round the others; then, as if they had been of hot wax, they stuck together and mixed their colors, and neither the one nor the other now seemed what it was at first: even as in advance of the flame a dark color moves across the paper, which is not yet black and the white dies away. The other two were looking on, and each cried, “oh me, Agnello, how you change! Lo, you are already neither two nor one!“.”

Charles S. Singleton translation

“So never did the barbed ivy bind/ A tree up, as the reptile hideous/ Upon another’s limbs its own entwined;/ They clave together, — hot wax cleaveth thus, — / And interfused their colors in such wise/ That neither now appeared the same to us: / Just as in burning paper doth uprise / Along before the flame a color brown / Which is not black as yet, and the white dies. / The other two each shouted, looking on, / “O me, Agnello, how thou alterest! / Lo, thou’rt already neither two nor one!”

Melville Best Anderson translation

Style: visual identity & equivalence

I made this post card to send to James Kochalka when his daily comic AMERICAN ELF  reached the ten year mark. My image is based on a photo of Kochalka and his kids and on a somewhat famous painting by someone else.

Here’re the same elements presented as a comparison, bits of multiply reproduced (degraded) GUERNICA and grid paper atop pages from Kochalka’s THE HORRIBLE TRUTH ABOUT COMICS.   This is from a series of photographs I took: videotaped collages I made while I was designing a previous version of this web site (no longer extant.)

And here again a comparison involving the GUERNICA baby: this time posed against Minnie, Vinny,  and some Mayan Glyphs.  I appreciate glyphs, especially with regard to their foreignness. I am always looking to achieve in my drawing and writing the formal quality I appreciate most readily in markings that are illegible to me.

And finally, GUERNICA baby and some grafitti I copied from a barrier on the side of southbound Route 17, around Allendale, NJ. (Graffiti no longer extant, except in the series of photos I took.  I believe this tag says or originally said, “Messiah.”)

Another Stereoscope: Bill and Lynda B.

Stereoscope juxtaposing Plate XI from William Blake’s ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE BOOK OF JOB (1826) and Panel 2, page 74 from Lynda Barry’s THE FREDDIE STORIES (1999).  Separated by 173 years, sharing a similar vision.  I’m sure Lynda Barry has seen this image of Blake’s.   Does that make her’s a copy of  his?  Not necessarily. Blake himself found the poses and compositions for his divine visions in reproductions of Renaissance Masterworks.

I find this likeness wonderful and marvelous.  I have notes for an essay I’d like to put up as a permanent page here. For now, though, I will suggest the direction the essay would take with a quote from Paul Piehler’s THE VISIONARY LANDSCAPE (pps 19-20):

“The major poets of medieval visionary allegory regard themselves as part of a cumulative tradition, in which each allegorist recapitulates, refines and develops the thought and imagery of his [sic] predecessors, exploring new dimensions of traditional topics, and, most important, attempting to integrate earlier thought and imagery pertaining to the topic into a coherent whole …”

Is 173 years a long time? A bit too long, I guess, for any one of us to endure.   Whatever the number of years, Blake seems irrevocably long ago, from the age of revolution, the mythical time of our era’s origin. His words, images and ideas shine through history like a dead star.  He has, it seems,  joined history — that flat offensive significance of human life which the living are barred from entering.

Meanwhile, Lynda Barry has such a knack for the voices of adolescence and childhood she seems to resurrect a reader’s own past.   The memories she stirs live again.

That makes THE FREDDIE STORIES all the more a marvel: in it Freddie undergoes a “journey to the underworld” which employs imagery familiar from Dante’s journey, even Virgil’s journey. But she builds Freddie’s journey of ” psychic redemption” out of such recognizable, contemporary stuff that she invites us to our own inside of a visionary landscape that has floated along with people for thousands of years.

Style Coloring Page.

“The deeper the influence of the formal, decorative element upon the method of representation, the more probable it becomes that formal elements attain an emotional value.  An association between these two forms of art is established which leads, on the one hand to the conventionalization of representative design, on the other to the imputation of significance into formal elements.  It is quite arbitrary to assume a one-sided development from the representative to the formal or vice versa, or even to speak of a gradual transformation of a representative form into a conventional one, because the artistic presentation itself can proceed only on the basis of the technically developed forms…”

— Franz Boas, “Representative Art,” pps. 82-83 Primitive Art (1927)

  Stereoscope: Blake of the Shtetl.

Here is a stereoscope I’ve had in my possession for over 10 years. On the right is an illustration by Maurice Sendak (1928-2012).  It is one of Sendak’s illustrations for Herman Melville’s PIERRE. Under the image is a caption that reads, “an unbidden, most miserable presentiment.”    On the left is a doodle from a private letter by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) an artist to whom William Blake admitted a debt.  In the Tate Gallery’s catalog of Fuseli’s work this drawing is titled “Caricature of the Artist Leaving Italy.”  The naming of Sendak as the “Shtetl Blake” I take from Margalit Fox in her obituary of Sendak in today’s New York Times. (May 8th, 2012)

  Blake:  Stereoscope as Comic Strip.

These are plates 9 & 10 from William Blake’s little book FOR THE SEXES: The Gates of Paradise.  I grabbed them off of the wonderful site The Blake Archive.   One way to read them is as adjacent comic book panels: ‘this happens and then this happens.’  Another is to read them as slightly different views on the same thing, as in a stereoscope.  Another possibility is that they are completely unrelated.

  One day in the maze …

the rat met the minotaur.

Seriously though

Style and Stereoscope.

Human creators do not have access to the atomic level (artists anyway) and must discover their own smallest building block.  Each must innovate an idiosyncratic [mark] to which a life’s work can be devoted. Rilke speaks of it in terms of Cezanne, Rodin, and his own poetry: “Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything…”  After this discovery the artist is free to become a laborer and to spend every minute of life working at “expressing everything.”

I figured I might as well post one of my favorite all time comparison lessons on that style discovery.   Above are two well known paintings by Van Gogh.  One is painted by the artist we know Van Gogh becomes and one is painted before Van Gogh fully realized that transformation.   I think the chief difference between these two paintings is how each painting relates to itself.  The difference between these two painting styles is in the relation between what the painting conveys and how it is rendered. In the first, the smoking skull image, an idea of something is conveyed, however vaguely, without regard to how it is rendered.  The idea is communicated then we notice how it is communicated, the calligraphy in which it is written.  In the second one, the sunflower, what the painting conveys is conveyed through how it is rendered.   It contains no abstract-able message by which we can paraphrase it and do without the painting.  The painting is all.   I like to think that both paintings have the same thing to say.  They are both Van Gogh expressing something, but only in the second painting is the artist mature enough to say what he means.  In that maturity he became capable of “expressing everything.”

When Worlds Collage.

This is a collage in white grease pencil (china marker) of drawings I copied from Lynda Barry and Robert Fludd.    I chose Fludd’s drawing, which I saw for the first time on the front of a book catalog, because it uses the phrase “mundus imaginabilis.”  I mistook his drawing  as a diagram of Sufi mystic experience which I had just been reading about in books by Henry Corbin.  It turns out that Fludd’s ideas were a bit different but by the time I found that out, the drawing had been made.   I combined the drawing of the mundus imaginabilis (which now that I think of it may be the mundus imaginalis in Corbin) with drawings from Lynda Barry because it suited my abiding interest in the difference in accounts of visionary experience in different periods of history.

The Lynda Barry drawings I took from her 100 DEMONS, one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. These panels come from the introduction where she describes the writing exercise which gave rise to the book (and the title of the book): intending nothing, leaving her brush free to record her every stray thought, she captures the demons that enter her mind. If you haven’t read 100 Demons, I’m not sure what you’ve been doing. You must read this book.

I did this drawing initially as a card for my friend Avy’s 30th birthday. I liked it so much that I made three prints of it, giving one to Avy, one to my friend Kat, and one to someone else (OF).

I post this drawing today because I spoke to Kat on the phone and because today, after years of waiting, I received my copy of Lynda Barry’s latest,  THE NEAR SIGHTED MONKEY BOOK.  Years ago, I put my name on a list so that I could have it as soon as it was available but its publication was repeatedly delayed. I kept getting little e-mails from Amazon saying, “Sorry, not yet” and “oop wait a second.”  So the book finally arrives — with $7.50 due COD — and Kat  tells me Kyle bought the book for her a week ago from the bookstore!

Kat and I spent the rest of our conversation talking about writer’s block, ways of breaking it and how Lynda Barry is the coolest.   Always good to talk to you, Kat.

Two without captions.

  And finally here’s a stereoscope of me

A life mask taken when I was 30 years old.  Twenty three years ago.

A Variety Of Stereoscopes The Perfect Stereoscope This post features a collection of images that I've labelled "stereoscopes" over the years. 

[biofunmy]

100 Best Memes Of The Decade

Debora Westra for BuzzFeed News

This decade, memes became something not just for a handful of internet nerds who lurked on message boards; memes are now for everyone. The online culture of this decade hasn’t just changed the words we use, it’s changed how we express ourselves. Huge technological shifts of the 2010s led to this: widespread smartphone adoption and the rise of newfangled social media platforms like Vine. Memes also became a business — brands used meme-speak and accounts like @fuckjerry made big bucks by reposting memes.

To determine the ranking of this list, we considered the overall popularity of a meme, its longevity, and historical importance — what kind of impact it had on other memes and internet culture. Here they are:

100.

Yodeling Walmart Kid

View this video on YouTube

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In 2018, 10-year-old Mason Ramsey sang a Hank Williams song in a Walmart, and the internet went nuts. But this time, the reaction to a precocious kid singing somewhat oddly (a sort of yodeling) was very different than it was in 2011 when Rebecca Black sang “Friday.” Instead of mocking the kid, the internet loved him, declaring the clip a “bop” that “slaps.” This is the change that happened over the decade: Instead of relishing cringe, the more memetic and ironic thing to do is embrace and love something like a child yodeling in a big-box store. Ramsey has gone on to have some version of mainstream success, performing country music to live crowds, and, well, good for him. —K.N.

99.

Moth Memes

Twitter: @thebobpalmer

Much like a moth is drawn to a flame, we were drawn to memes about moths and their unquenchable thirst for lamps in summer 2018. They got their start with a Reddit post that July, a close-up photo someone took of a moth, which people soon began captioning and photoshopping until it took on a life of its own as a meme. There’s really not much you can say about moth memes, besides that they are funny and good and I will love them until I die. —J.R.

Every generation has its subcultures, and in 2019, Gen Z’s was undoubtedly VSCO girls. The aesthetic comes with a number of signifiers: scrunchies (piled high on the wrist), Hydro Flask water bottles (covered in stickers), puka shell necklaces, oversized T-shirts, Crocs, Fjällräven backpacks, metal straws (save the turtles!), Carmex lip balm, and the ubiquitous catchphrases, “sksksk — and I oop.” The easy-breezy look, named for the photo editing app VSCO, was essentially “Tumblr girl” meets “basic white girl.” Though the style became trendy in earnest through Instagram and internet stars like Emma Chamberlain, it catapulted to popularity (and mockery) on TikTok. —J.R.

97.

Duck Army

View this video on YouTube

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Kevin Innes, a Norwegian twentysomething, was in a store with his girlfriend one day when they came across a bin of squeaking duck-shaped (technically, the toy is a pelican) dog toys. To embarrass his girlfriend, he pressed down on the whole bin, and an unholy cacophony that sounds like the wheezing sum total of human misery was released. Innes posted to Facebook, then YouTube, and then someone else ripped his YouTube video and posted it to Vine, where it went viral. The beauty of this 2015 meme was a perfect Vine: absurd, easy to understand, surprising, and based on something that happened in real life. —K.N.

96.

Deep-Fried Memes

reddit.com

You might not even know what they’re called if you saw them, but a deep-fried meme is one of those pictures that has been screenshotted, edited, and reuploaded across Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit so many times that has started to degrade in quality. At first this deep-frying process was largely genuine, kids refiltering and remixing each other’s images. But as the phenomenon became more known, a second wave of ironically deep-fried images started to appear. It’s a fairly silly thing on its surface, but it also speaks to the innate desire for people to share stuff online. If Instagram had a share button, there’s a good chance this sort of thing would have never started happening in the first place. The walled culs-de-sac of proprietary platforms will never be able to stop the world’s teens from sharing a picture of Peter Griffin from Family Guy smoking a huge blunt. —R.B.

95.

Twitter Sign Bunny

|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣| vaccines save lives you stupid motherfucker |＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿| (__/) || (•ㅅ•) || / 　 づ

02:12 PM – 01 Dec 2019

A series of ASCII image memes popped up on Twitter this decade: “Howdy, I’m the sheriff of,” “In this house we…” “got dat” cat, a stick figure falling off a building, or even the simple ¯_(ツ)_/¯ or (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. These work in part because they visually take up a lot of space on the Twitter timeline, making them stick out and be more likely to be interacted with or remembered. Plus, there implies some element that the poster has some technical abilities to be able to summon the ASCII. But it’s the bunny that’s had staying power over those other ones. —K.N.

94.

Doggos and Puppers

This is Rey. She’s a very puptective doggo mommo. Will grrbork bork at any potential threat. 13/10 heartwarming as h*ck

12:00 AM – 20 Oct 2017

Dogs have been man’s best friend for thousands of years, but only around 2015 did they evolve into “doggos” and “puppers.” “Doggo-speak,” as NPR called it, arose in Facebook groups like “Dogspotting” before exploding on Twitter with the @dog_rates Twitter account. The lingo is characterized by cutesy nicknames for dogs (Samoyeds are “floofs” or “clouds,” corgis are “loaves,” any huge fluffy dog is a big boofin’ woofer) and onomatopoeia (a doggo can “bork,” or stick their tongues out and do a “blep” or “mlem”). To me, it’s a fascinating as “h*ck” thing that an entire dialect, with all its own grammar and syntax and vocabulary rules, could spring up in an organic way online. —J.R.

93.

Planking

CC BY-SA 3.0 / Donkey100 / Via commons.wikimedia.org

In 2011, everyone was taking pictures lying facedown on the ground, rigid as a board. It was a thing, and that thing was called planking. Plankers would assume the pose in unexpected places — atop a car, inside a supermarket freezer, even across two camels — then get a buddy to snap a picture. The trend got so big The Office even did a cold open about it. Soon, it spun off into other photo pose trends, including owling and leisure diving, but it also sadly led to at least one death.

Eight years later, these photo memes can feel a bit old-school, but they represent a key moment when ready access to cameras (both the digital kind and iPhones, which were still pretty new) was still a novelty, and people were leaning into ways to use it creatively. —J.R.

The point of bros icing bros was simple: At any point during the day, present a warm bottle of Smirnoff Ice to your bro, and he has to get down on one knee and chug the cursed beverage. However, if he produces his own bottle immediately, he is exempted, and it is you who must chug. This prank was the peak of IRL-memeing in 2011. Smirnoff denied any sort of marketing stunt, which makes sense if you consider that the central conceit is that being forced to drink a Smirnoff Ice is a form of punishment. The meme threatened a resurgence in 2017, but never really caught on again. —K.N.

91.

Bone App The Teeth

In 2016, someone posted a pic of white bread just absolutely smothered in corn and captioned it with a phrase that ignited a million memes: “bone app the teeth.” Those four words — sometimes edited to “bone apple tea,” “bone ape tit,” or even more bonkers iterations — became the battle cry for shitty food porn posters everywhere. It’s a pretty simple meme, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a picture of Goldfish sushi or a chicken noodle watermelon without completely losing it. —J.R.

90.

Clowns

Instagram: @davie_dave

Remember that brief moment in fall 2016 when towns around the US were overtaken by mass hysteria over scary clowns being spotted in the woods (which then immediately stopped being a concern when Trump got elected and everyone suddenly had other stuff to worry about)? Yeah, that was a thing that happened. Clowns had quite a ~moment~ in the latter half of the 2010s. Less than a year after the clown sightings, a remake of the horror movie It came out, prompting a ton of memes of Pennywise in the sewer and dancing (and, of course, people wanting to fuck the It clown). The clown memes just kept going from there, with clown photos being used as reaction images to illustrate our most dumbass moments. Sometimes I wonder if those clowns are still in the woods. I hope they’re happy. —J.R.

89.

Kim Kardashian Breaks the Internet

Jean-Paul Goude / papermag.com

In November 2014, Kim Kardashian appeared on the cover of Paper magazine bearing her whole entire ass. It went massively viral, and people immediately got to work photoshopping it into a centaur, Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” (which had just come out), the turkey in a Norman Rockwell painting, you name it. The phrase on the cover “break the internet,” would go on to become timeworn, but it all started with Kim K and her big, glossy butt. —J.R.

88.

