This Week in the World of CSMFHT
A round of the highlights and lowlights from this week of Memes & social media
Welcome to you all, thanks for reading once again. I thought a fun way to finish the week would be a round up of all the interesting things going on it the world of Classical Memes - because a week is a long time on social media, and we have had some doosies. Here’s the highlights:
Sisyphus Jokes
It’s been a big few years for Sisyphus on Twitter, with some new variation of a similar joke about him going viral every few weeks. To get on top of this, I made the startling observation:
I think the reason Sisyphus jokes are so popular on twitter is that you can just keep reposting the same ones over and over and claim it's part of the joke
Now, that would be a sane thing to do. Being me of course, I’ve been quote tweeting it every day with the same joke, currently at around 10 layers deep. It will be truly interesting to see how far it goes.
The Barbie Movie
The full trailer and posters for the upcoming Greta Gerwig Barbie film launched this week, and the internet has gone to town on it. This was made much easier by the incredible Barbie Selfie Generator website which was up in literally a matter of hours. Here are some examples:
Not only that, but the tag-line “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.” was rife for parody:
Family Shrubs?
Uncovering this old screenshot brought a lot of joy and comparisons to some extremely dodgy family trees:
This one is particularly rewarding as it takes a second to notice it, but when you do it feels very clever. The only difficult part was whether to link it to the Greek Gods’ family tree, the Ptolemies or even the Julio-Claudians…
Ea Nasir
Once again, our sneaky salesman made it back into the world of social media - this time in comparison to the new changes to Twitter verification. Now that Elon Musk has decided to turn the platform into a joke, you can now no longer tell if someone is ‘verified’ because they’re important or just are a sucker paying money to an idiot. So naturally the comparison to Ea Nasir and his sub-par copper write itself:
Bronze vs Iron
This one was a bit of an anti-meme but it sparked some very interesting discourse over the use of Bronze vs Iron.
I actually researched this some time ago because it seems counter-intuitive that Bronze (an allow that required mixing copper and tin) would have preceded Iron (a naturally occurring element). This led to two major findings, which I will share with you: firstly, while Bronze weaponry was more prevalent in the ‘Bronze Age’ they also had basic iron weapons. The major distinction between this period and the later ‘Iron Age’ is that the temperature required to smelt Iron to a high quality necessitated the invention of more advanced furnaces to get it to higher temperatures. It’s obviously more complicated than this, but that’s the gist. Secondly, the notion that society progresses naturally through these set ‘Ages’ has been proliferated through Age of Empires type games which present the development of civilisation as a linear progression. But the reality is that through time and across the earth, civilisations have developed in their own way in relation to the resources at hand. A nice little moment as a teacher to get us to think about our preconceived notions of what is ‘normal’ or ‘usual’.
Easter vs Ishtar vs Eostre
Ok so this was a whole deal, mainly sparked by yet another account perpetuating a made-up ‘back story’ to a religious festival. We get this a bit at Christmas, and Easter has been just a difficult. I’m not going to repeat their claims, but it can be neatly summed up in this edited infographic from Digital Hammurabi, correcting some of this information:
Apparently the link goes back to 1853 where a Scottish minister named Alexander Hislop published the idea in his anti-Catholic writing, The Two Babylons. It has since spread despite being widely debunked. It seems that people are all too keen to try and find links between ancient religions which aren’t there - which is a shame, because there are plenty of real ones that you can explore with actual research and literature!
Of course, once this discussion started, people were quick to jump in with their own version of its origin, often discussing the Germanic Goddess Eostre. However, once again the truth of this is more complex than people think - there is strong contention that it was essentially made up and subsequent connections to Easter customs have been connecting the dots where no connections exist. This theory has been put forth in an infographic by Jewitches on Instagram:
Regardless, I think the takeaway is that we shouldn’t rush to make these links just because they sound good - we must be robust about sources of information in this day and age!
Meme of the Week
My favourite meme of the week came by way of the revelation of Michael Cera’s character Allan in the new Barbie film. The combination of bright, garish colours and the over the top makeup was perfect for a comparison of how ancient statues looked versus our expectations.
Do you agree with the Meme of the Week? Let me know in the comments!
Sisyphus Jokes
It’s been a big few years for Sisyphus on Twitter, with some new variation of a similar joke about him going viral every few weeks. Ok no I’m not gonna do the whole thing but that was a little sneaky.
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