Author Archives: Youngjin Hwang

Old School Object Labeling: Tony Kornheiser

Nationality: South Korean
Age: 26
Residence: Chicago, IL
Performance Date: 4/11/21
Primary Language: English

Main Performance:

Image Labeling Memes have become a tremendous format across multiple social media sites. You see the things everywhere with laughably bad photoshops, other people’s faces crudely cut and pasted over other familiar formats, the works. Its relative simplicity has proliferated its usage like wildfire on twitter and other platforms for mass sharing but the format that seems so rudimentary had a really specific start to it all.

Enter Tony Kornheiser, famous American TV sportscaster whose coincidentally inquisitive facial expression placed above some nicely timed captions over the word “Why” captured a picture that would spawn millions of derivatives of a person’s or fictional character’s facial expression placed above photoshopped captions, often in recognizable fonts native to the TV. show, videogame, or comic.

Background:

The informant BL is one of my longest known friends who has also been around since the start of the internet’s massive growth and has inevitably taken part of the outburst of early memes and digital culture spawning from forums and image boards.

Context:

When memes were on the table for the project, I pondered with my friends over which were the ones that were most relevant to our own experiences and these were the results of our brainstorming.

My Thoughts:

Image Macros and Reaction Images are an enormous part online culture that has become rather inseparable to the posting experience. Beyond words, images capture emotions and resonate with a particular emotion to a feeling that others may recognize from knowing where the image originates from, creating layers upon layers of in-jokes and understanding that can become a culture all on its own. Kornheiser represents one of the originals that metaphorically birthed the image macro posting culture we have today and I have particular fondness for it as making one has slightly more effort put into than hap-haphazardly photoshopping people’s badly cut out faces onto unrelated pictures. These derivatives can also be taken to the extreme with entire sentences or songs with its text being cut and pasted to provide the necessary effect the given creator wants to convey in the parody.

A rather extensive example of the cut and paste dialogue

Acquire Proficiency: The attitude of “Git Gud”

Nationality: South Korean
Age: 26
Residence: Chicago, IL
Performance Date: 4/15/21
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

Main Performance:

In 2009 a videogame called Demon’s Souls was released on the Playstation 3 and its relatively unforgiving difficulty made it a surprise hit with the gaming community worldwide. A sequel was promptly made in 2011, Dark Souls, and it launched the “Souls” series’ popularity skyrocketing, with the game’s difficulty being put front and center for the masses to challenge themselves against the experience. The series still continues to this day, the latest release being Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2019 which went on to win Game of the Year despite many complaints about it being “too hard”.

The important stuff begins here, as difficulty is apparently relative and many people playing these games definitely struggled, but with different parts. Certain boss fights were easy to some, impossible for others, and the differences in these opinions led to many arguments and name-calling online, jeering others for their apparent lack of skill. What was for sure though was that the game was definitely beatable and not impossible as many newcomers to the series would claim. To trivialize entire paragraphs of complaints online, a phrase would become adopted to shut down these walls of text with two simple words: “Git Gud”. A bastardized spelling of “Get Good”, it has become a popular and incredibly simple, rather dismissive command to simply become better at the game, lest they be given another insulting phrase such as “mad because bad”.

Background:

The informant, AK, is longtime friend of mine who I bonded with over videogames and other entertainment mediums. He is also incredibly well versed with deck-building in trading card games and particularly loves to be “annoying” type of player who is much more focused on entertaining himself than worrying about winning or losing. The Git Gud phrase as leaked into many other skill-based mediums be it card games, traditional video games, and any other competitive activity requiring strategy and good timing.

Context:

When memes were on the table for the project, I pondered with my friend over which were the ones that were most relevant to our own experiences and these were the results of our brainstorming.

My Thoughts:

The meme is very personal to me and my friend as these games in particular have been becoming less and less common. Difficulty in games is a point that I am heavily opinionated on and I firmly stand on the side that difficulty is an inherent game design choice and part of an experience is overcoming the obstacle and the fun comes from the satisfaction of beating it. While there are some merits to the arguments about unfair design or arbitrary difficulty, there definitely should be more scrutiny under which these sweeping generalizations are made for a given title. I am particularly against the wave of “casualization” that hopes to give accessibility for the sake of catering to the widest audience possible by watering down mechanics and difficulty for the sake of easier digestion. Dedication and investment into self-improvement, even digitally, should not be compromised or derided. While the phrase itself is dismissive, it mostly applies to those who have given up too quickly and are quicker to judge a game’s difficulty as a flaw on the game’s design than any personal shortcoming of their own.

Memes of the Previous Generation: Spurdo

Nationality: South Korean
Age: 26
Residence: Chicago, IL
Performance Date: 4/14/21
Primary Language: English

Main Performance:

AK: Remember Pedo-bear from the 2000s?

YJ: Yeah what about it?

AK: You don’t really see much of him these days right?

YJ: Yeah not even the Chris Hansen memes survived

AK: Have you seen the Finnish version of it?

YJ: The what?

AK: Finland mutated Pedo-Bear into something completely random, but it’s still a bear or something

YJ: What for?

AK: I think they wanted to gatekeep and make fun of new people on their image board sites, I think he’s called Spurdo

YJ: Does it work? I’m not sure really how to describe it, like what sort of posts do you even attach the image to? How does gatekeeping with a character even work?

AK: It’s like stylized broken english but you replace the hard-sounding consonants with lots of G’s and D’s. So the most common example would be “f*ck being” turned into the more soft sounding “fug”.

Take any phrase, long quote, or even a song and start making edits for it. It’s like an overly specific cultural mutation of mad libs. You can basically apply it to anything you want.