Bed Intruder

View this video on YouTube

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In July 2010, Antoine Dodson appeared on the local news in Alabama after a home invader attempted to assault his sister, saying: “He’s climbin’ in your windows, he’s snatchin’ your people up… So y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife…” The news clip went viral, and a few days later, Dodson’s words were remixed into the Auto-Tuned “Bed Intruder Song,” which made it onto the Billboard 100 charts and become the most-viewed YouTube video of 2010.

“Bed Intruder Song” captured two powerful vectors that would come to define the rest of the decade: a normal person being propelled to some sort of viral fame, and a critical backlash over the exploitative race, gender, and class dynamics. At the time, some people pointed out that turning a video of poor black man expressing anguish over the attempted sexual assault of his sister was problematic. Years later, this feels even more true. Dodson went on to a strange post-virality career, with a reality show that never got off the ground, celebrity boxing matches, controversial statements about being gay, and a Trump endorsement. —K.N.

87.

Alex From Target

Alex LeBoeuf / Twitter: @auscalum (deleted)

In November 2014, a young woman tweeted a photo of a teenage checkout clerk at Target with Alex on the nametag. Her tweet was simply, “YOOOOOOOO,” signaling that, well, this teen boy was cute. The tweet went viral, and people fell in love with this mysterious Alex from Target, creating memes and tributes in his image, leading anyone over the age of 23 to wonder: What the fuck is happening here?

There was some legitimate confusion over how and why Alex’s photo blew up. An internet marketing company stepped forward, claiming that it had gotten the original girl to tweet the photo of Alex as a viral marketing stunt, and seeded the meme with inorganic retweets and promotion. But the woman who made the tweet (whose Twitter account is now suspended) said she had never heard of the marketing company, and that she just randomly found the photo on Tumblr and tweeted it out, and it seems that the marketing company was trying to claim stolen viral valor.

But the ending wasn’t so great for the guy at the center of it. Alex LaBeouf, who went by Alex Lee as a stage name, eventually dropped out of high school because he had missed so many days to fly to Los Angeles for appearances on talk shows. He was homeschooled and joined the 2015 DigiTour, a tour for social media stars, mainly Vine stars at the time. In a 2017 video, he said that his managers at the time had stolen $30,000 from him, and since then he’s abandoned his public social media accounts. —K.N.

86.

Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles”

View this video on YouTube

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The music video for “Miracles” debuted in April 2010. The song had been kicking around since 2009, but the video is what really did it. It’s been viewed 18 million times — and watching it back in 2019, it is still just as deranged as it was when it debuted. A lot of the meme songs on this list exist in that uncanny valley of like “misunderstood banger.” I want to be clear: “Miracles” is not that. It is a nonsense song. And while it’s best remembered for its “fuckin’ magnets, how do they work” and “Magic everywhere in this bitch” lines, I would argue the best part is the line about pelicans: “I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco Bay / It tried to eat my cellphone, he ran away / And music is magic, pure and clean / You can feel it and hear it but it can’t be seen.” Damn, that’s real. —R.B.

85.

First-World Problems

Thinkstock / Twitter: @ughshaye

When you’re eating nachos and one stabs the roof of your mouth, when one pillow is too low but two pillows is too high; these sorts of issues — annoying, but generally indicating your life is pretty easy and privileged — were best summarized by the early-2010s macro image “First-World Problems.” A lot of things feel dated about “first-world problems” memes, ranging from the style of the image all the way to the use of the concept of countries being first world vs. third world. But the meme was also one of the first concerning social privilege, which many people would learn about for the first time in the 2010s. —J.R.

84.

Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge

vine.co

Kylie Jenner dominated the 2010s, particularly with the launch of her Kylie Lip Kits in 2015. The now-billionaire’s lips had been the subject of gossip and envy that year when she suddenly debuted thick, pillowy lips (the result of lip fillers, though she denied it until two years later). The star kicked off something of a lip-plumping craze, and teens starting trying to plump their own lips by sticking them in shot glasses and sucking till they swelled up. Needless to say, it did not come doctor-recommended.

The rise in popularity of injectable fillers and the instabaddie takeover are inextricably linked to the Kardashian/Jenner family’s influence. Each trend made way for the other, clearing the way for a bunch of teens to damage their faces to score Kylie-level lips. —J.R.

83.

Sad Keanu

nerdlikeyou.com

Keanu Reeves kickstarted the decade as a meme after a paparazzi photo of him eating a sandwich on a park bench was shared on 4chan. “Instead of Chuck Norris, let’s make Keanu Reeves a meme,” one redditor wrote as the image started to spread. Which is interesting to think about — that this particular decade, one so heavily shaped by increasingly radicalized social media platforms, began with users of heavily male communities like 4chan and Reddit deciding to abandon an aggressively masculine meme like Chuck Norris and instead embrace a picture of disheveled loneliness. Splash News, the agency behind the photo, has attempted to remove the picture from the internet via DMCA takedowns, but Reeves and his sandwich have proved too popular (and photoshoppable) to really scrub away. As for how Reeves feels about the whole thing, at the time he told the BBC, “Do I wish that I didn’t get my picture taken while I was eating a sandwich on the streets of New York? Yeah.” —R.B.

82.

“Haven’t Heard That Name in Years”

Twitter: @goIfkart

As you read this list, you’re probably at various points looking at a meme, taking a drag on a cigarette, and saying, “Gangnam Style? Haven’t heard that name in years.” —K.N.

If you dumped a bucket of ice over your head in summer 2014, it was probably to raise money for ALS research in the Ice Bucket Challenge. The challenge involved participants dousing themselves in ice water on video, then nominating others to either do the same or make a donation to fund ALS research. Many did both, using the viral videos to promote the cause, and the ALS Association wound up raising more than $100 million in a month. The rare meme that did demonstrable good. Sadly, the man who inspired the meme died in December 2019. —J.R.

80.

“I’m in Me Mum’s Car, Broom Broom”

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A Vine of a British girl in her mum’s car (broom broom) was a perfect Vine: It makes no sense, it doesn’t follow any known comedy format, it’s vaguely cringe, and yet it’s so silly it’s guaranteed to make you laugh. The brief and glorious life of Vine thrived on these moments of surprising and unexpected humor. TikTok is the closest thing we have now to Vine, and yet it requires a certain knowledge of its memes and tropes to “get” it. “I’m in me mum’s car, broom broom” only requires you to be a human with a pulse to find Tish Simmonds’ 2014 masterpiece funny. —K.N.

79.

The Rent Is Too Damn High

Kathy Kmonicek / AP

The thing about Jimmy McMillan’s slogan for the 2010 New York gubernatorial campaign is that he’s absolutely correct: The rent IS too damn high, and he was accurately predicting the coming housing market crisis in New York City. McMillan was a minor local politics figure, having run for mayor a few years earlier. But it was the televised debates for the governor’s race in 2010 that brought him national fame for his flamboyant facial hair, gloves, and his one-issue campaign platform. He was parodied on Saturday Night Live, and a meme was born. —K.N.

78.

“What Does the Fox Say?”

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Few music videos of 2010s hit it bigger than one by Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis, as they tried to answer a perplexing question: What does the fox say? The video — which featured a cast of people dressed up in animal costumes and a whole slew of sounds a fox might purportedly say — was named the top trending video on YouTube in 2013. It’s a video that feels definitively old, and it’s hard to imagine it coming out now and being earnestly enjoyed, but we were doing lots of things more earnestly back then. And I’d bet you anything you still know the words. —J.R.

77.

Hot Dogs or Legs

times-new-romann.tumblr.com

Showing off your tan in 2013? The trendiest vacation humblebrag in 2013 was snapping a pic of your thighs and captioning it “hot dogs or legs.” The meme first went viral on Tumblr but had a long life on Instagram afterward. This was mostly annoying, unless it was actually hot dogs, which was pretty funny. –J.R.

76.

Darude’s “Sandstorm”

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One of the bright spots about the 2010s is the way that young people immediately understood and identified the parts of shit culture of the ’90s and ’00s, and mercilessly mocked it. Guy Fieri, Shrek, Bee Movie, and the hit 1999 techno song “Sandstorm” by Darude. To be fair, “Sandstorm” is probably the best and most well-known trance song, but still, it’s incredible silly. It also became a huge meme to namedrop the song in the comment sections of random YouTube videos. What’s silliest about it is the idea that it has lyrics (it does not), and they’re simply dun dun dun dun dun dun DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN dun dun dun dun. —K.N.

75.

*Record Scratch*

*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.

03:44 PM – 25 Aug 2016

*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup, that’s me. I’m a meme you could not stop seeing all over your feed in 2016. The meme was based on the clichéd movie trope in which a protagonist would begin to explain how they got themself into a ~wacky situation~. The meme spread quickly, with Twitter users aligning the text with all sorts of images. This was not the first text-based Twitter meme, nor would it be the last, but its takeover was so big it eventually became a Twitter trope in and of itself. —J.R.

74.

Double Rainbow

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What makes Paul Vasquez’s effusive awe at seeing a double rainbow distinctly from 2010 as opposed to 2019 is how it’s barely what we’d call a “meme” now. It’s a viral video, sure, and it was one of the first truly huge and popular ones. In many ways, even though it happened in 2010, it resembled the memes of the 2000s more: It went viral after Jimmy Kimmel’s show account tweeted it, and it spread over email and Gchat from person to person.

The things we think of as memes now are mostly defined by being iterative: a photo you can write new captions over and over ad nauseum and can mean a million different things. But “Double Rainbow” is just a funny video – you watch it once, you laugh, and that’s it. It’s more of the Tosh.0 version of the internet where there are funny things to be found than the Distracted Boyfriend or Pepe the frog version where there are existing memes that we make our own meaning out of. The monetization of the video was also (by current standards) primitive: He appeared in a Microsoft ad. —K.N.

73.

Mannequin Challenge

There were a lot of dance crazes and video fads in the 2010s — the suddenly widespread use of phones with cameras made it possible — but few grew as big as the Mannequin Challenge of 2016. The videos involved standing as still as a statue, usually with the song “Black Beatles” by Rae Sremmurd playing. The meme’s origins lie with a group of Florida high schoolers, and within just a few weeks there were Mannequin Challenge videos from pro sports teams, then– presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and quite possibly your family on Thanksgiving. The Mannequin Challenge went viral because it was the stationary dance craze version of the “Cha Cha Slide” — it was family-friendly, everyone could catch on pretty quickly, and it was something that could bring everyone together. —J.R.

72.

“Harlem Shake”

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In early 2013, a dance meme was born. Set to the techno song “Harlem Shake” by Baauer, the premise was to start off dancing very mildly, and when the beat drops, all hell breaks loose and a large group of people dance wildly. It’s stupid, I know. As quickly as the meme came to life, it died: A few days after the first few videos went viral, BuzzFeed’s office did a version (Ryan is in the horse mask; I run and hide into a conference room), and six days after that, the Today show anchors did one, which seemed to everyone to signal the end of the meme. But the real nail in the coffin was in 2017 when FCC chair Ajit Pai did a video to help explain the end of Net Neutrality. —K.N.

71.

Bottle Flipping

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If you were a teen in 2016, you probably flipped a bottle or two. The trend really took off when high school student Mike Senatore executed a flawless flip at his school talent show to rapturous applause. After that, everyone was flipping bottles, and a “replica bottle” signed by Senatore himself fetched over $11,000 on eBay. Teens do all sorts of kooky things, but to this day, it’s hard to watch a video of a perfect bottle flip and NOT feel unbridled joy and triumph. —J.R.

70.

Bronies

Katie Notopoulos / BuzzFeed News

The world first learned of bronies when in 2011 Wired wrote about the adult men who loved the rebooted My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic show. For the next five years, bronies seemed to dominate every aspect of internet culture — they were rampant on Reddit, 4chan, DeviantArt, Twitter, Tumblr, and even IRL conventions (and of course, horrible, horrible version of pony porn, known as “clop”). The fandom morphed through every phase of an online community, including a small faction of fascist bronies, creating fan art of the colorful horses in Nazi uniforms.

No group since furries has been as routinely mocked as the bronies. And yet, now that they’ve sort of faded away slightly, we sort of miss them. —K.N.

68.

Bee Movie

quilavastudy.tumblr.com

According to all known laws of memes, there is no way Bee Movie should have been able to go viral. And yet, posting the entire script to the 2007 movie somehow became a big Tumblr meme. The reasons for this semi-flop movie becoming a meme aren’t totally clear. Perhaps it was the realization of how grotesque the plot is (a bee and a human woman fall in love), perhaps it was that star Jerry Seinfeld was having a moment. Or maybe because it was just because it’s random and shitty movie, which is inherently funny. Unlike beloved childhood characters Shrek or SpongeBob, Bee Movie’s mediocrity is what makes it memeable. The crummier, the more nonsensical the meme, the better. The layers of ironic detachment have to be so thick that to pretend to love Bee Movie and post its entire script is something only someone with a truly online brain in 2015 could be capable of. —K.N.

67.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ (Shruggie)

Fun fact: The symbol in the center of the shruggie is a Japanese Katakana character called “Tsu.” It’s commonly used in Japanese fiction to represent the end of a line of dialogue. Kind of perfect right? Nothing left to say? Shruggie time. The shruggie was the perfect emoticon of the Obama era: a slightly worried-looking, yet pleasantly numb smirk, throwing its hands up at everything’s lack of meaning. Also, it just looks really cool! Things are going to probably only get worse over the next decade, so I say we bring the shruggie back. Let’s all really get into casual nihilism. I mean, everything’s fucked, so why not, right? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ —R.B.

66.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”

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The infectious pop song became a hit in early 2012, and by late spring, the distinctive rhyme scheme of the chorus had become a meme. Example: This still of Marty McFly and his mom in Back to the Future: “Hey I just met you / and this is crazy / but I’m from the future / and I’m your baby.” Or a tweet by @jwherrman: “HEY, I JUST MET YOU / AND MY DOG IS CRAZY / WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF / HE HAS RABIES.” —K.N.

65.

Dashcon

notsafeforweabs.tumblr.com

There was a time right around the middle of this last decade where the internet was a largely more innocent place. Nerdy fandom subcultures built around TV shows like My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Sherlock, Doctor Who, and Supernatural weren’t quite in the mainstream yet, nor did people fully understand the realities of what happens when you bring a bunch of people from the internet together in real life. That giddy naivete died with Dashcon. The unofficial Tumblr-based convention wasn’t quite a Fyre Festival–level disaster, but the level of secondhand embarrassment it generated seems to have killed an entire mode of internet use. One could even argue that Tumblr — the little social network that could — lost its last bit of grip on the larger culture of the internet. From the sad photos of cosplayers sitting in a weird ball pit to the haunting photos of empty of showrooms to accusations later of fraud, for fandom internet there was a before and after Dashcon. Based on things like Tanacon and Fyre Festival, though, it seems like those who do not learn from Dashcon are doomed to repeat Dashcon. —R.B.

64.

Galaxy Brain

reddit.com

This 2017 meme has staying power because it’s so simple and applies to so many things. The format shows several different concepts in increasing order of brainpower, culminating with something ridiculous. It speaks so perfectly to how we argue and discuss any topic online: a basic idea, a smarter take, slowly devolving into anarchy. —K.N.

63.

Loss.JPG

cad-comic.com

There’s really no way to sugarcoat what loss.JPG is. It’s a four-panel web comic about a miscarriage that has evolved into some weird Where’s Waldo? game played on social media. The story behind the infamous comic is that Ctrl-Alt-Del creator Tim Buckley wanted to make his series more mature. His audience recoiled at the mature storyline and found the whole thing incredibly lame. To make matters worse, the text-less comic was uploaded to the site with the filename loss.JPG. There’s a good chance you’ve come across loss.JPG parodies and never even realized that’s what they were. Buckley has spoken a bit about the meme over the years. “Perhaps I had miscalculated my demographic’s ability/willingness to approach such a sensitive subject matter,” he said. “As much as I hate to admit it because I certainly don’t want to make light of the subject matter itself, I found them quite amusing.”

But still the meme remains. And there’s a good possibility it will continue to stick around well into the next decade, if only because it’s too tasteless to ever really address directly. —R.B.

62.

Baby Shark

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The origins of why a techno version of a public domain campfire song became accurately described as “‘Sicko Mode’ for babies” isn’t totally clear. Normally, internet culture has no interest in what the parents of young infants and toddlers are doing (gross, old people). And yet somehow the catchy story of a multigenerational shark family (doo doo doo doo) meant for babies became inescapable. In a review for the live stage show of Baby Shark, the New Yorker wrote, “It wasn’t Disney or Nickelodeon executives who plucked it from among the millions of other videos on YouTube. Instead, babies themselves made it a juggernaut, by relentlessly clicking Play on their parents’ phones. It might be the first genuine example of baby pop culture.” —K.N.

61.

