• he/him

Si | 23 | queer | discord light theme user

My art page: @cloneroom


tubular
@tubular

there's this tumblr post1 from august which contains an assorted 20-pack of memes about dirtworld. if you haven't heard of dirtworld, you don't need to to understand these memes; the joke is that it's an inside joke (one of the tumblr tags is "#inside joke").

i love this meme in particular, which is why i've made it the main image of the chost. if you ask me, i think it is very squishy and juicy for a guy to be sleep-losingly obsessed with how totally fucked up dirtworld is. did he make it up, or is dirtworld real and his partner is just over it? what is so disquieting about not even having trees? it's enough of a mood that i have said "man dirtworld is so fucked up" out loud in real life. it's a good meme!

viewing all 20 dirtworld memes together, however, reveals to me too much of the pattern. dirtworld, as it turns out, is an inside joke about an advanced alien civilization called dirtworld where their entire deal is that everything is dirt. this is a pretty solid premise, i admit, but it doesn't need elaboration imo; the more of them i read, the more it felt like these memes were generated by playing mad libs and writing in "dirt" for every prompt.2 there's a largely random amount of mystery through the first couple of memes depending on which ones you peruse first, but the gimmick falls off pretty quick as you continue (or at least, it did for me).

i think the one meme i selected, presented alone, is better than all twenty memes together. the existence of the other 19 memes collectively takes something mystical away from it. taken together, they suggest that no, dirtworld is actually quite understandable, it's just a dirt world. it has some fun idiosyncrasies that poke at scifi worldbuilding, but it's mostly dirt. i feel like i could make dirtworld memes myself now.

so here is my philosophical dilemma. do i like dirtworld if i only like this one dirtworld meme? can it stand alone? on the one hand it would be rude and dishonest not to source this art, and the source contains all 20, so it would be weirdly petulant to act like there's only this one. but on the other hand i had a meaningful experience with it that i feel is actively diminished if not even contradicted by the introduction of its 19 vingtuplet siblings. is it a valid death of the author to just ignore the parts of the canon that i find inconvenient, and keep the rest, if that is a sensible way to encounter the work?3

i don't know. i think it's the same phenomenon as when a sequel to something goes in a direction that you disagree with. my resolution to that has sometimes been to reject the sequels, but sometimes i try to let it grow on me, and it doesn't always work. but also i kinda think the answer doesn't even matter because it's just about funny joke jpegs on the internet. memes are such a pulpy medium


  1. there will be a link shortly but if you're on this footnote and you demand to see the post right now then here you go i guess

  2. dear original creator of the dirtworld memes: if you're reading this, i'm sorry for putting your memes on blast, ma'am, for the crime of posting them in a discord server while i was looking

  3. if this chost is your first time hearing of dirtworld, then your encounter could have been this, had i not revealed otherwise. much to think about


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