In 1997, John Silveira was asked to come up with fillers for unsold ad space in the magazine he was writing for. The clock was ticking, and he decided to just place two ads of his own. He needed to get the page filled up fast and get on with his day.

The first ad Silveira placed was a personal ad he'd written in hopes of finding a girlfriend. For the second, he chose a fake "wanted" classified. In it he included the opening lines of a sci-fi novel he'd been working on.

Here's the ad:

It reads:

WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview, CA 93022. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.

Posting the ad in the magazine was hilarious, an inside joke Silveira had with himself. He figured no one would really notice it.

He was wrong.

The ad led to an explosive volume of letter responses, a series of internet memes with millions of views. It was the inspiration for a critically acclaimed indie movie in 2011, "Safety Not Guaranteed," starring comedian Aubrey Plaza, 14 years after the ad ran.

And it still won't die.

Letters from prison

We heard about the story of the "Safety Not Guaranteed" meme, as it's known, on "Reply All," a podcast about the internet produced by Gimlet Media. Co-hosts PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman give a peek inside the madness of the meme's origin.

You can listen to their episode here:

It inspired us to dig deeper into the layers of its popularity. Lynn Levy of Radiolab interviewed Silveira and found out about the unintentional consequences the ad had on his life.

So first, that magazine Silveira was working for. It was called Backwoods Home Magazine, a small Oregon publication specializing in "practical ideas for self-reliant living." It's still active today and publishes six issues a year. Its website is a tribute to '90s internet; there's an animated American flag and Comic Sans MS headers. It's surprisingly kept up to date with select material that the editorial team puts online.

It has a small but seemingly loyal readership. Topics Backwoods Home covers include weaponry and home canning. It has, Levy says, a "survivalist vibe." It's not People or US Weekly or Vogue, and it definitely does not have the audience of a renowned print publication.

It was the night before the September 1997 issue was to go to print when Silveira and his boss ran into the space issue in the advertising section. There was room for two ads and barely any time to fill them, so Silveira threw in his own — the "Safety Not Guaranteed" ad being one of them.

It was brief and intriguing, and Silveira expected a handful of funny responses to the P.O. Box he listed.

He got tons of replies, from curious to desperate to potentially crazy. Silveira read some of his favorite responses to Levy during their interview.

"How are we going? Why is it dangerous? Why do we need weapons? What kind of weapons should I bring?" one reply read.

Another asked if there would be toilet paper — or "do I have to bring my own?"— while another was penned by a bunch of felons writing from prison. "We would like to go back and not get caught."

The joke ad, the space-filler, became a weird beacon of hope for readers who had major problems or devastating histories. Silveira said the letters from prison were especially tough.

He told Levy:

Dozens, in prison, asked me to go back in time and talk them out of committing the crime that put them away. Others (and not a few) were from people who begged me to go back and save a loved one from a tragic death. Those letters were so heartbreaking I almost couldn't read them and I felt a certain amount of shame for not anticipating the false hope I placed in so many hearts.

This emotional can of worms was an unanticipated consequence of Silveira's flash decision to post the ad.

The responses went on for a few months, but eventually letters were no longer overflowing Silveira's mailbox. It seemed as if the madness was coming to an end.

But not so fast.

'You're the man now, dog!'

It’s tough to trace incidences of the "Safety Not Guaranteed" ad appearing between 1997 and the early 2000s, but we know it was read on NPR's "Car Talk" radio program on March 31, 2001, though we don't know what sparked the show's producers to choose to include a four-year-old meme in that particular installment.

Silveira claims it was featured in a "Tonight Show" monologue, but the internet has turned up no proof of that.

So now it's 2004, and a new internet sensation was gaining popularity: YTMND.com. The acronym stands for "You're The Man Now, Dog"— a quote from the movie "Finding Forrester."

In this bizarre moment from the movie, Sean Connery’s ornery character barks the line at his black protégé.

A man named Max Goldberg heard the quote in the movie’s first trailer, and "immediately recognized the power of the catchphrase." He purchased the domain and went to work.

The original page features a tiled photo of Sean Connery and WordArt-era text, with a sound loop of the ludicrous quote, and to this day the site remains home for a perfect formula for internet humor: static image + text + sound = unlimited possibility.

The rules seemed simple. Choose a photo, pair it with audio that enhances the level of weird humor, and give it a catchy URL.

So how does this involve "Safety Not Guaranteed"? OK, stay with us.