Infinity War Memes

yoongis-home-moved.tumblr.com

TV shows and movies that become their own sort of visual meme language all tend to come from the same place emotionally. There seems to be a certain secret sauce for cracking through the zeitgeist, and it largely comes down to particular kind of glee people get from taking the piss out of something serious. Avengers: Infinity War wasn’t the first Marvel film to get memed (Bruce Banner’s “That’s my secret, Cap” line from The Avengers was the first big one), but Infinity War hit in a big way. I’d argue that all came down to its shocking ending where literally half of everyone’s favorite superheroes all died horribly. First were the Infinity War spoilers-without-context posts, followed by the “I don’t feel so good, Mr. Stark” memes, and then there were even thicc Thanos memes. Ultimately, Infinity War memes didn’t have a huge staying power, but it seems to have rewired the way audiences digest big blockbuster movies; if you jump on Twitter right as you get out of the theater and start retweeting memes, you suddenly don’t feel so silly for crying when Spider-Man dies. To be honest, thicc Thanos is much more traumatizing. —R.B.

60.

Binders Full of Women

bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com

Mitt Romney made a truly weird gaffe in a 2012 debate when he answered a question about pay equality — describing how, as governor, he asked to see more women candidates for Cabinet positions and was shown “binders full of women.” Twitter, in peak parody account mode, immediately latched onto this weird and vaguely sexist turn of phrase. A parody Tumblr was made that posted photos of binders. People flocked to Amazon listings of binders to write funny reviews.

Now it seems laughable that this was the biggest gaffe of the election, the most shocking thing a politician said. Yet in the 2012 internet ecosystem, this perfectly played out a cycle of political memes that we don’t really have the stomach for anymore. No one’s making a “grab them by the pussy” Tumblr. —K.N.

59.

“Gangnam Style”

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Here’s the thing about Psy’s 2012 hit: It’s extremely good. The song is catchy, but it’s the visuals in the music video that propelled it to an international hit and the most-viewed YouTube video for years. It’s a video you want to watch more than once, one you want to show it to your friends. The fact that it was by an artist unfamiliar to most people outside of South Korea didn’t matter. The videos that would later best its YouTube record — “Despacito,” “See You Again” — did so more because of how long their respective songs stayed at the top of music charts than the nature of the video itself.

But “Gangnam Style” is a wildly entertaining as a video. The sets and backup characters change constantly, Psy’s style of deadpan serious rapping while lying on an elevator floor with a man in a cowboy hate gyrating over him is funny. Psy’s pony-riding dance is funny. It was the dance, of course, that people did at weddings and high school dances and flash mobs. —K.N.

58.

Forever Alone

knowyourmeme.com

Constructing a linear narrative out of internet content is extremely complicated — things connect across time and space in ways that make a traditional retelling almost impossible. That said, if there is a story of the internet in the 2010s, I’d argue it’s about loneliness and the bizarre and surreal ways people try to overcome it. So perhaps it’s fitting that this decade started with FunnyJunk user Azuul’s May 2010 rage comic “April Fools” — the first appearance of the phrase “forever alone.” Azuul’s swollen-faced character has more or less gone extinct, but the phrase, and more importantly, the meaning behind the phrase, have gone on to define the core irony of the internet: We are deeply isolated, yet connected enough to each other to commiserate about it. —R.B.

57.

Wholesome Memes

Twitter: @tenderfiresign

Ah, wholesome memes. In a decade in which things online (and offline!) tended to be pretty bleak, wholesome memes were a salve. In these memes, the punchline lies in the genuine surprise of an online joke actually being pure and good — particularly about “loving and supporting” one’s friends, significant other, or yourself. —J.R.

56.

There’s Always a @dril Tweet

Without a doubt, @dril is the most important person on Twitter of the 2010s. He has a specific absurdist take on living in some modern digital hellworld where his boss doesn’t let him kiss his ferrets at work, people keep asking him about fucking the Betsy Ross flag, and his candle budget is out of control. He never breaks character — there’s never a “but seriously folks, I’m sorry about that last tweet” — and has, miraculously, nearly maintained his anonymity.

@dril’s fans have taken some of his tweets and turned them into specific terms for online existence: “Corncobbing” is when someone has been owned and refuses to admit it; “help my family is dying” is a reference to the candle budget tweet.

During and after the election, people noticed that often there was an old Trump tweet that said something almost the opposite of what he had just said, coining the phrase “there’s always a tweet.” Soon people started to notice that Trump’s tweets had an odd similarity to @dril tweets and that you could often find an old @dril tweet with a parallel message. —K.N.

55.

Game of Thrones Memes

reddit.com

Like Infinity War, Game of Thrones became its own genre of meme. It wasn’t the first peak TV drama to do so — I’d argue Breaking Bad set the stage for it — but GoT did something both Breaking Bad and movies like Infinity War didn’t: It got much worse over time. Game of Thrones, especially in its early seasons, was an outrageously grim, dark show full of sex and violence, which made the memes it generated feel even more fun and risqué to share. But as the show’s ratings increased and its digital footprint became nearly unavoidable, it also became a much stupider show. Somewhere in that uncanny valley of extremely serious and incredibly stupid was the perfect breeding ground for memes. Much like the army of White Walkers pouring into Winterfell in an episode shot so dark people had to desperately try to readjust their TV settings, once internet users smell blood in the water, they’re going to swarm. —R.B.

54.

You Know I Had to Do It to Em

Twitter: @LuckyLuciano17k (deleted)

There’s something so visceral about the YKIHTDITE photo. You either get why it’s funny, or it’s just a random photo. I also think people notice things about this photo in different orders. For instance, I notice the sock tan lines and the diamond earrings first. The tweet also begs us to answer the question of what exactly “it” is that he had to do to ‘em. Luciano’s pose — hand in hand, loafered power stance — has evolved into something akin to an internet-wide Where’s Waldo? with people photoshopping him into anything they can. People even go on pilgrimages to where the photo was taken (it’s in Florida, obviously). Like I said, I can’t explain why it’s funny, but it is. Maybe that’s the “it” that he’s doing to ‘em. —R.B.

For a brief time in early 2017, people were transfixed by Turkish chef Nusret Gökçe, who would slice steak and sprinkle salt on it, but, like, in a sexy way? (See #13) A still image of “Salt Bae” tossing on the salt like it’s fairy dust became a meme representing any time we’re being our most extra selves. (Oh yeah, and then he hugged Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at his restaurant and Marco Rubio doxed him for it. Becoming a meme is a rich tapestry.) —J.R.

52.

Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams

timmie-cee.tumblr.com

The theory that 9/11 was an inside job, as evidenced by the fact that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, was floated in the 2005 documentary Loose Change, which, despite being Alex Jones–level conspiracy theory, became incredibly popular on YouTube. It takes countless levels of irony to use the phrase (along with “Bush did 9/11”) as a joke. On some level, it’s not unlikely that a young person has been exposed to Loose Change or some other truther and perhaps believes it a little bit. On another level, they’re making fun of boomers and truthers who actually believe it. And then there’s the gallows humor of laughing at a tragic event that only those too young to remember could exhibit. It’s not callousness that made this a meme; it’s a reaction to the noxious conspiracy theories that flourish online and the disillusionment of an event that led to a war that’s lasted the entire lifetime of the young people who make the joke. —K.N.

51.

Cringe

knowyourmeme.com

True cringe is something posted in earnest, and being earnest is the enemy of internet culture in the 2010s. Irony is the online currency. Cringe as a concept started on Reddit, where r/cringepics and a YouTube-focused version posted awkward and embarrassing earnest photos and videos taken from social media. R/CringeAnarchy, a more cruel board that tended to make fun of women and minorities, was banned in 2019 by Reddit (other forms of cringe boards are still active).

“Cringe” became a catchall for something embarrassing and uncool. Hillary Clinton tweeting in meme-speak was cringe. Your old LiveJournal is cringe. BuzzFeed is cringe. Everyone has posted cringe; it’s universal, and that’s why we’re so obsessed with it. —K.N.

49.

Drake/”Hotline Bling”

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Drake has been a massively popular and famous rapper for the entire decade, and there’s always been memes about pop stars. But Drake has managed to be more memeable than his musical peers, except for maybe Kanye West. There’s been the “In My Feelings” dance challenge, where people dance out the side of a moving car to his 2018 hit, the “hope no one heard that” lyric from “Marvins Room,” Drake’s myriad of faces and expressions while he watches basketball games, images of his character from Degrassi: The Next Generation, and the handwritten scrawl of the cover art for his album If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.

But it’s the video for “Hotline Bling” that was memed a million times. The Day-Glo colors and goofy dancing made for perfect GIFable moments. The meme was nearly killed when Donald Trump danced to it on Saturday Night Live, but a version managed to live on: Drake shaking his finger to one thing, and smiling in acceptance to another thing. —K.N.

48.

Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life”

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“Bring Me to Life” is like the goth cousin of “All Star.” It works for the same reason. It’s from that ridiculous Ben Affleck Daredevil movie. It has a call and response. Its sadder lyrics definitely fit my general mood about all of life right now. Also, Amy Lee can sing! This song is a genuine banger. When is the Evanescaissance coming? —R.B.

47.

Ryan Gosling

feministryangosling.tumblr.com

Hey, girl. Ryan Gosling was more than just a Hollywood heartthrob in the 2010s — he was also the basis of multiple memes. First came the Tumblr “Feminist Ryan Gosling,” in which photos of the actor were superimposed with quotes that mixed feminist texts with shit your imaginary hot-yet-sensitive boyfriend might say (this was 2011, so the sheer concept of a man openly calling himself a feminist was still a Big Deal and kind of a pantydropper, which is bleak in retrospect!!).

On a completely different note, the actor became an online sensation again in 2013. In the Vine series “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal,” creator Ryan McHenry would feed real-life spoonfuls of cereal to an onscreen Gosling, who would “reject” the bite by turning away or appearing to slap away the spoon during intense movie moments. In 2015, McHenry died of cancer when he was just 27 — and in his memory, Gosling made a Vine of himself actually eating cereal. —J.R.

46.

ASMR

me drinking iced coffee on an empty stomach knowing it’s going to make me feel like shit

05:00 PM – 11 Aug 2018

One of the decade’s hottest trends was getting a bunch of tingles down your spine. Among the biggest genres on Youtube, “autonomous sensory meridian response” videos usually involve people whispering, tapping on a glass, or even crunching on pickles straight from the jar. For some, the sounds provoke a sensory response that feels extremely calming and euphoric, and may help listeners go to sleep. Though many had long experienced the strange tingly feeling, it wasn’t until recently that people knew what to call it. Following conversations on message boards about the nameless sensation, a woman named Jennifer Allen coined the term in 2010 and made a Facebook group in its name.

From there, it entered the popular consciousness, becoming gradually more well-known over the decade. Many enjoyed it in earnest, but it also was widely parodied. There were celebrity ASMR videos, and ASMR creators became YouTube celebs in their own right. One of the biggest ones, a teen girl named Makenna Kelly, became the basis for a ton of memes. Some of these YouTubers became famous for their funnier themed ASMR videos, such as “1300s A.D. ASMR: Nun Takes Care of You in Bed (You Have the Plague).”

Self-care and wellness were major buzzwords in the 2010s, which helped popularize the relaxing videos. But perhaps the most interesting part is how social media helped many people name the bizarre neurological phenomenon they’d experienced their whole lives and find out they weren’t alone. —J.R.

45.

Cropped Gay Porn

Instagram: @http://bit.ly/2ElyLuw

Porn! It’s the central driving force of the internet (see #13). So much of the web culture created in this last decade has been defined by an explosion of diverse and global points of view suddenly entering the mainstream (and the conflicts that sometimes rise up when that happens). So it makes sense that most defining porn meme of the 2010s is cropped gay porn. It’s cheeky, it’s wildly inappropriate, and, fuck, it was so big. The meme really climaxed with the “Right in front of my salad” clip, where two adult film actors interrupt a woman peacefully eating her salad by having sex behind the kitchen counter. It’s sort of nice to think that no matter how crazy things get, there’s one thing that can still bring us all together online, and that’s porn. —R.B.

44.

Cash Me Ousside

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Imagine you’re Dr. Phil. Having helped families and individuals through countless crises on your television show, you’re feeling pretty good about your abilities. There is nothing you, a couch, and a camera can’t fix. Then one day, a 13-year-old Floridian named Danielle Bregoli comes on set and rocks your world. After she calls your audience a bunch of hoes, you repeat the accusation, just making sure you heard right. When she confirms, the audience goes berserk, and Bregoli gets upset. You hear her say “Cash me ousside, howbow dah?” five magical words used to challenge the audience to a fight. The phrase lives on in infamy. And now you, Dr. Phil, are part of one of the decade’s greatest memes. —Alex Kantrowitz

43.

Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man

ABC / MARVEL

It’s simple: Spider-Man points at another Spider-Man. What’s not to get. It’s us, looking at ourselves. Iconic. —K.N.

42.

Nickelback

youtube.com

The Canadian band has miraculously remained untouched by the trend of critical reassessment and appreciation of pop music. They occupy an uncanny valley of being wildly popular AND wildly reviled by anyone who considers themselves a person of taste. For a while, they occupied a space as the punchline to something bad (there was a time in 2014 where you could use a Facebook graph search to find which of your friends “liked” Nickelback and unfriend them).

But it was the still from the video for “Photograph” where singer Chad Kroeger holds up a photo, along with the memorable lyric “look at this photograph,” that blew up in the second half of the decade. The meme ultimately died when President Donald Trump tweeted a version where the photo Kroeger holds is of Joe Biden golfing with his son and another American who also served on the board of a Ukrainian company at the center of the impeachment inquiry. Nickelback’s label filed a copyright claim, and the video has been removed from Trump’s tweet. —K.N.

41.

Rebecca Black

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It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday! In 2011, then–13-year-old Rebecca Black made her debut with “Friday,” and looking forward to the weekend was never again the same. The music video went enormously viral, but it was widely dubbed the “worst song ever.”

Still, it was also a hit, and the song debuted at No. 72 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was covered on Glee, and Black even appeared as herself in Katy Perry’s music video for “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.).” Two years later, Black got in on the joke, releasing a sequel to “Friday” — named, of course, “Saturday.” Whether you think “Friday” slaps or is a nightmare, I’d bet you anything you’ll know all the words until you die. —J.R.

40.

“Come to Brazil”

diorc.tumblr.com

If you’ve ever clicked through on a tweet from any sort of celebrity, chances are you’ve seen the phrase “come to Brazil” written over and over in the replies. According to Know Your Meme, the first time the phrase was tweeted at a celebrity was April 2008. Then, when Justin Beieber joined Twitter in 2009, it exploded in popularity. I once asked some members of BuzzFeed Brazil why exactly it was such a common occurrence among Brazilian internet users. I was told the answer is actually pretty simple — American musicians rarely tour Brazil. But to really best understand why Brazilians mass-send it though, on a deeper level, you probably need to know the concept of “zuera,” Brazilian slang for “zoeira” which means “heavy fun.” It basically means that moment when a meme becomes a meme and spirals completely out of control. COME TO BRAZIL, MIGAAA. —R.B.

Guns or glitter? Touchdowns or tutus? One of the most inescapable party themes of the 2010s was that of the gender reveal. At gender-reveal parties, expecting parents and their loved ones gather to find out what kind of genitals their unborn child will have. This is often accomplished by cutting a cake, with pink or blue frosting revealing whether it was a boy or a girl.

Party planners tried to one-up each other, sometimes executing the big reveal using explosives — which, as you might guess, often had disastrous results. In 2018, a father-to-be accidentally ignited a wildfire in Arizona. The following year, a grandmother was killed in an explosion, and there was even a gender-reveal plane crash.

As our understanding of gender (and how it was not the same thing as sex) evolved over the decade, so did criticism and mockery of gender-reveal parties. And some people had changes of heart; in 2019, Jenna Karvunidis, the lifestyle blogger who had the first viral gender reveal in 2008, criticized the parties, which she said put “more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby.” She added, “PLOT TWIST, the world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!” —J.R.

38.

*tips fedora*

Twitter: @MoonOverlord

One of the most magical things about the internet is when we all collectively realize something is a thing. For instance, sometime between 2010 and 2012, everyone on the internet realized that every town has a couple weird guys who wear fedoras, trench coats, fingerless gloves, have terrible facial hair, and talk to women like they’re 12th-century knights. Long before these dudes turned into violent incels, there was just a really nice moment where we could all agree that these dudes were goofy and awful and fun to rag on. Swag is for boys; class is for gentlesirs, m’lady. —R.B.

37.

This Is the Future Liberals Want

36.

