Don’t you ever send me a link on Gchat. Don’t. I’ve seen it. I saw it 17 hours ago and there’s nothing you can do about it. I already saw that picture of Kanye standing on top of a table to maximize his British Teen Selfies Per Minute (BTSPM). I’ve already seen that interactive Honda R advertisement and also their new speed reading themed ad which is actually just a rip off of a technology that I’ve not only already seen but already written about too. Seriously. Don’t even try me (actually though please don’t stop or I will feel lonely when I should be working anyway).

I’ve long since dragged my tendencies towards hipsterism out of mere music/clothing and onto the web. Through my vigilant presence on Reddit, I stay on top on the most current content that people consume. I’ve become even more adept over the last few weeks as I’ve ascended one level deeper into the Internet. Most normal people (“normies”) will only dip their toes into the sea of Facebook and Instagram, possibly visit the shallows of Twitter, or even venture to the waters of Tumblr and Reddit. I, however, have entered my submersible (Google Chrome with strong antivirus add-ons) and begun my quest to explore the deep sea of the Internet: 4chan.

4chan shares many similarities to the deep ocean. It’s dark, inhabited by horrible and grotesque creatures, and is quite frankly not hospitable for human life. However, the most important commonality is that just like life on Earth started in the deep ocean, Internet content is born from the depths of 4chan. When a meme originates on 4chan it evolves through many iterations before assuming its final form on the mainstream web.

For example, Rickrolling, the act of replacing exciting and clickable content with a video of Rick Astley singing his (more famous now than when it was contemporary) “Never Gonna Give You Up”, actually originated from the above image of a duck with wheels. After a 4chan’s lead moderator, Moot, made a setting on the site that changed the word “egg” to “duck,” the bait and switch lead users attempting to type “eggroll” to type “duckroll.” Imitating this switcheroo, users would trick others into visiting an image of that duck, and eventually Astley’s video.

This leads me back to my ever enduring quest to gain my peers’ approval by being the first to discover something. Surely, had I been the first in my circle to discover and apply a Rickroll (let’s be real, I probably was) I would now be several orders of magnitude more popular and well-liked. With that in mind, I submit to you below the three dankest memes I’ve discovered in my research, and would like attributed to myself going forward. Please bear in mind that the term “meme” represents a repeatable digital idea/reference and is not limited to the image/text combinations found on /r/adviceanimals.

Chicken Tendies:

Originating from this post on a forum for British parents known as “Mumsnet,” this meme centers around the idea of an overgrown man child on a never ending quest for chicken tenders. Meme content consists of stories, poems and songs of said man-children earning GBP (Good Boy Points) to trade with the mothers they live with for the precious chicken tendies. Expect Bobby Moynihan to star in Chicken Tendies: The Musical in an upcoming SNL episode.

Pepe:

We’ve all seen Pepe the frog floating around Twitter and the web in general. Perhaps he’s been happy, angry, or maybe even smug. On 4chan, an image of Pepe represents the emotion felt by a poster at the end of whatever story they’ve written. In real life, we’ve already seen Pepe pics used in response to text messages, on t-shirts, and referenced by Katy Perry to describe jet lag. This frog is already swimming in the mainstream, but now you know him by name.

Lean Snek:

This meme might be too dank to touch right now. It originated from this Facebook macro of a woman holding up a large cobra and commenting “hissssssss……..hissssssss……….ssssss” (5 likes) and “This is snek” (4 likes). Don’t try to understand, just post in the comments or the snek won’t share his lean.

You may be tempted to visit 4chan on an adventure to find your very own dank memes. Do not do this. I’m a professional Internet browser. While some places on 4chan are safe, the vulgar, gory, disgusting, heinous, and quite frankly despicable content that canvases much of the site have left me a changed man, despite doing most of my research in the relatively safe 4chan subreddit. So stay safe out there and keep to your mainstream memes, I’ll send you a Gchat link to the dankness soon enough.