About

Alfred Matthew Yankovic (a.k.a. “Weird Al” Yankovic) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, actor, author and producer. Yankovic gained much fame and notoriety for his comedic parody versions of popular songs and their accompanying music videos.

Early Career

In 1976, Yankovic gave radio host Barret Hansen (a.k.a. Dr. Demento) a homemade audio tape containing parody songs performed with an accordion. A song from the tape titled “Belvedere Cruisin” was subsequently played on the Dr. Demento radio show. During his sophomore year of college, Yankovic was given the nickname “Weird Al” by other students and used it as his on-air persona while DJing at the university’s radio station. In 1979, Yankovic recorded the song “My Bologna” as a parody of that year’s hit rock song “My Sharona” by the Knack (shown below, left). In 1980, Yankovic released the song “Another One Rides the Bus” as a parody of the song “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen (shown below, right).

Music Videos

In 1983, Yankovic released the music video for the song “I Love Rocky Road,” a parody of the song “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Arrows (shown below, left). In 1984, Yankovic released the music video for his parody of Michael Jackson’s“Beat It” titled “Eat It” (shown below, right).

In 1985, Yankovic’s “Like a Surgeon” parody of the pop song “Like a Virgin” by Madonna was released (shown below, left). In 1988, Yankovic released the music video for “Fat,” a parody of the song “Bad” by Michael Jackson (shown below, right).

In 1992, Yankovic released “Smells Like Nirvana” as a parody of the grunge rock song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana (shown below, left). In 1996, Yankovic’s Amish-themed parody of the rap song “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio was released (shown below, right), which Coolio later claimed he had not Yankovic permission to parody.

In 1999, Yankovic released a music video for the computer hardware-themed song “All About the Pentiums,” a parody of the rock remix of the song “It’s All About the Benjamins” by Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs (shown below, left). In 2003, Yankovic was prepared to produce a music video for the song “Couch Potato” off his eleventh studio album Poodle Hat when Eminem refused to give permission to shoot it out of concerns that it may hurt his public image. This marked the first album Yankovic had released without an accompanying music video. In 2006, Yankovic released a video for his song “White & Nerdy,” a parody of the hip hop song “Ridin’” by Chamillionaire (shown below, right).

#8videos8days

On June 29th, 2014, Yankovic tweeted^[7] that he would be releasing a new music video each day for eight consecutive days starting on July 14th to promote his new album Mandatory Fun (shown below).

On July 14th, Yankovic released the music video “Tacky” as a parody of the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams (shown below, left). On the following day, Yankovic released the music video for his grammer Nazi song “Word Crimes” as a parody of the song “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke (shown below, right). The video features references to the Doge meme and the /r/hamstergifs^[8] subreddit.

Online History

The AlyankovicVEVO YouTube channel was launched on September 2nd, 2009, which gathered upwards of 245 million video views and 372,000 subscribers in the next five years.. In March, the @alyankovic^[5] Twitter feed and the “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic” Facebook^[6] page were launched, gaining more than 3.28 million followers and 1.3 million likes in four years.

Know Your Meme Episode

In 2009, Weird Al made a guest appearance for the Know Your Meme episode on auto-tune, in which he assists Internet scientist Jamie Dubs in analyzing the pitch-correction software’s rise in popularity.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

In February 2014, Yankovic guest starred as the voice of the pony Cheese Sandwich in Season 4 Episode 12 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic titled “Pinkie Pride” (shown below).

Epic Rap Battles of History

In June 2014, Yankovic played the role of scientist Sir Isaac Newton in the web series Epic Rap Battles of History (shown below).

AMA Post

On July 15th, 2014, Yankovic participated in an “ask me anything” (AMA) post on the /r/IAmA^[9] subreddit to promote his new album Mandatory Fun. Within one hour, the post gained upwards of 3,297 votes (95% upvoted).

#WeirdAlSuperBowl

On February 2nd, 2014, Twitter user paulandstorm^[11] introduced the hashtag #WeirdAlSuperbowl suggesting Weird Al perform at the 2015 Superbowl.

The idea was reignited by a Change.org petition^[12] started by Ed Ball^[10] on August 6th, 2014. Ball explained in the petition:

“For decades Weird Al has entertained fans, young and old, with his popular clever parodies and unique sense of humor. Having him headline the Super Bowl XLIX Halftime Show. would not only be overly accepted by the millions of views, but it would remain true to the standards and quality of the show business we have come to love and respect out of this prestigious event. The songs of artists that he is parodying could join him on stage to accompany, as well as other surprise appearances from well-known actors/actresses, adding more prestige and star power. The theatrics alone would be hilarious and a welcoming change, and draw a wider audience of fans that typically would not tune into the championship game or half-time show.”

Within 48 hours, the petition has gained over 100,000 signatures. The petition was covered by many sites on August 7th, including The Huffington Post^[13], CNN^[14] and Buzzfeed.^[15]

Personal Life

Yankovic was born on October 23rd, 1959 in Downey California as the only child of parents Nick and Mary Yankovic. In 1992, Yankovic became a vegan after reading the book Diet for a New America. In 2001, Yankovic married Suzanne Krajewski with whom he had a daughter Nina in 2003.

External References

About

TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit (Sometimes just TB) is the alias for the British video game critic, commentator, professional Youtuber^[1] and “let’s player” John Bain. He was originally known as TotalHalibut on YouTube and since his channel creation in 2006, has gained over 2 million subscribers, over 650 million views, and over 2000 videos as of July 2015.

Online History

Origin

Bain began his internet broadcasting career In 2004, originally he had worked as a DJ in talk radio for various services and from that he branched out as the owner and host of the online WoW Radio channel^[2][3]. Here, he hosted a variety of shows revolving around World of Warcraft, which ran for roughly 5 years, until 2010, when he changed from World of Warcraft and started casting Starcraft 2 matches^[4].

TB uploaded his first video to Youtube on July 27th, 2006, of his antics in a World of Warcraft area (shown below, left). His YouTube career began in full haste in 2010 after Bain’s employment with a financial advisory company ended^[5]. He began with YouTube commentaries of the Cataclysm Expansion for WoW (shown below, right) along with commentaries over other video games. These videos grew to be incredibly popular which caught the attention of the gaming channel network “The Game Station” (now known as Polaris) through the Starcraft 2 commentator HuskyStarcraft who offered Bain a place at the network.

Spread

After deciding to focus fully on Youtube and gaining a following, TB has modified his channel to include different video formats and branched out to different locations on the web. On Steam TB is the largest curator with over 500,000 followers^[6]. One of the more popular videos on his channel include a Magicka LP featuring the Yogscast which gained over 2 million views on the first episode (shown below, left), and a LP of Terraria featuring Jesse Cox / OMFGcata which gained nearly a million views on the first episode (shown below, right).

On the channel many other series exist such as “The Content Patch”, a gaming focused news show, “The Sale Box”, a video series about Steam Sales and the best deals, “15 Minutes of Game”, a series that takes brief looks at smaller indie games, and the “Co-Optional Podcast”, a podcast featuring Dodger / presshearttocontinue and Jeese Cox as co hosts along with a random guest. TotalBiscuit makes an appearance in the game Airmech (shown below, left) as a premium pilot and voice acted the character Vinnie & Spike in Awesomenauts (shown below, right).

“WTF is…”

WTF is… is TotalBiscuit’s most popular series of Youtube videos that is his first impressions and critique series of a video game that first began on Sept 14th, 2010 on a game titled R.U.S.E. (shown below, left). The most popular game WTF is.. is of League of Legends that was uploaded on December 2nd of 2010 gaining over 3 million views (shown below, right). The most popular non-video game related WTF is… was a video explaining the Stop Online Piracy Act gaining just over half a million views of the LoL video^[7]. Spinoffs of the series have spawned such as “Why do I own…”, “Steam sells…”, and “Let’s NOT Play…”

Starcraft

Ever since the TotalBiscuit focused on Youtube, he has been constantly getting involved in the Starcraft scene. In June of 2011, he announced his SHOUTcraft Invitational Tournament^[8], a self-funded less-serious tournament with many differences compared to default Starcraft. The first tournament took place shortly after and in the following months three more events were organised, with larger prize pools and a differing format each time.

On 21st of February 2011, TotalBiscuit uploaded a video titled “I Suck at Starcraft 2 – Episode 1 – The Suckening” (shown below, left) of him playing through ranked Starcraft 2 games. Another show “Showcraft” was also started which was described as a Starcraft 2 Variety show, featuring segments of the game including casting, coaching, custom games and community interaction during a Twitch stream. However TotalBiscuit’s other obligations forced the show into hiatus with only 20 episodes being released by the end of 2012. TotalBiscuit also owns the Axiom eSports team that specializes in Starcraft^[9].

Controversies and Copyright Claims

Sometime around late 2012, TotalBiscuit had received various copyright claims and strikes on some videos on Shining Force from Sega of Japan. TotalBiscuit reported on the issue in a Content Patch (shown below, left) and issued a channel wide boycott^[10] on all Sega video games and content ever since. On March 18th, 2013, TB had removed all the strikes from his channel^[11]. In Feburary of 2014, TotalBiscuit reviewed the game “Guise of the Wolf” (shown below, right) and FUN had both his stream and review taken down. A Reddit post^[12] was made on r/Games about the removal and received over 3,900 points with 95% upvoted. Gaming news sites such as the Escapist^[13], Talk Amongst Yourselves^[14], N4G^[15], and many others. On Feburary 26th, 2014, TotalBiscuit made a tweet confirming that both videos were back and both strikes were gone^[16].

Day One: Garry’s Incident Controversy

The Day One: Garry’s Incident was the largest controversy to have taken place that involved DMCA takedowns and took place on his channel. TB had released a WTF is… on the game in question and gave it a negative review (shown below, left). Shortly afterwards, Wild Games Studio made a copyright claim, giving the channel a strike and taking down the video. TB released a response video analyzing the situation which, as of June 2015, is his most viewed video with over 4 million views (shown below, right).

Personal Life

John met his wife Genna at Blizzcon 2005 and married soon after, and has a stepson named Orion. But because of visa and immigration problems, TB was unable to move to the United States and live with his family for nearly 2 years^[17].

In April 2014, TotalBiscuit released a vlog titled “My Little Problem” (shown below, left) announcing to his audience that he had a precancerous mass in his colon, a month after this Bain then revealed that he had developed cancer and was to began chemotherapy and radiation treatment immediately. On May 12th, 2015, TB released another vlog titled “My Big Solution” (shown below, right) going over his treatments and that the mass had been removed.

Search Interest

Editor’s Note: Previous search results for John Bain may be referring to the football / soccer player

External References

About

Squad is a term from African American vernacular English, used to refer to a group of close friends. It is commonly used in hip-hop culture, especially Trap Music and can be associated with both special friendships and organized criminal groups.

Origin

The term derives from the term squadron, which is historically an army cavalry unit. In March 24, 2004, Urban Dictionary user Greenie submitted a definition for squad^[1] defining it as “an informal group of individuals with a common identity and a sense of solidarity.” The oldest instance of the term squad being used in hip hop dates back to the group “Trap Squad”(shown below).

Spread

In 2007, the hip hop label 1017 Brick Squad Records^[2] was founded by Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane. As of 2015, this was the most popular trap label associated with the term, followed by its subsidiary label “Brick Squad Monopoly”^[3], founded by Waka Flocka Flame.

On October 4th, 2014, Youtube user Casa Di uploaded a segment of a news interview featuring a woman named Donna Goudeau. Goudeau claims she is innocent of driving a getaway car prior to shouting “Pimp Squad Baby for life” at the end. In the following half year, the video managed to gather over 9.4 million views.

The term has been heavily used on black twitter^[4], with the hashtag #Squad^[5].

Squad Goals

Squad Goals is a phrase used to represent a certain group or objective that another group is trying to imitate and reach. The phrase is ironically paired with images, normally taken from movies or TV shows; the phrase “squad looking fresh” can also be used. Multiple sites have made compilations of related tweets, including gurl^[6] and Buzzfeed;^[7] there is also a novelty Twitter account^[8]

Dicksquad

Dicksquad (also written out as D I C K S Q U A D), is a copypasta extracted from an awkward YouTube comment spoken by rapper Waka Flocka Flame. The word itself is also used in spam and shitposting.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References

Overview

2012 United States Presidential Election is the 57th quadrennial presidential election that is scheduled to be held on November 6th, 2012. The two major candidates are incumbent Democrat Barack Obama, running with Joe Biden, and Republican Mitt Romney, running with Paul Ryan. There are also three other candidates: Libertarian Gary Johnson, Green Party member Jill Stein and Constitution Party member Virgil Goode.

Background

Former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney was officially nominated as the presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in September 2012, after winning 11 primaries and caucuses during the state elections. The incumbent U.S. president Barack Obama was nominated for re-election at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) held a week later. For more information on the state elections, head over to KYMdb – 2012 Republican Presidential Primary.

Online Presence

Throughout 2012, a wide range of online communities, weblogs and interactive features emerged as hotspots of political and election-related news and memes, from globally popular services like Twitter, Reddit and Twitter to major news publications including The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, ABC News and many others.