Ted Cruz, the Zodiac Killer

During his run for president in 2015 and 2016, a widely circulated, joking conspiracy theory accused Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of being the Zodiac Killer, the unidentified serial killer who murdered at least seven people in California between the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Cruz was born in 1970 — after the first killings — so he is probably not the Zodiac Killer, in my expert journalistic opinion. But for many people he just…seems like kind of a weird dude, right? He pretty much made the perfect candidate for a bonkers conspiracy theory about a decades-old serial killer.

It seems like Cruz got a kick out of it eventually, though. He later acknowledged the meme, tweeting an image of the Zodiac Killer’s cypher on two separate occasions. —J.R.

35.

Confused Math Lady

TV Globo

If there was one dominant theme in the 2010s, it was “I have no idea what’s going on right now.” This was expressed in a bunch of different ways, from the fact that teens and the internet curled up with increasingly obscure memes and terms meant to confuse the Olds (the boomers don’t know what “sksksksk” is) to the rise of explainer journalism like Vox or email newsletters/catch-you-up-quick news like the Skimm. We are all confused. We have no idea what’s going on. If you take the time to catch up on one story, you’ll miss what’s happening elsewhere.

Hence, Confused Math Lady, a meme featuring an actor in a Brazilan soap opera looking confused, spread on Brazilian internet. By 2016, the GIF of the confused woman became a four-panel comic with various math symbols over it, suggesting she’s trying to solve some complex calculus problem. Confused Math Lady is us, trying to understand it all. —K.N.

34.

“Old Town Road”

youtube.com

Country music fandom went mainstream in the 2010s, and with it came the rise of the “yeehaw agenda” at the end of the decade. The term described a reclamation of country aesthetics among black Americans, who have long been erased from extremely white cultural depictions of the Wild West (despite the fact that 1 in 4 cowboys were black).

The concept exploded in popularity at the end of 2018 when rapper Lil Nas X released his breakout hit “Old Town Road,” a country rap song that became one of the biggest singles of the year — only getting bigger after being disqualified from the Billboard Hot Country chart over claims that it did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music.” In response, the artist released a remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, practically daring critics to say it wasn’t country enough.

The song was a viral hit, and videos featuring it — particularly one of Lil Nas X surprising a bunch of elementary school superfans, and countless transformation TikToks — only boosted it more. The song broke records as the longest-running No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100, and Lil Nas X became the first openly gay black artist to win at the Country Music Awards. —J.R.

33.

American Chopper Yelling

vox.com

Paul Teutul Sr. and his son, Paulie, were the stars of American Chopper, a 2000s reality show about their custom motorcycle shop. Not infrequently, they argued. The show was popular at the time, but not particularly cool or internet-y during its run. So it was slightly surprising when in 2018, stills of a scene of an argument between father and son became a meme. The more esoteric the argument — the role of media communication in science, Lord of the Rings plot holes, linguistics — the better. Part of the joy of the meme was seeing macho men argue about anime, but also acknowledging that a lot of our online lives is over-the-top screaming arguments about trivial things. —K.N.

32.

Brands Acting Like People

At the end of the day, consumers are people. And people crave authenticity. It’s what they look for in their relationships, their entertainment, and, yes, their brands. Which is why the orange juice account pretends to have depression now, and everyone likes it, and it’s good.

05:06 PM – 04 Feb 2019

Largely inspired by the Denny’s Tumblr in 2013, brands’ tweets over the decade have steadily grown to become surreal, humanoid, and Extremely Online. As the companies tried to figure out how to navigate their role in online spaces, there were missteps (who could forget the SpaghettiOs tweet about Pearl Harbor, or the time DiGiorno used a hashtag about domestic violence to make a pizza joke?). Eventually, many came into their own with genuinely fun and bonkers tweets, with MoonPie, Steak-umm, and Wendy’s being standouts. But in early 2019, things kind of jumped the shark when SunnyD just really went for it with a full-on depression tweet.

“I can’t do this anymore,” SunnyD tweeted in February. Immediately, all the other memey brand accounts got in on it, basically staging an intervention for the orange drink brand in crisis. “Hey sunny can I please offer you a hug we are gonna get through this together my friend,” Pop-Tarts tweeted. “Buddy come hangout,” tweeted Corn Nuts. It was pretty bleak, and many saw it as making light of mental illness and suicide. Most recently, brands started, uh, acting horny, in a nightmare Twitter thread started by Netflix. Who knows what other horros we’ll see in 2020? Brands! —J.R.

31.

Arthur’s Fist

The children’s show Arthur turned 20 in 2016, and with it came a ton of Arthur memes. But none had nearly as much staying power as a still image of Arthur’s clenched fist. Just a flat cartoon image of an aardvark’s curled-up hand, it somehow embodied such passion, such fury, that the meme became instantly relatable. —J.R.

30.

Florida Man

Florid Man Charged With Assault With a Deadly Weapon After Throwing Alligator Through Wendy’s Drive-Thru Window http://bit.ly/2Ppcn9P

11:48 PM – 08 Feb 2016

A meme that mocks someone’s shoes might seem to be more mean-spirited than other memes of the decade. It’s a catchphrase to laugh at someone for wearing ugly footwear, after all. But the most effective examples of the meme, including the Instagram video (and then Vine) that started it all, are always about punching up — taking a small shot at someone more powerful, like a teacher, a celebrity, or even Jesus.

But like “on fleek” and other viral catchphrases and memes, the “what are those” meme spread without any control from its creator, Brandon Moore. In a 2018 interview with HuffPost, Moore said that he “felt sick” when he heard his catchphrase in the movie Black Panther, because it was a reminder of how he had missed a chance to copyright or watermark his video and had seen his creative work monetized by others without him benefitting at all. Six months after the interview, Moore died in his sleep at age 31. —K.N.

28.

Kanye West

Twitter: @kanyewest (deleted)

Is Kanye West a meme? Is he a collection of memes? Is he the original material that gets remixed into memes? Is he all of these things? Perhaps. Kanye’s “Imma Let You Finish” moment happened in September 2009, but was still humming along by the time the decade started (the internet was slower then). For a while, his Twitter account was an endless source of internet content: “I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle.” Damn. Huge mood. And then, of course, like many memes, he went full MAGA after the election of Donald Trump. For much of the decade, it seemed like all of culture either flowed from or through West. Based on the reviews for his newest album, Jesus Is King, and the general lack of buzz around his Sunday Service project, that might be something we’re leaving in 2010s. Although, he did just bless us with Silver Kanye, so who knows really. —R.B.

27.

Dat Boi

ppt.wz51z.com

In the same way that a bunch of the X-Men are all blue for some reason, the internet really likes green frogs. Sadly for Dat Boi, he hasn’t had the same staying power as Pepe or Kermit. The version of Dat Boi that we all know was first posted in April 2016. In many ways, he’s the last meme specifically from Tumblr — a nice, wholesome shitpost featuring a picture stolen from an AP physics textbook that doesn’t really make any sense but is just kind of funny. Dat Boi, in my opinion, is the platonic ideal of a meme: It’s funny, it works as a cute little wink for superusers, it doesn’t make a lot sense, and it disappears before getting turned into some dumb brand tweet. —R.B.

26.

Harambe

On May 28, 2016, a gorilla who went by Harambe was fatally shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after attacking a 3-year-old boy who had climbed into the enclosure.

The incident absolutely dominated the news cycle, and it quickly spawned a ton of memes. People made videos of Harambe’s banger of a funeral, paid homage in their yearbook photos, and even painted street art in his memory. All across the land, dicks were out for Harambe.

It’s more than a little dark for a dead gorilla and an injured toddler to become meme fodder, but that’s exactly what happened. Harambe memes should not be funny, which means they totally, always will be. —J.R.

25.

Damn Daniel

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

High schooler Josh Holz loved taunting his friend Daniel Lara by following him around, filming him, and commenting on his sneakers. When he compiled the videos and tweeted it, the world loved hearing a creepy voice saying “Damn, Daniel, back at it again with the white Vans.” The teens boys went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and received a lifetime supply of Vans. In 2019, both Daniel and Josh are in college. Josh is studying fashion and works for, you guessed it, Vans. —K.N.

24.

Tiffany Pollard

Vh1

A still of Tiffany Pollard, best known as New York from the VH1 dating show Flavor of Love, lying on a bed in her clothes, hands folded in her lap, sunglasses on, seeming to stew in quiet anger, became a meme in 2015 and continued for the rest of the decade. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Pollard described what she was actually feeling in that moment: “I just remember being so alone, so pissed off; I wanted to get away from those girls … I was really having a rough time in that moment and I think me sitting there was actually me just trying to center myself, centering myself through this bad energy I was dealing with.”

Pollard’s memeability goes beyond that one image of her lying on the bed. Her over-the-top personality is what made her a standout reality star in the ’00s, and that same quality made her perfect for reaction GIFs in the ’10s. —K.N.

22.

Blinking White Guy

Drew Scalon / giantbomb.com

One of the biggest reaction memes of the decade, the “blinking white guy” perfectly summed up when you truly just could not believe what you were seeing. The man is Drew Scanlon, and the specific blink came from a gaming video he appeared in in 2013, though it wouldn’t become a meme until early 2017. It’s a simple reaction, but it seemed to say it all at a time when the world was a confusing mess and people were feeling pretty dang incredulous a lot of the time.

“As long as they’re not mean, I don’t have a problem with the tweets,” Scanlon told BuzzFeed News in 2017. “I think we need more positivity on the internet these days.” —J.R.

21.

Minions

Universal Pictures

Ah, yes, the official mascots of every boomer’s divorce announcement Facebook post. These little bastards took over the internet with a speed that was honestly unparalleled. Their disgusting yellow bodies flooded news feeds like a DDoS attack. I think to understand exactly how the great Minionfication of the internet happened you have to separate it out into two movements. First, there were people genuinely posting Minion memes. Then came the second wave, where people started using Minion memes to make fun of the people who posted Minion memes. I’d love to say that we’re in the clear now and we can leave these beasts in the 2010s, but Minions: The Rise of Gru is coming out on July 3, 2020, so get ready, everyone. —R.B.

20.

Milkshake Duck

The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist

08:07 AM – 12 Jun 2016

Coined by @pixelatedboat, a milkshake duck is some person or entity that enjoys a viral moment and then is swiftly exposed as problematic. The ultimate example was Ken Bone, a man in a distinctive red sweater and mustache who asked a question during a presidential town hall debate in 2016 — who after becoming the meme of the night, was discovered to have a spicy sexual Reddit user history. Cancel culture may not be real, but milkshake ducking certainly is. —K.N.

19.

Gavin

Twitter: @gavinthomas

There’s a good chance you know Gavin’s face even if you don’t know Gavin’s name. It’s sort of incredible to include Gavin Thomas on this list because he was literally born in 2010 at the start of the decade. He first went viral when his uncle Nick Mastodon started putting him in Vines. Gavin really solidified himself as a meme when he turned 5 years old. Suddenly, he was everywhere. He had this extremely relatable confused grimace that really seemed to capture the zeitgeist in 2015 and 2016 (not totally sure what was going on at the time that would explain why). He’s 9 years old now and has a million followers on Instagram. For all the cautionary tales out there about what life after being a meme is like, so far it seems like Gavin’s doing all right. His family seems to be looking after him and, more bizarrely, it also feels like the internet at large is looking after him. He grew up on social media, and it does feel like we’re all invested in making sure he ends up OK. —R.B.

18.

Shrek

Dreamworks / reddit.com

Even though the first Shrek came out in 2001, it took a few years for the internet to really embrace the green Scottish ogre. Ever since, it feels like he’s buzzed just below the surface of mainstream internet culture — always there, always talking about onions. My theory as to why he’s stayed so popular? Aside from maybe a postmodern riff on the extreme overcommercialization of children’s entertainment (see Minions), I think there’s actually something really relatable about a big, fat ogre who doesn’t want to leave his swamp. It’s the perfect metaphor for being online. —R.B.

17.

“Do It for the Vine”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Vine shut down on my birthday, and because of that, I’ve always felt a weirdly intimate connection to Vine. A good friend once told me he thought of a Vine as one sentence in the visual grammar of video. Everything you need to convey one idea in a video you could do in a six-second Vine. It was a revolution and you could argue it has had a more profound legacy on how we create and share videos than bigger platforms like YouTube or Netflix. For a long time, I, like many people, believed that Vine was shut down too soon. Now, I think it actually shut down exactly when it should. Social networks probably shouldn’t last! It’s weird that we still use Twitter.

The phrase “do it for the Vine” comes from a song created by YouTuber Kaye Trill and it immediately became the anthem of a summer full of people doing extremely outrageous things. Many of the original great “do it for the Vine” posts have been deleted, sadly. But, luckily, we’ll always have the YouTube compilations. —R.B.

16.

Real Housewives

Bravo / Instagram: @smudge_lord

Memes are often tied to some technological advance, such as the six-second looping video or the quote-tweet format. At the start of the decade, animated GIFs were actually hard to make. You needed Photoshop, which is expensive and hard to use. Sourcing high-quality video to turn into a GIF was also harder. In a pre-Giphy world, truly good animated GIFs were prized and hoarded, saved in folders on a desktop to use in reactions. On Tumblr, the main source of GIFs, there was a vast gulf between the number of users actually making GIFs and the amount of people reposting them. One of the early and prolific makers of high-quality reaction GIFs was the RealityTVGIFS.tumblr.com, made by a man named T. Kyle McMahon (who now works for Bravo), who pumped out GIF after GIF from the Bravo universe, particularly the Real Housewives series. Because of the format of the show, where the women were literally asked to react directly to the camera, the Housewives were perfect for emotional reaction GIFs.

The enduring power of the Real Housewives through the decades was proven in 2019 by the popularity of an image of an early season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, where one Housewife is yelling while another holds her back, juxtaposed with a white cat named Smudge scowling at a dinner table. —K.N.

15.

The Joker

The Joker obviously existed long before social media, but the character’s glee-filled take on chaotic nihilism has, for better or worse, become inseparable from how we imagine a very specific kind of kind internet user: angry, insular, often violent, male.

Over the last decade, a symbiotic relationship has evolved between new Hollywood iterations of the Joker and the internet’s digital underbelly. Starting in 2008, Heath Ledger’s anarchist, anti-capitalist Joker became the unofficial mascot of 4chan’s Anonymous hacktivist movement. The idea of a nameless grungy psychopath burning piles of dirty money, throwing a city into chaos to satisfy his twisted rage, was a perfect avatar for a generation of Occupy-adjacent millennials graduating into a global economic recession and harnessing technology to claw back control of their own lives. Jared Leto’s 2016 take on the Joker, even though none of them would ever admit it, mirrored the rise of Gamergate somewhat perfectly, giving the world a sniveling misogynist covered in face tattoos, singularly focused on controlling the anatomy of Suicide Squad’s standout woman character Harley Quinn. All the clown prince was missing was a vape to better embody late millennial toxic masculinity. So it’s fitting, then, that we close out the decade with Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, a chain-smoking, self-described mentally ill loner who hijacks mainstream media via an act of extreme violence and sets off a reactionary protest movement.

The Joker isn’t always a serious meme, like with the most recent Joker film giving us the scene of Phoenix dancing down a flight of stairs in Harlem. Instead, it’s something closer to SpongeBob, a visual and emotional language we use to express a part of ourselves online. As for whether the Joker will continue to evolve alongside social media, well, there are rumors already circulating of another Phoenix-led Joker film, so it’s likely he’s not going away anytime soon. —R.B.

14.

Why You Lyin’

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

The beauty of Nicholas Fraser’s Vine in his backyard singing “Why you always lyin’” over the music of “Too Close” by Next is that it makes no sense for why it exists. Why is his shirt open? Why is there a toilet in the yard? Who is lying and why is he so seemingly happy about accusing someone of lying? And yet, it turns out 2015 was the right moment for this meme to exist and serve as the perfect totem for the impending post-truth internet. Now, replying with a screenshot of Fraser’s smiling face is internet shorthand for “this is a lie.” —K.N.

13.

Being Horny

.@tedcruz my young daughters and sons follow you for good wholesome content can you please explain this???

04:40 AM – 12 Sep 2017

If you think about it, being horny is like when content trends before it becomes a meme (sex is the meme). And whether it’s Ted Cruz faving a porn tweet on 9/11 or Kurt Eichenwald screenshotting Chrome tabs full of hentai, if someone is online long enough, they will be caught being horny and it will be embarrassing. The only silver lining is that it can happen to any of us. My hope for the next decade is that we all just accept that most of the time people are online, they’re also probably looking at pornography or sexting with each other. That’s what this whole thing was made for! Horny users of the web, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! —R.B.

12.

Distracted Boyfriend

Stock photo memes had a moment in 2017, but none became as big or enduring as the one that became known as “Distracted Boyfriend.” The photo depicted a man checking out a woman while his own girlfriend glared at him with disgust. It quickly became a meme, though photographer Antonio Guillem told the Guardian at the time he “didn’t even know what a meme [was] until recently.” The photo has now been around a few years, but it’s still a classic, popping up as a meme pretty often and perfectly embodying so many emotions: deception, distraction, heartbreak, loss, and hope. —J.R.

