Hello! Welcome to the Meme Studies Forum.
Please introduce yourself.
Last but not least, post the last meme you saved to your device!
PS. Join the Meme Studies development server!
I’ll go first because introductions are kinda scary if you’re going first.
I’m Seong, and I am a philosophy & game design student in New Zealand.
I’m interested in researching memes by synthesising various traditions within meme studies as well as beyond it. I have a background in the philosophy of biology.
I’m currently working on Meme Studies, as well as The Philosopher’s Meme.
One of my hobbies is running a Gondola OC community and making pixel art. There indeed is a related memeculture around both Gondola (because it’s a form of meme art) as well as pixel art (I recommend Lospec if you are interested in learning more about pixel art!). I’m also into video games, which is a massive source of memes, of course.
My favourite platform to observe memes on at the moment are Facebook and TikTok.
Here’s the last meme I saved to my phone:
Hi, I’m Tyra, and I’m a sociology student from the US!
I’ve been on the internet for a long time and tried my hand at making content for a lot of websites, and lurked around for the birth and death of many a meme. I think my research interests center around taking a sociological perspective to the dissemination of ideas through culture and the internet, a la memes.
Currently I am between any kind of project, but I hope being part of this community can help that change!
I’ve been and still am an admin in different groups and of different pages on facebook at different periods of time, and enjoy posting in general on different websites, as of late TikTok and Twitter, which are probably also my favorite platforms for lurking. I also try to stay up to date with movies, TV, music, and video games, and how they achieve virality with the saturation of media on the internet being how it is today.
Here is my meme!
I’m Sengir. I used to be in Cultural Anthropology, but then I needed money so I became a maintenance tech. Then the 'Rona hit and I became a chicken farmer who lives off-grid. I used to make pixel art in high school! I moderated a pixel art forum under the supreme leadership of Adam/Dex from LoSpec! The internet is tiny 
I don’t have a specific meme project atm, but I’ve been analyzing early religious concepts like the kaoskampf and tauroctony through the lens of Meme Studies and I’m pretty pleasantly surprised how well it seems to work.
I’m relatively active in a few Weird Religious Facebook groups and I lurk in even more. Spreading religious/philosophical ideas via memes is so interesting, and I’m always looking up new information because it was suggested by a meme.
I only have a phone lmao
edit: here is the last meme I saved
Hi gang - my name is Niko, I’m here on the East Coast US and I don’t have too much relevant projects or research with memes but I did get a bit of online presence with my voice over work. Most recently was the Facebook page “memes read aloud (audio only)” that I’m real glad to be an admit for and cultivate a very cool community for audio-based meme content. Some of my favorite meme-based content, and I don’t even really know how to explain this, are pictures and videos with very oddly specific information or themes as a punchline. Something like:
bae: come over
me: i cant im studying
bae: but i just bought [3/4" OD Refrigeration A/C Copper Tubing 50 FT Coils MADE IN USA]
I think it’s very funny and I like to make similar memes with the knowledge I have from both my undergraduate studies in ecology and evolution and my graduate studies in histotechnology. Ladies, if your man has only one kidney and one set of book gills as a result of super coiling of the outer shell from evolution over generations in order to better prevent predation from birds by making himself with less surface area for a beak to grab onto, then that ain’t yo man that’s a mollusk. It’s dumb, it makes me laugh. Current hobbies with related meme culture, I like to record lines for folks on Fiverr.
I get my main memes from Facebook these days. I used to run a page called “Cool neat homemade histology pictures and/or memes” where I would post various histological stains I did in my spare time with some funny shtick about it.
Here’s the last meme saved to my device.
Hello! I’m fluff, I’m a CS major turned English major. I’m interested in transmission and how people see the same worldly thing differently from each other.
I’m not working on a formal meme related project, but I love games and have been collecting phrases/sentences of strategies for video games (the ones that sound insane if you don’t know exactly what they’re talking about, like “ENRAGE 13nw 24sw <-ht MTR fof ELMO foa ttrr s hhmm n r3 bait birbs in 3 or disband”) and tracking how notation, standardization, and expectation evolves over time and comparing that with memes to look for any common developmental patterns.
I get my memes mostly from my friends and the TPM discord, and send stuff between groups, and occasionally on Facebook/TikTok.
