Trump Sky Alpha
Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku. Internet Humor at the End of the World
On 1/28, the first commercial telephone exchange is established in New Haven, Connecticut, and a locomotive passing through Panamanian jungle links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
On 1/28, a fifteen-inch snowflake falls on Fort Keogh, Montana.
On 1/28, Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor, curses the known and unknown worlds he’s left unconquered, and his dumb ass croaks and becomes a ghost.
wow, so scare.
Trump to Ivanka: Let’s just do it and be legends.
The jokes at the end of the world do not have time to coalesce, to gain the full imprimatur of the internet, of the parts of the internet to which and through which such jokes would normally be spoken.
What is binch? What is corncob? but with human extinction.
Feels good man.
The internet is dying, blinking out.
The internet’s record of its own destruction—and that of the greater part of human life and civilization—is given in part through jokes, many of them familiar, though often modified, mutating. People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow, for instance, is an old joke already available in multiple image macros, the “lame pun coon” in blue color wheel, the “bad joke eel” jutting from the ocean floor, jaw tensed, vacant pushpin eye clocking your reaction, standard bold Impact font, white letters in black outline.
That joke is one of many that proliferate on 1/28, long-dormant memes alive again for one last night, faces of Keanu and Xzibit, woke af at the buffalo wild wings, flowing into other memes, the available prefab containers, Trollface, Nyan Cat, Crying Jordan, countless iterations of Pepe. People were bringing back the old things, the old dead memes, it became a kind of contest, a curtain call, a last chance at everything that had passed us by, an activation of all internet traditions (the “all internet traditions” meme itself dating back to a comment on a 2008 post on the left political blog Lawyers, Guns and Money, about the apocryphal Michelle Obama “whitey” tape).
#CurtainCall, #AllInternetTraditions.
Or it was, others said, a glitch in the Matrix, everything released all at once, a collapse of history, of chronology: the system vomiting itself forth before it expired. In any case, passing on bad jokes, ringing the last best changes on a bad joke, is how many spend their final hours. And there is a gentleness to so much of it, even amid horror: familiar, comforting, buffering the experience, slotting it into the known.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles can’t melt steel beams.
Where’s the Kaboom?
20 minutes into Netflix and chill and he gives you this look [GIF: flaming skull]
ima wait this one out, woke af at the buffalo