11.

Doge

shibaconfessions.tumblr.com

The only meme of the decade to inspire an actually used form of blockchain currency, Doge was a breath of fresh air in 2013 when people were starting to feel burned out about what the first iteration of what “memes” were. “Memes” now means something different — funny tweets screenshotted and posted to Instagram, or absurd teen humor. But in a darker, earlier time, “memes” were something like rage comics or the Forever Alone Guy. They took themselves seriously in a sense, and were the domain of redditors or angry 4chan guys, or something a brand used in a Super Bowl ad to seem relevant. Then, a friendly Shiba Inu appeared with funny language and words around him, just being amused and delighted by the world. This wasn’t FFFFUUUUUUU, it was such wow. Doge was here to make us happy. Of course by now, the phrase “such wow” is cringey and outdated, but it had a good long run. —K.N.

10.

Kermit

Lipton Tea

The lovable green amphibian became one of the most memeable nonhuman characters of the decade, next to perhaps only SpongeBob and Shrek. Two massive memes, Kermit sipping tea and Evil Kermit, earned the Muppet his place in meme Valhalla, and made a bunch of smaller memes (Sad Kermit puppet, Kermit in the car) take off. There’s something deeply funny about children’s characters behaving like naughty adults, by the idea of Kermit having shady opinions about others while he sips his tea or encouraging you to do something dangerous or sexual or drug-related. Part of the joy of Kermit memes is that everyone knows Kermit; he’s not obscure or niche. And yet someone, the official Twitter account for Good Morning America to be precise, called the Kermit-sipping-tea meme “tea lizard.” —K.N.

9.

Reaction GIFs

NBC / Via giphy.com

It’s hard to remember a time when reaction GIFs weren’t ubiquitous, but they really rose to prominence in 2012 with the launch of the Tumblr blog #whatshouldwecallme. The blog posted GIFs paired with ~relatable~ captions — for example, the GIF of Homer Simpson disappearing into the bushes, captioned, “When I’m in an argument with someone and realize I’m completely wrong.” This blog was a huge deal at the time, inspiring countless spinoffs, particularly at colleges. Though it was a pretty fresh meme format at the time, #whatshouldwecallme posts just look a lot like the way we communicate online today. —J.R.

8.

Guy Fieri

Fun fact: Guy Fieri is so ubiquitous and embedded in the language of American social media that we basically got to the very end of making this list and realized he didn’t have his own entry, even though he’s referenced throughout. Becoming a meme these days is pretty easy: You do something or appear in a piece of media, people latch onto it because of some innate and relatable reason, and voilà, you’re viral. But to stay a meme is a much harder feat. Usually it involves a bizarre and inexplicable alchemy of having chaotic high/low culture energy and a total lack of self-awareness. Memes can’t know they’re memes. Guy Fieri is embodiment of this. He looks like a failed ‘90s energy drink marketing campaign, he drives around in convertibles eating absolute garbage (he literally has a recipe for nachos made in a trash can) and seemingly cannot fathom that his entire persona is ridiculous. Even when he does lean into his memeness, he still doesn’t really seem to get it, like with his recent Baby Yoda photoshop. Whether Gen Z continues to latch on to the Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives host is unclear. Only time will tell whether or not Flavortown can survive the ages. —R.B.

7.

The Dress

Cecilia Bleasdale

“Black and blue or white and gold?” was the question that seemingly everyone on earth was asking on one day in early 2015. A woman in Scotland showed her friends a photo her mother took of a dress she planned to wear to a wedding, and a friend of the woman posted it to Tumblr, asking for help — “what colors are this dress?” She submitted it as a question to BuzzFeed’s Tumblr, and former BuzzFeed employee Cates Holderness reposted it to our account. From there, it blew up as a fun visual gag that was infuriating and odd.

The Dress was posted to BuzzFeed the same day two llamas escaped in Arizona, and a live TV police chase of the two animals enthralled the internet as adorable mayhem broke out. In retrospect, that two such happy, carefree, unproblematic things took over the internet on the same day seems like wild serendipity. It also feels like the last day the internet felt purely joyful, before the onslaught of the 2016 election took place and things took a darker turn.

The dress is, indeed, black and blue, even though over two thirds of the millions of BuzzFeed readers who voted said they thought it was white and gold. In 2018, a similar sensory illusion, this time auditory, went viral over whether a voice was saying “yanny” or “laurel.” But somehow, the special feeling just wasn’t there again; it felt like trying to recreate some old magic that was lost, like kids who have graduated hanging back at high school. —K.N.

6.

“This Is Fine” Dog

K.C. Green / Via kcgreendotcom.com

The dog engulfed in flames, denying that anything is wrong, is from a 2013 webcomic Gunshow by K.C. Green. In the full comic, the dog’s face eventually melts, while he continues to drink his coffee and insist he’s OK, but the version that became a symbol of the decade is just the first two panels where he says “this is fine.”

The meme has been used a lot to describe various political situations: The official @GOP Twitter used it once, and a senator even described the comic on the House floor while describing how Russian election interference was not fine. But the staying power of the dog is about how we all grin and bear it through everything that’s happened over this decade that feels like the house is on fire — the climate crisis, elections, the disappointing last season of Game of Thrones. There is nothing that captures the 2010s more than “this is fine” dog. —K.N.

5.

Smash Mouth’s “All Star”

me.me

Like Shrek, Smash Mouth’s “All Star” is another one of those millennial nostalgia points that has evolved into something bigger than itself thanks to the internet. It’s lasted for several reasons: One, it’s just a damn good song; two, the lead singer of Smash Mouth looks like Guy Fieri; three, it was on the Shrek soundtrack; four, it’s a cheery song about how shit everything is — which is exactly how it feels to be online. —R.B.

What makes “on fleek” a crucial meme for understanding the 2010s is not simply why the meme was catchy, but what happened to the meme after it left the hands of its creator and what that says about the commercialization and monetization of memes — i.e., who gets paid and who gets credit. Kayla Newman, who goes by Peaches Monroee online, was a teen when she posted a Vine musing that her eyebrows were “on fleek” because she thought she looked good. The Vine caught on because it’s simple and fun and enjoyable. Soon, brands were using the phrase on their social media. IHOP tweeted “pancakes on fleek.” Denny’s tweeted “Hashbrowns on fleek.” JetBlue and Taco Bell also used it, and the phrase all of a sudden seemed inescapable in marketing. Corporations were using Newman’s invention of a phrase without giving her any credit or compensation.

In the Fader, Doreen St. Félix wrote how “on fleek” is an example of an endless trend of black teenagers creating the memes, lingo, and jokes that make up internet culture, and how those black teens are often uncredited and don’t profit when brands use their creative works. This is in contradiction to a handful of white teens who also went viral around the same time: The “Damn, Daniel” boys got free Vans and appearances on talk shows; the Walmart yodeling boy got a record deal, as did Danielle Bregoli, the “cash me ousside” girl.

In 2017, Newman started a GoFundMe campaign to launch a beauty line, but it only raised around $17,000 of the $100,000 she was hoping for. In a 2017 interview with Teen Vogue, Newman said if she had known the phrase would catch on like it did, she would’ve been more aggressive about it, adding that she was trying to trademark the phrase. —K.N.

3.

Pepe the Frog

Matt Furie

None of us wanted to write about Pepe. What’s even left to be said about him that hasn’t been said already? He started as a chill frog in a 2008 comic by artist Matt Furie. He then became a consistent, but largely forgettable fixture of 4chan in the early part of the decade. The first time I saw him was in a meme that read, “We are the middle children of history. Born too late to explore Earth, born too early to explore space.” I thought it was pretty funny. Sometimes he’d be in memes about blasting the toilet bowl with piss to clean it. He’s something different now — a literal hate symbol that is still being used by far-right extremists and white nationalists.

In the course of his transition from slacker goof to hate symbol, he’s taught us a lot about symbols — not just how the internet works — but he’s also maybe revealed something deeper about how symbols work. Furie has famously tried to litigate Pepe away from fascists, but it hasn’t really worked. Pepe’s effectively theirs now. It’s a grim, but important reminder that all culture can be hacked and warped and poisoned. All speech, online and off, is political. And all symbols, even chill frogs, require protection and upkeep. Feels bad, man. —R.B.

2.

Crying Jordan

Stephan Savoia / AP

Michael Jordan wept during his 2009 induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, but it wasn’t until at least 2012 that the still of his face, red-eyed with tears streaming down both cheeks, became a meme. It started with sports fans but soon spread to become an enduring and universal image for faux sadness. It’s a bit of an anomaly for a celebrity photo meme; Michael Jordan isn’t particularly memey otherwise, and although he was one of the biggest celebrities in the world in the ’90s, he hasn’t been in the spotlight this decade. Perhaps his role in the movie Space Jam has lent him some level of internet irony that makes the meme so satisfying. Jordan has said through a spokesperson that he doesn’t mind the popularity of the meme, so long as it’s not used for commercial purposes. However, his former teammate and friend Charles Oakley did tell TMZ that Jordan actually isn’t amused. That feeling Jordan may have — a moment of vulnerable emotion being plastered all over the internet for laughs — of course would be best depicted by, well, the Crying Jordan meme. —K.N.

1.

SpongeBob

Nickelodeon / dearnville.tumblr.com

Did anything result in as many memes in the 2010s as SpongeBob? The show, which started in 1999 and is still going 20 years later, is so deeply entrenched in pop culture it would be hard to count how many memes have come out of it. But let’s try: There’s been caveman SpongeBob, mocking SpongeBob, tired naked SpongeBob, “ight Imma head out” SpongeBob, traveling SpongeBob, Krusty Krabs vs. Chum Bucket, evil Patrick, blurry Mr. Krabs, sleeping Squidward, and so many more.

The meme’s staying power can be attributed to a few things. It was an enormously popular show with a nearly universal sense of nostalgia for millennials and Gen Z’ers, who are the most prolific of meme creators. The simple art and animation style also beget some of the most instantly understandable reaction memes. May SpongeBob memes continue to prosper until [SpongeBob narrator voice] one eternity later. —J.R.

CORRECTION

Dec. 14, 2019, at 19:59 PM

T. Kyle MacMahon’s name was misstated in an earlier version of this post.

Drake starred in Degrassi: The Next Generation. An earlier version of this post misstated which Degrassi series he was on.

Sahred From Source link Technology

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[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: A Year in the Life of a Migrant Child in Texas, Separated From His Guatemalan Parents After Deportation Order

(BUDA, Texas) — There were water balloons at Byron Xol’s birthday party — bunches of them, filled a dozen at a time. He squeezed them with both hands, until the water burst on his face and chest. “Super good!” the 9-year-old yelled, again and again.

It’s a new catchphrase, but then, Byron spoke no English at all 15 months ago. (His first language is Q’eqchi, one of several dialects that trace back to Mayan times.) It was then that he was packed in a wooden crate by smugglers and shipped from Guatemala to the U.S., only to be grabbed immediately by border agents and ripped away from his father.

His dad was deported. Byron remained, locked away with the thousands of children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration. More than a year after the practice ended, a small number of children like Byron remain in limbo, far from their families.

The boy spent his ninth birthday in central Texas, with a host family devoted to giving him a loving home. For weeks they’d planned this day: the party in their leafy, suburban backyard, the grilled sausages, the rainbow-colored cakes, the water balloons.

His parents, meanwhile, passed the day a thousand miles away, in the gang-ridden forests Byron and his father had tried to escape. They have not seen their child in more than a year.

But they have hope. A federal judge could soon decide whether to let the father return to the U.S. If he rejects the motion, Byron may be sent home to Guatemala. So much hangs in the balance. “I think I’m going to go with you, or you’re going to come here,” the boy told his father, David, when they spoke on his birthday. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

David J. Phillip—APHolly Sewell carries Byron Xol, an immigrant from Guatemala, during his birthday party Sunday, June 23, 2019, in Buda, Texas.

Back home in Guatemala, Byron always asked his parents if it was his birthday, no matter whether June 24 was a week or several months away. “We’d tell him how many days were left,” his father said, smiling.

When the day arrived, David Xol would buy a small cake — a “pastelito” — for Byron to share with his two younger brothers. Then, between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., they would gather to pray during the hour that Byron was born, to give thanks that God blessed them with their first son.

San Miguel el Limón is a day’s drive away from the capital on narrow, winding roads. Most people are subsistence farmers or laborers. The village itself consists of around 100 small homes, most built of wood. There’s a one-story school and several evangelical churches, sanctuaries of a faith spread through Guatemala in part by American missionaries in the 1970s.

David, 27, worked a series of jobs as a laborer. He and his wife Florinda, 23, raised Byron and his brothers in their two-room, cinderblock-and-wood home. The parents slept in one bed; the brothers slept in another.

They went to church almost every day. David says he preached the word of God, just as his father did. His preaching caught the notice of gangsters who tried to recruit him; when he refused, citing his faith’s prohibition of violence, they threatened David and his eldest son, he says.

On May 4, 2018, David and Byron left San Miguel to seek asylum in the United States. Like tens of thousands of Guatemalans who have fled north, David hired a human smuggler, or “coyote,” for 45,000 Guatemalan quetzals, or about $6,000. He borrowed the money.

They were smuggled through Mexico by truck in a wooden crate. In the middle of the night, the coyote sent them and about 20 other migrants across the Rio Grande, the river that separates the U.S. and Mexico. The Border Patrol was waiting on the other side.

They were taken to the central processing center, a converted warehouse where hundreds of adults and children were detained in large cages of chain-link fencing. David was charged with illegal entry on May 19, the day after they were detained.

Two days later, an officer at the warehouse escorted him into a private room and presented him with a document he couldn’t read. If he signed it, the officer said, he could be deported with Byron. David refused.

A second officer entered. David says he was told that if he tried to seek asylum, the two would be separated. David would be detained for at least two years, while Byron would be given up for adoption. Their only option was to sign the document and be deported together.

He signed, renouncing his asylum claim. He didn’t know the document would allow the agents to take his son away. As soon as he signed the document, he says, Byron was taken away from him.

Seven days later, he was deported.

Santiago Billy—APDavid Xol sits in his one-bedroom home in San Miguel El Limon, 475 kilometers (295 miles) away from Guatemala City, on Sunday, June, 23, 2019.

David returned to San Miguel el Limón. Florinda screamed when she saw him arrive alone. Months later, he recounted the last words he exchanged with Byron in the processing center. “If I don’t return to see you, remember that I am your father,” he says he told Byron.

“He told me, ‘It’s OK, Dad. Don’t worry. I’m going to be OK.'”

Byron was sent to an old elementary school just outside Houston that had been converted to house 160 children. Operated by the nonprofit Baptist Child and Family Services, the facility had beds, common areas, classes, phones to call family and lawyers, and three meals a day. Byron was given weekly phone calls home. He cried during the first several weeks and begged his parents to bring him back to San Miguel. At times, he angrily refused to speak to his father.

More than a month after he was placed in the facility, on June 26, 2018, a judge ordered the Trump administration to stop separating families and reunite parents and children. Judge Dana Sabraw’s order required children under 5 years old to be returned to their parents in 14 days, and every other child to be returned within 30.

Children and parents began to be re-united in detention facilities, then released. But by the time Sabraw issued his order, more than 400 parents had already been deported without their children, including David. The parents faced a choice: Should they request that their children be returned to them in places they had fled? Or should they keep their children in the U.S., waiting in facilities until a relative could sponsor them?

The Xol family had no relatives or friends in the U.S. who could take Byron. With no potential sponsors, Byron could be detained indefinitely.

But David’s life back in Guatemala was troubled. He found work chopping trees at a palm oil plant an hour’s drive away. Otherwise, he stayed at home as much as possible. He knew the gang members were still out there. Other men in San Miguel questioned how he could have come home without his son and mocked him as a crybaby when he teared up about Byron.

Santiago Billy—APFlorinda Xol , sits with one of her sons, Alan, 3, in their one-bedroom home in San Miguel El Limon, approximately 475 kilometers from Guatemala City, on Sunday, June, 23, 2019.

The debt he had undertaken to pay the coyote has grown from $6,000 to $8,000. His monthly salary at the palm oil plant is about $400. His payments on the debt take up almost all of that. To pay for food, he worked extra hours. He sold his cellphone to help pay for the debt. His hopes were flagging. But then he met Ricardo de Anda, a human rights lawyer who would eventually bring David’s case to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Alerted to the Xols’ case by news coverage, de Anda went to Guatemala to discuss an option: David should petition to return to the United States, while Byron remained there.