Background:

The informant, AK, is longtime friend of mine who I bonded with over videogames and other entertainment mediums. He is well versed in image board culture after having spent over a decade on multiple forums when the internet was starting to burgeon out into a more curated environment. Spurdo to AK is one of his favorites for being absolutely nonsensical and how it can universally applied to franchises and jokes he already enjoys.

Context:

When memes were on the table for the project, I pondered with my friend over which were the ones that were most relevant to our own experiences and these were the results of our brainstorming.

My Thoughts:

https://i.imgur.com/OeB9OTx.jpg
An example of Practical Jokes and liminal experiences showcased in Example 4 where those in the In-Group get to mess around with the new recruits who have yet to go through the same bonding experience.

The Spurdo meme is one of the more esoteric and absurdist memes to come out of early image board culture and it provides a digital version of the historic-geographic method of studying how folklore travels and Spurdo has mutated no less than three times in its lifespan across different internet environments. The original Finnish mutation of pedo-bear used by the Finnish has since been carried over to the western “American” context and been turned into either a commercial retail worker, a stereotypical fat American addicted to fast food, or a highly conservative-nationalistic spokesperson for gun violence. The Finnish context remains as it is but has become adopted by the people who served in the military over their shared experiences. Somewhere in between, Spurdo further mutates from absurdity into the abstract, losing its legs and becoming what is known as a “Gondola”. Instead of speaking the way it usually does, it doesn’t speak at all and only observes its surroundings peacefully, and this descriptor has made it photoshopped in many pieces of classic artwork in the background simply observing its surroundings.

Where’s Gondola?

Winning or Losing, English or Japanese, just shout “Let’s Go, Justin!”

Nationality: American
Age: 26
Residence: Chicago, IL
Performance Date: 4/30/21
Primary Language: English

Main Performance:

Not pictured/heard: The audience absolutely losing it

NC: I think it was in 2004 that happened, you know Moment 37

YJ: The Daigo parry?

NC: Yeah and you hear someone in the audience go, “Let’s go Justin!”

YJ: What about it?

NC: I was studying tech on the videos on twitter last week and saw someone shout it during another tournament match.

YJ: So?

NC: It was in Japanese, dude. There wasn’t even a guy named Justin playing, they just say that whenever something exciting happens.

Background:

The informant is my friend, NC, who I have spent an inordinate amount of time together with playing fighting games and going to tournaments around the country with. The particular bit he heard was from a twitter-video. The Moment 37 and Daigo parry that was mentioned refers to a particular match between two incredibly talented fighting game players Justin Wong, representing America and Daigo Umehara, representing Japan. Both their characters are at incredibly low life and Daigo’s character is a slight breeze from losing the match, even blocking an attack would lose him the round. Justin Wong realizes this and goes in with a super-move, a 15 hit attack that will surely kill Daigo’s character, as someone else in the background shouts “Let’s go Justin!”. Instead of dying however, Daigo’s character performs a frame perfect parry, pressing the buttons at the exact time Justin’s character lands their kicks on his own character. 15 frame perfect parries later, Justin is defeated and the crowd, who at this point were already losing their minds, erupts in an an even louder cheer.

Context:

I asked NC if there were any “cultural” phenomena within our preferred entertainment medium and we recalled an exchange we had about this particular incident a couple years ago.

My Thoughts:

Even when Justin Wong was the one who lost the match in a spectacular fashion and even when there could possibly be no Japanese person traditionally named Justin in Japan, the phrase itself has gained an iconic status even among the Japanese who were in attendance watching the match in 2004. It feels hilarious to me that the name in the phrase was inconsequential to the emotions that were present when the phrase was uttered. Moreso than ever with the proliferation of internet culture and archived footage of old events, new generations of video-game players can see with their own eyes of what happened in years past. However, the expansion of social media and owned content as also made it so that longer videos of events are not often caught on camera and while it is easily shared between others some content or entire accounts with videos become terminated for a variety of reasons such as proper ownership and the likes. Moment 37 has since become a legend on its own where something of its difficulty in a tournament setting has not been replicated since and the rising industry of E-sports has seemingly come to “own” these types of content. Daigo hismelf and his story beyond this single moment has been published into a serialized comic book series.

For anyone curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzS96auqau0

Polish Proverbs: Lying and the Vertically Challenged

Nationality: Polish
Age: 25
Occupation: Medical Student
Residence: Poznań, Poland
Performance Date: 04/18/2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Polish

Main Performance:

  • “Kłamstwa mają krótkie nogi”
    • Transliterated Proverb
      • Kłamstwa = Lies
      • Mają = Have
      • Krótkie = Short
      • Nogi = Legs
    • Full Translation: Lies have short legs
      • Explanation: Lies travel upon weak and flimsy foundations that are will undoubtedly be discovered and be caught up to by a regular pair of legs.

Background:

The informant is one of my close friends from my Catholic high school who I maintain contact with after graduation. He hails from a devoutly Catholic Polish family. Among most of the families that I knew of while attending, most of my classmates did not speak their family lineage’s mother tongue except for most of the my Polish and Hispanic classmates. No German and definitely not any Irish being spoken there.

Context:

My informant is currently attending medical school in Poland and I reached out to him through social media to ask if he had any traditional/folk-things he could share with me given his actively apparent and practiced Polish heritage, doubly so now that he is back in Poland.

My Thoughts:

The act of lying is universally considered a negative and this would definitely would be a virtue that is practiced in a Catholic home. This would especially be effective as a warning to children to discourage them for lying as they would easily be found out. When I first heard it I thought it was referring to the legs of a table instead of legs on a human being. By being such a small table, I thought the proverb detailed that lies made for flimsy foundations instead of being short legs that cannot run very far. I’m not sure if a variation exists for the phrase about how lies eventually becomes truths if one repeats it enough and how that correlates to the quote.