You mean like when I used to ask my tween daughter how “the game” was going?
166Fuck you.
I lost.
93Whats this now? How am i already in the 'how do you do fellow kids'??
19The game has been around for generations
25Rules:
- Everyone is playing the game, whether they know it or not.
- When you know (or remember) that you're playing, then you lose.
6
Every once in a while, my dad makes sure I lose it, just like how I lost now
17The earliest recollection I have about The Game is a friend texting me a chicken with a sign that spelled The Game. I had absolutely no idea what that was supposed to mean so I very eloquently asked him "wtf". "You lost the game", he replied. "What game? Dude, what are you talking about?".
He then explained what the game was and how I had lost it by reading the sign on the chicken, something that I thought, and made sure to tell him, was one of the stupidest things to have come out of the Internet. About an hour later he sent me a screenshot from an old conversation where I originally told him about The Game. I somehow had completely erased it from my memory. I won The Game.
7Blocked ^(jk)
6Fuck you lmao
5
:.|:;111How long before this is an emoji or otherwise included in Unicode?
9
Calling it a rick roll dealt bonus damage.
65"the youth" 😏
18
I don't think you have to be under 30 anymore
60I didn't realise under 30s knew about it.
11The oldest under 30 would have been 7 years old when Loss was posted.
5
I've been playing for 30 years.
8You have to be over 30 now
7
If they were under 30 ten years ago
41What is this even talking about? Rick roll? Knives? Hieroglyphs? What do they have to do with each other?
35Rick roll refers to tricking someone into opening the YouTube video for Rick Ashley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. Knives are used to cut things, and in this case the father was arranging them to look like the loss comic. Without the context, the layout of the knives appears to just be a hieroglyph, which is a symbol used to convey information.
When you bring this all together, you get a dad having fun with his kids by ironically referencing memes he doesn’t understand. Kind of like how grandma used to call every video game console a Nintendo or every Pokémon a pikachu.
63
45In case, you're not familiar with the Loss comic, it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_(Ctrl%2BAlt%2BDel)
TL;DR: It's an unexpectedly dark comic (hence the psychic damage), and it turned into somewhat of a meme to try to remind people of it, by producing ever more abstract representations of it.
For example, you can post:.|:;here on Lemmy and someone will probably recognize it.The dad is creating such an abstract representation by arranging knives.
28The father used knives to create the Loss shorthand on the countertop. He called it "Rick-rolling" because he knows that word is associated with online trolling. He's never seen the original Loss comic, so the arrangement of knives on the counter is more akin to hieroglyphics than anything; an arrangement of symbols to convey an idea.
24Even after reading all the explanations, it still seems very forced and contrived. And definitely not humorous at all, not even grin worthy.
16Context is very important here, and maybe it's impossible to find funny if you weren't there for it.
But as just my little take on an explanation, it's less funny than it is shocking, which is what makes it funnier than it is shocking.
I know that's confusing, so let me explain. CTRL+ALT+DEL is like the be all end all of snarky gamer webcomics. Week after week, Tim Buckley would have his characters make nerdy 2000s-2010s gamer puns and complain about video games. It's pretty straightforward, just basically imagine The Gamer™ stereotype and you're pretty much there.
Ex:
So then out of nowhere, Tim starts uploading comics that really focus on relationship drama, culminating in Loss. Then he dropped the idea of being serious in that manner altogether.
So this gamer comic about gaming drops an arc about a miscarriage then immediately goes back to being a gamer comic about gaming without a second thought.
It's truly shocking. So shocking that if you were enveloped in that world at the time, you couldn't help but chuckle at Tim for releasing something like this. It's that mix of shock and (if you know the comic) an utterly unexpected situation that has given Loss staying power.
Remember, a meme is not a joke. A joke is something crafted to make us laugh, but a meme is just an idea with staying power. Yes, some memes have staying power due to their hilarity (I would say maybe "2 guys walk into a bar" jokes fall in this category - the idea is simple and can be set up to end in many different ways, but the goal and the way it's remembered is comedic), but on the flip side a lot of memes have staying power because of the shock they cause (2 girls 1 cup, jarsquatter, Astolfo Monster can, Shrek is Love Shrek is Life).