While de Anda had brought other children back to their parents in Central America, both he and David agreed that Byron would be in danger if he returned to Guatemala. And de Anda believed David had a strong case for asylum due to religious persecution — a case he says border agents wrongly made David drop. But Byron had to stay in the United States while the case went forward.

“Byron was the key,” de Anda said. “If Byron had been repatriated, there would have been no basis, no standing, for either of them to come back.” David agreed. Byron would stay.

De Anda visited the boy, first in the suburban Houston facility where he was initially taken, then at two of the three others where he was transferred. He could tell Byron was picking up Spanish from the other boys in detention. They could speak more easily about the case.

De Anda described seeing children become depressed and unresponsive after months of detention, but Byron “wasn’t overwhelmed by his experience. His curiosity never seemed to be dampened.”

The process of applying for David to re-enter the U.S. would take months. De Anda needed to find another place for Byron to live in the meantime. Through other lawyers, he found a family.

Matthew and Holly Sewell live in a spacious, five-bedroom house near Austin, Texas. Matthew, 49, works as a software engineer; Holly, 41, stays at home with their children, 6-year-old Desmond and 5-year-old Windy.

David J. Phillip—APByron Xol and Windy Sewell, right, watch her brother, Desmond Sewell, play an electronic game Monday, June 24, 2019, in Buda, Texas.

Watching the news last summer, they heard that children were being detained after their parents had been deported. And they thought: Why not provide a real home for at least one child? “The conversation we had is, somebody needs to do it,” Matthew said. “If not us, who?”

De Anda connected the Sewells to Byron and his family. After months of phone conversations, David and Florinda Xol said Byron could live with the Sewells while David’s case moved forward. Though David and Florinda approved, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services refused several requests from the Sewells to sponsor Byron because they weren’t related to him and had no prior relationship with his family.

HHS argues those rules are necessary to protect children. De Anda and the Sewells claimed the department was detaining Byron for no reason. De Anda sued HHS in February. A federal judge in April ordered HHS to consider the Sewells as sponsors.

The Sewells got the call: Byron was being flown to Austin, and they needed to bring a wheelchair. A few weeks earlier, they had been told, Byron had broken his right leg playing soccer. They brought him home. The Sewells had hung a banner above the bed in the downstairs guest room: “Bienvenido Byron.”

Holly Sewell requested medical records from the facility that she shared with The Associated Press. They show that Byron’s thigh fracture was misdiagnosed at one point as a broken ankle.

Several days had passed after the injury before Byron was placed in a full cast. And the break was on Byron’s growth plate, the soft area in his leg that had not yet hardened to bone. If not treated properly, the break could stunt his growth. BCFS, the nonprofit that ran the facility, says it’s confident that Byron received appropriate medical care.

The Sewells took him to a doctor specializing in pediatric foot injuries and enrolled him in physical therapy. According to the Sewells, the government took the position that sponsors must care for the children they’re sheltering. The family paid for doctor’s appointments out of pocket before Matthew Sewell’s employer agreed to re-open its insurance contract so that Byron could be covered.

As he recovered, the Sewells started to see more of his personality — his wide smile, his sense of humor — and his ability to adapt. He loves to yell commands at Alexa, the digital assistant in their kitchen, in a mix of the languages he’s picked up over time: Q’eqchi, Spanish, and English. When the assistant doesn’t respond, he yells, over and over: “Hey Alexa!”

At the beginning, they relied on Google’s translation app. Holly or Matthew would ask a question in English and wait for the Spanish translation to be read out so Byron could respond.

Soon, they didn’t need to use the app for most conversations as Byron started to pick up more English. The sticky notes they had placed all over the house with English and Spanish translations — the door, the microwave, the bathroom — were rarely necessary. He plays easily with Windy, their gregarious younger daughter. And while he and Desmond sometimes fight, the two boys learned to get along and play cooperatively — to throw the ball to each other and not at each other.

But they’ve also seen signs of what he’s been through. He told the Sewells about his nightmares. In one, monsters tried to put him in a cage. In another, he was reunited with his parents, but they didn’t look like his parents anymore.

Once, when the children were playing, Holly saw Byron grab Desmond by the neck. She took him aside and asked him where he had learned to play that way. An older boy in detention used to grab him that way, he said.

For 11 months in government facilities, staffers watching Byron weren’t allowed to hug him. At his birthday party, he ran up to Holly several times for an embrace or to ride on her back. “I say, ‘Do you need a hug,’ and the answer is always yes,” Holly said.

They’ve made sure Byron stays in touch with his family. They call Byron’s parents several times a week. On the bottom bunk where he sleeps below Desmond, Byron has photos of his parents and two brothers taped to the wall. “We have to make sure they know: We’re not trying to adopt,” Matthew says. “We’re not trying to take.”

After the kids went to bed one night, they sat in their living room and talked. What would happen if David wasn’t allowed back into the United States and Byron had to return to Guatemala? How would he adjust? How would they and their children adjust? Would they ever see him again? Holly starts to cry.

“[If] we know nothing about it other than they’re safe? That’s fine. That’s perfectly fine. We still were able to provide a place for him.”

Santiago Billy—APDavid Xol, talks with his son, Byron, over a video call from his home in San Miguel El Limon on June, 23, 2019. Fourteen months earlier, Byron was packed in a wooden crate by smugglers and shipped from Guatemala to the U.S., only to be grabbed immediately by border agents and ripped away from his father.

When his sons ask David when their brother was coming home, his answer is always the same, optimistic but indefinite. “Pronto,” he says. Soon. But everything hinges on the judge’s decision.

David is one of 21 parents included in the American Civil Liberties Union’s motion that they be allowed to re-enter the country and seek asylum. The ACLU argues that David and the others were denied a fair chance to request asylum, which would have allowed them to live and work in the U.S. under protections for refugees fleeing political or religious repression.

The government argues that the settlement between the government and the ACLU that paved the way for reunifications doesn’t guarantee that families be reunified in America. If David and other parents want to be with their children, the government says, they should agree to have those children returned to them.

If the ACLU wins, David could be in the U.S. in a matter of weeks. He could eventually petition for the admission of Florinda and their other two children. If it loses, Byron will most likely return to Guatemala and all its dangers.

Several weeks ago, David sent the recording of a song to Holly. She played it for Byron. “Donde quiera que estés, donde quiera que vayas, por favor, te lo pido que regreses a mi lado, nuestro niño perdido, porque solo un milagro nos lo devolverá,” the song goes.

It translates: “Wherever you are, wherever you go, I ask you to please return to my side, our lost son, because only a miracle will bring you back to us.”

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/glimpsing-a-world-beyond-human-extinction/

Glimpsing a world beyond human extinction

Image copyright © Helen Spenceley

Stand on solid ground and look down at your feet. Go deeper – through the flesh and bones, deeper into the Earth. What’s down there? It’s hard to imagine, let alone visit – should you want to.

Writer and explorer Robert MacFarlane has been voyaging in this hidden world, going back in “deep time” to places measured in “millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years”.

Now, he has surfaced and is asking: “What will we leave behind when we are extinct?”

And he is telling us why we should care.

Image copyright © Bradley Garrett

To MacFarlane, this image could be “an annunciation scene from Giotto”.

But look more closely – in fact, it’s an “avalanche of vehicles”.

He abseiled down into an abandoned Welsh slate mine where locals have been dumping wrecked cars for 40 years. He says: “We are not just shaping the surface, but shaping the depth.”

Will our future fossils just be “car-chives” like this, along with the inevitable strata of plastic, lethal nuclear waste, and the spines of millions of intensively farmed cows and pigs?

Or can we, as a species, start to do things better?

As a Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, inspires worldwide climate-breakdown protests, and Extinction Rebellion brings central London to a standstill, it seems a good time to be looking at what MacFarlane calls the “under-land”, and to be asking ourselves: “Will we be good ancestors?”

Image copyright © Helen Spenceley

Ice, says MacFarlane, “holds incredible knowledge”. So, in 2016, after the warmest summer on record in the Arctic, he dropped down into a fissure in a melting glacier to learn lessons from it.

Shafts in the ice such as this one, in the Knud Rasmussen glacier on the east coast of Greenland, are called “moulin” (the French word for “mill”). They are formed when the ice thaws and meltwater bores its way in. Scientists now use them to measure how quickly the glaciers and the ice caps are thawing.

Entering through its mouth, MacFarlane dropped 60ft (18m). He had time to look around, to be astonished, before getting caught in the torrent of meltwater and giving the agreed signal to “get me… out of here”.

Image copyright © Helen Spenceley

The deeper you go, the deeper the blue – and the older the ice. MacFarlane says: “As you drop down, you drop further back in time.” In a few minutes, he had travelled several hundred years.

“It felt like being inside a vast alien creature… a humming blue tube,” he says.

MacFarlane says he was “calm and serene” – before being spun out of control. “It was beautiful,” he says, “except when I was getting absolutely hammered by the meltwater stream, penduluming me out and smashing me back in.”

Image copyright © Helen Spenceley

Climate change is making the glaciers retreat so quickly that, according to MacFarlane, locals in the tiny settlement of Kulusuk, in Greenland, now can’t hear when it “calves” – when vast pieces of it shear off. Not so long ago, this sporadic thunder used to be part of their soundscape.

MacFarlane says: “The sense of rapidity and change up there is enormous.”

He forms a globe with his hands, representing the Earth and its ice-covered poles, and says of rising sea levels: “At the moment, the fate of the ice is the fate of us.”

Image copyright Phil Coomes

Image caption Claire Marshall talks with Robert MacFarlane in Epping Forest

But it’s not, thankfully, a tale entirely about looming annihilation. MacFarlane says he didn’t have to travel far from his home, in Cambridge, to find a world “humming with mystery and miracle”.

In Epping Forest, I hear about his walks there with an ecologist who taught him about the “wood wide web”, a name given to the subterranean relationship between plants and fungi – also known as the “kingdom of the grey”.

Image copyright Phil Coomes

Image caption Robert MacFarlane explores an upturned tree in Epping Forest

He smiles at the softness of the spring beech leaves. “An extraordinary social network is happening just 20cm [8in] under our feet,” he says.

“Rather than a lot of individual trees, it is a community.

“Knowing this changes the ground you walk on.”

The human world wide web has existed for less than 30 years.

The roots of plants and fungi mycorrhizal have been communicating with and helping each other for 400 million.

It clearly works – fungi were the first organisms to return to the blast site around Hiroshima. They seem to be in no danger of going extinct.

MacFarlane believes that learning from the wood wide web, learning to “speak in spores”, could help save humans.

Image copyright Posiva Oy

Gaze down in to Onkalo, a nuclear fuel repository in Finland, designed to bury something that needs to be kept from humanity forever – nuclear waste.

Onkalo means “The Hiding Place.” Its chambers are being excavated 1,500ft below ground, inside 1.9-billion-year-old rock on the west coast of Finland.

Surely a deeply depressing place to visit? But MacFarlane says that he was “oddly and unexpectedly lifted”.

Radioactive waste can remain dangerous to humans for tens of thousands of years.

This structure will need to outlast the people building it – by millennia – perhaps even the species that designed it.

Image copyright Posiva Oy

MacFarlane says: “I went there expecting apocalypse, to be the darkest place that I had ever reached, where we put the worst we have ever made – but it was one of the most hopeful places I ever reached.”

“It was an example of cooperation and communication.

“It’s an incredibly complex task – the pyramids have only lasted 5,000 years.

“And there was a sort of success that was born of deep time thinking engineering, scientific expertise and community cooperation.

“The thinking that is being done at Onkalo is an example of how to be good ancestors.

“And that is a question we need to be asking ourselves all the time now.”

Image copyright © Laura Brown

MacFarlane also met some of the denizens of the “invisible city” below Paris.

There are 200 miles of catacombs and quarries beneath the streets of the the French capital.

He spent three days navigating the labyrinth, sometimes having to turn his skull sideways to go “lizarding” forwards. It was the longest he had spent without sun or sky.

MacFarlane likens this sculpture to humanity’s current existential struggle with climate change.

“This figure is half stepping out of ancient stone and half into the air of the present, half caught between these two states, unable to advance or retreat,” he says.

Image copyright Robert MacFarlane

These are notebooks from a decade of underland exploration: words also written during the hunt for the origins of the universe in an ice laboratory beneath the Yorkshire moors, while deep in ancient mines in the Mendip Hills, mountaineering to a remote Arctic “cave-art” site in Norway, and descending to a “starless river” in the Slovenian highlands.

Having now shaped all this in to a book, called Underland, hasn’t he ended up wondering why we should bother caring about how we live? Humans will just die out soon anyway.

Image copyright Robert MacFarlane

No. MacFarlane believes that a deep time awareness should, at its best, “provoke us to action not apathy”.

It should help us, he says, “to see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us”.

Image copyright Robert MacFarlane

An artist carved this owl from the rib bone of a minke whale, washed up on a beach in the Hebrides.

He gave it to the writer on one condition – that he carry it with him as a talisman, to help him see in the dark.

Did it work?

“Yes,” he says, “in that I learned not just how to see in the dark but also to see the dark, as it were.”

And?

“We are a brilliant, terrible species.”

Photographs all subject to copyright.

[jackmonkeygames]

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It seems that everyone is starting their own actual play podcast. There is all kinds of good reasons to do so. I can go on about the benefits forever but this blog post will be focused on making the podcast in the first place. I will also point out some critical mistakes that I have made while making the podcast in hopes that you can avoid them. Though this will also cover podcasting a while there is a focus onHow to start an RPG Podcast

Have a concept its OK if others are doing it

The Place

The Right equipment (And Software)

Hosting Services

The editing

When should you publish

Pitfalls (What to avoid )

How to make a RPG Podcast

The Concept for making a great Actual Play Podcast

As a gamemaster, we always have ideas for campaigns. Then our players seem to take them in unexpected directions. Because of this you could actually run the same adventure as someone else and have it totally different results. The focus will be on the players and their unique view on the game you have presented.

For Star-Fall Actual Play Podcast I have a major plot line and a whole bunch of sub plots. set for each season. I recommend that you do the same. Sure you can run the game on the fly but you will want a basic framework. you may notice that running a RPG Game for home is very different to running a game for a podcast

As for cast members I recomend anyone who is outgoing. They do not need to be expert Dungeons and Dragons players (Perhaps it’s better if they are not less editing out the arguments over the proper way to cast magic missle) The Fifth Crew only half the players have ever played a RPG before our first recording session.

Listening to Star-Fall

The Place where to record your podcast

One of the things that I have noticed is that its really hard to record in any place that is not totally quiet. So forget Pubs , Bars , Restaurants. Other factors is that some rooms echo a lot. It’s a good idea to test the space before you start recording. More than once I have been too eager to start recording to find the room echoed so bad that I was unable to use the recording. It is also important to make sure the softer voices are closer to the mic. (We have that problem in our show)

The ideal place would be with a lot of irregular surfaces (Curtains we love curtains) for more information on how to set up a recording space in your living room. How to start an RPG Podcast The good thing about Game rooms is there is a lot of bookshelves with odd shaped objects like Warhammer minnies that are great to get a nice sound.

The Right equipment for recording an RPG Podcast

There are all kinds of articles on what to buy. But they are trying to sell you something. when writing How to start an RPG Podcast we have a total budget of $20 a month.. TOTAL! So before you start going out to buy a whole lot of equipment know that the first season of Star-Fall was recorded on my Samsung S7 and cheap microphone. Yes, we do not sound amazing but we feel its more important to publish something that needs work then to never publish at all. Then find out if this is something you want to do while you start to save for the expensive microphones. I would hate for you to buy thousands of dollars of expensive sound equipment to publish three episodes then find out you hate podcasting.

The Software

What I lack in hardware I have an abundance of Software. Being that I used to work at Apple teaching the creative apps I was able to obtain the some software dirt cheep. (No I can’t send you a copy). Though even now I’m using a lot of free software.

Ubuntu Studio (Cost: FREE)

Ubuntu studio is perfect for the budget RPG Podcaster. Not only is it free but will run on most of the older laptops people are using today. it comes packed with all kinds of audio software to help with the RPG podcast. Do you not need to be a Linux expert to use it but it does help.

I’m suggesting Linux because I’m currently writing this blog on a $300 Laptop that is about four years old. Linux makes this thing faster then it ever was with windows. So basicly a cheep computer that will get the job done. https://ubuntustudio.org/

Audacity (Cost: Free)

This editing software is fantastic and simple to use. There is a reason why podcasters have been using this for years. What i like best about it is that when you remove a “Ummm” from your clip everything behind that point that you cut out snaps to the left.  (IF you have ever done any editing this is a time saver) I also find the noise reduction, Compression, & Normalizing feature to be very good especially for a free software

The one thing that you need to work on is that you cannot publish to MP3 without manualiy installing a plugin. (They do that to avoid copyright issues) Don’t worry there is instuctions

Audactiy Runs on Windows , Mac , and Linux

Audactiy https://www.audacityteam.org/

Hosting services

Here is where it starts to cost you money. We have been lucky to have Patreon backers help with this cost. You need to find a hosting company that specialises in podcasts. The reason for this is that it will save you HOURS of work otherwise. Getting everything coded into an RSS feed for a podcast is hard work (I used to hand code my RSS feeds in the early days of podcasting and I DO NOT MISS DOING THAT)

Also, Podcasting services like Libsyn do not charge you for bandwidth. This is very good if you get popular for some reason. They also give you a blog. I hightlyrecomend doing some blogging about your podcast.

