APPLE VS EPIC MEMES HOW TO
APPLE VS EPIC MEMES SOFTWARE

APPLE VS EPIC MEMES HOW TO

How did “epic bacon” go from a dominant mode of communicating online to a parody of washed 30- and 40-somethings who still talk about their Hogwarts houses? The answer is more complicated than “millennials got old.” The internet got bigger and easier to join algorithms determined more of what we saw and did on it groups of people learned how to wield irony as a weapon on a macro scale the pace at which culture evolved sped up so that only those who spent all their time online could parse through the layers. Cringe may only exist in the eye of the beholder, but the “epic bacon” extended universe that dominated from the mid-aughts to the mid-2010s is its inarguable emblem. Cringe content - whether created in earnest or as parodies of earnest cringe content - makes up an astonishingly large portion of the social internet it combines everything from hysterical Twitter scolds to Instagram thirst traps to the entirety of the TikTok Discover page. “Cringe” is a shortened form of “cringey,” which itself is a shortened form of “cringeworthy,” referring to the embarrassment (often the secondhand kind) of witnessing something that is awkward, uncomfortable, passé, or cliché.

APPLE VS EPIC MEMES SOFTWARE

Count it among the similarly mortifying phenomena of ironic finger mustache tattoos, job listings for “ software ninjas,” the wildly popular YouTube channel Epic Meal Time, rage comics, idolizing Ron Swanson, Advice Animal memes, and dogespeak (“much feels” “very art”) and in particular the tone they’re associated with - hyperbolic, cutesy to the point of smarminess, and stuffed with seemingly “random” nouns. That’s because “the narwhal bacons at midnight” has become a relic of an era nearly everyone who spends time on the internet feels deeply embarrassed by, whether they participated in it or not. Today, this phrase is more likely to elicit groans and sighs rather than excitable recognition from anyone who was active on Reddit in 2009. What followed was a lively exchange among the platform’s most ardent superusers deciding how best to identify a fellow Reddit obsessive in the “real world.” The phrase they landed on combined several pieces of mid-aughts message board slang and coded inside jokes, yet, crucially, was otherwise meaningless: “The narwhal bacons at midnight.” “Just on the off chance, any fellow Redditors here?” Bored, he turned his attention to his favorite website: “I see a lot of people on laptops around using the free wifi,” he wrote on the popular subreddit r/AskReddit. Thirteen years ago, a man was sitting at the Denver airport.

Apple vs epic memes