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meme
meme: An idea, image or joke that spreads and mutates online; in 2010 the word was crossing from Know Your Meme into ordinary speech. Example: "Sad Keanu is my favourite meme of the year"
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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
meme: An idea, image or joke that spreads and mutates online; in 2010 the word was crossing from Know Your Meme into ordinary speech. Example: "Sad Keanu is my favourite meme of the year"
The internet's meme encyclopedia
Know Your Meme documented the origin and spread of memes with the seriousness of an encyclopedia and the deadpan of a science show. Started by the Rocketboom video blog in 2008, it was the reference...
Anonymous, /b/, and the meme factory
4chan's anonymous image boards, especially /b/, generated much of the internet's meme vocabulary in 2010 and gave rise to Anonymous, which attacked PayPal and Visa in December in support of...
The blockbuster of 2010, and the BWONG that launched a thousand trailers
Christopher Nolan's Inception, released in July 2010, was the year's most discussed film online: forums argued about the spinning top, the trailer's booming brass note became the Inception BWONG...
I can has cheezburger? Still going strong in 2010
LOLcats, cat photos captioned in lolspeak with Impact font, had been mainstream since 2007 and were still the most recognisable internet joke in 2010. Ceiling Cat, Basement Cat, Happy Cat and...
The trailer noise that took over every trailer
The booming brass note from the Inception trailers, nicknamed BWONG or BRAAAM, became a meme in the summer of 2010: added to cat videos, mocked in parodies and copied by every film trailer for years...
Philosoraptor, Socially Awkward Penguin, Courage Wolf and friends
Advice Animals were image macros with an animal's head on a colour-wheel background and a two-line joke in Impact font. Advice Dog started it in 2006; by 2010 Philosoraptor, Socially Awkward Penguin,...
Problem?
Trollface, a grinning MS Paint face drawn by Carlos Ramirez in September 2008, became the universal symbol of internet trolling by 2010. It appeared at the end of rage comics, in YouTube comments and...
The rage face for loneliness, born in May 2010
Forever Alone, a lumpy, tearful rage face first posted in a comic about a fake date in May 2010, became one of the year's most-used images: the face of solitary Friday nights, empty inboxes and...
LOLcats as a media company
I Can Has Cheezburger turned LOLcats into a business, and by 2010 the Cheezburger Network ran dozens of sites, including FAIL Blog and Memebase, publishing user-submitted image macros to millions of...
The face for enjoying something you should not
Me Gusta, a bulging-eyed face drawn by Matt Oswald in March 2010, was the rage comic reaction for guilty pleasure. It spread through Reddit and Tumblr through the year and, with Trollface and Forever...
"Y U NO" + any complaint, in broken English
Y U NO Guy, a rage face taken from a manga panel, became a 2010 image macro for exasperated questions: "Facebook, Y U NO let me dislike?" It was one of the first rage faces to jump from comics into...
The catchphrase of summer 2010
Antoine Dodson's warning to his Huntsville neighbours, "Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband, cause they rapin' everybody out here," became the year's most quoted line after the Bed...
A paparazzi photo of Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich, Photoshopped everywhere
A May 2010 paparazzi photo of Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich alone on a New York bench became Sad Keanu in June, when Reddit and 4chan users cut him out and pasted him into paintings, film stills and...
From Hyperbole and a Half to every to-do list
In June 2010, Allie Brosh's blog Hyperbole and a Half published "This is Why I'll Never be an Adult", with a crudely drawn figure shouting "CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!" The panel became the template for "X...
"I am a motherf***ing ambulance"
A February 2010 cellphone video of a fight on an Oakland bus involving a 67-year-old bearded man became one of the year's first viral sensations, generating remixes, a Flash game and T-shirts. It was...
Sunglasses drop, argument over
The "Deal With It" GIF, a pair of pixel sunglasses sliding onto a face, originated on the Something Awful forums in 2010 and became the standard way to end an argument on Reddit and Tumblr. It was...
The droning horn of the 2010 World Cup, and the internet's loudest joke
The vuvuzela, the plastic horn that droned through every 2010 World Cup broadcast from South Africa, became a meme within days: browser extensions added a vuvuzela to any site, YouTube got a vuvuzela...
A strutting cartoon and a shrug at criticism
"Haters gonna hate", paired with an image of someone strutting obliviously (often a cartoon character or a walking pigeon), spread across Tumblr and Reddit in 2010 as the universal response to...
Captain Picard, hand over face
The facepalm, especially the still of Captain Picard with his hand over his face, was the standard forum and Reddit reaction to stupidity in 2010, along with the double facepalm and the word itself,...
Three years old and still catching people
Rickrolling, tricking someone into clicking a link to Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, was a 2007 4chan prank that by 2010 was the internet's most famous bait-and-switch. In 2010 the original...
From a Lonely Island song to a caption for everything
"Like a Boss", from The Lonely Island's 2009 SNL Digital Short with Seth Rogen, became a 2010 catchphrase and image macro: any mundane act, captioned "like a boss". It lived alongside "epic" and...
Epic fail, FAIL Blog, and the Fail Whale
"FAIL", stamped over a photo of a mishap, was 2010's favourite one-word verdict, with "epic fail" for the worst cases and "WIN" for their opposite. FAIL Blog published a stream of them, and Twitter's...
"Hide yo kids, hide yo wife": the most-watched video of 2010
Antoine Dodson's furious, funny interview on a Huntsville, Alabama news broadcast in July 2010 was Auto-Tuned into a song by the Gregory Brothers days later. YouTube named Bed Intruder Song the...
"What does it mean?"
Paul Vasquez filmed a double rainbow over Yosemite in January 2010 and wept with joy on camera. The clip sat unnoticed until Jimmy Kimmel tweeted it in July, after which it became one of the year's...
FFFFFUUUU, Trollface, Forever Alone, Me Gusta, Y U NO
Rage comics were crude, four-panel MS Paint strips about everyday frustrations, drawn with a shared cast of stick-figure faces. Born on 4chan in 2008, they peaked in 2010 and 2011 on Reddit's f7u12...
The psychic octopus who picked every World Cup result correctly
Paul, an octopus at a German aquarium, chose the winner of all seven of Germany's 2010 World Cup matches and the final by picking a mussel from a box, and became a global internet celebrity with...
Twitter's over-capacity page, seen constantly during the World Cup
Yiying Lu's illustration of a whale lifted by birds appeared whenever Twitter was over capacity, which in 2010 was often: during the World Cup, the Lost finale and the iPhone 4 launch. The Fail Whale...
Eminem's comeback, Kanye's masterpiece, and Arcade Fire's Grammy
Eminem's Recovery was the best-selling album of 2010 in the United States. Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, released in November after his weekly G.O.O.D. Friday free downloads, topped...
"Press X to Jason": the interactive drama
Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, released in February 2010, was a PS3 thriller told through quick-time events and branching choices. Its ambition drew praise, its awkward moments became memes ("Jason!"),...
A black border, a photo, a word in serif, and a cruel caption
Demotivational posters parodied corporate motivational posters: a photo in a black frame, a one-word title and a deflating caption. Despair.com started the joke in 1998, and by 2010 the format was...
Christopher Nolan's dream-heist film became the year's most-discussed movie online, spawning the BWONG trailer meme and endless ending debates.
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