Castleton State College has its fair share of inside jokes that only a CSC student would get. How slow is the internet on campus? Where did the waffle-maker in Huden go? On a scale of 1-10, how difficult is it to navigate North, Audet, or South House? These references, and others, have become the punch lines to a student-created Facebook page aimed at turning said jokes into memes.
Most fads blaze in popularity for an instant until collapsing into an ignorant black hole of obscurity. Beanie Babies, Tamagotchi pets, Parachute Pants, the words “boss” and “groovy” as colloquial words, are reminders of huge popularity – and then a quick death. Now, with powerful technology in the palm of our hands and an insatiable need to communicate our every thought and joke, we have internet memes.
With their popularity, sites dedicated to memes grew out of the woodwork; www.icanhascheezburger.com features the best, humorous, ‘lolcat’ images; knowyourmeme.com explains how esoteric and complicated memes work; www.9gag.com features an endless supply of various photos, even entire comics that use stick-figures representing emotions; another, www.quickmeme.com, lets people build their own, making the process highly accessible for newcomers to enjoy.
The two CSC Meme administrators, who will be referred to as “Derp” and “Derpina,” asked for anonymity because they wouldn’t want to risk receiving negative feedback from those potentially taking offense to person-specific memes.
“We don’t want it to be another one of our Facebook pages,” says Derp. “We want to have it continue by itself naturally.”
The Castleton State Memes Facebook page was set up by Derpina February 9. It has 49 submission from Derp and Derpina, and 32 from students. It’s also garnered 505 ‘likes.’
For Derp, they remind him of comics, though he admits some of them aren’t particularly healthy. Lolcats, Derp mentioned, with its intentionally bad grammar and spelling is “degrading” to the English language.
“I think they’re all great,” Derp continued. “Every time someone posts something new whether it’s [Derpina] or others, I just get a kick out of it.”
Derpina suggests that if anyone had ideas and requests for certain memes that they should submit them to the website.
“We can’t always think of everything,” says Derpina. “So if they post a request we could do that – even if we don’t think of something someone can.”
Derpina envisioned the Facebook page while studying abroad. If that school had a meme website, so could Castleton. After Derpina had made the page, Derp was one of the first submitters and was offered administrator status.
“I knew you’d be a great partner in crime,” Derpina said to Derp.
“And lo and behold I was,” Derp agreed.
Professor John Klein, psychology department chair, is referenced in one meme indicating at his resemblance to Gene Wilder (which he is absolutely aware of).
“It’s actually kind of cool,” said Klein, referring to the memes page.
Klein’s actually supported the use of “meme-y” things in his classes, such as drawing on scenes from “Animal House” specifically to explain id, ego, and superego.
Some students feel entirely different about the webpage.
“I can’t think of anything that I’m more apathetic about,” said junior John Lucas. “I don’t support it at all because they incorrectly use memes like it’s their job.”
Derp and Derpina set up the page with the best intentions.
“It’s nice having those kinds of memes of our school,” said Derpina. “It personalizes it.”
Both of them are graduating this May, but they have complete intentions to keep the site running.
“We’ll just find the right person who gets it so they can just keep it going,” said Derpina.