Imagine the pre-Emoji world, the world before you could send a smiling turd being shot by a smoking gun followed by a phallic eggplant to tell your mother just how you’re feeling after your third round of failed job interviews. And now imagine a world before Keeping Up With The Kardashians, when sex tapes were racy and Robert Kardashian was just the lawyer who defended his buddy O.J. Simpson. Now imagine the world yesterday, when these two things existed only as separate entities. And now, think of today, and know that Kimoji — Kim Kardashian emoji — exists.
Who needs the murky representation of a peach when Kim’s shiny buttocks are available whenever you need to call anybody an ass? And what is a donut if not a lesser, non-Kim Kardashian-branded donut? And what is the emoji, if not a representation of the significant advances made to web and mobile development since the creation of the Internet’s first website, 25 years ago?
While the idea of the pre-Google Internet isn’t so foreign to most adults, the reality of it is. The cobalt hyperlinks and disjointed text is long gone, but behold: a gallery of images that compare and contrast the web today as it was yesterday. Things are shinier, prettier, and perhaps more grotesque than back when the Internet was a fresh thing, its ugliness manifesting in a kind of beauty unknown to the smarmy youths of today.
They probably wouldn’t even appreciate this, a kind of real-life lightsaber created by a guy named Allen who realized that a lightsaber might as well just be a controlled, elongated flame. Because sometimes the solution to a problem requires redefining the solution, rather than stubbornly chasing the impossible. (Lightsabers are impossible, right?)
Almost as impossible as lightsabers are the paintings by Norman Rockwell, classic portraits of an America one could think was entirely dreamed up. But no! They were not dreamed up — at least not entirely. Many of Rockwell’s paintings were based on photographs he staged, and now those photographs are on display over at Wired .
And now, something that is not of the future, nor is it of the past, but it simply is: the cast of Fuller House whippin’ and nae naein’, courtesy of Vulture. Because sometimes the past isn’t sufficient and the future is too much, and so the only true solution to happiness is to bring the two of them together in the present and make them participate in an embarrassing, pointless exercise that cultivates society’s need for cultural homogeny, all things of all places idolizing all memes equally.