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The best way to deal with not having a sweetheart on Valentine’s Day is to have a sense of humor about it. If you’re at all familiar with the “forever alone” meme, you know that it’s all in fun, and nothing is forever. With that in mind, Ranker has collected the 40 best images about how those who are “forever alone” deal with the most romantic of holidays. Link
A simple and not-too-effective spam Twitter account has become an internet phenomenon. @Horse_ebooks may or may not be a ‘bot, but the nonsensical snippets that it Tweets, supposedly from the ebooks it is trying to sell, has caused over 25,000 people to follow the account.
I tend to liken horse_ebooks to some wacky public access show you might have watched in college. There’s no comedic motive — as with the weirdo doing a foreign events call-in show at 3:00 in the morning, there’s no irony — but it doesn’t carry that guilt of mockery: you are not, and couldn’t be, making fun of Horse_ebooks. If anything, it’s making fun of you.
Whatever the appeal — explication does more harm than good — it’s stuck with people. Someone started a genuinely good horse_ebooks fanfiction site. There’s Horse_ecomics, which posts comics inspired by the account’s Tweets, and a litany of smaller tributes: people have had ordered framed images of the account’s avatar, turned Tweets into mug inscriptions (“Swallow that garbage”), and renamed their Twitter accounts in it honor.
John Herrman at Splitsider explains what he knows about this account, and how it has taken off as a rising star on Twitter and in the larger internet universe. Link -via Boing Boing
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We all know Danny Trejo is a badass as far as actors go, but now he’s going to star in a movie that casts him officially as Badass.
Loosely based on the true story of Epic Beard Man, a guy who valiantly defended himself on the bus and became an internet sensation because of his actions, this looks like the good old action flicks you know and love, and Danny Trejo is once again in a starring role so I’m definitely on board.
Hopefully if this movie does well, they will consider making Badass 2: Trejo vs. Chuck Norris!
–via Ology
Tim proposed to his girlfriend Audrey through a glass door using image memes. This video is a lot sweeter and happier than that short description makes it sound. You can see all the individual images at Audrey’s blog. Link -via YouBentMyWookie
What
makes a viral video go viral? While cats certainly helped, the secret
sauce of making viral videos is a highly sought after knowledge. After
all, every advertising agency and their grandpas want to know a sure-fire
way of making their next ad-masquerading-as-viral-entertainment be seen
by millions of eyeballs.
Well, marketing professor Brent Coker of the University of Melbourne, Australia, came up with a recipe of viral videos. All you need, he says, are four things:
According to the algorithm, the four ingredients required for a video to go viral are congruency, emotive strength, network involvement, and something called "paired meme synergy."
First, the themes of a video must be congruent with people's pre-existing knowledge of the brand it is advertising. "For example, Harley Davidson for most people is associated with Freedom, Muscle, Tattoos, and Membership," Coker explained on his website. Videos that strengthen that association meet with approval, "but as soon as we witness associations with the brand that are inconsistent with our brand knowledge, we feel tension." In the latter case, few people will share the video, and it will quickly "go extinct."
Second, only viral-produced videos with strong emotional appeal make the cut, and the more extreme the emotions, the better. Happy and funny videos don't tend to fare as well as scary or disgusting ones, Coker said.
Third, videos must be relevant to a large network of people — college students or office workers, for example.
And last, Coker came up with 16 concepts — known on the Internet as "memes" — that viral-produced videos tend to have, and discovered that videos only go viral if they have the right pairings of these concepts. "When combined, some combinations appear to work better together than others," he told Life's Little Mysteries.
Natalie Wolchover of Life's Little Mysteries has more: Link
How many internet memes are in this song by the GAG Quartet? All of them! Well, according to the YouTube page, there are forty -in case you want to try to find them all. -via The Daily What
One way to breathe new life into a meme is to autotune it. This was made from the original Rhett & Link ad for Ojai Valley Taxidermy plus the Kids React to Chuck Testa video by the Fine Brothers with audio treatment by the Gregory Brothers. -via Blame It On The Voices
If you wear a costume that illustrates an internet meme, you might find yourself explaining it over and over, but when someone “in the know” sees you and gives a thumbs up, it’s all worth it! Still, this Old Spice Guy shown here will probably be recognized by everyone. Our own Jill Harness put together a list of the hottest meme Halloween costumes for this year in a list at Oddee. Link
If Nyan Cat were around in 1988, he would the star of an NES game. And it would be in the bargain bin now. J. R. Baker took this idea and ran with it, designing both the front and back of the game case in the style of Konami games from the ’80s. See the expanded art and work in progress at his site. Link
Image: Photo_History
[Flickr]
Tired of the Keyboard Cat? Perhaps you need this: Banjo Cat. And 'fess up - who hears the Dueling Banjo just now?
