Yeah, basically, this week, I was kind of, I was kind of
reminiscing and, you know, reflecting on the state of things. And I remember
that there was like, one very, like, important concrete, like turning points in
like, in my life, and I would say, in like, culture and society in general,
where essentially, when memes became like a mainstream thing. So for most of my
teenage years, memes were this like, weird nerdy thing that me and my nerd
friends and random people on the internet would make and kind of laugh out on
internet forums. And if you dabble in this kind of stuff, you know, there were
memes like that the foul bachelor frog meme.
And then basically, the format used to be like, it's a square picture, it has
some like, it has some animal face in the middle of the picture, then it has
some text above it above the face and some text below the face. And so, you
know, there was this, like, one of the sort of common, pretty famous original
ones was called the Foul Bachelor Frog. And it's like a green. It's like a green
square with a picture of a green frogs face in the middle. And then basically,
the text around it would describe, describe something that kind of like single
bachelor dudes might do in that kind of waste man lives. So you know, a
particular, a lot of these kind of gross that won't be actually on the podcast.
But one of the more tame ones was, you know, something like, you know, at the
top, I would say like, "Out of shampoo?" And at the bottom would say "Use soap
instead." So this is like a classic kind of gross bachelor thing of like, poor
hygiene, or like, you know, "Spill a drink on the floor? Time will clean it up."
You know, this kind of stuff. This is what a meme used to be. It used to be
like, these formats. Yeah, there was this, this frog one. There's one called
like, Bad Luck Brian where basically was it'd be a picture of this guy with like
braces, he looks a bit like downtrodden by life. And then, you know, the text
would describe some like, misfortune that happened to to Brian. Yeah.
One of them for example is, "Jumps from tall building, doesn't die instantly" so
it is like, you know, dude is unlucky. Basically, I was thinking back then,
like, that's what a meme used to be used to be like a weird internet forum nerd
thing. And then there was like, a very, almost like, overnight, it became like,
it became something mainstream. I remember when I saw my first ever sort of
mainstream meme. I think it was on Instagram. Like, my mind was completely
blown. Because I think until the whole kind of mainstream meme culture happened,
I didn't quite, I didn't feel much of a sense of connection. I felt a sense of
connection with my fellow kind of nerd friends and internet forum people.
You know, we had this shared culture, we had these shared jokes. We had this,
like, you know, we shared this connection. I didn't feel much of that with the
wider population in general. And I remember that in 2017, yeah. I mean, the
whole kind of meme stuff started to take off before that maybe like 2013 and
2014 onwards it started to kind of go mainstream. And I remember to this day,
like the first mainstream meme that I saw, and I posted about it on Twitter. And
it's a picture of this guy sort of standing at a microphone looking kind of
smug. And the caption is, "When your joke bangs and you're waiting for your
friends to settle down"
I saw this thing and like, like something. It was such a strong feeling that I
had, like, something went off inside me of like, "Oh my God, that's like, A it's
like hilarious and B, like so relatable." And like that I had the sense of like,
something is happening here. Something new is happening here. If like someone
made this picture, and I saw it, like, things aren't gonna be the same again.
And yeah, like, you know, meme culture is just culture now, you know, it's like,
probably like 50% of all content on Instagram is memes and reposts of memes and,
you know, on Twitter as well.
