gentlemen stuff is outdated and stupid? / tell me again about the great guys you've dated
A journalist post.
The night before the test, you open the textbook, read the first line, and decide the revision timetable needs colour-coding first. By midnight the timetable is beautiful and the game is on. You are, as ever, completely calm about it. The Spanish homework is due first period. Twelve sentences, ten minutes, one translation tab. Your teacher will say the grammar is "interesting", and you will agree. You hand in thirty pages on a Friday and spend the weekend imagining someone reading it. Marked, the first page has a tick and the last has nothing. The bibliography alone took you an evening. Someone says they have a joke, builds up the pause, and delivers the punchline with total confidence. It is a single word. You laugh anyway, mostly at the confidence. **Why it caught on:** a hand-drawn laughing face in the rage comic style, widely known as the Yao Ming face or "Bitch Please", taken from the basketball player's expression. It was dropped onto a red, yellow and blue starburst for the advice-animal format, where it was used for smug punchlines and shrugging at one's own bad decisions. It spread because the grin does the job of every caption: it says the speaker finds himself hilarious, whether or not anyone else does.