News Media Analysis

[this section is currently being researched]

Described by some journalists as the first U.S. presidential election driven by social media and internet memes, the online popularity of both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama has been a recurring topic in the election news coverage. Beginning in early October 2012, the role of social media and memes in election campaigns became a central talking point in the news, as the number of internet memes continued to stack up with each round of the presidential debate.

Notable Developments

March 21st: Etch-a-sketch Gaffe

The first bipartisan face-off relating to the 2012 presidential election took place during Eric Fehrnstrom’s Etch-a-sketch Gaffe controversy on March 21st, 2012 when Mitt Romney’s senior campaign adviser likened its game plan to a mechanical drawing toy which can be erased by shaking it while appearing on CNN’s Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien.

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

The comment was mocked by all sides of the GOP primary candidates, as well as the Democratic National Committee, which released a whimsical video titled “Mitt Romney: Some Things You Can’t Shake Off” highlighting the candidate’s contradictory statements from his rally speeches.

April 17th: Obama the Eater of Dog

On April 17th, the political blog The Daily Caller posted an excerpt from President Obama’s biography describing his experience of trying dog meat as a child with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro.

“With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

The article was quickly picked up by others in the political blogosphere and news media as well as on Twitter, where people began using the hashtag #ObamaDogRecipes to poke fun at the President’s past culinary choices. Among the satirists were Romney’s campaign strategist Eric Fehrnstrom:

In hindsight, a chilling photo RT <a href="https://twitter.com/davidaxelrod">davidaxelrod</a>: How loving owners transport their dogs. <a href="http://t.co/KC9u3GSy" title="http://bit.ly/xGeJuZ">bit.ly/xGeJuZ</a></p>&mdash; Eric Fehrnstrom (EricFehrn) April 18, 2012

May 3rd: Life of Julia Parodies

On May 3rd, 2012, the Obama re-election campaign team released a slideshow titled “The Life of Julia”, which went through the life of a faceless female character with the government providing assistance for her at every point in her life. The slideshow was immediately criticized by political media outlets including news aggregator Breitbart, who was the first to parody the page by providing an alternative life story of a real person named Julia.

On May 3rd, 2012, Twitter users also began critiquing the slideshow with the hashtag #Julia and a handful of image parodies emerged with TheLifeOfJulia.com creating a similar interactive slideshow to show an alternative view of her life under Obama’s presidency.

 

May 29th: Romney’s iPhone App Gaffe

On May 29th, the Romney campaign launched the official iPhone app “With Mitt” on the iTunes store. The free app allowed users to add a variety of pro-Romney slogans like “I’m a Mom For Mitt” and “Obama isn’t working” to their photos and share the edited images on Facebook and Twitter. However, Mitt Romney’s attempt at raising his social media profile did not last long, as it quickly became apparent that one of the 14 banners in the app contained a spelling error (“A Better Amercia”).

The gaffe inspired a series of parody images and tweets mocking the typo while the hashtag #amercia became a trending topic the following morning according to the Twitter analytics site Twee. On May 30th, the “Amercia is With Mitt” Tumblr blog was created, which featured parody images created with the app. The same day, the tech news blog Mashable published a post titled “Amercia! Epic Mitt Romney App Gaffe Goes Viral Online”, including a slideshow of notable Amercia image macro examples. The Romney campaign has since filed an update to the app with corrections.

July 13th: Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” Gaffe

On July 13th, President Obama gave a speech at a local fire station in Roanoke, Virginia, as part of his 2012 presidential re-election campaign. In taking direct aim at Mitt Romney’s ongoing Bain Capital controversy and expanding on his administration’s plan for higher taxes on the wealthy Americans, President Obama addressed the crowd:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

President Obama’s speech in Virginia didn’t catch on immediately in the mainstream news media, as the political press had already retreated into the weekend mode by Friday evening, but many people on the Internet began discussing President Obama’s speech and his quote “you didn’t build that” through social news and media-sharing sites like YouTube, Reddit and 4chan.

By July 16th, Romney’s campaign team as well as conservative single topic blogs like Didn’t Build That and RNCResearch had caught the wind of Obama’s exploitable soundbite, which led to further reiteration and even re-contextualization of the original quote.

July 21st: @MittRomney’s Followers Skyrocket

On July 21st, 2012, election-related social media analysis site 140Elect published an article highlighting an unusual spike in Mitt Romney’s Twitter followership, which soared from the average daily gain of 3,000 to 4,000 new followers to well over 90,000 followers per day since July 20th. Although the article didn’t explicitly accuse Romney’s campaign of tempering with Twitter followers, the provided data suggested that there may have been some sort of foul play involved. As shown in the chart below, it appears there has been little correlation between the spike in the number of @MittRomney’s followers over the weekend and the total number of mentions and retweets from the same account. In addition, the media criticism blog Mediate pointed out that many of @MittRomney’s new Twitter followers had no tweets or followers, or others had posted “unintelligble or in another language.”

The article was reblogged by the Daily Dot and BuzzFeed with headlines noting that Romney is being accused of “buying out Twitter followers.” Soon, political blogs from both end of the spectrum, including The Daily Edge, Top Conservative Cat and 2012Twit, began exchanging tweets addressing the accusation, spawning more than 6,000 tweets with the hashtag #MoreFakeMitt in less than 24 hours, according to Topsy’s report. Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign digital director Zac Moffatt rejected accusations that the campaign has been buying followers for Romney, adding that they have reached out to Twitter to further investigate the rapid growth in the Republican candidate’s followership.

September 2nd: Romney’s Tax Return Theft Scandal

On September 2nd, 2012, an anonymous group of hackers posted a bulletin announcement titled “Romney 1040 Collection” via Pastebin, in which it claimed to have obtained copies of the Republican presidential candidate’s 1040 tax returns after breaking and entering the Tennessee office of PricewaterhouseCooper, the accounting firm that has been handling Romney’s tax returns, on August 25th. The group also asserted that flash drives containing encrypted copies of Romney’s 1040 files had been sent to the Republican and Democratic campaign offices and threatened to publicly release the encryption key on September 28th, unless Romney’s campaign paid the ransom of $1 million in Bitcoins, an online currency that has been known to be difficult to trace.

On September 5th, the U.S. Secret Service revealed that it began investigating the alleged theft of Romney’s pre-2010 federal tax records, which have become a key focus of attack points against the candidate during the 2012 Republican presidential race. Along with the Pastebin communique, the news of the investigation was quickly picked up by the Associated Press and featured on a wide range of tech news, internet gossip and political blogs. On September 21st, Mitt Romney released his tax returns for 2011 in an effort to quell the lasting controversies surrounding his personal financial records. The hundreds of pages of documents revealed that the candidate paid $1.9 million in taxes on $13.69 million in income, mostly from his investments, or 14.1 percent of his income.

September 17th: Romney’s 47% Remark

On September 17th, MotherJones released a hidden camera tape of Mitt Romney speaking at a private fundraiser in Florida earlier in May. When asked what his strategy was to win the presidential election, Romney answered by saying that he will focus on earning the trust of taxpaying Americans rather than convincing the 47 percent of the people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.”

“And so my job is not to worry about those people--I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.”

The following day, a single topic Tumblr titled We Are the 47 Percent was created as a parody of the We Are the 99 Percent blog, featuring photos of people holding up paper signs playing up Romney’s depiction of whiny freeloaders. Meanwhile on Democratic Underground, forum user Mr. Scorpio shared his satirical commentaries on Romney’s stance on the so-called 47% in a post titled “Fuck You, Mitt.” Romney’s official response to the leak of the camera tape was that it was “not elegantly stated” but did not deny his statements.

October 3rd: The First U.S. Presidential Debate

On October 3rd, 2012, the first 2012 U.S. presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama was held at the University of Colorado in Denver, moderated by the renowned PBS journalist Jim Lehrer. During the course of the debate, Mitt Romney remarked that he “[will] stop the subsidy to PBS” in order to reduce the national deficit despite his self-declared affection for Big Bird, a protagonist of the children’s television show Sesame Street.

“I’m sorry Jim, I’m gonna stop the subsidy to PBS, I like PBS, I love Big Bird, I actually like you too, but I am not going to keep spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.”

Minutes after Romney’s comment went on air, several Twitter accounts, including #FiredBigBird and #BigBirdRomney, were created, along with thousands of tweets criticizing Romney for his PBS budget cut proposal and the implied firing of Big Bird. By the end of the debate at 10:30 (ET), the hashtag #SaveBigBird climbed to the fourth-highest trending topic on Twitter. Meanwhile on Reddit and Tumblr, humorous image macros portraying Big Bird as an unemployed job seeker quickly began pouring in, as well as catchphrase slogans like “Save Big Bird,” “Don’t Mess with Big Bird” and “Mitt Romney Hates Big Bird.” Furthermore, dozens of Facebook fan pages carrying pro-PBS and anti-Romney slogans began to surface on the social networking site.

The “Big Bird” fiasco eventually spilled onto the campaign trail with President Obama drawing a reference to Romney’s remark on the Sesame Street character during a rally outside of Washington D.C. in which he was quoted as saying “[Romney] is getting tough on Big Bird. Wall Street can run wild again, but he’s bringing the hammer down on Sesame Street.” On October 9th, Barack Obama’s reelection campaign team released a new TV advertisement starring the Sesame Street character as its central figure. Produced in the typical fashion of a negative political ad, the faceless narrator attacks Mitt Romney’s preoccupation with PBS subsidies while turning a blind eye on the Wall Street.

October 5th: “Completely Wrong” in Google Images

On October 5th, Mitt Romney backtracked on his own 47% remark as “completely wrong” during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. In the following days, the presidential candidate’s retraction was covered by news publications and election-related news blogs, which led to a sudden upsurge in the volume of Mitt Romney’s images associated with the keyphrase “completely wrong” (shown below).

The ripple effect of Romney’s retraction in Google Images was initially reported as early as on October 9th and shortly after that, screenshots of image search results pages for “completely wrong” began to circulate on Twitter and Tumblr. On Facebook, Romney’s detractors even urged others to go to Google Image Search and type in the phrase to reinforce the association (shown below).

By October 10th, “completely wrong” had shot up to the third most searched phrase on Google’s Hot Trends list and Mitt Romney’s SEO debacle was inevitably looped back into the election coverage in the news media. While some readers speculated the possibility of a Google bombing campaign behind the phenomenon, a spokesperson for Google later confirmed with ABC News that it was a “natural search result.”

October 11th: Paul Ryan Workout Photos

On October 11th, 2012, Time Magazine published a series of Paul Ryan’s photos^[1] for his runner-up position as Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2011, which featured Ryan sitting on a workout bench while performing bicep curl exercises. According to the article, the workout theme was chosen in consideration of the congressman’s passion for fitness regime and his finess in fiscal policymaking. The same day, the viral content site BuzzFeed published several of the Time photos in a post titled “Paul Ryan Did a Beefcake Photo Shoot and It’s the Best Thing Ever”^[2] (shown below).

The TIME Magazine photos also led to the creation of a Twitter parody account (@PaulRyansBicep^[3]) and an OKCupid^[24] dating profile later that same day.

Schedule for tonight: 8pm Workout. 9pm Debate. 11pm Workout.

— Paul Ryan’s Bicep (@PaulRyansBicep) October 11, 2012

The voice behind Paul Ryan image macros soon reached a stable state with the launch of Mansplaining Paul Ryan^[4], a single topic blog that pairs up Ryan’s workout photos with patronizing or patriarchic commentaries on key election issues like economy and women’s rights. On the following day, New York Magazine^[5] described the blog as “a perfect storm” inspired by Ryan’s glamour photo release and nonspecific explanations of his tax plan during the vice presidential debate later that day.

October 12th: The U.S. Vice Presidential Debate

On October 12th, 2012, the vice presidential debate between the Democrat incumbent Joe Biden and Republican nominee Paul Ryan took place at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. In stark contrast to the first presidential debate, the candidates carried on a spirited exchange with an energetic presence and the moderator Martha Raddatz won praise for pressing both for more specific answers. Throughout the 90-minute session, Biden was repeatedly seen wearing a smirk on his face when it was Ryan’s turn to speak, which quickly became a trending topic on Twitter.

Within minutes into the debate, Twitter parody account @LaughingJoeBiden was launched at 9:20pm (ET) with the first tweet reading “LOL”, immediately followed by another parody account @BidenSmirk created at 9:21pm (ET) and the third account @LaughingBiden at 9:50pm (ET). During the first hour alone, @LaughingJoeBiden gained nearly 5,000 followers and by the end of the 90 minute debate, the account had gained more than 8,000 followers. In addition, screenshots of Biden’s smirks began making the rounds with hashtags like #malarky, #laughingbiden and #bidensmirk. By the end of the debate, image macros and photoshopped parodies had spread across Twitter as well as on Reddit.

On the following day, the Republican National Committee released a YouTube campaign advertisement featuring a back-to-back montage of Joe Biden’s smirk sequences set to Paul Ryan’s speaking points from the debate. The video gained a quarter million views in the first 12 hours of upload.

