PRESS ENTER / TO EXIT
A Omsk Crow post.
The "Omsk Bird": a round red bird with a long beak and white dot eyes, on a dizzying psychedelic background. It's based on "Winged Doom", a drawing by the artist Heiko Müller, and became a meme on Russian imageboards in 2009, where the city of Omsk was a running joke for anything surreal. Müller first thought Omsk had picked his bird as a city mascot. He eventually got the joke, and even drew the white-eyed icon the meme uses. The bird's speciality is literal-minded nonsense puns. Top line sets up a phrase, bottom line breaks it. "Microsoft" / "Macrohard." "London" / "Londoff." "Press Enter" / "to exit." Many posts are in Russian, like "кинь ссылку" / "в Сибирь" - "send a link" / "to Siberia", because the Russian for link also means exile. The joke is that there's barely a joke. The bird says it anyway, with total confidence. **Why it caught on:** wordplay this dumb is somehow impossible not to repeat.