If you’ve been using the hashtag #yassify since, oh, 2015, there’s a 90 percent chance you’ve been using YassifyBot to streamline your Yassification. Other people have probably had Yassify Robots come to their house and take messages from their Yassifyers, but I hadn’t.
But I’m now in that dark, shadowy, lonely stretch of internet where people literally move that an entire meme on their phones and stick them somewhere within a few thousand tweets, and I realize I need to rectify this situation.
So here’s the setup. For those unfamiliar with the New England Patriots, they make a living — most, in fact — by trolling their opponents. “Gronk is an unstoppable force! You have no idea how good he is!” “Tom Brady is a statue!” And so on.
This trolling generally happens online: Tom Brady throws a football at whatever receiver is next to him, and then the receiver says something outrageous to his target in an attempt to get in Brady’s good graces, and it instantly becomes a meme. And because the Patriots and Instagram and Twitter have created some indescribable magic that allows the Patriots to win the Super Bowl — but the Internet only won Super Bowl 52, because that was declared a mistake on Monday — the jokes end up going viral.
A post shared by Trainwreck (@trainwreck_movie) on Oct 15, 2015 at 4:09pm PDT
For example, in 2015, someone made a post about Gronk making an unbelievable catch and saying, “The Patriots try to win with a cooler wife and I’m trying to win with baseball.” You can read the whole thing here. I edited some things so there would be no confusion.
And yet, within days, an entire subculture of overuse, nudge and smirk memes bloomed, mocking the Patriots’ opponents to a T. (Yassify your opponent as a collective noun.) It’s part of a love/hate cycle that defines the Patriots, and by extension, the world.
(Before you can go to any kind of crowd, you have to figure out how to ask: “Are you ready for this?”)
I wouldn’t presume to point fingers here, but I don’t mean to be smug. There’s a weird relationship between disrespect and gratitude among trolls. Some say to do: give them free stuff. Some say: smack them on the ass.
For example, if someone finds that you look like a zombie or a clown or a rotting shell of your former self, say, after a depressing season at work, you’re a near-boundary jumper and should pay them a compliment, but if they find you to be “an incredible fireman,” you’re on your own.
Is it worth it? Not unless your battlecry/motto/prophet/everything-bear is Shanna Moakler.
So you wonder: “How do we take this meme to next level?”
OK, two possible answers.
First, do what I did, and as soon as I wrote this, gather a group of friends, put them in a room and create this: A Yassifyifier. You have to sign in with your Twitter handle, and they have to sign in, and they have to type your various actions into whatever an engine program that compiles all your tweets will input (you’ll be comfortable since you’ve been making giant #yassify memes).
Then go on to the New England Patriots-related Twitter threads and your own Twitter. These are the only places you’ll see this thing, and a good chunk of them may even have taken place off the internet, so you’re basically almost guaranteed to want to replicate that experience.
Then your assigned hashtag will appear, or it will appear somewhere where you connect your Twitter handles, and you’ll all enter a dialogue with each other. Your goals? Find other Yassifyers. Find other people to harass. Find someone who has a Yassify, knows how to tweet in the Key Magic Ratio and has a dumb ass image for it. Find the Kyrie Irving meme that’s all over New England and start sucking at the latter. Find an insult-meme in the cardinal Key and Wonderful Key family, and repeat it around your house (I keep bringing up this one because it’s the perfect New England meme).
It’s on to next level when you see how your tweet gets its status update.