People loved"You're The Man Now, Dog." Remember that trope from a few years ago, "Shit ______ say"? It was kind of like that. With YTMND, other people began creating inspired spin-offs, hosted on their own sites, but with the same formulaic approach to get the same punch line. Goldberg began archiving all of the spin-off sites in another section of the original YTMND URL, giving all of the inspired meme-makers ultimate visibility on his already major platform.

So on October 27, 2005, user "AxlBonBach" created an inspired YTMND site titled "Safety Not Guaranteed." Using the URL www.timetraveler.ytmnd.com, he Photoshopped a serious-looking man with a mullet next to the ad, and chose "Push it to the Limit"— the popular montage song from "Scarface"— as the audio.

People loved it. "LMAO," one user wrote. "This is bound to be an instant classic."

While "Safety Not Guaranteed" as it appeared on YTMND was many folks' first time seeing the ad, some users criticized the post, claiming that it was plagiarized or simply old news (they had supposedly seen the ad on Jay Leno).

AxlBonBach paid no mind to the critics. He'd never claimed he created the ad itself, and the site continued to flood with fans of "Safety Not Guaranteed."

Don LaFontaine gets involved

The popular YTMND formula paid off for the classified ad. The added mullet-man and jazzed-up soundtrack had successfully spawned an army of replicas and iterations, bringing us to January 2006, when a user who went by "Scrow" claimed he had found a Civil War-era photo in his attic that looked eerily similar to the time-traveling mullet-man.

He made his own YTMND site to publicize his findings (pictured), which breathed new life into the nearly 10-year-old "Safety Not Guaranteed" classified ad.

From there, a user named "Blackadders2" emailed Don LaFontaine, the iconic voice actor who had recorded more than 5,000 film trailers, asking him to create a movie-trailer style reading of the ad.

LaFontaine came through, and once again another YTMND site was made featuring an iteration of "Safety Not Guaranteed," this time with a sloppily Photoshopped image of LaFontaine's face over the mullet photo and the newly recorded trailer as the audio sample.

YTMND users were stunned and impressed, many of them convinced the voice they were hearing was not LaFontaine's.

Blackadders2 replied to comments calmly, maintaining he had simply emailed the guy and hoped that he'd play along.

When LaFontaine died in September 2008, that particular YTMND page resurfaced and amassed tons of traffic. A new generation of internet users visiting the site after LaFontaine's death had never seen it, nor had they heard of the "Safety Not Guaranteed" meme.

Around that time a screenwriter named Derek Connolly saw the Don LaFontaine version of the "Safety Not Guaranteed" meme and was inspired to write a script for a movie. He, like most everyone who became a fan of the meme through YTMND, didn't know the ad's backstory. He told IndieWire he "immediately wondered if it was real."

Regardless, Connolly wrote the script for "Safety Not Guaranteed" in 2010, and a man named Colin Trevorrow was signed on to direct the film.

Neither had ever heard of John Silveira.

Silveira writes again

It's important to remember that throughout the 13 years the meme had taken on a life of its own, Silveira had stayed silent on his role as the creator. And he also didn't know anyone was writing a script based on the ad. So it seemed serendipitous when Silveira chose to write the story of the "Safety Not Guaranteed" ad as he knew it for Backwoods Home Magazine in 2010.

This was the first time he publicly declared he was the author of the ad.

Silveira, amused by the whole thing, explains the story.

He goes through the issue of the unfilled space and the responses he got. The only mention that YTMND and the "meme-ification" receive is this statement: "Some guy with a bad mullet has run the ad with his picture as if it's his."

From there, Trevorrow — who has already committed to directing the "Safety Not Guaranteed" movie and who has already lined up producers, financiers, and the actors — comes across Silveira's tell-all on Backwoods Home Magazine. It's unclear as to how. Unless Trevorrow is an avid reader of Backwoods Home Magazine, the idea that he happened to stumble upon the article is unlikely, so maybe they had alerts out for the phrase "Safety Not Guaranteed" or similar.

Regardless, Trevorrow is blown away. He needed to call Silveira, who, remember, has no idea this movie is in the works.

Trevorrow recalled that moment in a 2012 Wall Street Journal essay:

We could have simply changed the words in the original ad, moved a few sentences around to create a cheap knock-off of the real thing. But I wouldn’t do it. Not just because it would be a cynical and inauthentic move — but because the source material was flawless.

Trevorrow calls up Backwoods Home and is put through to Silveira. It wasn't long before the two of them met for a meal and got to know each other better.

Trevorrow described Silveira as very different from the "Mullet Man: [Silveira isn't] acid-washed jeans tucked into action hero boots, whittling something lethal with a hunting knife while telling me in no uncertain terms to go to hell."