October 16th: The Second U.S. Presidential Debate

On October 16th, 2012, the second U.S. presidential debate took place at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. During the debate, an undecided voter by the name of Katherine Fenton asked both candidates about pay inequality for women, to which Romney replied with an anecdote about how he sought to form a gender-balanced cabinet during his governorship in Massachusetts:

“And I said, ‘Well, gosh, can’t we -- can’t we find some -- some women that are also qualified? I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women."

Immediately after Romney’s remark went on-air, image macros captioned with Romney’s “binder” response began circulating on Twitter, as well as the launch of parody blogs Binders Full of Women on Tumblr^[2] and novelty account @RomneysBinder on Twitter.^[3]

October 17th: Menacing Josh Romney

Following the second presidential debate held on October 16th, a still image of Mitt Romney’s son Josh staring intently as his father was speaking about his “”knowyourmeme.com/memes/binders-full-of-women">binders full of women" was turned into an image macro by Redditors titled “Menacing Josh Romney.” The first image was submitted to Reddit^[6] on October 17th with the caption “Father, strike down Obama and together we can rule the galaxy.” (shown below, left). Over the next day, instances of the image macro series appeared on the Huffington Post^[7], Buzzfeed^[8], Uproxx^[9] and the FWD.^[10] Within 24 hours, the Quickmeme page^[11] accrued 472 instances.

October 19th: Obama Mentions #Romnesia

During a campaign rally stop in Virginia on October 19th, 2012, President Obama criticized his opponent candidate Mitt Romney’s inconsistent policy stances by using the term “Romnesia”, a portmanteau of the Republican presidential candidate’s last name and amnesia, a medical condition in which one’s memory is lost either partially or in its entirety.

“He’s forgetting what his own positions are, and he’s betting that you will, too. I mean, he’s changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping – we’ve got to name this condition that he’s going through. I think it’s called ‘Romnesia’. That’s what it’s called. If you come down with a case of Romnesia, and you can’t seem to remember the policies that are still on your website, or the promises you’ve made over the six years you’ve been running for President, here’s the good news: Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions.”

Shortly after President Obama’s mention of the word, the paraphrased version of his quote appeared via his official Twitter account. Within the first 72 hours, the tweet has received more than 8,800 tweets and nearly 950 favorites.

RT if you agree: We don’t need a president with #Romnesia in the White House.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 19, 2012

October 23rd: The Third U.S. Presidential Debate

During the third and the last U.S. presidential debate on October 23rd, 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama’s plan to reduce the size of the naval forces by asserting that there are less military ships than there were at the beginning of the World War I in 1917.

Mitt Romney: “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now at under 285. … We’re headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me.”

President Obama rebutted Romney’s criticism by arguing that the quantity of naval firepower came second to their strategic roles and capabilities in the context of technologically advanced and modern military.

Barack Obama: “You mention the Navy, for example, and the fact that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets. We have these things called aircraft carriers and planes land on them. We have ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. It’s not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships, it’s ‘What are our priorities?’”

Within minutes of the candidates’ exchange on the U.S. Navy’s downsizing plans, Twitter became inundated with photoshopped images and the hashtag #horsesandbayonets, swiftly taking over the top trending topics in the United States and worldwide. In keeping up with the recent trend, several parody accounts also emerged on the microblogging service, including @HorsesBayonets and @HorsesBayonette, which was originally introduced as @RomneyBinders during the second presidential debate on October 16th. By midnight, @HorsesBayonette had gained more than 34,200 followers.

October 23rd: Twitter Bomb Threat

On October 23rd, the tech news blog IEEE Spectrum^[14] published an interview with computer scientist Panagiotis Metaxas, who warned that a form of spam known as “Twitter bombs" could be expected to spread across the microblogging service during the weeks leading up to the election. The scheme involves employing automated computer programs to retweet posts on a massive scale, misleading people to believe that a topic is legitimately trending. Metaxas further warned that if Twitter bombs were used as a last-minute tactic, they may be able to sway public opinion with misinformation prior to being discovered as spam. On November 4th, 2012, the American Free Press^[12] published an article titled “‘Twitter bombs may deliver late election surprise,” which compared the practice to the search engine manipulation technique known as “Google bombing”. The same day, Euro News^[13] published an article titled “‘Twitter bomb’ Fears Cast Shadow Over US Election Race,” which featured a video report on the Twitter bomb threat (shown below).

Turnout

Online Coverage

On election day, several news media outlets ran live YouTube streams for the first time during a United States presidential election, including Al Jazeera,^[50]ABC News,^[51]CNN,^[52] Univision,^[53] The New York Times^[54] and The Wall Street Journal.^[54] Live-updated electoral dashboards and maps were featured across many news websites, including CNN,^[22] The Washington Post,^[23] Fox News,^[24] Huffington Post,^[25] C-Span,^[26]MSNBC,^[27]CBS News^[28] and The New York Times^[29] (shown below).

Statistician Nate Silver of the New York Times blog Five Thirty Eight^[55] published a prediction^[30] that Barack Obama had a 90 percent chance of winning the presidential election. According to The New Republic,^[31] Five Thirty Eight had become 20 percent of the New York Times traffic. The parody Twitter account @fivethirtynate gained thousands of followers, which tweeted mystical cryptic ramblings from the perspective of Silver (shown below).

The last Aztec shaman whispered to me his methodology. “Don’t oversample partisans,” he warned. “Tenochtitlan fell to independent voters.”

— Nate Silver 2.0 (@fivethirtynate) November 3, 2012

Online Reaction

As the election results trickled in state by state, members of various social media sites responded and participated in different ways. On Tumblr, the analytics team from Union Metrics compiled kept a live visualization^[15] of the top tags in posts related to the election. They also color-coded posts specifically related to political parties, leaving bipartisan posts shades of gray. At a point on November 6th, there were approximately 37 posts about the election per second on the microblogging platform.^[16]

On Facebook, Barack Obama’s official page shared a photo of the President and his wife, Michelle, embracing with the caption “Four more years.”^[17] Within fifteen hours, the post had accrued more than 3.5 million likes, nearly 476,000 shares and more than 173,000 comments. The post earned two Guinness World Records, for most likes on a Facebook item in 24 hours and most likes on a Facebook item ever, which will be awarded at 11:16pm EST on November 7th.^[18]

Obama’s social media team also posted the photo to Twitter^[19], where it broke the record for most retweeted tweet of all time after receiving 302,176 retweets within an hour.^[20] By 12 PST on November 7th, the tweet had 716,258 retweets and 247,536 favorites, breaking the previous record set by Justin Bieber.^[21]

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

There was aso large volume of conversation about the election results from high-profile users on Twitter. The Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper^[32], as well as celebrities including Mariah Carey^[33], Katy Perry^[34], Lady Gaga^[35], Rashida Jones^[36], Jessica Alba^[37], Neil Patrick Harris^[38], Pitbull^[39] and Cher^[40] (shown below) among many others tweeted congratulatory messages and positive responses to the results. Collections of these tweets were featured on the Huffington Post^[41], USA Today^[42] and Entertainment Weekly.^[43]

LOVELIES WE WON ! WE WON ! YEAH WE WON ! GODBLESSPRESIDENTOBAMA! have such a headache! TOLD A FRIEND IT’S 1 OF THEBESTNITES OF MY LIFE

— Cher (@cher) November 7, 2012

Romney supporters also took to the microblogging site to express their displeasure with the results including Donald Trump, who called for a revolution^[44], and former Saturday Night Live cast member Victoria Jackson, who claimed “America died.”^[45] The next morning, Jezebel^[46] featured screenshots of racist tweets toward the president after his win.

Vice^[47] published a similar article, looking into the interests of the negative tweeters, analyzing the traits of Obama haters. Mashable^[48] also curated tweets from Conservatives, both positive and negative. The same day, the satirical single-serving site Is Nate Silver a Witch?^[49] was launched, which featured an announcement that Silver was “probably a witch” (shown below).

Hair Flag Lady

As the President was giving his acceptance speech, a woman was shown seated behind him with what appeared to be a flag in her hair. During the speech, the hashtags #HairFlag^[56] and #FlagLady^[57] both began to trend, but people also discussed the woman with the hashtags #FlagHead^[58], #FlagHair^[59] and #FlagInHairLady.^[60] Screenshots of the woman, along with image macros and other commentary, were featured on a range of news sites and internet culture blogs including Business Insider^[61], Buzzfeed^[62], the Independent^[63], Politico^[64], Mashable^[65] and ABC News.^[66]

Inauguration

On January 21st, 2013, Obama was inaugurated into office for his second term as President of the United States of America. The same day, his full inauguration speech was uploaded to YouTube on TheNewYorkTimes channel (shown below). According to the Internet news site The Daily Dot,^[68] reported that there were more 1.1 million inauguration-related tweets sent during the course of the ceremony

Shortly after the ceremony, Redditor ZtiWinterfell submitted a post to the /r/pics^[71] subreddit, featuring a photograph of former president Bill Clinton looking at Kelly Clarkson during her inaugural performance. (shown below, left). Within six hours, the post received over 36,700 up votes and 1,345 comments. Redditor PoisonIvvy responded to the post with a linked photograph of New York Senator Charles Schumer grinning at Beyoncé Knowles during her performance of the national anthem (shown below, right). The same day, the New York Post^[69] published an article with the Clinton photo.

Also on January 21st, the viral content site BuzzFeed^[67] published a round-up of notable “Beyonce moments” from the inauguration. Meanwhile, Gawker^[75] published an animated GIF of Michelle Obama reacting to Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner (shown below), calling the gesture a “hall-of-fame shade-throwing moment.”

Search Interest

Candidate Search Trends

External References

[this section is a work in progress]

About

Roxane Gay is an American novelist and essayist known online as the founder of Tiny Hardcore Press and a writer for online literary site The Rumpus.

History

The Rumpus

On September 17th, 2009, Gay published her first post on The Rumpus,^[7] a literary website founded in January 2009, titled “Funny Women #2 A Play About Post Racial America in Seven Acts.” She went on to act as the site’s essay editor, until she stepped down^[10] on July 26th, 2014, becoming the Essays Editor Emeritus. During her time as an editor she published more than 50 pieces of original content.

Tiny Hardcore Press

Gay founded Hardcore Press,^[13] an independent publisher focused on publishing pocket-sized chapbooks, in 2010. The press published their first title, Normally Special, on March 1st, 2011. As of August 2014, the press has published ten books including short story and essay collections. Gay explained her drive for running the press in an interview with Side B Magazine:^[15]

“Finding such beautiful books and knowing I have a small part in putting them out into the world is what makes it all worth it and then some. It’s a privilege even at its most frustrating.”

Bad Feminist

Gay’s essay collection Bad Feminist was published on August 5th, 2014, by Harper Perennial. As of August 6th, the book was the #1 best seller in Amazon’s women writer’s in women’s studies sections. The essay collection gained positive reviews for many sites including Slate^[17], Flavorwire^[18] and The Huffington Post.^[19]

Social Media Presence

Gay created her Facebook page^[1] on June 4th, 2014, within a month it gained over 800 likes. As of August 2014, her Twitter account^[2] has gained over 22,000 followers. She started her Tumblr RoxaneGay^[3] on May 6th, 2011.

Reputation

On July 14th, 2014, Flavorwire^[8] named Gay as one of “The 35 Writers Who Run the Literary Internet” describing her online influence:

“Gay suggests books on Goodreads, writes about things she cooks (and, even in those same pieces, a whole lot more) on her Tumblr, and tweets all the time. Between all of that, her widely published essays, and her fiction, readers just can’t get enough of her.”

All four of Gays books, including Ayiti (2011), An Untamed State (2014), Bad Feminist (2014) and Hunger (2016) have over a four star rating on the readers social media site GoodReads.^[9] Gay is also a frequent contributor to Buzzfeed^[11] and Salon.^[12]

Search Interest

External References

About

Alex From Target is a nickname given to American teenage cashier Alex Christopher LaBeouf who rose to global viral fame on Twitter for his apparent charming look after an anonymous customer tweeted a picture of him scanning and bagging items at a Target retail store in Texas. Since entering circulation in early November 2014, the hashtag #AlexFromTarget quickly became a worldwide trending topic and went on to inspire several novelty accounts and fan art image macros on Instagram and Tumblr.

Origin

On November 2nd, Twitter user @auscalum^[1] tweeted a picture of a Target employee wearing the name tag “Alex” and bagging items behind the cashier. In the following 24 hours, the tweet gained over 1,000 retweets and 2,000 favorites.^[2]

Spread

Within the 24 hour period on November 2nd, the hashtag #AlexFromTarget was mentioned more than one million times on Twitter^[3] while the keyword “Alex From Target” was searched over 200,000 times on Google.^[4] Soon, Twitter users began looking for information about the subject in the photo, ultimately leading to the identification of his Twitter handle @acl163.^[5] In that same time period, Alex garnered more than 250,000 followers.

On the morning of November 3rd, Target’s official Twitter account posted an image of an employee’s tag featuring the name Alex in support of the overnight phenomenon, which gained over 10,000 retweets and 15,000 favorites in less than six hours.

