It’s Actually Victory Wine

The fact that you know what that subject refers to is a sign that you have brain worms, and so do I, and if you didn’t recognise the source, but did recognise what it means, then you’re part of the spread of those worms.

There are a truly stunning number of quotes in our common discourse that can be attributed to the digital pen of the Twitter user dril, aka wint, aka no I’m not going to go provide the known information about this person’s real identity after Homestuck doxed him and boy isn’t that a sentence to even joke about, good god, what the living hell. dril (stylistically, lower case d), is a twitter user who’s responsible for a number of really widespread tweets, but also specific phrases that themselves now feel like they predate his 2008 account creation.

Have you heard someone say ‘I’m not owned, I’m not owned?’ How about ‘corncobbing?’ ever been told to ‘spend less on candles?’ Does something ‘smack of gender?’ Do you know anyone who’s ‘faced god and walked backwards into hell?’ Do you know how important it is that Wario is a libertarian? Is jail isn’t real? Do you demand that someone show themselves, coward, for you will never log off? What about your fears of the Skeleton War?  Are none of you free of sin? Do you know how heavy your heart is when you announce the celebs are at it again? Drink precisely one beer? Zero difference between good things and bad things, you fucking moron? Is your problem that you’re perfect and everyone’s jealous of you? Turning a dial marked racism? Sorry, sorry, I’m trying to delete it?

Do you know how unlikely it is that you’ll ever get to fuck the flag?

This isn’t even a comprehensive rundown of common memes that trace back to dril. This is a glance at his wikiquote page from 2008 to 2014. This is Shakespearean.

dril is a prolific comic writer and sort of despair poet, whose medium is twitter, which involves not just reflecting on the culture of twitter but also the way that twitter users behave when presented with a platform to finally vent their thoughts. It’s also super fucking postmodern, where the fact that tweets are created by a person who is relating their own life introduces the fundamentally unreliable narrator, which dril then milks for comedy, and absurdity, and uh, through that, more comedy.

 

I reflect on dril sometimes, because there’s a way that the jokes the creator makes have spread well wide from their source. Dril has now told jokes that are seen as kind of fundamental to twitter – not just made about and of twitter, but now the kind of joke that people who use twitter recognise, even the ones who are several steps removed. Sometimes his quotes are taken entirely out of their context and used by people who don’t even realise they’re referencing him.

This is where things get really weird.

We have an example in history, though, of this kind of thing. In a medium, someone who starts as a parody that mocks a familiar form, something we all recognise. dril mocks the idea of the self-important, politically engaged dumbass, the metaphors made by the so-called intellectuals that populate twitter, or just the extremely petty people who document their own largely unremarkable lives with extensive crisscrossing feelings of resentment, old grudges and attempts to restructure their personal narratives such that make them. That mockery, however, has been so effective that now, dril and his jokes are told by those people, people who recognise their own ridiculousness (ha ha, unless?) and then becomes part of the shape of that ridiculousness.

What I’m saying is that dril is Homer Simpson.

 

EDIT, UPDATE: Okay, sigh, so

So it seems that CNN is now referring to the Trump leavings as ‘Adult Sons,’ which is, as is being pointed out, evocative of My Large Adult Sons.

That’s it. The dude’s now infecting the CNN style guide.