An element of shock memes that increases their prevalence is the game of "getting" your friends. A lot of those shock clips were circulated through people saying something similar to "oh hey check out this cookie recipe I found" and then deviously sending a link to something horrific instead, thus tricking the victim.
Here's where Loss comes back in, because there's a third relevant category of meme here - "gotcha" memes. These memes play on the same "gotcha" value that helps spread shock memes.... but they're not necessarily shocking. People get a kick out of their friends' reactions when they see that meme, so they send it to them to get that reaction without necessarily causing real trauma by actually sending horrific pornography.
Examples of this include Loss, Rickrolling, Darude - Sandstorm, The Game, Updog. One common factor between these? They generally rely on shared cultural experiences. If you rickroll a 10-year-old they're just going to be like "uhm I think you sent me the wrong link," but it's funny to people who were there for that moment in history.
Another common factor is most of these are spread by people "getting got." If you fall for "smells like Updog in here," I guarantee the first thing you're doing is going to try that out on someone else.
In short, is Loss funny? Not really. But it's not forced either. It's widespread because people reading gamer comics got smacked in the face out of nowhere with a miscarriage plot and it was so outrageous that they spread that feeling of "what the fuck did I just see" all over the internet.
But that's just my two cents.
34Comic that got roasted for trying to be artsy and ended up being mockworthy. Then it got simplified to the lines. Then people started making variations in increasingly ridiculous ways. So kinda like how people run doom on their fridges
7Maybe you had to be there
4
he was arranging the knives to look like loss
14There's a bunch of other words in between those words that you should also read, in order, and then the meaning will be revealed
1
I still have no idea what the fuck is going on with loss. I’ve seen the comic. I don’t get it.
28Out of context Loss is actually pretty good, frankly. The thing is the context it was found in doesn't deserve it. It came from a sub-boner humor gamer comic that suddenly got really dramatic. The tone whiplash just struck a nerve at the time, which is why the comic came to wide attention.
Then there's the "is this Loss" meme, which is kind of a prank game where you encode the layout of Loss as abstractly as possible, often with one line, to represent the character walking through the door alone, two lines, one tall and one short to represent him standing and the sitting nurse, two tall lines for him and the doctor standing, and then one vertical and one horizontal line to represent him standing and her lying down. The joke here lies in reminding people of this stupid thing in as abstract and distant a way as possible.
27Do you "get" rickrolling? It's the same thing
6
Pics or n'est pas le happen
16No idea how to parse this. Still a proud non-knower of the loss meme.
16You're not missing out on much. As far as memes go, this one is pretty bad.
12As the post says it's about the same quality as a Rick roll. Take that as you will
7I’d argue that the loss meme is unique in that people do their best to make it as abstract as possible.im sure I’ve missed so many loss memes cause there wasn’t a comment of “is this loss?”. There is something fun about the game in it cause I’ve seen some high quality attempts to sneak loss into other things
1
Given that the author was genuinely inspired by something he lived (it's never been cleared up for me whether he had a girlfriend experience miscarriage or what), I never really understood the vicious and now eternal mockery. Just goes to show the community...
The meme itself is wonderfully elegant! It's a reduction of the original comic to its simplest form. The sort of shit that should evolve over the course of centuries gets done in a few weeks in the Internet primordial soup. I could write it thus and I reckon it's still recognizable : I Ii II I_
Each bar represents a character in the otherwise silent comic. And is usually presented in a two by two pattern to reflect the comic layout. But it's been deconstructed to much it'd still work as I've rendered it above.
8
̶:̶ ̶.̶ ̶|̶ ̶:̶ ̶;̶
12Did it work? Are you crazy now?
9How old is this? I don't feel like anyone under 30 would know what loss is.
8I'd agree.
But saying "a part of younger millenials" just wouldn't have the same impact as a joke
4
That happened.
4Nothing ever happens.
1
Did anyone under the age of 30 even read Ctrl+Alt+Delete? It’s 16 years now so they’d have been 10 at maximum when the strip came out.
1