Viral Marketing Rumors

On November 3rd, Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares, founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based startup company Breakr, posted a statement on his LinkedIn^[21] page claiming responsibility for coining the hashtag #AlexFromTarget. The following day, CNET^[20] published an article with additional quotes from Leonares, who continued to maintain that his company worked with @auscalum to spread the story among the “fangirl demographic” on Twitter. Shortly after the CNET article appeared online, @auscalum posted a tweet^[22] denying any involvement with Breakr (shown below, left), which was further backed up by LaBeouf’s tweet^[24] stating that he had never heard of the company (shown below, right).

On November 5th, BuzzFeed published an article titled “There’s No Proof That A Company Was Behind The #AlexFromTarget Meme,” which raised several questions regarding Leonares’ claim of having engineered the viral hashtag in collaboration with @auscalum. The article also cited the CEO’s somewhat toned-down statement regarding the degree of the company’s involvement in the meme-making, who was quoted as saying:

“it was all a chain reaction that Breakr happened to be a part of.”

Appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show

On November 4th, LaBeouf appeared on the talk show Ellen, where he was interviewed by host Ellen DeGeneres about his recent Internet fame.

Notable Examples

Spin-Offs

Kieran from T-Mobile[15]	Frankie from Starbucks[19]	Xian from McDonald’s[18]
Matt from Red Robin[16]	Steve from Starbucks[17]	Betty from Walmart[10]

Search Interest

External References

About

“Vomit-Chan” is the nickname given to a fanart of Madotsuki, the main character of the indie japanese RPGYume Nikki, attempting to contain her vomit. The drawing has been often used as reaction image to express disgust towards someone’s opinion or facts, in adittion to its use as exploitable template.

Origin

The original image was drawn by the Pixiv artist 蒼天空 (Aosora),^[2] known for his drawings featuring guro, and originally posted on July 7th, 2010 under the title “★嘔吐★” (Vomiting).^[3] The original image can’t longer be found on his account.

From the same collection of drawings that feature Madotsuki (also removed from his account), three of them were also adopted as reaction images, without meeting the popularity of “Vomiting”. The image of her taking pills usually denotes depressing subjects while the one of her going crazy usually depicts that something is either so terrible that the user can’t believe it, or that something is slowly driving the user crazy.

Spread

The first instance of the fanart use as reaction image can be found on a 4chan’s japanese board /jp/ thread about visual novels, where one of its posts, submitted on November 27th, 2010, posted the image as reaction to play to the visual novel Idols Galore!.^[4] The image remaint dormant during the following weeks, until a thread that featured the image was featured on the same board on December 13th, 2010.^[5] The same day, the drawing was featured on a thread submited to 4chan’s anime and manga board /a/ that featured an ironic NSFW post.^[6] During the following weeks, the drawing was often paired with greentexts to express dismay and disgust for popular opinions on /a/ and /jp/.^[1]

At some point, the original image inspired derivates, becoming an explotable. The image is also refered as “vomit-chan.jpg”, used as reaction without posting the image, and Madotsuki has been often labeled as “Vomit-Chan” due the popularity of the drawing.^[7]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Not available

External References

About

Twiface is an exploitable image of the character Twilight Sparkle from the cartoon My Little Pony Friendship is Magic starring at the viewer with a scrunched face and squinted eyes. It is frequently photoshopped onto images relating to MLP, and used with the phrase You Came to the Wrong Neighborhood, Motherfucker or as a variant of the get out frog.

Origin

At the end of Episode 10, Season 1 in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Swarm of the Century,^[1] Princess Celestia receives a welcome from the Mane 6 in the form of a bow. When Twilight Sparkle stands back up, she can be seen with the scrunched face (shown below).

Spread

In June 2012 the user Yurp uploaded an image^[2] of the scene to Derpibooru with the caption “Varying degrees of want” receiving 20 votes up (shown below, left) the few people who commented noticed Twilights expression and commented about how the characters are in fear while she has a look of joy. In March 2012 a user uploaded a image^[3] of a Facebomb with the Twiface, receiving 52 votes up (show below, right.) After which several users of Derpibooru began uploading images using the exploitable under the tag Twiface;^[4] there are over 900 of such images as of July 2015. The exploitable slowly spread to other brony related websites because of it’s popularity on Derpibooru, such My Little Brony^[5] and ponychan, and some images using the exploitable can be found on photosharing sites like deviantART.

The exploitable has also been used extensively in fan videos, especially YouTube poops. Examples include “tilight sprakle disrupts your sleep”, uploaded by The Unhappy Orchestra on October 21st, 2013, and “Fluttershy Burns in Hell” (seen at 3:37) by FlamingoGroper, uploaded on June 21st, 2014.

Notable Examples

External References

About

Bleach is a Japanese manga and anime series created by Kubo Tite^[1] and originally published in Shōnen Jump^[2] and later in Weekly Shōnen Jump^[3]. Since the beginning of its run in August 2001, the series has garnered a strong online following across the world.

Premise

The manga follows the adventures of Ichigo Kurosaki^[29], a Japanese teenager who has the ability to see ghosts. He soon accidentally comes across a girl named Rukia Kuchiki^[30], who comes from the Soul Society^[31], a society of Soul Reapers^[32] who help guide dead souls away from the world of the living. However after she is wounded in battle, she transfers some of her powers into Ichigo, causing her to later be arrested by the Soul Society. Ichigo, as well as his classmates Orihime Inoue^[33], Yasutora “Chad” Sado^[34] and Uryū Ishida^[35], then decide to travel to the Soul Society in order to free Rukia from her sentence.

History

The idea for Bleach was first conceived when creator Kubo Tite decided to draw what a shinigami^[4] would look like in a kimono. The design he came up with would be the basis for the Soul Reapers and the character Rukia Kuchiki. Though the series was initally rejected by Shōnen Jump, after a letter of encouragement from fellow manga artist Akira Toriyama^[5], the series was picked up shortly thereafter. The manga began production in August 2001 and is still ongoing. The popularity of the manga prompted an anime series by the same name to be produced. The anime started airing on October 5th, 2004 and ended on March 27th, 2012. In addition to the the manga and anime series, four animated movies based on the series have been produced.

Other Media

In March 2010 Warner Bros.^[6] confirmed that is was in talks to produce a live action film^[7] based on the franchise. A series of musicals known as Rock Musical Bleach^[23] have been produced starting in August 2005 with the latest premiering in August 2012. A trading card game^[8] based on Bleach was produced from 2007 to 2009, and has since ceased production. Three Light Novels^[9] have been produced based on the series, all of which were co-written by Kubo himself. Along with all these, numerous video games based on the series have been created^[10] with first game, Bleach: Heat the Soul^[11] being released on March 24, 2005, and the latest release being Bleach: Soul Resurrección^[12] on August 2, 2011.

Online Presence

Bleach has an immense online following in the online anime community, and is often grouped with Naruto and One Piece into the “Big 3” of the Weekly Shōnen Jump series. The series has a significant following on sites like Tumblr^[13], Reddit^[14], Fanpop^[15], 4chan’s /a/ board^[16], My Anime List^[17], and DeviantART^[18]. Aside from these there are also numerous sites dedicated to archiving information based on the series such as the Bleach wiki^[19] and TV Tropes^[20]. There are multiple Facebook pages based around the series, the most popular of which have over 400,000^[21] likes and 350,000^[22] likes respectively.

On YouTube there are around 2.6 million results for “Bleach”.^[36] The two most viewed videos (excluding AMVs) the franchise are “Bleach – Ichigo’s Theme – Number One”, uploaded by YouTuber All Music I Can Think Of on April 26, 2007 (shown below, left), and “Bleach OST– Stand Up Be Strong”, uploaded by YouTuber LaryRecords TV on February 18, 2011 (shown below, right). As of July 2015, both videos have over 7.6 million views and 6.8 million views, respectively.

Fandom

The Bleach series has spawned a significant online fanbase since it’s creation, which has created much fanart and fanfiction. On the Japanese video shaing site, Nico Nico there are over 1,300 videos,^[26] as well as over 79,000 stories on Fanfiction.net^[28].

On YouTube there are around 320,000 results for “Bleach AMV”.^[37] The two most viewed AMVs are “Bleach AMV: Ichigo – ‘The Animal I have Become’”, uploaded by YouTuber Monztor on June 9, 2007 (shown below, right), and “Bleach AMV– Monster”, uploaded by YouTuber Epyon757 on July 3, 2010 (shown below, right). As of July 2015, the videos have over 6.9 million views and over 6.6 million views, respectively.

Fan Art

On YouTube there are various YouTubers who upload speed drawings of various Bleach characters.^[39] The two most viewed speed drawing videos have over 343,000 views and over 309,000 views, respectively (both shown below).

On DeviantART, there are also over 847,000 images tagged related to the series^[27], as well as over 39,000 images tagged under “ブリーチ” on the Japanese fanart site Pixv.^[25]

Also on YouTube there are around 45,300 results for “Bleach Fan Animation”.^[38] On July 31st, 2013, YouTuber Rayjii uploaded a fan animation of the 542nd chapter of the Bleach manga entitled “Ichigo´s True Zanpakuto – Animation” with full original voice acting and music taken from the anime series (shown below, left). As of July 2015, the video has over 1.1 million views. On January 3rd, 2010 YouTuber klFiretears uploaded a fan animation titled “Fan Animation Aizen Jacks Hair Gel” (shown below, right). As of July 2015, the video has over 587,000 views.

Notable Submemes

Leekspin / Loituma Girl

Leekspin / Loituma Girl is a 2006 YouTube video featuring Bleach character Orihime twirling a leek to the tune of Finnish song Ievan polkka. As of November 2014 the video has over 6 million views.

Kubo Troll

Kubo Troll refers to the criticism of Bleach creator Kubo Tite’s seemingly lazy designs where a panel will appear to be mostly blank with little to no background whatsoever.

Incarnate / The Nick Simmons Plagiarism Scandal

Incarnate / The Nick Simmons Plagiarism Scandal refers to the allegation of plagiarism directed towards Nick Simmons’ (son of KISS member Gene Simmons) comic series Incarnate^[24]. The series is notorious for allegedly copying panels from the Bleach manga.

Search Interest

External References

About

Discord is a villain in the animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP: FiM). A pony-dragon hybrid known as a “draconequus," the character is introduced in the show’s second season premiere as a cunning manipulator with powerful magical abilities. In the show, Discord performs a shuffle-style dance which inspired a series of YouTube remix videos.

Origin

On September 12th, 2011, the tech news blog Wired^[1] posted a leaked one minute clip showing footage from the upcoming second season of MLP:FiM. In the video, several ponies discover Discord at the entrance to a hedge maze, where he proceeds to disable their magical powers in order to make them play a game of his choosing. The same day, a screen capture of the footage was posted on the Cheezburger site My Little Brony.^[27]

The Character

Discord is the former ruler of Equestria, the land in which MLP:FiM takes place. During his reign, he was seen as a tyrant by Equestria’s inhabitants, which caused Celestia and her sister Luna to imprison him in stone using magical artifacts known as the “Elements of Harmony.” When the artifacts broke their bond with Celestia and Luna, they connected to Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Rarity and Rainbow Dash, which allowed Discord to break free from the prison. Using powerful magic and illusions, Discord manipulated the ponies in a series of tests but was ultimately turned to stone by the Elements of Harmony a second time.

Spread

On September 13th, 2011, the web culture blog UpRoxx^[28] published an article titled “Good News, Bronies: My Little Pony is Back, and Star Trek’s Q is Voicing the Villain”, which contained an embed of the leaked video footage from Wired. On September 17th, the full episode “The Return of Harmony” was released, which featured Discord as the primary antagonist against Twilight Sparkle and her friends. The same day, DeviantArt^[26] user Vitoamito submitted a fan art of the character.

On October 22nd, a photograph of Discord papercraft sculpture (below, left) was posted on the Paperkraft^[30] art blog. On October 31st, FanFiction.net^[29] user Bronuis Maximus submitted a fanfiction story titled “Discord’s Reign”, which received mostly positive reviews from the community. On May 5th, 2012, an animated pixel art version of the character was posted on My Little Brony.^[25]

The meme has continued to spread on sites like Deviantart^[2][6][7][8], Ponibooru^[3], the /r/mylittlepony^[4] subreddit and Ponychan.^[5] As of May 15th, 2012, a Facebook^[24] page for Discord has received over 3,100 likes.

Notable Examples

Discord Dance

In the second season premiere of MLP:FiM, Discord performs a dance similar to the Melbourne Shuffle in a stained glass window. On September 17th, 2011, YouTuber Trizero126^[19] posted a video of Discord performing the dance to the song “On the Dancefloor” by the electronic musician David Guetta (shown below, top, left). The same day, the single-serving site Disco Discord^[20] was launched, which featured the looped animation accompanied by the song “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by the electronic duo Daft Punk. Shortly after, other YouTubers began uploading remix videos of the dance scene, in similar fashion to the DJ P0N-3 dub videos.