:o
Hi everyone! I am Òscar, Catalonia born, raised and based (though I may move away pretty soon). I am currently finishing up my uni philosophy studies, juuuuust working on my thesis about Kafka and Deleuze & Guattari’s influence on Mark Fisher’s vision of the bureaucratic apparatus.
I am pretty new to meme studies to be fair, I haven’t done much research outside of what has been assigned to me at uni because I’ve gotten overburned with it, but I am eager to delve into it whenever I am done with university. The thing is, I recently stopped using Facebook and Twitter, the two main platforms through which I interacted with memes, and I feel like it will be interesting to see how my vision of memes and how my daily life unfolds in relation to memes now that I do not use said platforms.
“When did this become hotter than this”
Hello everyone
I’m Stephen, and I’m a Starbucks barista with a PhD in philosophy. My doctoral research was on performativity and ritual, but I’ve seen been focusing my research interests on memes as mimetic (largely in a Girardian sense) rituals, as well as some interesting sidetracks in phenomenology.
I did a talk a couple of years back entitled Rene Girard and the Philosopher’s Meme, which you can probably find on Facebook if you go looking for it, which largely focused on the stylistic elements of memes and their reproduction, and why overtly pedagogic political memes tend to fall flat largely as a result of ignoring those things. I still intend to expand on and write it up as a proper paper, but the pandemic causing me an extended absence from academic activity has caused me to get sidetracked. It’ll be done soon!
I like films and videogames, which tend to be major sources of memes.
My main source for memes is Facebook these days, honestly.
Hi I’m Megan! Originally from Tennessee and now living in rural Japan. My background of study was graphic design and visual communications, but I’ve been interested in symbols from an early age. Psychology is my secondary research interest and something I almost combined with my skill set into the product advertising field until I realized I didn’t want to use my powers for evil (I think some of that mindset still carries over into how I use memes though). I worked as a corpo graphic designer before I moved and now I teach English as a second language.
Interests I have related to meme culture are the “subversively wholesome”: hyper-femme aesthetics, pastels/kawaii, cottagecore, traumacore. Lately creating things that look “bad” on purpose is fascinating to me. I’m also a lifelong game- especially RPG- enjoyer. I like narratives, and the way memes evolve is a pretty neat form of collective storytelling in my eyes.
Despite everything, I like Facebook groups a lot for memes. The ultra-niche communities I’m a part of and even the broader “catch-all for multiple niche interests” group I run now has brought me a lot of joy.
The last meme I saved on my device is:
I’m an Australian currently living in the USA. My online background is through forums long ago and then facebook groups of varying interests from cars to music to memes to tv show memes with member bases 1k up to 230k. Admin/mod/creator. My main interest is the logistics of a successful group. Spurring initial growth. Controlling the flow of content. Leading from the front with OC to spur more content. Etc. Etc. Facebook groups are pretty dead due to the algorithm and the way reach works and i ended up with too many groups to actively manage so now I’m just some oldhead that enjoys a good meme, plays some video games, delegates to qualitys mods when im needed, and is trying to live this new American life.
I wrote about there being no possibility for “new” memes years ago but that doesn’t mean we can’t still create and enjoy everything about memes. The gist of my writeup was that every meme we now see is just a refining or mashing over of everything we already achieved by january 1st 2017
Looking forward to learning new things or perspectives from within this group and maybe i can have some input too!
Here’s the latest meme saved in my phone
Hello!
Research interests and background: American gothic literature and comic book studies, especially superhero comics, but pop culture studies as well more broadly. My background is that I got my BA and MA in English and am now starting my PhD in English.
Projects: Not particularly relevant to meme studies, except I have a draft of a conference paper on reception of Wonder Woman actresses that of course has a bit to do with the Internet (there's other work on that that deals more specifically with Internet things). I would like to do more with Internet culture in the near future though.
Relevant interests with memes: Superhero comics have a lot of memes, but literature has a lot of memes in general. I follow a lot of comics meme pages, and comics are good for meme-making because a lot of time it's just a screenshot of a panel that makes up a meme.
