Memeography 101

We note today on the latest WRSA edition of memes that CA shared that he'd created a meme in about 5 minutes on imgflip.

We didn't think this knowledge was arcane enough that it needed to be shared, but for those who need it, we offer a brief tutorial.

Memes started here when we dedicated ourselves to the task of flinging as much sh*t as humanly possible against the douchebadges who arrested an ER nurse in Salt Lake City for refusing to violate the U.S. Constitution, state law, police and hospital policy, medical ethics, and sheer common sense, by refusing a completely illegal demand by Officer @$$hole to collect illegal evidence as a job-jacked medical minion of the state, from an unconscious person, not suspected of any crime, for said Officer Asshole, and his overbearing supervisor, Lt. Shitforbrains.

We are rather pleased that whatever small contributions we made contributed to Lt. Shitforbrains' eventual demotion, and Officer @$$hole becoming an ex-police officer for life, and hope he's enjoying the winos as an unarmed night shift security guard duty outside the local Circle K, or greeting the hoi polloi at WalMart.

He still deserves a daily kick in the balls for being one of the biggest dicks ever inflicted on the planet, but there are limits to what we can accomplish in a day.

But as a happy serendipity, we now get to create many of the pictures that accompany our posts, which breaks up the monotony of a wall of text, underlines and emphasizes our efforts, and most importantly, when we nail it, travels far and wide, flinging sh*t at idiocy far beyond the pages of one humble blog.

We may have put some words in Mr. Churchill's mouth,
and/or removed a digit from his hand. Sic transit mundum.

When (if) it's good, we might cost some folks a keyboard due to spit-takes. 

When it's better, other bloggers we enjoy pick it up and distribute it to an even wider audience.

When we're very lucky, it exceeds our wildest hopes, travels around the world over and over, and keeps coming back to us from other sources.

Which effort, incidentally, was when we started tagging them. It pisses us off when people use our creations without attribution. We still make $0 per meme; it's the principle of the thing. Some people are douchey enough to scrub it out, but fucktards gonna fucktard.

But in the grand scheme, we are not the World's Foremost Memester. Nor even in the Top Ten. We're probably in the top 1% of the anglosphere, in our niche, but even that's an enormous club. But we're definitely doing our part, and pulling our weight.

And there's a simple fact: None of us is smarter, or funnier, than all of us. And we see your comments, here and elsewhere. Some of you truly are some funny m*****f*****s. It was a commenter here that, AFAWK, dubbed the China Syndrome "Kung Flu". We were the first one to start memeing that, and in less than six weeks, it went all the way to POTUS, during a televised White House Press Briefing. We're particularly happy with that.

And if we can do it, so can you. And many of you ought to. We read somebody say something really good, and the wheels turn over, and it becomes a meme. Or we see a pic, and a caption or three spring immediately to mind. So for those of you who still haven't bothered to learn this arcana, we humbly offer the following brief treatment of how to do it yourself, so that you and your efforts can take their rightful place amidst internet lore, and add another hundredweight tub of flung sh*t to the edifices of Libtardia we'd all like to bring down.

First Iron Law Of Comedy:

Comedy requires Truth + Humor.

This rule cannot be broken without abject failure. Go back and read that again. Anybody can say funny things, or make funny memes. But if it's factually bullsh*t, you've faceplanted in front of the entire internet. That's generally behavior you're supposed to be lampooning, not aspiring to. Write that one on your hand, lest ye forget.

There's no law that says your meme has to be funny. (Thank a merciful deity.) But funny or not, it has to tell the truth. If you're not a Libtard, that shouldn't be hard.

But when you ignore this principle, you deserve all the scorn thrown at you. Which you're going to get, believe me. And you're an idiot. Which, like being dead, is something everyone knows, except you.

Outside of that, the sky's the limit.

You can simply tell the truth. In a time of lies, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

You can meme a famous (or obscure) quote. From life, media, culture, iconic movie lines, whatever.

You can find a great picture and put your line(s) over it.

You can put words in the mouths of great men. (Try to make the satire obvious from space, please. See the second meme below the header.)

You can add your own captions to totally separate and unrelated events. Just like the lamestream news does 24/7/365.

If there's already a classic meme, you can re-invent it in your own style. Maybe yours is funnier, better, or more original.

Knock yourself out.

How To:

You have multiple options.

First off, you can use the Paint program that comes with about every computer sold. I do.

Generally, that will let you cut-and-paste and crop images as well, .bmps, jpegs, pngs, etc. (I have to translate the new WEBPs into jpeg or pngs with mine first to play with them, because it's old.) Use whatever works. The Paint programs usually allow you to add text too, in colors, with a choice of fonts. But there are some text limitations, which we'll discuss presently.

