The Meme Textbook Part 2: The Language of the Internet | Page 35

Distribution
Loss.jpg
History
“Loss.jpg” or “CADbortion” was originally a
comic page from a well known web comic called
Ctrl+Alt+Del (CAD) made by Tim Buckley. It
started in 2002 and ended in 2012, although it
was rebooted in 2014. The main story follows
Ethan, a quirky video game fanatic, Ethan’s
sarcastic roommate Lucas, and Ethan’s girl-
friend, and later wife, Lilah. There are a num-
ber of story arcs including Ethan’s job at a
video game store, Ethan starting his own reli-
gion, and the creation of a robot made of a
video console. There are also frequent com-
ics that are unrelated to the main storyline
and are usually video game based humor.
In this page, released in 2008, Ethan finds
out Lilah, his wife, has suffered a miscar-
riage. (Fig. 101) However, due to the dra-
matically different tone in this page in com-
parison with the generally lighthearted video
game based slice-of-life, many people on
the internet began spreading it as a joke.
After the initial release of the comic page,
many other web comics and internet per-
sonalities parodied it, including the comic
Cyanide and Happiness. Initial parodies would
replace the characters with other ones from
various subcultures and fandoms. However,
as the popularity of the meme expanded and
progressed, the jokes became abstracted.
Most frequently, memes rejuvenate comedy by
combining popular meme imagery and for-
mats. Fig. 102 is one such example of this,
although it combines five separate memes. First
is the format of Loss. Second is the lyrics to
The Village People’s YMCA, which became a
popular format for creating rhymes that refer-
enced popular culture events. The third, “Take
the breadsticks and run” was created on Tumblr
in 2014 and it parodied a dinner date in which
the speaker’s date would do or say something
perceivably unacceptable so the speaker would
steal the breadsticks from the table and leave.
The fourth, “Man door hand hook car door” is a
reference to a creepypasta, an internet age scary
story, posted to 4chan in 2012 where the those
words were the title of the story. The fifth, “gun,”
was the punchline to long winding stories where
they would end simply with “gun,” resulting in
an unsatisfying, often frustrating ending. fig. 13
The longest lasting aspect of the comic is the
format. The sequence of lines: | || || | _ has
become ubiquitous. It is so well known that
simple lines in a square are recognizable as
the meme. With this abstraction, comes a new
breed of humor in which the joke is how far
the original meme can be abstracted and still
be understood as Loss.jpg. The next two pages
show a range of the Loss meme, from the fan-
dom references to the abstract. (Fig. 103-109)
fig. 102
The Meme Textbook | 35