Since others seem to be responding to the Discord prompt, I'll copy most of my answer here: "I am in the US; mainly I use Facebook and Discord (and Goodreads and Letterboxd but those don't really have memes themselves); meme studies is relevant to my studies because I work a lot in pop culture studies; probably the most recent thing I've read relevant to memes is Women and Power by Mary Beard as it discusses misogynist memes in relation to the classics; and my main research studies are American gothic literature and pop culture studies, especially comic books and related media! To answer the questions listed in this channel: I found this lovely place because Seong invited me and we know each other via LLM." (Also I will post a meme once I figure out how to post images here).
Hey I'm Felix, Australian living in Sydney, studying cultural anthropology. Still slogging my way through undergrad so no particular research interests as such, but I spend a lot of my free reading time on pol-phil, libcom, poststructuralism, specfic, and increasingly Chinese history, culture & language. I'd love to develop Gothic Marxism more as an idea/aesthetic, feel like there's a lot of scope for that in the wake of Fisherwave (which is already a phantasm) and the current growing intersection of class consciousness and occult interests. Not a lot of scope for digital humanities / meme culture stuff in my current degree but maybe someday, til then I'm just along for the ride. Very rarely use Discord but happy to add people on Letterboxd, Goodreads, Storygraph. Most recent meme:
Welcome @squashwhack! Good to see you here.
Running the early Gondola.Space with you was pure magic, and I miss your artworks. Perhaps you'd like to make some more art (of any kind) with me in the Creativity subforum?
I love that image so much 
It moves me.
I think religious concepts fit exceptionally well with meme studies. My personal hypothesis is that much of the psychological and cultural tools that we use for religious practices fit perfectly with memeing, and we frequently apply them without realising.
Are you still involved with Lospec?
Welcome, Niko! I can't believe that mollusc lied to me.
Hi fluff, welcome! Do you still do both CS stuff and literary stuff? This is such a great setting for a crossover between the two, and it seems like many of us are doing something similar.
Hey Oscar, welcome! I would love to read about your thesis. I read Derrida's essay on Kafka's "Before the Law" not too long ago (through the LLM reading group led by @Ginia) and that was quite the challenge. The metaphysics of law and bureaucracy become much more of a real concern in an age when increasingly more things are as much a part of the Internet as the Internet is a part of them; code is law after all.
I remember that talk! Welcome, Stephen. And your thesis sounds really interesting, too. Was there something about philosophy as "first performance" too?
Try using the forum as a place to take notes and muse as you work on the paper, if you like. I've been testing out the idea and the forum format seems to work exceptionally well for putting down notes.
Welcome, Megan! I really love the way that you take new ideas, new creative tools, and new platforms and simply jump into playing with them in an earnest way. It's inspiring to me.
Welcome, @ViscousLinguini! The thread you made about this was fascinating. I still have some more thoughts to post into the thread. Post more of your existing posts and writing if you have anything else you want to discuss here!
Welcome, Ginia! Half the memes that exist are just edited comics, and memes are structured much like comics anyway, so it's a perfect fit. I think if you understand comics, you can also understand much of what makes memes effective.
Welcome, Felix. Good to have you here.
What is "Gothic Marxism"? I'm really into polphil as well but I need to catch up on postleft stuff and other meme-political materials. It would be cool to discuss Fisherwave in the Research subforum too.
I was never actually involved with Lospec tbh, we had met on an earlier forum called The Spriters Resource. One of my besties also has a feud with a guy on Lospec over what an acceptable color palette is, so he started his own website in protest. I figured I'd just remain on the outside to avoid side-taking (I haven't had a computer to pixel art on in years anyway tbh)
Holy shit. Those are great! Yeah, Gors is my usual meme analysis partner; he taught me everything I know about Brazilian memeculture. What a trip lmao
Small internet
Hello i'm yoshi,
I have 0 background in formal research, i just enjoy thinking about thinking, and niches. So dissecting internet culture fits this. Also a reason why my 'research' is fragmented , messy and unexact, the way i like it.
At the moment i don't have any structured studies, i just chime in, and try to help where i can. In the past i did programming for a project which never really came off the ground, but it's the journey that counts.
If anyone needs a programmer, shoot me a message !
Favorite platform is Facebook, the combination of boomers, good meme game, underdog status and the fact the website is unusable most of the time creates something very unique and beautiful.
also like philosophy and i guess politics
Last meme (pretty crusty lmfoa)