Instead, he met a gray-bearded poet from Oregon with a soft voice.

The two bonded over their ideas of who the fictional man behind the ad would be.

Silveira, after all, had written it as part of a sci-fi novel. They both agreed, "He’d be a real man, one who has experienced true loss and pain. He’d be erratic, possibly brilliant, and full of contradictions—an outcast who hates being misunderstood while simultaneously not giving a damn. He’d be a survivalist and a poet. And, yes, he’d bring his own weapons."

The movie was made, and in 2012 it made its debut at Sundance Film Festival. At the premiere, Silveira was introduced and received a standing ovation from the crowd.

Loyal YTMND users remembered the life of the "Safety Not Guaranteed" meme before it became "Safety Not Guaranteed" the movie, and discussion was rampant online about this next-level meme installation, truly, the finale it deserved after so many of its iterations appeared on the internet over the past 15 years.

Before "Safety Not Guaranteed" the movie became mainstream (it lived on Netflix for a while), the trailer was posted to Reddit, where a majority of the comments made references to the meme's pre-Hollywood life: mullets, "Push it to the Limit," and YTMND.

The movie had moderate success, and Trevorrow went on to direct the blockbuster hit of 2015, "Jurassic World." Now he's slated to spearhead one of the new "Star Wars" movies. 

And as for Silveira? He still writes for Backwoods Home Magazine, publishing articles about climate change, the Second Amendment, and the benefits of homeschooling.

Silveira summed up the life of his ad, the tiny one used to fill some space one night in September 1997: "What lies in the future? ... for all the writing I've done, they are probably the only words I've written that will outlive me."

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NOW WATCH: Here's why memes are so much more than just funny internet photos – straight from the man who coined the term

Have you seen a post from a Facebook friend asking you to participate in a book exchange? The system is basically an old-school fraudulent chain letter. It won't work the way you probably expect, and it might be illegal.

Here's the text from a typical post:

Hello all! Calling out to all of you who are bookworms, book lovers, and bibliophiles (like myself) from all walks of life. We need at least 6 people to participate in a book exchange (but can be more). You can be anywhere in the world. The further we get, the better! All you have to do is buy one of your favorite books and send it to one person. You will receive approximately 36 books back! If you are interested like this status so I can fill you in on all the details!

Sounds harmless, right?

Here's the problem.

Chains like this — with every new member sending books or gifts or money backward to the last people on the chain— are basically efficient systems for enriching a small group of people at the expense of a much larger group. In fact, no matter how big the chain grows, it's mathematically impossible for more people to get free stuff than people who spend money without getting anything at all.

The chain asks you to believe that if you send an item to one person you stand to benefit because you will recruit six more people and they'll all send you books. Of course, once you finish those books you send them along to the person who recruited you. And all the books your recruits receive will eventually end up in your hands.

But because each link on the chain has to include more people than the last one for the chain to work, there will always be this massive, expanding group of people who have bought books and sent them up the chain that far outweighs the group of people who have received books. Eventually, the chain will run out of steam with a small group of people at the middle who've managed to hoard lots of books and a giant group of people who eagerly signed up but ultimately spent money they'll never get back.

Even if the chain spread all over the world, it would eventually die out when all seven billion people had signed up, and it would die with billions more losers than winners. You are much more likely to be one of the losers.

The only difference between this book chain and chain letters that typically target elderly, under-educated, or otherwise vulnerable people is that it seems to go after college-educated nerds.

In case you don't care, maybe because you're confident you're jumping on board early enough that you think you're guaranteed to be one of the winners, you should know that there's a good chance it's illegal.

The U.S. Postal Service says this on the matter:

They're [chain letters] illegal if they request money or other items of value and promise a substantial return to the participants. Chain letters are a form of gambling, and sending them through the mail (or delivering them in person or by computer, but mailing money to participate) violates Title 18, United States Code, Section 1302, the Postal Lottery Statute. (Chain letters that ask for items of minor value, like picture postcards or recipes, may be mailed, since such items are not things of value within the meaning of the law.)

Recently, high-tech chain letters have begun surfacing. They may be disseminated over the Internet, or may require the copying and mailing of computer disks rather than paper. Regardless of what technology is used to advance the scheme, if the mail is used at any step along the way, it is still illegal.

The main thing to remember is that a chain letter is simply a bad investment. You certainly won't get rich. You will receive little or no money. The few dollars you may get will probably not be as much as you spend making and mailing copies of the chain letter.

The only halfway sensible argument in favor of participating in one of these schemes that I've seen came from my friend Gus Schlanbusch, who wrote on Facebook, "It's fundamentally a pyramid scheme, only instead of investing money for potentially no return you're giving someone a book for potentially no return and I do that sometimes anyway."