Via Panabasis (who has another Banjo Cat sighting)
Who says internet memes don’t last? Some people have the most fleeting memes tattoos on their bodies. Imagine trying to explain to your grandchildren why those things were so important to you that you had them permanently inked into your skin. Ranker has a list of ten memes, some with more than one tattoo found. A couple pics are NSFW. Link
A meme finds its way into toenail art. I honestly envy anyone who has the time to do something like this. Link
A very internet video, indeed! This collection of clips features just about every video meme that ever hit the ‘net, edited into appropriate places to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Some language NSFW. -via BB Spot
YouTube combines vintage footage, special effects, and modern memes to salute the viral videos of 100 years ago with this top 5 countdown. Somehow this video has 7,200 likes and a few hundred dislike, but only 489 views -but it’s their website, so I guess they can do that. The YouTube page has links to the videos that inspired this compilation. -via Buzzfeed
Ben Huh, who found success with I Can Has Cheezburger and its many spinoff sites, recently secured $30 million in investment funding. That may sound like success, but the real sign that you’ve arrived is when NMA makes an animation of your story for Asian news outlets. -via Laughing Squid
Caldwell Tanner and Kevin Corrigan rounded up internet memes to bedevil Batman and Robin in a series of comic book cover mashups. There are five in all; this one is my favorite. Link -via Gorilla Mask
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The line-up for the annual Coachella festival was leaked a few days ago, and dozens of parody posters featuring everything from deceased artists to the most horrific music combinations have been designed. Urlesque collected the funniest posters into one post, and added this one featuring internet memes. Link
We’ve already posted twice about Amy Chua’s essay “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”, so is it any wonder that a new image meme has grown up around the backlash? Note: the image used in the generator is not Amy Chua; it’s a stock photo. Link -via Buzzfeed
A recent meme is to mix up science fiction universes to provoke an indignant response from science fiction geeks. A quote from a movie, TV show, book, or video game will do, but make sure it’s mis-attributed and laid over a picture that has nothing to do with the quote or the attribution! See 32 examples at Geekosystem. Link
The Gifford Children’s Choir of Racine, Wisconsin perform Trolololo (previously at Neatorama) as a Christmas gift to the people on the internet! Link -via The Daily What
Remember the 2008 4chan meme "FFFUUUU" AKA Rageguy? Well, CGHUb member SLiD3 has created a computer graphic of the meme as a sculpture.
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Where would the Net be without all those funny pic memes? Even if you’re tired of LOLcats, you’ll still enjoy this big list of image-driven memes lovingly compiled by Geekosystem.
This one above is part of a long CAPTCHArt (previously on Neatorama) thread over at Something Awful’s legendary Photoshop Phriday:
CAPTCHArt, or works of art MSPaint inspired by those squiggly CAPTCHA codes some websites make you type in to post or comment, is making a comeback lately since 4chan implemented it recently, but we’ve got to give Something Awful credit for pioneering the form. This is also the origin of Internet hero Responsibility Scallop.
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Unfortunately, in this case it isn’t Neatorama. Kristjan asked The Daily What to post his proposal to Alexandra on the form of a meme comic. Only a portion of it is shown here. Commenters are waiting not-so-patiently to hear her answer. Link
Update: Finally, an answer. Link
Neatoramanaut SenorMysterioso liked the creature the Alot a lot! He even made one of his own, for a competition among a knitting group called Knit Knack. See the winner and the other runner-up in this post. You can see more of this alot at SenorMysterioso’s Flickr stream. Link
The latest meme is to mix two or more memes together. The result is exponentially more amusing or annoying, depending on your perspective. This video combines Keyboard Cat with David After Dentist. It was made by Charlie Schmidt, the original creator of Keyboard Cat.
via Urlesque
Josh Millard turned a little idea into a flier which turned into a meme. Deservedly so, don’t you think? Other people are now putting them up in far-flung places. Link -via Metafilter
Update: Josh has started a blog to document these useless fliers.
Taking photos of people lying facedown on the ground in public is an emerging Internet meme. Facedowns is a photoblog of such pictures. The goal of the bloggers behind it, Lynn and Michael Chealander and Amy Mihyang, is to get facedown photos of themselves in many different countries around the world. Above is one of Lynn Chealander’s photos of a facedown from the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone.
Forty-four years after he recorded the song we’ve come to know as Trolololo (previously at Neatorama), Eduard Khil is offering to sing the song again, this time with lyrics! -via Buzzfeed
You might remember the picture of Disaster Girl that was a popular meme a couple of years ago. Jack Shepherd at Buzzfeed called the child pictured here “Disaster Girl’s evil grandma”. She is actually Flickr user Nathan Callahan’s mother, pictured after the Long Beach earthquake of 1933. Link -via Buzzfeed
This is just one of 5 Science Fair Projects for the Internet, brought to you by College Humor. Other subjects are Facebook, Google search, comment thread eruptions, and how to build a great website. Link -via Digg