Editing your RPG Podcast

My Biggest tip for learning know how to edit is do it when it does not matter. I know its tempting to record a session and go straight to work editing. But if you do it that way you are going to stress your self out trying to figure it out. It’s better to record a game that you are not going to publish so you can edit it without worrying about messing it up. (Trust me I have been teaching adults computers for 10 years) You will learn more in five min of playing with something you don’t care about than two hours on a clip that needs to be published tomorrow. Get to know Noise Reduction, Normalize & Compressor

Removing the dead space during the show

There is always a little bits of quiet duing the conversation. Or parts where everyone is waiting for the wizard’s action who happens to be in the bathroom to come back. These points nobody wants to hear these so cut them out. Our rule of editing. “If it does not add to the story cut it out ”

Side topics

Remember the last time your RPG game table stayed on topic the entire game? Me neither! These moments are very fun during the game and I can say that it can really bond a game group together, however. It is something that nobody else wants to hear. I would say that most of my time is spent cutting out this sort of chatter during the game.

The Dreaded ummmmm!

You are going to get really good ad editing out “Ummms” out of your Actual Play Podcast. It happens a lot. The cool thing about this is that its easy to do and it makes you sound like you have spend a lot of time public speaking.

New To Star-Fall?

Go back to the first episode to see what you are missing.

Star from Episode One!

The Pitfalls of recording an actual play pocast

What is a blog post on How to start an RPG Podcast without warnings? there are a few pitfalls you need to be aware of if you are going to start publishing your RPG podcast. Here are a few that I have discovered .

COPYRIGHT don’t be a dick!

Respect other peoples copyright. ok ok you don’t beleave me or feel you can do what you want. That is ok because there is a Lawyer who needs to upgrade their computer and could use some extra cash they will be contacting you shortly. I’m lucky that I’m married to an International Copyright lawyer. Though because I’m not a Lawyer this should not be taken as advice just “Get a real lawyer if you need help” This is just a blog post How to start an RPG Podcast

Avoid Logos of other companies. I don’t care how much you love Dungeons and Dragons or Monte Cook Games. The moment you put their trademarked logo on your website without their written permission, you will get the scariest letter you have ever seen in the mail from their lawyers. TO be clear this is not because they are evil its because they have to do so in order to protect themselves. So if you do get a scary letter from a lawyer don’t blame the company they are just doing what they need to do.

Do not read the rules out on your podcast word for word. I know this sort of thing comes up all the time in a game where you need to know exactly how a spell is used or how to grapple. If you do this you are going to make someone very angry. Edit that part out of your show. ITs ok to use your own words on the rules but word for word is a bad idea.

Do not use other peoples artwork! I know you have a character who just happens to look like Deadpool. Do not use the artwork in your show! Do not take images from other websites. Do not use the images in your books. (Comic book characters can fall under Trademark and Copyright so don’t use the artwork even if you drew it yourself )

Artists work very hard and we often do not get paid enough when we do get a gig. So don’t add salt to the wound by taking someone else’s artwork. Do everyone a favor and pay the artist to make something for you. I would also like to mention I’m married to a Lawyer who very protective of my artwork so don’t steal it .

If you need artwork you can hire an artist like myself.

Music.. only use public domain or music that was created for your show. Remember what I said about the game companies and their logos. How they are not evil? The Music copanies are the definition of Lawful Evil. Entire law firms are dedicated to finding people who have violated music copyright laws on their podcast so they can take your money (and lots of it)

I know many gamemasters who like to have music playing in the background. This is a bad idea for two reasons. One the copyright. Two if its playing in the background it will make your edits sound odd. IF you are going to use public domain music then add it in post edit. It will sound better.

Record all your shows before you publish the first one. I know it sounds daunting but it’s better to do that and then edit then to always be behind on publishing your episodes. That and we found that we had issues with scheduling a game night

Dice are loud on the table !!! If you have your mic on the same table as the dice it sounds like thunder to some mics. This may not be an issue but its something to be aware of. having everyone roll on their books putting the mic on a boom or somethign soft can help

Do not give up! You are not going to get famous by doing this anytime soon. It’s going to take a lot of work. Keep going. Your audiance will find you,

Each episode of Star-Fall Actual Play Podcast takes about 3 hours of editing. So expect to be spending a lot of time editing. If you can find a way to have some of your cast embers help do that

The Gamemaster should be closest to the Mic. We had one session that was a total nightmare to edit. As the GM I was the furthest away from the mic and nobody but the players could hear me. The sound quality was total crap and we had to scrap the episode. If you only have one mic it should be closest to the gamemaster. I do recommend more than one mic.

Battle is boring characters eating in the pub is fun … to listeners. The problem with fights in Rpg Podcasts is that its fun for the players but boring to the listeners. Try to focus on the characters more than the battle. Sure have battles now and then but try to keep them short or edit the shit out of them.

I hope this was helpful in How to start an RPG Podcast

Episode 14: Zapperburger Roleplaying in fast food

January 8, 2019

In “Episodes”

RPG Actual Play Podcasts for 2019

January 6, 2019

In “RPG Podcasts”

Star-Fall Season Two Episode Four Something is Hungry

March 17, 2019

In “Episodes”

The post How to start a RPG Actual Play Podcast appeared first on Star-Fall RPG podcast.

[truthinhistorycharlestonsc-blog]

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The question that is posed in the title is more than legitimate and it can just as easily be asked right here in Charleston, South Carolina. The truth in history is; the evidence shows that only a very small percentage of South Carolinians know or have ever been taught about the incredible contributions and undeniable influence Charlestown’s Founding Fathers had on the creation, formation and evolution of our great United States of America.

The evidence I have of this is through personal experience in speaking with thousands of affluent, impoverished and every where in between local Charlestonians. Certainly if we all knew more, we as a city would make a better effort to celebrate them. I was rightfully forced to memorize an almost War and Peace size, City of Charleston Tour Guide Training Manual in order to become a licensed guide. I can confidently say, with no disrespect to our great former Mayor Joseph Riley that our manual does not begin to adequately honor the local, national and international influence Charlestown’s Founding Fathers had on our great nation.

I can also proudly say that less than 5% of the content of any of my tours come from that heavily censored and one sided book.  I will also suggest to our now Mayor John Tecklenberg, that now is the time for this manual to not just be revised, it should be rewritten. We have the world as our guest as the “#1 Tourist Destination City on the Planet”. Visitors come to our great city expecting to learn truths about her history. So why do we hide so very many of our most compelling stories?

Charleston has at her fingertips the incredibly unique opportunity to become the impetus for solution but that will never be achieved by perpetuating the southern charm anecdotal narrative or the perpetuation of the largely contrived ghost tours, that unfortunately the majority of our guests experience. We all need to do a significantly better job of having these visitors from around the globe leave Charleston knowing her truths, no matter how great or how dark they may be.

We will use an excerpt from the Historic Charleston Walking Tour, King Cotton, Slavery and the Planter Aristocracy in an attempt to illustrate the greatness and influence Charlestown had over the creation, formation and evolution of our United States. Happy Fourth of July!

Our story continues here at a marker placed here by the Sons of the American Revolution in order to commemorate a massive Live Oak tree that once stood here, the Liberty Tree. This entire area then was a huge green space known as Mazyck Pasture, named for Charlestown Planter Alexander Mazyck, as is this street, Alexander.

It is here that we appropriately ask the following questions. How influential was Charlestown’s Founding Fathers to the creation and formation of the United States of America and how connected was the institution of slavery to our American Revolution?

It was here under the shade of that Live Oak that our American Revolution was first advocated in 1763 by Christopher Gadsden and his group of working class men known as the “Mechaniks”. This land we are standing on was the literal breeding ground for the American Revolution here in Charleston.

Christopher Gadsden

  It was also right here where we are standing that a crowd of thousands gathered to first hear those most famous words spoke, “that All men are created equal”. The problem was at that time Jefferson’s idea of “all men” was as exclusionary as you could possibly imagine. 

Jefferson was not only a master wordsmith, apparently he was a soothsayer extraordinaire…

  It is important that we recognize the contributions of Charlestown’s Founding Fathers in the role they played in both, the American Revolution and America’s continued evolution. Charlestown’s leading role was apparent from the very beginning of the revolution and started with the Stamp Act Congress in 1765. It continued all the way through to the creation of our United States Constitution in 1787 and only increased as our nation was achieving its Manifest Destiny as we expanded westward.

For those of you who have been to the Holy City, you know just how finite an area the Charleston Peninsula is today but imagine it even smaller in the 17th and 18th centuries. This tiny little patch of land encompassing only a couple thousand acres produced 4 out if the 39 signers of the United States Constitution. It produced 5 out the 48 signers of our nation’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation. It produced 4 out of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and chances are you may not have heard of any of them.

There is no disputing that Charlestown was the wealthiest and most powerful real estate in our then burgeoning nation. The most powerful Charlestonian of all and the only one man in the history of our nation that heavily influenced both the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787, is a man not so affectionately known here as the “Dictator” John Rutledge.

John Rutledge was actually appointed as the Chairman of the two committees that drafted, as in wrote the documents, that these two most important congresses, 22 years apart produced. John Rutledge was also the most fiercely pro-slavery Founding Father from the most fiercely pro-slavery state, South Carolina, our country has ever known.

John Rutledge at only 26 was the youngest man at the Stamp Act Congress and he was elected to chair the committee that drew up the petition to British Parliament’s, House of Lords demanding the repeal of the Stamp Act. This was where the whole idea of “taxation without representation” was created and going up against England was about as ballsy as you could get. Remember England was by far the most powerful country in the world at that time.

The Stamp Act Congress is largely viewed as the first form of a national government that has ever existed in our country and is regarded as the first coordinated political action of the American Revolution. All told only 27 men represented their respective colonies and Charlestown provided three of those men, John Rutledge, Christopher Gadsden and easily the wealthiest man in the room, Thomas Lynch.

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John Rutledge

Christopher Gadsden

Thomas Lynch Jr.

It is important to note that South Carolina was the only southern colony in attendance, noticeably absent was Virginia who at that time, one could only assume, feared reprisal from the British and chose to remain loyal to the Crown. The fact that North Carolina and Georgia were not present, is not as important because at that point there was no question that Charleston and Rutledge spoke for both of those colonies. Both Georgia and North Carolina’s origins lie in the Carolina colony which Charleston was the supreme center of.

So…..was  racially based American slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade important to our nation’s Founding Fathers and our United States Constitution? This is the easiest and most cut and dry question that can ever be answered. YES! It was not just important it was 100% fundamental and critical to the American Revolution, how our nation was created and how our United States Constitution was drafted.

The United States Constitution guaranteed slavery in four different places……

Don’t think so? The fact is the rights of Slaveholders were guaranteed in four different ways in our United States Constitution.

Article 1 Section 2 describes how representation would be calculated for the House of Representatives. The 3/5th compromise directly guarantees the southern slave holding states 3/5th representation for every slave they owned. The terminology was “adding to the whole number of free persons…. those bound to service….3/5th off all other persons”.

That is how important slavery was at the time our country came to be. The only items that came before slavery in the Constitution was the Preamble, “We the people in order to form a perfect union” and Article I Section 1, which covered the Legislative branch, the House of Representatives and the United States Senate.

Article I Section 9. Slavery was once again ensured in the Constitution in Article I Section 9. This time guaranteeing their right to at least 1808 to import slaves, as in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The wording was “the importation of persons of any state shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by Congress prior to 1808.”

Keep in mind both of these clauses are included before the Judicial or Executive branch are even mentioned, as in the institution of slavery took precedence over the Supreme Court and the President. The Founding Fathers did not stop there.

Article IV Section 2 discusses how fugitive slaves had to be returned to their rightful owners as part of the Fugitive Slave Clause. “no person held to service or labor in one state escaping into another shall, in consequence of any law there in be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered to whom such service or labor is due”.

Article V addresses how the U.S. Constitution can be amended BUT it specifically includes a double surety insisted upon by Charlestown’s John Rutledge that was iron clad. The verbiage was that “no amendment can be made prior to 1808 with regards to altering Article I Section 9” which guaranteed the right of slave importation up until at least 1808.

Any and every other part of the United States Constitution was open to be amended. The document was experimental and the Founding Fathers expected some changes would have to be made, just as long as you don’t mess with Charlestown’s right to import slaves prior to 1808.

It is true that the word “slave” is not used in the United States Constitution and modern day historians love to grasp on this, to use as an example of the Founding Father’s ambivalence and uncertainty with regards to this institution but that is a complete fairy tale and one that is easily dispelled.

Consider the man who chaired the committee largely responsible for the first draft of the U.S. Constitution was the most outspoken representative from the most fiercely pro slavery state and that the majority of that draft did comprise the final document and ambivalence goes out the window.

Who is the man and what is the state? John Rutledge, Charlestown’s own John Rutledge.

Whoa!!!…Wait a second, you must be wrong on this Dimitri, didn’t Thomas Jefferson or John Adams write our United States Constitution? No, neither did, nor was either even in the country at that time. Both Jefferson and Adams were on diplomatic missions abroad and had been for years, they were in France and England respectively. This was long before email, Skype or teleconferencing. neither wrote it nor signed it and I would argue directly influenced it. This is not meant as a slight to either these are simply the historical facts.

Thomas Jefferson

President John Adams

The history we are taught deliberately misleads us to think that there was this cohesion between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the framing of the US Constitution in 1787. There wasn’t, the fact is 11 extremely long, hard and war torn years, filled with distrust and internal turmoil, separate those 2 documents.

There was even our nation’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation written in between these two documents and ratified in 1781, neither Jefferson or John Adams signed or authored that document either but as we learned at the start of our walk a man that answered to John Rutledge did Charlestown’s own Henry Laurens, owner of the largest slave trading house that has ever existed in our nation.

Charleston’s Largest Slave Trader also presided over the group that created our nation’s first constitution….

Henry Laurens owner of the largest slave trading house to ever exist in our country

So how did it come about and how could this place Charlestown, possibly have influenced the most important document our nation has ever produced? I have never even heard of any of these men this can’t be true. This is not a difficult question to answer either, the subject is well documented although never advertised, surprisingly not even here in Charleston.

1787 Commander in Chief but still not yet President George Washington chairs the Constitutional Convention. The convention is called to make the necessary changes to the Articles of Confederation, our nation’s first constitution. The Articles were failing miserably and its glaring weakness was the lack of authority it gave the federal government.

Two months into the convention it was obvious to all the Articles of Confederation needed to be scrapped completely. Virginia came prepared namely James Madison and his “Virginia Plan”.

Chairman George Washington picked the 5 smartest men in the room, those with the sharpest legal minds, he himself not included and formed the Committee of Detail.

The responsibility of these five men were to go into a room, close the door and draft a text that reflected the agreements made by the convention thus far including the Virginia Plan. The Virginia Plan was important indeed and covered how the three branches of government would be divvied and check and balance one another, but it still would have never been ratified on its own.

Two weeks later starving, sleep deprived and jacked up on opium and coca leaves, 5 men emerged from that room…….no they did not..I am sure they did sleep and eat, among other things and as far as what they were hopped up on, they took with them to their graves.:)

Two weeks later they came out of that room with a legal document whose text constituted the 1st draft of our United States Constitution and the vast majority of which made it into the final document.

These five men drafted the most important document in world history. One that has been emulated the world over. It is a document that has been challenged over 11,000 times but only amended 27 times.

Of these five men, one became our 1st United States Attorney General and three appointed by George Washington to our inaugural United States Supreme Court.

Who chaired this Committee and was its “most influential”, Washington’s words not mine, was…….you guessed it…….Charlestown’s own, JOHN RUTLEDGE…..

It is important to note that the U.S. Constitution was not quite finished but Virginia came prepared for that too, namely George Mason and James Madison and the Virginia Declaration of Rights. James Madison introduced a bill containing 37 amendments based largely on the Virginia Declaration written by George Mason and ultimately 10 were passed and became our constitutions first ten amendments known forever as the Bill of Rights.

