I was recently reminded of one of my favorite memes on the Internet known as the "Distracted Boy" meme. You know the one. The man being distracted by an attractive woman while he is already holding the hand of an attractive girlfriend. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the girlfriend realizes that her boyfriend is distracted. The original meme is pictured on the left. The meme began to go viral in 2017 and has been edited, referred to, and parodied ad nauseum all this time since. The meme has been used to demonstrate betrayal, disloyalty, or to mock a person or idea. It has been popular because the image is so good at illustrating these ideas in a single image. The meme has become so ubiquitous on the Internet it has it's own Wikipedia article. One of my favorite videos on YouTube was posted by channel Funny or Die in which they dramatized what happened after this moment in the meme.
The video is funny and worth a watch. I also wanted to post some of my favorite memes based on the original.
There are websites that lets you make your own versions for free. One of my favorites is imgflip. Of course now it is 2024 and we have generated AI tools that can take a still photo and realistically animate a video that runs 25 frames per second (fps). Below is an example I got from indy100.com where Stablility AI's Stable Video tool was used to animate the meme. It is surreal.
Fortunately, there has been code to generate such videos yourself. Here is the link to the GitHub project. By far, my favorite use of editing this meme is the following.
This particular article brings up a very interesting point about anonymity and how it can be abused.
Obviously Peter Parker is going to behave differently as Spider-Man than he will in his nerdy, unmasked idiom, but the Amazing Spider-Man sizzle previewed for the press last month featured a wall-crawler whose behavior went beyond the typical boundaries of vigilante bravado; something I described as "epic spider trolling." I was referencing a scene that's since surfaced of Spider-Man giving some foolish criminal a bit of the business, but a new interview with Amazing star Andrew Garfield confirms that the darker(/funnier) nature of internet anonymity is something he built into his performance as Spider-Man.
In fairness, there is ample evidence for both conclusions in current events and our daily lives. So here’s the dish on the estimated effects of Google, a favorite gateway for internet users worldwide.
