I usually don't have a hard time explaining referencial humor when it's, like, an older movie that was super popular in my day to a younger person who hasn't seen it; but memes are often inexplicable unless you just know.
so uh this guy once ordered a pizza with no toppings but only beef on the left side and that's why I have a 40-year-old man's face on my shirt with a pizza background.
Honestly, things like that remind me how vast the internet is. There are some things that I think are just ubiquitous that my friend has never heard of before. She had never heard of Creepy Pastas. She had never seen Long Long Man. She didn't know what an SCP was. I was baffled. Made me think about my own digital world, and what sources I may be completely blind to.
So like, she had a miscarriage and is crying about it and her boyfriend makes it just in time to see the results and uh yeah it's the funniest thing ever why are you leaving
The original reaction to the comic was kind of a collective chuckle of "Whahahahat the fuck?" Because the comic was like discount store brand Penny Arcade, irreverent bullshit gamer humor, and then comes the sudden plotline that the girlfriend character has a miscarriage.
Like, Loss itself isn't bad in and of itself; telling the story of the character's journey through the hospital with no dialog, it's competent...but it stood in such contrast to what the comic had been about for so long and the audience just wasn't on board with it that it became a controversy. And Buckley's clap back against it and the following drama made it memetic.
At some point, the imagery became so recognizeable even in the abstract that it became a prank to communicate the idea of the comic in as abstract a form as possible, hence the "Is this Loss" meme. Somewhere between rickrolling and "you just lost the game."
I think it 's (Edit: started out) more about how Tim Buckley is terrible than anything. (Edit: Then from there it) sort of collapsed into its own joke. No one really knows or cares about the context anymore, its become a self-contained meme with no real meaningful connection to Tim, the original comic, or its message now.
Same with young people and older Internet stuf and often you can't even show it because it was some flash application on newgrounds or something like that. NEDM, Bob the ball, Sinnlos im Weltraum, Kimbles Homepage, rotten, tubgirl and whatnot
Ceiling cat is a reference to possibly the earliest generation of memes. They mostly involved cats. Ceiling cat was a popular one of a cat poking its had down through a hole in a ceiling, captioned "ceiling cat is watching you masturbate" or something similar. The odd grammar/spelling is of the same Era, where these cat memes would be spoken in the "voice" of a cat. The most famous example is "I can haz cheezburger"
Leaving Britney alone is a reference to an early Era of YouTube video, where an actor bawling at the camera ranted about how people were being too mean to Britney Spears, a famous pop star. It was hotly debate whether the contents of the video were genuine or acting. Remember, this was before Snopes, even.
One of the funniest that shows just how little people know is this, a conversation I heard from someone like a month ago: "[name] is nonbinary, she uses they/them pronouns right?"
for context this is a Gen z person, not even a retired grandma who doesn't go around queer people at all, there was a group of really fruity folk next to them about dieing for their whole conversation
This is the bad thing about finding a good employer...the type you feel okay staying at a long time because they treat you well, the pay is reasonable and the benefits are great.
That's where I'm at now, and I'm starting to get bit in the ass by my own harebrained ideas, too.
So there's this kid and it's about a heist parody...wait let me start over. Theres this show with a smart old guy and a kid, kinda like back to the future, but like.....
I often laugh about things that are not always funny haha but sometimes horrible nonsense. So now when I laugh about it, my wife gives me the "do I want to know or not" look and I have an escape route to tell her its not really something funny or something she wouldn't think is funny