WTF happened on the internet this week?
Moo Deng came back
Well, well, well. As predicted in one of my previous editions of WTF happened on the internet this week, Moo Deng faded into obscurity. As I foresaw, that was to be expected — at the end of the day, she’s a hippo and the collective hysteria around her is a testament to nothing more than we, as a society, have gone insane. Unfortunately, however, another key tenet of living through 2024 is we can’t let things die. You only really have to look at something like The Office US (Americans are especially bad for it) to see that’s the case. Where I’m going with this is Moo Deng has come back, this time with a leaf on her head. It’s been dubbed Moo Deng’s “emotional support leaf”… That’s it really. I’m glad I’ve just turned 27 because if I get too sad at the state of the world and decide to top myself, I can at least be included in a cool posthumous club.
Halloween got gay
Take a scroll through X right now and you’ll quickly discern that there’s something of a cultural moment taking place: there’s tweet upon tweet (upon tweet) starting with the prefix “I hate gay Halloween what do you mean you’re”. What followed was everything from Liam Gallagher and Damon Albarn at a 1996 charity football match to the French children playing tribute to Serge Gainsbourg in 1988, with the name of the game being the more niche, the better. It was funny? I think? What was implicit was gay people are inherently “crazy” and “silly” and generally better than the general (straight) population. That’s probably true, to be fair. As is the aim of something like WTF happened on the internet this week, however, I have to play devil’s advocate, and side with someone like @joe_bish. The journalist (and online funnyman and, I would argue, 2024’s answer to Charlie Brooker) quoted one of the tweets with this sardonic little remark: “feel like a costume should be instantly recognisable in any scenario and not just when posed for a photo and contextualised with another photo, then again i’m not a play dress up adult baby”. Bang on.
We found the best Timothée Chalamet doppelganger
Across the pond, people were gathering in New York’s Washington Square Park to find the best Timothée Chalamet doppelganger. Starting with a lowly flyer created by YouTube personality Anthony Po that promised a $50 prize to the most Chalamet-esque punter, in the end thousands of people RSVPd, the event got shut down by police, and someone got taken away in handcuffs. Organisers were even slapped with a $500 fine. Still, the whole thing created more than its fair share of memorable cultural moments. Not least were hundreds of curly-haired lads milling about, but actual Timothée Chalamet showed up, stopping to take pictures with his look-a-likes. Another standout moment came in the form of the response from chief Timothée fan, none other than @ClubChalamet. Her statement on the event included such phrases as “I’m not Buddha” and “It’s not that deep folks” and you can read it in its entirety, here. Also, the whole thing has now transmuted into hordes of other tweets that play on the notion of a lookalike competition. In one of the most damning indictments that (again) we’ve lost our collective minds, someone wrote “Me after the Henry Cavill lookalike competition in my bedroom”. That was accompanied by an image of what’s meant to look like a face dripping in semen… Lovely. I’m tired. I may even be chronically depressed?