John de Lancie

Discord is voiced by the American actor John de Lancie. The day after the first Discord episode aired on September 18th, 2011, de Lancie reacted to the sudden surge in attention from pony fans on his Twitter account.^[14]

Roddenberry warned me that I had no idea what I was getting into with Star Trek. Someone should have warned me about My Little Pony! Egads!

— John de Lancie (@johndelancie) September 18, 2011

De Lancie is known for playing the omnipotent trickster Q in the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. In an interview at the 2011 BronyCon convention, MLP: FiM supervising director Jayson Thiessen mentioned that Discord was created with the Q character in mind. On September 25th, sections of the interview were posted to the MLPonies Forums^[16] by member Headless Horse.

"Discord was a character straight off Lauren’s pen, because apparently she’d been bingeing on Trek:TNG lately at the time that script got written. She decided to play him just like Q, because why the hell not? She’d originally planned to have Discord voiced by a De Lancie soundalike; but then during one of the meetings, someone (Jayson said it might well have been him) just said, “Why don’t we just try to get the real guy?” Sure it cost money, but Hasbro said why the hell not? And John was free, and he was game, so there’s our Discord. Why the hell not?"

On September 28th, fans edited the Q Wikipedia^[18] page to match the Wikipedia^[31] description for Discord. The changes were reset a few hours later with the message “Very funny, guys. Real mature.”

Search Interest

Search query volume for Discord rose in September 2011, the same month the leaked footage was released on Wired.

External Links

About

Mitt Romney (born March 12th, 1947) is an American politician, former Governor of Massachusetts and the 2012 U.S. presidential candidate for the Republican party. Since the beginning of primary elections in January, Romney quickly emerged as the frontrunner in the race and officially won the party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention in September 2012. He was defeated by Barack Obama in the presidential election in November of 2012.

Online History

MittRomney.com^[1] was registered on February 8th, 2002, the same year he presided over the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games of 2002. Romney joined Twitter^[2] on June 23rd, 2009 and gained over 360,000 followers in less than three years. His personal Facebook^[3] page had more than 1.4 million likes in February 2012.

2008 Republican Presidential Primary

On February 13th, 2007, Romney formally announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president in 2008. His website was relaunched with a new design and several new sections, including the video gallery MittTV, merchandise store MittGear and Romney’s sons’ blog Five Brothers. On February 7th, 2008, two days after John McCain posted strong gains in the Super Tuesday primaries, Romney announced the end of his campaign and endorsed McCain.

  

2012 Republican Presidential Primary

For more information, read the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary entry.

On June 2nd, 2011, Romney announced that he would seek the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Romney was able to raise more than any other Republican candidate with $56 million in 2011. For a front-runner candidate, Romney’s poll numbers remained relatively low with only 25% of prospective GOP voters in October of 2011. Romney came in second in the initial 2012 Iowa caucuses on January 3rd, 2012, with only 34 votes behind winner Rick Santorum. The following week, Romney won the New Hampshire primary pulling in 39% of the vote. Romney came in second to New Gingrich in the January 21st South Carolina primary but went on to beat Gingrich in the January 31st Florida primary. During the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses on March 6th, Romney won six of the ten primaries.

@MittRomney’s Followers Skyrocket

On July 21st, 2012, election-related social media analysis site 140Elect^[35] published an article highlighting an unusual spike in Mitt Romney’s Twitter followership, which soared from the average daily gain of 3,000 to 4,000 new followers to well over 90,000 followers per day since July 20th. Although the article didn’t explicitly accuse Romney’s campaign of tempering with Twitter followers, the provided data suggested that there may have been some sort of foul play involved. As shown in the chart below, it appears there has been little correlation between the spike in the number of @MittRomney’s followers over the weekend and the total number of mentions and retweets from the same account. In addition, the media criticism blog Mediate^[38] pointed out that many of @MittRomney’s new Twitter followers had no tweets or followers, or others had posted “unintelligble or in another language.”

The article was reblogged by the Daily Dot^[37] and BuzzFeed^[36] with headlines noting that Romney is being accused of “buying out Twitter followers.” Soon, political blogs from both end of the spectrum, including The Daily Edge, Top Conservative Cat and 2012Twit, began exchanging tweets addressing the accusation, spawning more than 6,000 tweets with the hashtag #MoreFakeMitt in less than 24 hours, according to Topsy’s report. Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign digital director Zac Moffatt rejected accusations that the campaign has been buying followers for Romney, adding that they have reached out to Twitter to further investigate the rapid growth in the Republican candidate’s followership.

Tax Return Theft Allegations

On September 2nd, 2012, an anonymous group of hackers posted a bulletin announcement titled “Romney 1040 Collection” via Pastebin^[49], in which it claimed to have obtained copies of the Republican presidential candidate’s 1040 tax returns after breaking and entering the Tennessee office of PricewaterhouseCooper, the accounting firm that has been handling Romney’s tax returns, on August 25th. The group also asserted that flash drives containing encrypted copies of Romney’s 1040 files had been sent to the Republican and Democratic campaign offices and threatened to publicly release the encryption key on September 28th, unless Romney’s campaign paid the ransom of $1 million in Bitcoins, an online currency that has been known to be difficult to trace.

On September 4th, another post titled “Dear PricewaterhouseCooper LLP” surfaced on Pastebin^[50] with a transcript of a ransom e-mail letter that was apparently sent to the London-based accounting firm. In addition to the detailed instruction of how to stop Romney’s tax records from getting exposed, the e-mail also asserted that other interested parties are welcome to compete against the firm and provided a separate Bitcoin address for those who want the documents to be released with a payment of $1 million.

For those that DO want the documents released will have an different address to send to. If $1,000,000 USD is sent to this account below first; then the encryption keys will be made available to the world right away. So this is an equal opportunity for the documents to remain locked away forever or to be exposed before the September 28 deadline.

Who-ever is the winner does not matter to us.

Bitcoin Address to Promote Full Release:
12AP6iCwRNFQqKLStH3A4b4hw3SL6RaNgB

On September 5th, the U.S. Secret Service revealed that it began investigating the alleged theft of Romney’s pre-2010 federal tax records, which have become a key focus of attack points against the candidate during the 2012 Republican presidential race. Along with the Pastebin communique, the news of the investigation was quickly picked up by the Associated Press and featured on a wide range of tech news, internet gossip and political blogs, from Gawker^[43], The Verge^[44] and The Daily Dot^[45] to Politico^[46], Washington Post^[47] and The Huffington Post^[48] among others.

On September 21st, Mitt Romney released his tax returns for 2011 in an effort to quell the lasting controversies surrounding his personal financial records. The hundreds of pages of documents revealed that the candidate paid $1.9 million in taxes on $13.69 million in income, mostly from his investments, or 14.1 percent of his income.

47% Remark Controversy

On September 17th, MotherJones^[50] released a hidden camera tape of Mitt Romney speaking at a private fundraiser in Florida earlier in May. When asked what his strategy was to win the presidential election, Romney answered by saying that he will focus on earning the trust of taxpaying Americans rather than convincing the 47 percent of the people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.”

“And so my job is not to worry about those people--I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.”

The following day, a single topic Tumblr titled We Are the 47 Percent^[51] was created as a parody of the We Are the 99 Percent blog, featuring photos of people holding up paper signs playing up Romney’s depiction of whiny freeloaders. Meanwhile on Democratic Underground, forum user Mr. Scorpio shared his satirical commentaries on Romney’s stance on the so-called 47% in a post titled “Fuck You, Mitt.” Romney’s official response to the leak of the camera tape was that it was “not elegantly stated”^[52] but did not deny his statements.

“Completely Wrong” in Google Images

On October 5th, Mitt Romney backtracked on his own 47% remark as “completely wrong” during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. In the following days, the presidential candidate’s retraction was covered by news publications and election-related news blogs^[69][70], which led to a sudden upsurge in the volume of Mitt Romney’s images associated with the keyphrase “completely wrong” (shown below).

The ripple effect of Romney’s retraction in Google Images was initially reported as early as on October 9th and shortly after that, screenshots of image search results pages for “completely wrong” began to circulate on Twitter^[71] and Tumblr.^[72] On Facebook, Romney’s detractors even urged others to go to Google Image Search and type in the phrase to reinforce the association (shown below).

By October 10th, “completely wrong” had shot up to the third most searched phrase on Google’s Hot Trends list and Mitt Romney’s SEO debacle was inevitably looped back into the election coverage in the news media. While some readers speculated the possibility of a Google bombing campaign behind the phenomenon, a spokesperson for Google later confirmed with ABC News^[70] that it was a “natural search result.”

Obama Mentions #Romnesia

During a campaign rally stop in Virginia on October 19th, 2012, President Obama criticized his opponent candidate Mitt Romney’s inconsistent policy stances by using the term “Romnesia,” a portmanteau of the Republican presidential candidate’s last name and amnesia, a medical condition in which one’s memory is lost either partially or in its entirety.

“He’s forgetting what his own positions are, and he’s betting that you will, too. I mean, he’s changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping – we’ve got to name this condition that he’s going through. I think it’s called ‘Romnesia’. That’s what it’s called. If you come down with a case of Romnesia, and you can’t seem to remember the policies that are still on your website, or the promises you’ve made over the six years you’ve been running for President, here’s the good news: Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions.”

Shortly after President Obama’s mention of the word, the paraphrased version of his quote appeared via his official Twitter account. Within the first 72 hours, the tweet has received more than 8,800 tweets and nearly 950 favorites.

RT if you agree: We don’t need a president with #Romnesia in the White House.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 19, 2012

The term is believed to have been coined by blogger Brian Rosman, who wrote a blog post titled “Romnesia” for the Health Care for All Massachusetts website on April 4th, 2011. On Twitter, the term began to pick up momentum following @BreakingNuts’ introduction of the hashtag #Romnesia on March 23rd, 2012. It has been also used in the news media on multiple occasions, including a New York Times editorial titled “The Amnesia Candidate” from April 2012 and a Mother Jones article titled “A Case of Romnesia” in June 2012. The first Urban Dictionary definition of “Romnesia” surfaced on July 19th, 2012, which was later chosen as the Word of the Day on October 20th, the day after its mention during President Obama’s rally speech in virginia.

Disappearing Romney

On election day, Mitt Romney’s Facebook fan page reached an all-time high of 12,135,972 likes by 11:30pm EST.^[73] However, following Romney’s concession speech, the page lost more than 50,000 likes over the span of hours on November 10th.^[74] The next day, the single serving website Disappearing Romney^[75] was established with real-time graphs (shown below) charting the large-scale exodus of his Facebook supporters. On November 12th, the Tumblr blog was featured in an article by Mashable^[76], which noted that Romney’s page was losing 847 fans per hour. Disappearing Romney was subsequently shared on Gawker^[77], the Huffington Post^[78], CNN^[79] and Slate^[80], among other news and internet culture sites.

See also: November 14th: #ObamaGifts Parodies

Reputation

Awkwardness

Since embarking on his 2012 presidential campaign, Romney has been characterized in the news media as being socially awkward and unable to relate with other people, particularly the core demographic of Republican voters. On June 6th, 2011, the Twin Cities Star Tribune^[15] published an article titled “Mitt Romney, America’s awkward stepdad” claiming that Romney was trying too hard to be “cool.” Satire news site The Onion^[18] published an article titled “Mitt Romney’s Goal To Connect With One Voter By The Time This Is All Over” making fun of Romney’s inability to win over voters on October 24th, 2011.On November 23rd, 2011, The Huffington Post^[17] published an article titled “Mitt Romney’s Awkward Exchanges With Humans” which featured several awkward videos of Romney interacting with other people. The single serving site MehRomney.com^[23] also illustrates the point with a pun on his first name Mitt (shown right).

  

On December 12th, 2011, Time^[16] Magazine ran the cover story “Why Don’t They Like Me?” (above) about Mitt Romney’s inability to connect with certain members of the Republican party. Romney is often characterized as wealthy and out-of-touch in skits on the comedy show Saturday Night Live.

Personal Wealth

Romney was able to accumulate a large amount of his wealth by working at the asset management company Bain Capital. Romney has been criticized for cutting jobs when Bain bought other companies. On December 19th, 2011, The Daily Kos^[20] published a story about Bain Capital cutting jobs under Romney’s management in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Romney’s campaign disclosed that the candidate’s net worth was between $190 million and $250 million on August 12th, 2011.^[18]

Notable Parodies

On October 14th, 2011, a Bad Lip Reading video (shown left) was uploaded featuring with new audio edited over footage of Romney speaking. On February 9th, 2012, the Shit People Say video “Shit Mitt Says” (shown right) was uploaded to YouTube featuring various awkward and strange things Romney has said on camera.

Several Quickmeme pages have been created for Romney including Scumbag Mitt Romney^[12] (left), Socially Awkward Mitt Romney^[13] (middle) and Badass Mitt Romney^[14] (right).

Spreading Romney

Similar to the Spreading Santorum campaign aimed at fellow GOP candidate Rick Santorum, the campaign Spreading Romney^[21] was created to pass around a new definition for the word “romney.” The campaign was reported by the web news site Blogger News^[22] on February 11th, 2012.