George Mason

The Bill of Rights

Sorry everyone I know I can be long winded on this point but this document is the foundation of our country, has affected every American that has ever been and we need to have a better understanding of it and how it came to be. So-called constitutional authorities certainly don’t help and they get me fired up with their “point of view” suggesting ambiguity. The original document including the signatures is only 4 pages long and contains 4,543 precisely crafted words. It is the antithesis of ambiguous.

The position so many blind eyed “Professors”, “Historians” and “Authors” have today and their willingness to continue to perpetuate the myth that the United States Constitution was somehow unclear when it came to slavery is laughable. That is one of the biggest lies ever told to the American people, as in you and I. There is only one other “thing” that I will ever suggest to you that is as cut and dry and either true or false and that is Calhoun’s “paternalistic” point of view of slavery.

Each of these lies are specifically and dangerously crafted and each as narrow minded as the other. Ignorance is always dangerous BUT when that ignorance comes from those that are in positions of authority and trust, it can be lethal. We are living in the midst of that type of danger with our now President Donald Trump. If you haven’t already guessed I am a “kid from Queens” as is Trump and generally someone from Queens loves everything from Queens BUT there are exceptions to every rule and Trump is mine. For you Trump supporters my apologies but he is a dangerous man.

Why can’t we just admit that the founders of this country, our great country, a country I love and I am sure you do too, transported, traded, owned, punished, profited from and led lavish lifestyles as the result of enslaving fellow human beings?

That is actually the kindest way to ask that question. I could have easily suggested they tortured, whipped, hanged, burned, humiliated, raped and or murdered, these all happened at a Slaveholders whim, with no worry for any legal repercussion.

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The facts are undeniable, they are in the print and they are in the actions. Slavery did after all legally continue unrestricted until 1865, that was 76 years after the Constitution was ratified. Where is the ambiguity in those 76 years? Do you think that the several million who were tortured and enslaved over that 76 year period felt any ambiguity? Is there ambiguity in the scars on the backs of the hundreds of thousands that were mutilated for profit? Slavery is still to this day constitutionally legal if it is imposed as punishment for a crime. Just read the 13th Amendment.

The institution of slavery was too consistently reinforced by Congress and our United States Supreme Court any time it had to be before the Civil War. Don’t think that is true? Think that the powers that be as a collective were still unsure how to treat the institution of slavery?

Consider the rights of slaveholders had to be first reinforced by Congress in 1793 with the Fugitive Slave Act. The exact wording was “an Act respecting fugitives from justice AND persons escaping from the service of their Masters”. If there was a Master there was most definitely a slave. That act passed through our United States Congress by an unambiguous 48 to 7.

Fast forward 50 plus years to 1850 when our United States Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. This further reinforced Article IV Section 2 Clause 3 of our constitution by drastically increasing the punishment for those that were viewed as aiding the enslaved.

This federal law made law enforcement agencies and judges liable to a $1,000 fine if they did not arrest a runaway slave. $1,000 in 1850? That’s the equivalent of $38,000 in today’s money. This law applied nationwide and our United States Congress passed this law with even less ambiguity than the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was passed. The vote was 62 to 4, with Ohio the only state in the Union voting against.

That law further stated that any “SUSPECTED” runaway slave could not ask for a jury trial or even testify on his own behalf after being arrested. He was not allowed to even speak for himself or to provide evidence to defend himself. In addition that law stated that any person found aiding a runaway slave by even providing them with food or shelter was subjected to 6 months in prison and a $1,000 fine. In 1850 America you could be imprisoned for an act of humanity. Well you can today too considering almost every major municipality nationwide has been cramping down on feeding the homeless without a license or permit.

How was one determined to be a runaway slave? The only thing that had to happen was for a white man to open up his mouth and declare it, that is all. All a Slaveholder had to do was swear under oath and supply an affidavit to a Federal Marshall.

Six years later it was the United States Supreme Courts turn to show just how ambiguous our political establishment was on slavery. Dred Scott was a slave who had been taken by his Master to non slave holding states and territories and he attempted to sue in court for his freedom. The Supreme Court ruled that because African Americans, whether enslaved or free were not and could not be United States citizens, therefore had no right to sue in federal court.

They want on to further set a legal precedent saying that the federal government had no right, no power and no authority to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States. Who the Supreme Court Justices credited with influencing this decision was none other that Charleston’s greatest statesman, John C. Calhoun. Calhoun had been dead for years but he was still influencing this country. The ruling was passed 7 to 2.

Are you still ambivalent on the Founding Fathers “ambiguity”? Let me pose two more questions before we go.

Why would the man still regarded as the greatest American of all time, our nation’s first President, General George Washington, pick the most outspoken man from the most fiercely pro-slavery state to legally draft our new United States Constitution? AND, even more importantly why did no one object?

The truth is that all the Founding Fathers were tied to the Institution of Slavery, in one way or another and all the Founding Fathers from both the upper and lower south including those nice tobacco farmers from Virginia were major Slaveholders. Cash crops came and cash crops went but slavery was the one essential constant.

Why do historians continue to insist on making excuses for these men? Why do our history text books choose to completely ignore the facts in order to serve this more digestible historic plate? AND….Most importantly, why do “We the People” today accept it, when there is no ambiguity that it is our constitutional right to not?

We can easily extend these questions to our modern day in every way imaginable. Does a “government for the people by the people” exist today? Did it exist then? Has it ever existed?

I am happy to be an American. I am happy to have grown up in America. Me questioning my American government is not UN-American it is as American a concept that has ever existed. Our Founding Fathers had no ambiguity on that notion either, thankfully in this case.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA…BUT LET ME ASK YOU A QUESTION | HOW COME WE WERE NEVER TAUGHT ABOUT CHARLESTOWN’S FOUNDING FATHERS? | THEY WERE WEALTHIER AND JUST AS POWERFUL AND INFLUENTIAL AS THOSE NICE “TOBACCO FARMERS” FROM VIRGINIA, HISTORIANS HAVE BEEN SO VERY KIND TO… The question that is posed in the title is more than legitimate and it can just as easily be asked right here in Charleston, South Carolina.

[fabulizemag]

Illustrator and Visual Studies professor, John Jennings will be debuting the graphic novel at the Black Comic Fest at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jan. 13th and 14th.

“Afrofuturism is black survival. It is an affirmative aesthetic and philosophic position that questions how will we survive in the future, not if we will. It asks what do we need to know, how do we need to adapt, what knowledges do we need to take with us, what new ways of being to we need to create, and how do we retain our ancestral memory.” – Deirdre Lynn Hollman, Director of Education and Exhibitions at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of The New York Public Library.

Octavia E. Butler, one of the most recognized black science fiction writers of our time will have her most celebrated novel, Kindred available as a graphic novel for sci-fi fans and comic books enthusiasts alike.

“The thing about Octavia, she was speaking of the now – If you read Parable of the Sower, we are not that far away from it. What she was doing was pretty revolutionary”, John Jennings curator, visual studies professor and illustrator of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, the graphic novel told me as we talked about Butler and her best-selling book. Kindred has the perfect balance of slave narrative, sci-fi and grim fantasy that has the ability to capture a reader’s undivided attention. Finally, those vivid descriptions of saving slaves from beatings and rape are now brilliantly illustrated for us to time-travel in color.

What initially started off as a last minute submission to compete in a call-of-entry in 2007 turned into a rollercoaster ride of denial, uncertainty, and finally completion over the course of a decade for Jennings.

“…Writing yourself into existence…” – John Jennings

“Damian [Duffy] and I have been working for twelve years, we saw it at the last minute so we killed ourselves and it was due in a week, so we didn’t even have a chance to do a serious, full-blown version of it to submit,” Jennings explained. After rushing to produce something in the midst of cross-country traveling and a multitude of FedEx deliveries, they finally got an answer.

“We failed in getting the project but we were excited about it still getting made,” Jennings told me. Disappointed but not dejected, Jennings continued to work on other projects even though he remained passionate about Kindred.

Fast-forward to 2012, Jennings traveled to San Diego Comic-Con hoping to get his work picked up by editors and publishers and coincidentally ran into ABRAMS publishing. The editor at that time was impressed by his works and disclosed that they were working on a project he might be a good fit for; that project was Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred.

“I almost passed out, I was like are you serious?” Jennings joked and explained how it took about five months for this project to come together but he still endured his share of obstacles with changing editors and rights to the book. “It’s been a ride trying to get the book together but it worked out for the best”.

Kindred is an emotional book as it takes you from the present to the past without allowing time to sort out your feelings with what you just read and what you will anticipate further on in the book. It centers a black woman that time travels back to slavery to help her ancestors and she watches first-hand slave beatings, rape, and even death.

“I ended up giving up on comics honestly because I didn’t know a lot about the independent comic scene. The way I draw is cartoony; a lot of my art is influenced by fine art methods so it doesn’t look like the run of the mill superhero comic book style.” Jennings talked about how he started as a commercial artist but has grown into an interdisciplinary researcher, curator and art professor that continues to intertwine art, societal issues and identity politics together. He is also the co-founder of the Black Comic Fest at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.

“I became a curator, and I started to realize how you see yourself is being constructed in media and I starting creating spaces like the Schomburg, where people [can] economically empower themselves. It degrades your self-esteem when you don’t see yourself in mainstream culture.”

Jennings talks about intersectionality and the importance of understanding that black history is American history. We also talked about diversity and why it’s important in comics and art. I asked Jennings if he felt non-people of color can write minority characters that seem genuine and real.

“Yes, I’ve been working with Damian [Duffy] for over a decade and he’s written robust characters of color. If you actually care about your characters and do research and respect the culture you can.” Jennings, like many black creatives, wants real diversity and not just gimmick, token characters to fill in spaces just for the sake of claiming diversity.

The graphic novel will be about 100 pages shorter than the actual novel so I asked what parts were left out and how do you condense a novel of this magnitude without losing its lure?

“We had to cut out a few things but for the most part, we have all the story. We only have 200 pages to use and Kindred is over 300. Damian successfully collapsed a lot of secondary characters but Kindred is all there. You can get more depth in writing but a picture is worth a thousand words. All of Kindred is there, you get the Kindred experience,” Jennings confirmed.

Reading Kindred is an emotional rollercoaster so I could only imagine how it could affect Jennings as the process of illustrating entails drawing, sketching and inking several times over. I asked him what was the most difficult chapter and scenes to do.

“You know the second chapter – the fire. When she figures out she has time-travelled and she is trying to save her ancestors and she’s faced with the slave catchers. It was painful to read so imagine trying to articulate that in a visual interpretation. It affected me so much I started crying on the actual page I was drawing. I had to put it off, it was almost the very last part I worked on,” Jennings stated candidly.

Jennings gives us an emotional, pivotal, and entrancing visual interpretation that is moving, memorable and powerful. HIs determination on making this project tangible can be felt in the images of this graphic novel. Will there be more Octavia E. Butler graphic novels to come?

“I’m not at liberty to say at the moment, but I would hope so but I would love to see a graphic novel of Victor Lavelle,” Jennings revealed.

You can pre-order Kindred on Amazon.

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Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

The Black Comic Fest is free to all and will be two days this year.

Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Is Now A Graphic Novel And Will Debut At The Black Comic Fest Illustrator and Visual Studies professor, John Jennings will be debuting the graphic novel at the Black Comic Fest…

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/business/why-businesses-depend-on-this-mans-technology/

Why businesses depend on this man's technology

Image copyright Twilio

Image caption Jeff Lawson’s entrepreneurial streak was first evident when he was 13

The BBC’s weekly The Boss series profiles different business leaders from around the world. This week we speak to Jeff Lawson, co-founder and chief executive of US technology company Twilio.

Jeff Lawson was all set to secure investment in his new start-up Twilio when suddenly people thought the world might be collapsing.

Back on Monday, 15 September 2008, Jeff and his two co-founders walked into a meeting with potential investors in Silicon Valley.

Getting the funding was supposed to be “almost a formality”, remembers Jeff, who was 31 at the time.

Unfortunately, US investment bank Lehman Brothers had collapsed on the Sunday night, one of the most shocking moments of the then global financial crisis.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Lehman Brothers demise caused Twilio some problems

“We walk in, and it’s like chequebooks closed,” says Jeff. “People were wondering ‘is the world melting?!’.

“My co-founders and I looked at each other and thought ‘maybe this is a dumb idea. Maybe you know, maybe this is just stupid’.”

The idea Jeff and colleagues Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis had was a software business that helps companies automate communications with their users, be it by text message, or telephone and video calls.

Fast forward to today, and San Francisco-based Twilio is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and worth more than $14bn (£10.5bn).

With annual revenue of $650m in 2008, its thousands of customers include Uber, WhatsApp, Coca-Cola, AirBnB, Twitter, eBay, and UK retailer Marks & Spencer.

So when you get a text message from your Uber driver, Twilio’s technology likely handles that interaction. The same if you telephone M&S – Twilio’s technology will route the call. Or if you get a notification via numerous firms’ mobile phone apps.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Uber is one of Twilio’s major customers

Back in September 2008 the success of Twilio was still a world away. After the funding had fallen though, Jeff says he felt as if the company – which they started work on in March of that year – was back at square one.

But determined to carry on, he and his co-founders borrowed money from family and friends to get started on what techies refer to as the MVP – minimum viable product. As in, the most basic incarnation of their idea.

When that first pot of money started to run out, Jeff – with the blessing of his wife Erica – sold their wedding presents.

Twilio’s first client was a man who had designed a website to help people find their missing mobile phone. You’d visit the site, input the number, pay a dollar, and it would ring your phone.

Jeff and his colleagues made the process more automated. Hardly world-changing, but a client is a client.

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Image caption Jeff is a regular speaker at tech events

A big break came in November of 2008 when Twilio decided to show off its technology by pranking the most influential tech blogger of that era, Michael Arrington, founder of tech news website TechCrunch.

It did this by telephoning him a recording of the pop song Never Gonna Give You Up by UK singer Rick Ashley. At the time there was a craze to unexpectedly play the song, a phenomenon that was given the term “rickrolling”.

The publicity Twilio gained caught the attention of record label Sony Music, which called Jeff the next day.

“There was a guy who was a manager of one of their bands,” says Jeff, now 41.

“And he said ‘look, we’ve been trying to have this little promotion where the band records a voice mail, and we blast it out to fans who opt into this. Can we build it?’.

“I told him ‘yeah sure, I’ve never heard of that idea’.”

With Sony Music on board as a client, Jeff was able to go back to the same investors who had previously turned him down. This time they said “yes”, and Twilio secured $1m of seed funding at the start of 2009.

It went on to raise $261m in investment, and in 2016 it floated on the stock market. Today it has 16 offices in 10 countries, and 1,275 employees.

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Image caption As is the custom, Jeff was there in person when Twilio floated on the New York Stock Exchange

Twilio’s business model sees it charge companies for every communication with a customer. For a simple text message in the US the fee is $0.0075. That doesn’t sound like much at all, but when a business is texting tens of millions of customers it can soon add up.

Growing up in Detroit, Jeff’s entrepreneurialism can be traced back to when, aged 13, he launched a video production company, despite knowing very little about it.

“My first event was a three-year-old’s birthday party,” he says. “By the time I graduated high school I was doing full wedding videos, and I made $15,000 for that. So I graduated high school with a lot of money saved up.”

Also learning to code as a teenager, he wrote computer programs for his father’s company, which provided the software for industrial printers.

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Jeff then juggled doing a computer science and film and video course at the University of Michigan with business interests including running a company called Notes for Free. This offered college students a way to share notes and study material online.

Senior jobs at ticketing firm StubHub and Amazon then followed, before the idea for Twilio was born.

The company’s success is down in part to its terrific timing – it emerged just as businesses were realising that customers, particularly the younger ones, would rather get a text message than have to make a phone call. Or if they did need to make a call, they were simply not prepared to sit on hold.

However, it has not all been plain sailing for the business, with its shares slumping in 2016 and 2017 as it missed Wall Street’s earnings targets.

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Image caption Auction and retail website eBay is another company that uses Twilio’s technology

Alex Wilhelm, editor in chief of Crunchbase, a website that tracks tech investments, says: “Starting in mid-2016 Twilio went into Wall Street purgatory, losing more than half its value and seeing its stock stagnate until early 2018.

“Since then the company has been on a tear, appreciating rapidly and drawing accolades from media and investors alike. Twilio now has to prove that its sky-high revenue multiple is not dangerously inflated and that it can increase profitability while growing into its $14bn valuation.”

On a day-to-day basis Jeff says that Twilio staff are encouraged to solve problems on their own, without the need for hand-holding by bosses.

To counteract the possibility for reckless decision making, the company also tells employees that there should be “no shenanigans”.

It is more straightforward, Jeff argues, than a vague, loftier declaration like “have integrity”.

“I know what the word integrity means,” he says. “But do I really know if what I’m doing right now has integrity? It can be hard to tell.

“But shenanigans you know, you know shenanigans.”