Learn it, love it, live it.

If you want to go Grand Master Class, you can rent Photoshop, and there's no end of what you can do with the pixels you create.

So go forth, find, and make your baseline masterpiece.

But you probably don't have (nor want) the bandwidth to host people clicking on that image 24/7/365. Like you hope they will.

But image-hosting sites do, generally for free. You may have to sign up, and provide some breadcrumbs to who you really are. Get over it.

As CA noted, you can do it through imgflip. I use IMGUR. There are many others. And you can also flip through Know Your Meme's catalog of what's already out there.

Most sites let you load a raw picture, and include that as or in a post.

I use that a lot for finished product, or bare pics I haven't futzed with at all. More on the former in a minute.

But, if you want to add their version of text, usually in just one font, you have to select the "make a meme" option, or something similar.

Which means before you upload that pic to add your text, look at your picture.

If the text can go on the pic and still get the point across, great. Type it in, and you can make it bigger or smaller to suit the space. Less is more, and bigger is better. Some people are looking at this stuff on their phones, FFS.

But if the text is going to kill the pic, you might be better off adding some black or similar-color text bars, top, bottom, or both, to contain your verbal efforts.

Do that in your paint or photo editor software.

A safe way is to make them way too big, then crop the excess away after the text is in place.

Again, more on that momentarily.

If you didn't need to crop anything, once your text is where you want it, CHECK FOR TYPOS. Looking like an illiterate f**k doesn't help anyone, and there's nothing more frustrating than making a killer meme, and finding out you mis-typed a word in your creative rush to the presses, and now have to start all over again. (Ask us how we know.)

Once you do that, and save it, your meme is done enough for prime time. Whichever site you're using provides a link you should cut and paste, to save it, display it, or share it around.

But, if you need to crop it, open that link, re-save the picture (imgur compresses everything down at this step), and put it back in your paint or editing software.

Blow it up to the original (or larger) size. I recommend 1000 pixels wide, minimum.

A good default for landscape is 1280 wide and 700-900 pixels tall. Your pic editing or paint software will generally let you specify one parameter, either height or width, and then enlarge the other one to scale, so you don't get a funhouse mirror distortion.

Crop any excess of your image out, especially any overslop text bars.

You can also cut pieces out and move them at this stage to center them visually, and make a better presentation. Do that, as necessary.

Signing Your Work

Once our product starting getting legs, we began cropping out "made in imgur", which always popped up at the right lower corner, and replacing it with a suitably small but readable "made by Aesop" tag, usually by adding a sacrificial neon green bar on the bottom edge big enough to contain Imgur's tag, knowing we'd whack it out at the final stage. then re-sign it with our own tag.

1) Because we want credit for our best works, and

2) because we own what we write, good or bad.

We figure we're already on twenty lists of Undesirables anyways. Get over that, too. That ship sailed the minute you logged online. And we also know some douchebags will try to crop our signature/watermark out, but that can't be helped. Sign it anyways, and make them work to be douchebags.

Sometimes (see above) we'll move our sig up, or flop the pic sideways, to make it harder to crop out. Some people/software let you put it anywhere, make it a semi-clear watermark, and/or slant it to match pic contours, or whatnot. Up to you.

It's also a couple of extra steps. but we feel it's worth it in the long run.

When it's literally picture-perfect, re-save it, and upload it as a simple image to the same image site, and save that link. (We'll usually kill the earlier working copy, both to save our time and host bandwidth when searching through old ones, and avoid the existence of dueling images. We may save the raw image to re-use for other memes*. Dealer's choice.)

Imgur, for example, has a library of about 50 certain pics that lend themselves to a million uses.

Sean Bean's "Brace Yourself", Gene Wilder's "Tell Me More", Office Space's "That'd Be Great", John Krasinski's whiteboard from "The Office", Steven Crowder's "Change My Mind", Picard and Riker's double facepalm, etc. etc. The list is endless, limited only by your imagination.

Throw in some bare facility to jerk around the right pixels, and you have a world of endless possibilities, limited solely by your own talent and imagination.

Now you have the bare tools to make your own memes in Shop Class, with any one of 500 billion images on the internet.

And with the endless clowncarnucopia of AI sites that will whip any picture from the ether at your whim, there's no limit to what Wrongthink mischief you can wreak on civilization, from pictures not yet even created.

If you can type, and work a mouse, you have the skills. If you're not on the Left, you have the requisite brains and sense of humor they lack by the metric f**kton.

Go forth and become the sh*t-posting memelord you have inside you, and help us tear the Libtardian behemoth down, and burn it to ashes. Or just crack up a few of your friends and neighbors. Civilization is in desperate need of both just now, and you may be the David that fells Goliath.