Parody Pinterest Account

In early February 2012, humorist Eric Spiegelman^[4] began a parody Pinterest account for Romney with the handle “MittRomneyGOP.”^[5] The site initially contained four separate pinboards, or image collections, titled “Favorite Things,” “Snacks,” “Pet Accessories,” and “Great Deeds.” The site was initially covered on February 8th by Uproxx^[6] and on the 9th by the Daily Dot.^[7]

When the account caught the attention of Mitt Romney’s campaign team on February 10th, the Pinterest community manager Enid Hwang got in touch with Spiegelman, stating that they felt it was misleading and requested that the username be changed to “fakemittromney.” Spiegelman responded stating that he did not feel comfortable changing the name by saying:

…you’re a publishing entity that’s more or less open to the public, and I can’t in good conscience change my parody at the request of the subject of that parody. It should be obvious to the Romney campaign that nobody sees this as official, and that I am exercising my Free Speech rights in making fun of Gov. Romney’s utter tone-deafness when it comes to matters of privilege and class inequality.

Ten minutes after he sent his response, Hwang went ahead and changed the username of the account^[8] anyway. Their email interactions were later published on Gawker^[9] and was covered by the Inquistr^[10] and the Daily Beast.^[11]

“Etch A Sketch” Gaffe

On March 21st, 2012, Romney’s senior campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom appeared on CNN’s Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien and was asked if Romney might be hurt in the general election by going too far to the right during the GOP primary. Fehrnstrom responded that the general campaign is similar to an “Etch A Sketch”, a mechanical drawing toy which can be erased by shaking it. Romney’s critics interpreted this statement as implying that Romney’s political views were fabricated in order to win the nomination and would be altered as soon as the primary election was completed.

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

Shortly after, Rick Santorum’s campaign deputy communications director Matt Beynon tweeted^[9] a photo of Rick Santorum holding an Etch A Sketch (shown left) and CBS reporter Rebecca Kaplan tweeted^[27] that a Santorum spokeswoman Alice Stewart was handing out mini Etch A Sketch boards outside a Romney campaign event. That evening, the parody Twitter account @MittsEtch-A-Sketch^[8] was created, which tweeted support for both sides of rival fandoms (shown right), and Ann Romney appeared on CNN to defend her husband calling Fehrnstrom’s gaffe a “distraction.”

The following day, the Wall Street Journal^[26] published an article titled “Etch A Sketch Stock Soars! Thank You Mitt Romney” which reported that share prices had doubled for the Etch A Sketch manufacturers Ohio Art Co. after the Fehrnstrom gaffe. The website “Etch A Sketch Mitt Romney”^[10] was launched which featured a photo of an Etch A Sketch board that cycled through contradictory quotes attributed to Mitt Romney drawn on top.

iPhone App Gaffe

On May 29th, 2012, the Romney campaign launched the official iPhone app “With Mitt” on the iTunes^[32] store. The free app allowed users to add a variety of pro-Romney slogans like “I’m a Mom For Mitt” and “Obama isn’t working” to their photos and share the edited images on Facebook and Twitter. However, Mitt Romney’s attempt at raising his social media profile did not last long, as it quickly became apparent that one of the 14 banners in the app contained a spelling error (“A Better Amercia”).

The gaffe inspired a series of parody images and tweets mocking the typo while the hashtag #amercia became a trending topic the following morning according to the Twitter analytics site Twee.^[34] On May 30th, the “Amercia is With Mitt” Tumblr^[33] blog was created, which featured parody images created with the app. The same day, the tech news blog Mashable^[31] published a post titled “Amercia! Epic Mitt Romney App Gaffe Goes Viral Online”, including a slideshow of notable Amercia image macro examples. The Romney campaign has since filed an update to the app with corrections.

Little Face Mitt

On August 20th, 2012, the single topic blog“Little Face Mitt”^[39] was launched on Tumblr, which features edited photographs in which Romney’s eyes, nose and mouth are drastically reduced in size in comparison to the rest of his head.

On August 21st, Redditor SiliconC submitted a post to the /r/pics subreddit, which included a tiny face photoshop of Romney’s vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (shown below, left). Within 24 hours, the post received over 14,500 up votes and 2,150 comments, with several Redditors submitting their own photoshopped variations of the Ryan photo (shown below, middle, left).

On August 22nd, the Internet culture blog UpRoxx published a post featuring several edited images from both the “Little Face Mitt” Tumblr and the Paul Ryan photoshop post on Reddit. The same day, Gawker^[42] published an article titled “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan Provide Internet With Hours of Photoshopping Fun”, which included a quote from “Little Face Mitt” creator Reuben Glaser who revealed, “The idea of ‘Little Face Mitt’ is to get people to involuntarily forever see Mitt Romney with a tiny face.”

Lucille and Mitt

On March 7th, 2012, a single topic tumblr named Lucille and Mitt^[53] was launched, pairing Mitt Romney quotes with photos of the character Lucille Bluth from the cult TV comedy show Arrested Development.^[54] The blog was created by writer Hanna Brooks Olsen^[55] and graphic designer J. Adam Brinson^[56] as a way to highlight the ridiculousness of certain things Romney has said by juxtaposing his quotes with the over-the-top decadent lifestyle of Bluth’s character. The blog was featured on sites including Uproxx^[57], the Huffington Post^[58], Buzzfeed^[59] and BlackBook^[60] the month it was created. In September 2012, the Atlantic^[61] also featured a series of images from the blog.

RomCom 2012

On May 11th, 2012, an unknown Tumblr user launched a blog titled RomCom2012^[62], as a play on the nickname “rom-com,” used to describe romantic comedy films. The blog features photoshopped movie posters of well-known romantic comedies, replacing the male lead’s face with Mitt Romney’s and a caption applying something from the politician’s life to the movie plot. In September 2012, images from the blog were featured on humor site Uproxx^[63], celebrity site Glittarazzi^[64], and political blogs Politico^[65] and ThinkProgress.^[66]

Texts From Romney

On September 21st, 2012, Slacktory editor Nick Douglas posted an article titled “Texts from Mitt Romney”^[67] featuring a compilation of iPhone-style SMS chat logs written from the perspective of Mitt Romney, exploring a range of gosspips and scandals surrounding the candidate. Douglas’ post was promptly picked up by Huffington Post, The Inquisitir and Newser later that same day.

#ObamaGifts

On November 14th, during a conference call with hundreds of his campaign donors and fund-raisers, Romney attributed Obama’s victory to so-called “gifts” he doled out to certain groups of people including people with incomes between $25,000 and $30,000 a year, Hispanics and African Americans. One of the callers allowed a New York Times reporter to listen in on the call, and details were published on its political news blog^[81] the same day. As the story broke, Twitter user and New York Magazine social media editor Stefan Becket^[87] suggested using the hashtag #ObamaGifts^[88] to share the best things that have come out of Obama’s campaign or time in office. The hashtag was used more than 1000 times that day^[89], with coverage of the tweets on Gawker^[82], the Atlantic^[83], Twitchy^[84], The New Yorker^[85] and the Los Angeles Times.^[86]

Transition Site Leaked

The day after Romney’s defeat in the presidential election, the political news blog Political Wire^[92] published a post titled “Romney’s Transition Site,” featuring several screenshots of Mitt Romney’s “President Elect” transition website prior to its removal. On November 8th, the Internet news blog The Daily Dot^[90] published an article titled “What Mitt Romney’s Website Would Have Looked Like,” which described the various transition pages that had since been taken down.

Gas Station Photo

On November 19th, a photograph of Romney pumping gas titled “Mitt Romney at my local gas station.. he looks tired and washed up” was submitted to the /r/pics^[93] subreddit, which received 23,700 up votes and 3,900 comments within 20 days. On the following day, Redditor IceBreak submitted an image macro of the photo titled “Emotionally Defeated Romney,”^[94] including the caption “How would you like 47% / of my foot up your ass?” (shown below, right). Within the next 20 days, the post received over 15,600 up votes and 700 comments. Also on November 20th, The Daily Dot^[91] published an article titled “Redditor’s photo of Mitt Romney pumping gas becomes a meme,” which featured a slideshow of notable image macros using the gas station photo.

Search Interest

Search for Mitt Romney had a small peak in January 2008 before peaking again in January 2012.

External References

About

Calne Ca (Japanese: 骸音シーエ)^[1] is a Vocaloid inspired character^[2] officially recognized by Crypton Future Media.

Origin

Calne Ca was created by 3D CG artist and sculptor Kotaro Maeda (前田幸太郎) also known as Deino.^[3] The first illustration to feature Calne Ca was uploaded to pixiv on March 15th, 2009^[4] previewing a model Deino was working on for an upcoming music video.

The music video was uploaded to Deino’s Nico Nico Douga (NND) account on July 2nd, 2009 (shown below, left); it was for the song “Machine Muzik” by Ding Saya (鼎沙耶).^[5] A day later a music video with only a few illustrations and some limited animation was released for “Corpse Attack!” by Utsu-P (鬱P) on Utsu-P’s NND channel (shown below, right).^[6]

According to illustrations for explaining Calne Ca’s character settings which were later uploaded by Deino^[7][8], she is essentially a robotic female skeleton named Calcium (シーエ)^[9] cosplaying Hatsune Miku or sometimes other Vocaloid or Utauloid characters. She has interchangeable parts and her “skin” is a casing that’s as much a part of the cosplay as her clothing so her appearance can vary from skeletal, to cybernetic (her most common appearance), to insectoid, to human. She almost always has a stylized wharf roach named “Sodium Sulfite”, usually called by the nickname “Nato-kun” (ナトくん)^[10], living on top of her head.

“Calne Ca” and “Calcium”

Spread

The scary form of Calne Ca has a weird presence and has gained a cult following in the Vocaloid fandom. The majority of the works were uploaded after the release of “Bacterial Contamination” (細菌汚染) music video on February 3rd, 2012.

There are more than 2,000 fan illustrations on the illustrator communities deviantART^[12] and pixiv.^[13] On NND, users have featured Calne Ca not only in Vocaloid music videos, but also in Miku Miku Dance (MMD) videos.^[14] Those MMD videos utilize her character model released by Deino along with his friend Hinoi^[15], which has been periodically updated.^[16] Besides, she is of May 2013 the face of the Nightmare Fuel subsection of the Vocaloid entry on TV Tropes.^[17]

Official Recognition

On January 21st, 2011 Sega announced that Calne Ca would be one of the characters featured in Project Diva Aracade skins.^[18] For the sake of it, Deino struck a licensing deal for several versions of Calne Ca with Crypton Future Media, and Calne Ca became to join the official Vocaloid franchises. A similar licensing deal had previously been made with the creators of the fan characters Tako Luka, Akita Neru and Shiteyanyo.

An animation of Calne Ca was among the videos shown during a mural painting by Doppel as part of the Snow Miku for Sapporo 2011 event held on February 21st, 2011 (shown below, left).^[19] The card “Broken Virus” for the virtual card game Alteil was included as part of a Hatsune Miku event held in October of 2011 (shown below, right).^[20][21]

In late June of 2013 it was revealed Union Creative International Ltd. is planning to release a PVC figure of Calne Ca (along with one of Nurse Calcium).^[24]

Notable Examples

Deino’s Further Works

Deino continued to periodically provide illustrations often featuring Calne Ca for various songs and album covers. The most regular series of collaborations seems to be with an amatuer composer called Sime-Saba Twisters (シメサバツイスターズ) creating the cover illustrations for several of his albums.

One additional fully animated music video featuring Calne Ca has been created by Deino:

On June 26, 2013 the third volume of the Prisoner, Paperplane _{Boy Paradox} (囚人紙飛行機 _{少年パラドックス}) novel series by Shuujin-P (囚人P ) (based on said author and Vocaloid producer’s “Prisoner” series of songs) was released: it featured illustrations by Deino and a character based on Calne Ca.^[25][26]

Videos

Illustrations

Cosplay

Search Interest

External References

Editor’s Note: Registration is needed to browse the original videos listed in this section.

About

Moon Man is the name given to an alternate interpretation of Mac Tonight, a former mascot of the McDonald’s fast food chain. Moon Man is usually accompanied by text-to-speech voice synthesis which speaks of racism and violence against minorities.

Origin

Mac Tonight was created by the McDonald’s fast food chain in 1986 and was portrayed as a lounge singer with a moon for a head. Commercials featuring the character originally ran from 1987 to 1990, though later commercials featuring Tonight were occasionally produced.^[1]

On May 31, 2007, YTMND user farkle released a YTMND featuring a GIF of Mac Tonight and the song “Chacarron Maccaron”, which is usually considered the first Moon Man YTMND.^[2]

Spread

Several Moon Man YTMNDs were created in the days following the original. The first one to be made by a user other than farkle was uploaded on June 2, three days after the original. The first song sung by Moon Man was uploaded on September 3, 2007 by YTMND user hypersaxon, featuring the song “Money in the Bank” by Lil Scrappy.^[3] In 2008, the Moon Crew was created as a group dedicated to the creation and spread of Moon Man-based media.^[4] On October 2, 2009, a Moon Man version of the song “Hypnotize” by The Notorious B.I.G. was uploaded by YTMND user MuMluxMlan, where it was viewed over 70,000 times, making it the most viewed Moon Man YTMND on the site as of 2015.^[5]

Revival

Moon Man remained fairly contained to YTMND until 2015, when the character saw a revival with the rise of race-based humor such as that found on 4chan’s Politically Offensive board. A YouTube mirror of the “Hypnotize” YTMND was uploaded on May 24, where it was viewed over 200,000 times in the following two months before being removed from the site for violating hate speech rules. On June 1, an album of Moon Man rap parodies was released under the name WhiteTopia; a YouTube version of the album has been viewed over 130,000 times.

