Become a Member
Opinion

Maybe I'm not such a sceptic after all

Jamie Rodney finds himself singing Chanukah songs down the phone - to his own surprise.

December 19, 2017 10:31
3146025161_41bcb5578b_o.jpg
2 min read

A couple of things have happened since my last article. The first, is that Chanukah started - if you don't know what this is, then you're probably reading the wrong newspaper.  

The second - far less important in the grand scheme of things, but equally significant to this article - is that I went home for a couple of days during exam leave. Now, aside from the usual advantages a visit home can give a skint, underfed and permanently cold student, this latest visit home let me have a conversation with my younger brother which inspired this article.  

My brother is what the internet calls a "meme boi" - I'm not sure what the precise definition of this is, and if he's reading this he's probably cringing at the way I've misused it, but essentially it means he's got a better grasp of internet humour than is reasonable or healthy. It also means that whenever I see a meme I don't understand or haven't seen before, I'll ask him to explain it for me.

The most recent of these, coming up on my last visit home, was "Press F to pay respects." This meme, currently weirdly popular in Facebook groups, is based on a scene from the video game Call of Duty Advanced Warfare (hadn't heard of it either), where the protagonist attends the funeral of his best friend. The game gives the character the option to "Press F to pay respects" to the dead, apparently totally unaware of how unsuited the gesture is to the gravitas of the situation.