Search Interest

External References

About

Impact is a typeface designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 and popularized through its inclusion as one of the Core fonts for the Web in Microsoft’s operating system software Windows 98. Due to its thick strokes, compressed letter-spacing and overall high legibility, Impact initially gained traction on the web as a favored choice of font style for headlines and titles by online publishers, before it became known as most widely used font for captions in image macros.

Origin

The realist sans-serif typeface was designed by Geoffrey Lee and released by the Stephenson Blake foundry in 1965. According to Lee, the objective behind the typeface design was to “to get as much ink on paper as possible in a given size with the maximum possible x-height,” leading to its noticeably high x-height and narrow spacing between each letter.

In 1996, Microsoft included Impact as one of the Core fonts for the Web in its operating system Windows 98, which at the time served as the operating system for more than 90% of the PC market, giving the font a significant boost in mass exposure.

Spread

By the beginning of the 2000s, image captioning had become a widespread practice among MS Paint and Photoshop users in online forums. As the early image macro culture began to emerge on sites like Something Awful, the font became increasingly visible as a popular choice of font for captioning images, along with Arial and Comic Sans. According to the founder of Something Awful Richard Kyanka^[6]:

“I believe the first time the font face changed to Impact was when somebody posted an image of a very obese black woman wearing a spandex superhero outfit, and the text just said ‘DAAAAMN.’ After that, everybody seemed to use Impact.”

In 2003, Something Awful forum user FancyCat submitted the earliest known instance of the Happy Cat image macro with the caption “I Can Has Cheezburger” written in Impact typeface, which paved the way for Impact to be known as the de facto font for captioning LOLcat images. Soon, many other popular image macro memes and reaction images of the time, such as FAIL and Cool Story Bro, began featuring Impact-stylized captions, followed by Advice Animal memes that exploded on to the scene at the turn of the decade (shown below).

Following the launch of numerous image macro generators during the latter half of the decade, Impact further solidified itself as “the meme font” as most captioning tools adopted it as the default typeface, including Cheezburger, Meme Generator, Quickmeme, 9GAG and Imgur among others, typically stylized in white font color and black border.

Criticism

With the rise of the typeface to prominence within the Internet culture, its improper use in irrelevant contexts also became more frequent, prompting a series of image macros with meta-commentaries on the overuse of the Impact font.

Coverage

On May 10th, 2013, German design and technology blogger Dennis^[2] published a tutorial guide to captioning images with the Impact font using the image-editing application Photoshop. In December 2014, The Journal of Visual Culture^[4] published a research paper titled “A Brief Introduction to Impact: ‘The Meme Font’” by Kate Brideau and Charles Berret, offering a visual-semiotic analysis of the typeface and its stylistic elements that contributed to its prominent usage in image captioning. On June 25th, 2015, CNN^[6] ran an article titled “This font has a big Impact on memes” with first-hand accounts of how Impact became the de facto font for image macros from some of the early key players in meme culture, including Something Awful founder Richard Kyanka and Cheezburger founder Ben Huh. On July 26th, Vox^[5] highlighted the memetic stature of the typeface in an article titled “The reason every meme uses that one font.”

Search Interest

External References

Warning: This entry contains major spoilers

About

One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース Wan Pīsu) is a Japanese manga and anime series created by Eiichiro Oda. The manga centers on Monkey D. Luffy, who gains the ability to stretch like rubber after he unintentionally eats a Devil Fruit. Luffy, inspired by his idol “Red-Haired” Shanks, gathers a diverse crew of pirates, named the Straw Hat Pirates, and explores the ocean in search of the legendary treasure known as “One Piece” in order to become the Pirate King. Since its debut in 1997, it has gained a substantially large fanbase worldwide, who praise it for its humor, character development, and story.

Plot

One Piece takes place in a parallel universe, and follows the adventures of the Straw Hat Pirates. The captain of the crew is “Straw Hat” Monkey D. Luffy, who has eaten a Devil Fruit called the Gum-Gum Fruit, turning him into a rubber man with the ability to stretch and expand. All Devil Fruits are unique, and the abilities that they give all vary, but they all cause the user to be incapable of swimming. Luffy’s dream is to find a great treasure called the “One Piece” left by the executed Pirate King Gold Roger, and in doing so, proclaim himself as the new Pirate King. Each of Luffy’s crewmates have their own dreams they wish to achieve by sailing with him. As they travel in the strange world covered mostly by sea, they encounter many enemies and allies, including rivaling pirates; Marines; the tyrannical World Government; and the Seven Warlords, pirates whom the government has pardoned in exchange for their loyalty.

History

The first versions of One Piece, one-shots titled Romance Dawn (ロマンス ドーン Romansu Dōn) and Romance Dawn Ver. 2 were published August 4, 1996 in Shōnen Jump’s summer special and September 23, 1996 in Weekly Shōnen Jump, respectively.^[2][3] Both one-shots featured Luffy and his stretching abilities; other than that, the two stories are decidedly different, although the final manga took most of its elements from the former one-shot. Oda started writing One Piece for Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine in July 1997. Originally the series was supposed to last five years, but the story became longer than Oda expected, and continues to this day.^[1]

Reception

One Piece is one of the most successful manga series of all time, being the highest selling manga series in Japan^[1] and being extremely popular worldwide, among all age- and gender groups. In 1998, an OVA, Defeat the Pirate Ganzack! premiered during the Jump Super Anime Tour;^[14] an anime series produced by Toei Animation premiered on October 20, 1999, ^[4] airing over 600 episodes since then. Additionally, Toei has produced 12 movies, 8 TV specials and two OVAs.

Fandom

During the years, One Piece has garnered an international following. As March 23, 2015, the Japanese illustrator social network Pixiv^[5] contains over 90,000 images tagged “ワンピース,” the online artist community DeviantArt^[6] has over 1,300,000 submissions submitted under the keywords “One Piece,” and the /r/OnePiece sub-Reddit^[8] has over 40,000 subscribers. Fanpop’s One Piece club has over 4,500 fans,^[10] and Fanfiction’s page for One Piece has over 23,000 stories.^[11] The fandom’s presence can also be found on Tumblr^[7]; 4chan’s /a/ board,^[13] TV Tropes^[12]; Arlong Park Forums, a One Piece-centered discussion board with nearly 3000 active users^[15]; and the One Piece Wiki, with over than 4,000 pages.^[9]

Related Memes

No One Dies in One Piece

No One Dies in One Piece is an statement used to criticise the very low death toll of the series outside of flashbacks, with almost no named characters dying at all and often miraculously surviving from the most fatal situations. One of the most notable examples is Pell in the Alabasta arc, who survived an explosion that was supposed to wipe out the entire kingdom. This started a series of jokes about how explosions or lightnings were absolutely harmless in One Piece‘s world, and guns were deadly weapons, as they are the most used weapon on deaths. This also includes stairs, as Zoro’s friend Kuina died when she fell from a flight of stairs after losing her footing; this particular circumstance is often seen as ridiculous compared to other situations.

Will of the D.

The Will of the D. is the name given to the middle initial “D.” that some characters have in the series.^[16] Its association with important characters, such as Luffy and his older brother, Portgas. D. Ace; and its overuse in fanfictions and OCs started the joke of modifying the names of characters names to include the initial; notable examples include “Buggy D. Clown” or “Donquixote D. Oflamingo”, which are often featured on series circle jerks.^[17]

Nakama Discussions

Nakama Discussions (the word nakama translates to “comrade”, although it is used to greater extent within the series^[18]) refers to the debates about the next member joining the Straw Hat crew. This discussions have often been criticized for being based on minor facts and being biased, being often parodied.

Enel Face

Enel Face is the name given to the memorable reaction of the antagonist Enel, who ate a Devil Fruit giving him power over lightning, when he discovers Luffy is immune to his attacks due to the latter’s rubber abilities. It has been parodied in some manga situations and used as a snowclone (shown bellow, right).

4Kids Era

The One Piece anime was originally licensed by 4Kids Entertainment in the United States. This dub was heavily censored, omitting or editing references to elements such as smoking, blood or cleavage; edits were also made pertaining to violence, religion, and references to death. This led to 4Kids becoming a pariah, with criticism being leveled towards these edits, as well as horrible voice acting, butchered and insulting scripts, removal of episodes (most of which turned out to be important later on), and a rap number that was used as the opening theme. Nowadays, the 4Kids dub is often used to trollOne Piece fans, and the lyrics from the opening have often been used as spam practice. Videos exist on YouTube which highlight the extent of 4Kids’ censorship.

Sabo

Sabo is a character introduced in Chapter 583 (manga) and Episode 494 (anime) as one of Luffy’s adopted brothers. Sabo was believed to have been killed when he was hit by a cannonball after setting sail, but it was later revealed in Chapter 731 that he survived and joined the Revolutionary Army. His near-death experience caused some fans to think that Sabo could be alive, starting a series of theories as when could he return to the series. As a joke, people would say that every new character introduced on the story could be Sabo.

Search Interest

External References

About

Brandon McCartney, best known by his stage name Lil B or the Based God, is an American hip hop artist from Berkeley, California, known for his off-tempo rhymes, extensive social media usage and an exceptionally devoted fanbase. He has been also described as a prolific songwriter, having released thousands of songs since 2004, including more than 600 that were released on the social networking site MySpace by 2010.

Online History

Lil B began rapping with the San Francisco-based hip hop group The Pack^[1] in 2004, releasing two mixtapes that were locally successful before seeing mainstream attention with the 2006 single “Vans,” (shown below, left) which Rolling Stone ranked at #5 in its Top Tracks of 2006.^[2] By April 2009, he had uploaded dozens of solo songs across at least 114 different MySpace pages^[3] he called his “novelty pages,” which has been also referenced in his song “My Life’s a Dream” (shown below, right). Each account was numbered chronologically and documented the way his music changed, abandoning rhyme schemes around page 60 and rambling about eating with monkeys in space in the 100s. Many of these pages have since been deleted, but archives remain on Digital Dripped^[4] and Hulkshare.^[5] As of February 2013, his main MySpace page^[6] is still live, where his tracks have gained more than 1.7 million plays.

In March 2008, Lil B joined YouTube^[8] and uploaded his first video on April 8th, showing an instructional session of him learning how to shoot a gun (shown below, left). The channel has since expanded to include music videos and has more than 81.8 million views as of February 2013. Also in 2008, his solo work was featured on Real Talk NY^[9], resulting in a handful of positive comments about the rapper. The next year, Lil B launched a homepage, BasedWorld^[10], and a Twitter account^[7], which has more than 620,000 followers as of February 2013. He also began selling his music on iTunes^[11], opening up his music to a wider audience. In 2009, Lil B was featured on NPR^[12], The Seattle Times^[13] and the Fader^[14], who called him “the internet’s savviest” rapper.

Also in 2009, the term “based”^[15] began taking off, in reference to Lil B’s nickname “Based God.” Lil B has defined the term as being true to onesself and not caring about other’s opinions.^[17] That year, a blog post explaining the various levels of based a person could attain began circulating on MySpace.^[16]

On May 4th, 2010, Lil B created a Facebook page^[18] to directly interact with his fans, which has gained more than 293,000 likes as of February 2013. In July, a fan-run single topic Tumblr called Thank You Based God^[19] launched, featuring images, videos and quotes from the rapper. A few months later, the first definition for Lil B was added to Urban Dictionary on November 2010.^[20] Throughout 2010, his music was reviewed and discussed by the New York Times^[21], MTV^[22], SF Weekly^[23], Pitchfork^[24], Fact Magazine^[25] and Mostly Junk Food.^[26] In December, the rapper joined Tumblr^[45] and observing this, Complex^[27]predicted that Lil B would blow up the following year, thanks not only to his free music but because of his deft navigation of social media.

Most Popular Videos

Reception

Controversy

In April 2011, Lil B announced onstage at the Coachella music festival that his next mixtape would be titled “I’m Gay.”^[28] Following the announcement, however, Lil B began receiving hateful messages and death threats^[29] from the community, despite him claiming his heterosexuality. Additionally, many members of the LGBTQ community, as well as rapper DMX^[31], saw the announcement as a publicity stunt intending to sell his project.^[30] The album was released June 29th, 2011, with the amended title “I’m Gay (I’m Happy),” featuring songs discussing race relations, poverty and the justice system, never mentioning homosexuality. News of the album was shared on The Fader^[32], Billboard^[33] and MTV^[34] before Lil B chose to make the album available for free download on July 1st.^[35]

Fandom

Lil B’s fans in general are known as the Bitch Mob, with an elite faction known as the Task Force, who swear to protect Lil B at all costs. He has written songs dedicated to both groups, in support for his fans. The Task Force song (shown below, left) specifies that these fans should not only be based themselves, but they have to be one of the top commenters on Lil B’s social media sites. In early February 2013, members of the Task Force caused Brooklyn-based rapper Joey Bada$$ to delete his Twitter account after he got into a fight with Lil B, which lasted over the course of several diss tracks and social media mentions. After Task Force members took to harassing Joey Bada$$ over Twitter, he called them “gay ass computer nerds” and deactivated his account.^[46]

Related Memes

“Thank You Based God”

The phrase “Thank You Based God” was popularized in late 2010, reflecting the cultish nature of Lil B’s fans, who attribute any positive experience to the rapper. One of the earliest known uses of the phrase appeared in a blog post on Destructural^[36] explaining the allure of Lil B on July 28th, 2010. By November, a Facebook fan page^[37] launched, accruing more than 7500 likes by February 2013. In May 2011, TYBG was first defined on Urban Dictionary^[38], noting that the phrase can replace any congratulatory remark. After Osama Bin Laden’s death in May 2011, Fox News captured someone yelling “Thank You Based God” at a college celebration. Around the same time, a Yahoo! Answers question^[39] asking about the importance of the phrase was posted. The hashtag version, #thankyoubasedgod, is active on Instagram^[40], Tumblr^[41][42] and Twitter^[43], where it has been used more than 25,000 times.^[44]

Personal Life

Lil B was born on August 17th, 1989 and grew up in Berkeley, California. He began rapping at the age of 16 and has since released seven full-length solo albums, two albums with The Pack and 43 solo mixtapes, one of which contained over 800 freestyles, as of February 2013.

Search Interest

External References

About

Drake is the stage name used by Canadian actor and recording artist Aubrey Drake Graham, best known for his role as Jimmy Brooks on the Canadian teen drama series Degrassi: The Next Generation and post-acting career as a recording artist.

Online History

On March 14th, 2007, the official @Drake^[2] Twitter feed was launched for the then-cast member of Degrassi: The Next Generation. On May 23rd, 2009, the official Drake Facebook page^[4] was created. On June 6th, the official Drake website^[1] was launched, featuring biographical information, tour dates, music and videos of the artist. As of October 2013, Drake’s social media presence on Twitter and Facebook command more than 12.7 million followers and 31 million likes, respectively.

Music Videos

On November 25th, the music video for the song “Forever” was released on the DrakeVEVO YouTube channel (shown below, left), raking in over 53 million views and 170,000 comments in the next four years. On April 7th, 2010, the music video for the track “Over” was uploaded to YouTube (shown below, right). In the first three years, the video brought inmore than 64 million views and 100,000 comments.

On October 21st, 2011, Drake released the music video for the song “Headlines” on YouTube (shown below, left), receiving upwards of 49.8 million views and 79,000 comments in the following two years. On April 23rd, 2012, the music video for the song “Take Care” was uploaded to the DrakeVEVO channel (shown below, right). In the next 18 months, the video gathered over 91 million views and 76,000 comments.

On February 13th, 2013, Drake released the music video for “Started From the Bottom” on YouTube (shown below, left), which accumulated more than 84 million views and 173,000 comments within eight months. On September 25th, the music video for “Hold On, We’re Going Home” was published on the DrakeVEVO YouTube channel (shown below, right). In the first month, the video gained upwards of 11 million views and 24,000 comments.

On July 10th, 2015, Drake released his music video for the song “Energy”. Despite being only released on Apple Music, the video did well, getting over 14,000 likes, 2300 comments, and 3500 shares.

Related Memes

Wheelchair Drake

Wheelchair Drake is an advice animal image macro series that combines wheelchair-related puns with lyrics of music created by Drake, which first appeared on FunnyJunk in August 2010. The image template is based on a photograph of Drake’s wheelchair-bound teen character Jimmy Brooks in the teen drama TV series Degrassi: The Next Generation.

   

Drake the Type Of

Drake The Type Of is a series of fan-written factoids that are presented as the personality traits of Drake, which typically take the form of tweets, comments and image macros. The earliest known tweet using the phrase “Drake the type of” was posted on Twitter in April of 2011.

YOLO

YOLO is an acronym for the phrase “you only live once”, which is often used as a hashtag to bring attention to exciting events or excuse irresponsible behaviors. On October 23rd, 2011, Drake posted a tweet using the phrase accompanied by a photo of himself standing on a balcony.

Drake’s song “The Motto” was officially released on November 29th and was followed by the official music video on February 10th, 2012. In just 21 days, the video accumulated over 450,000 views.

“Now she want a photo, you already know, though
You only live once: that’s the motto nigga, YOLO”

Drake Wearing Dada

Drake Wearing Dada is a photoshop meme based on a photograph of Drake taken during the shoot of his music video “No New Friends” in May 2013. The photograph quickly drew attention from his fans and hip hop music communities alike, mainly for the rapper’s wardrobe choice of Damani Dada, an athletic apparel and shoes company that was once popular among hip hop musicians in the 1990s, as well as his leaning posture.

Starbucks Drake Hands

#StarbucksDrakeHands is an Instagram hashtag associated with a series of videos in which people silently gaze at the camera while listening to Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home” playing in the background. The hashtag was inspired by a video by Californian barista Brody Ryan Curtis.

Drake’s “All These” Parody Lyrics

On November 6th, 2013, an anonymous Drake fan created @AllThese^[5], a novelty Twitter account which features a series of tweets poking fun at the rapper’s pun-driven, melancholic style of lyrics, particularly his frequent use of the phrase “all these…” In the following week, the Twitter account garnered nearly 50,000 followers after a compilation of notable tweets were featured in a BuzzFeed^[6] post titled “These Made Up Lyrics Might Be The Funniest Drake Meme Yet.”

If You’re Reading This Cover Parodies

If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late Album Cover Parodies is a photoshop meme parodying the cover of Drake’s 2015 mixtape. The images consist of text written in crude block handwriting with the letter “E” tilted at a 45 degree angle, a style created by the street artist Jim Joe, nicknamed “Drakefont”. The parodies are mainly spread around Tumblr.

Meek Mill Drake Beef

The Meek Mill Drake Beef is an ongoing feud between Drake and rapper Meek Mill. On July 21st, rapper Meek Mill tweeted that he was tired of comparisons to Drake, saying that he doesn’t write his own lyrics.

Stop comparing drake to me too…. He don't write his own raps! That's why he ain't tweet my album because we found out!

— Meek Mill (@MeekMill) July 22, 2015

The tweet quickly hit over 100,000 retweets. The Twitter storm received coverage around the internet including Time^[7], Perez Hilton^[8], Billboard^[9], and TMZ^[10]. The next day former Nickelodeon actor Drake Bell responded to the tweet jokingly apologizing for not writing his own raps in years, receiving over 80,000 retweets and 77,000 favorites in a day.

Guys…@MeekMill is right…I haven't written my own rap in years…I'm sorry

— Drake Bell (@DrakeBell) July 22, 2015

Later that day, radio host of New York’s Hot 97, Funkmaster Flex leaked a reference track for Drake by his ghost writer, Quentin Miller. He later leaked more tracks of Drake’s, including R.I.C.O, Know Yourself, and Used To.

Drake released two songs in response to the accusations, Charged Up and Back to Back. Both songs were received highly, with Meek Mill’s comeback being panned and being labeled as both “Weak” and “Trash” by users of the sites Instagram and Twitter.

Search Interest

External References

About

Kill Yourself, also known in plural as Kill Yourselves, is phrase that is commonly used in online discussions in response to incompetent and/or pathetic remarks, statements, or images, with the purpose of telling those who it is directed at that they should just kill themselves for having said or done something so pathetic. The phrase is usually accompanied by the Correction Guy image macro.

Origin

Though the phrase itself predates internet history, One of the earliest recorded examples of the image macro was in July 16th, 2012 on a WeKnowMemes post titled “Best Swag Memes”^[4]. The post contain several swag related memes, among them is a picture of a boy proposing his “swag” to a girl which is then followed with the image macro.

Spread

On July 10th, 2005, Urban Dictionary user roccaphella19^[1] submitted an entry regarding the phrase, describing it as “Something that is said to someone because they are very stupid.” On July 31st, 2012, the image macro was registered to memegenerator.net^[2] and is current ranked 82nd with over 78.000 registered images as of April, 2015. On Archive.moe, typing the keyword “kill yourself” would yield more than 726.000 4Chan posts^[3].
On an unregistered date, 9Gag user LAVIDALOCA55 uploaded an image (shown bottom left) which shows a facebook post where the poster mistook the word homo sapien for gay people. As of April, 2015, the post has gathered more than 45.000 points^[5]. On September 17th, 2012, Funnyjunk user edmondc posted an image (shown bottom right) which shows several twitter posts where the poster mistook her HIV positive results to being that she is clean from the virus. As of April, 2015, the post has gathered more than 73.000 views and 3.000 points^[6].

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References

About

Satirical Hip Hop (often referred to as Ironic rap or Meme Rap) refers to a sub genre of hip hop that is created with the intention of becoming viral, normally as a joke and/or a parody of prominent genres such as Gangsta rap^[1] and trap music^[2]. The satirical nature of an ironic rap song is often intentionally left out of its title, cover image, and description, in order to catch listeners by surprise. Meme rap typically features lo-fi cloudy production^[13], simplistic music videos, lazy rhymes, and intentionally stereotypical lyrics, with humor as the goal.

Origin

Although satirical hip hop music was made with no serious intent or for the purposes of parodying the gangsta genre in the 90’s, meme rap only became mainstream with the success of American rapper Lil B with his single “Wonton Soup” (shown below) released on August 11th, 2010.

The video has received over 12 million views, 50k likes, and 54k comments as of December 2014. It is worth nothing that it also has 30k dislikes, likely due to the stealthiness of its parodistic nature. The song features lines that would be considered stereotypical of the hip hop genre, as well as poor rhymes and a lazy flow.^[9] The style has become the defining characteristic of Lil B’s body of work as well as meme rap in general.

Spread

After the success of Lil B, many other artists began taking on the same lo-fi self-parodying style of music, one of them being Swedish rapper Yung Lean, who with his associates (named SADBOYS), would become popular after the release of their mixtape Unknown Death 2002 and the release of the single “Hurt” featuring multiple 90’s products and references, as well as 98’s windows screensavers.

The song features the same sloppy delivery that Lil B is famous for.

On Sep 24, 2011, Tyler The Creator,^[4] under the moniker “Young Nigga”, released a song named “Come Through Looking Clean”^[6] which was a parody of mainstream hip hop music. The song draws heavy inspiration from Lil B’s music, who is said to be one of Tyler’s favorite artists.

After a few years, the term “Meme Rap” was used as a term to insult rap music and artists; this use was heavy on the 4chan board /mu/ (Music) due to the constant spamming of said artists. The term has since become popular outside of the board and is now constantly used to attack popular underground artists.

The hate was normally presented on “essential charts” common on the board. The charts typically featured rappers and albums that were popular on the board, despite not intentionally making music that would be considered ironic.

Youtube has created a playlist titled “meme rap” featuring an assortment of satirical rappers.^[8] The satirical site Encyclopedia Dramatica includes an article on Ironic Rap.^[11] Other popular meme rappers include Riff Raff,^[3] Die Antwoord,^[5] Das Racist,^[12] Lil Ugly Mane, and Viper the Rapper.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References

About

Stoner Comics, also known as Tree Comics, are a series of MS Paint-styled web comics that use psychedelic drugs as a comedic plot device, mostly cannabis. The comics illustrate various commonly shared experiences or sensations while under the influence of marijuana, with each pane carrying more colors as the story progresses.

Origin

Though is rumored that the first stoner comics appeared on the drug-centric imageboard 420chan in 2009, though the earliest archived comics can be found on 4chan’s random board /b/ in early 2010, being one of the earliest references to them a post on the marijuana entusiasts subreddit /r/trees on April 19th, 2010,^[11] linking to a /b/ thread archived on the now defunct chanarchive.

Spread

On May 10th, 2010, a tumblr blog dedicated to the comics was created,^[4][8] being followed by other blogs with similar theme.^[3][5] On July 14th, 2010, a /r/trees^[1] spin-off subreddit dedicated to tree comics was created, gaining over 31,000 subscribers on 5 years.^[10] Stoner comics can also be found on dedicated pages,^[2][12] Tumblr^[9] and 4chan.^[6][7]

Widdly Scuds

Widdly Scuds is a slang term used by members of the stoner subculture in order to refer to a desperate but incoherent attempt at ordering fast food due munchies, adopted from a stoner comic where the main character attempts to order a bacon burrito from Taco Bell, wording “Widdly scuds?” at the end of his command (shown bellow). On April 5th, 2010, user ontario submitted a definition for “Widdly Scuds” on Urban Dictionary, gaining over 1000 in five years.^[14] Uses of the term can also be found on communities like Tumblr^[13] or 4chan.^[15]

Click to see the full image

Various Examples

Search Interest

External Links