In other words, only participate if you're comfortable with the overwhelming likelihood that you're sending a book to someone but will receive nothing in return. I'd add that you have a moral obligation to make that abundantly clear to your recruits as well.

That said, you shouldn't participate in fraudulent, exploitative, possibly illegal chain mail schemes.

If you're looking for free books, I have great news for you. There's almost certainly a place near your home where thousands are available for free. It's called a public library.

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Daniel definitely helped the company that makes Vans sell a ton of white Vans. 

In case you missed it, the "damn, Daniel" meme blew up in February. It's a video of one friend named Josh Holz calling out his teen friend Daniel Lara over and over for wearing Vans. Mostly white Vans. 

"Dammmmnnnnn, Daniel, back at it again with the white Vans!" the tagline goes.

Daniel and Josh gained a ton of Twitter followers, went on Ellen, made a website, and did all the other things viral sensations get up to soon after.

Sales of white Vans on Amazon because of Daniel blew up in the following weeks. And that was the first sign we got that VF Corp, the apparel company that owns the Vans brand, was cashing in.

The company reported first-quarter earnings on Friday, and beat expectations for profits and sales. It said direct-to-consumer sales spiked 20%, while online sales jumped 30%. 

Here's president and COO Steven Rendle:

Of course, how could we not mention Daniel, as in 'Damn Daniel', which, as you can imagine, did have a strong impact on the sales of White Vans, which saw 100% sell-through in both retail direct-to-consumer and wholesale channels. 

The national media attention the brand received is a wild demonstration of how creative expression, youth culture and loyalty can conspire to cause a phenomenon. Well done, Daniel, well done.

Bloomberg notes that Vans jumped on the meme — like a #brand would —  and redirected its homepage to a listing for white Vans.  

All this happened at a tough time for apparel retailers, who are facing headwinds from changing consumer tastes and online shopping. 

Here's the original viral video:

SEE ALSO: The insanely popular ‘damn Daniel’ meme is now an insanely popular game in the App Store

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Australia's minister of immigration, Peter Dutton, and his team wanted an unflattering photo of him removed from Twitter.

Instead, he ended up becoming the internet's latest meme.

The original photo, taken by photojournalist Alex Ellinghausen, was posted to Twitter by journalist Stephanie Peatling. 

The photo was taken at a press conference where the minister was discussing the ongoing refugee crisis in Australia after two recent events where refugees reportedly lit themselves on fire.

Once the photo of the minister surfaced, his press office requested it be taken down. Peatling, a senior writer at The Age, explained the request on the Live Budget Blog.

"Keen observers would have noticed that I tweeted some of Alex's photos from the press conference as they came in," she wrote. "Mr Dutton's office felt it was 'unflattering' and demanded to know why I had tweeted it. [...] After one of those conversations where both parties say the same thing over and over again, I agreed I would take it off Twitter so long as I could say they asked me to do so."

She also tweeted about the request, as did other reporters like Dave Donovan, the managing editor of the Independent Australia:

Dutton and his office's request proved futile, serving to merely encourage people to spread the picture around. On the subreddit Photoshop Battles, Redditors got ahold of the picture and Photoshopped their own creative versions.

User SirReginaldTheDumb subbed Dutton in for Tim "the toolman" Taylor's neighbor Wilson:

Redditor Senpai_Has_Noticed_U switched Frank from "House of Cards" out for Dutton:

And the user Animal-Kingdom superimposed Dutton's face on the "Citizen Kane" slow-clap:

Twitter commentators also joined in, calling Dutton's priorities into question:

And poking some fun at the minister.

We reached out to Dutton and his team for comment, neither had responded at the time of this post.

SEE ALSO: How 2 Stanford grads made a hot new app that soared past Facebook in the App Store — while being falsely accused of sex trafficking

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NOW WATCH: Here's why memes are so much more than just funny internet photos – straight from the man who coined the term

The hashtag #tealizard is currently circulating online right now — if you have no idea what it means, this breakdown is for you.

On Sunday night, LeBron James led the Cleveland Cavaliers to defeating the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals. James was so happy with the win that he started crying, and pictures of #CryingLebron soon became a hashtag on Twitter.

Some people even thought it could join the ranks of memes the internet has grown to love like #CryingJordan.

Then on Monday, James wore a hat with the Kermit sipping tea meme when he brought the NBA trophy home to Cleveland and posted it on his Instagram.

If you’re not familiar, Kermit sipping on tea has become a well-known meme that stands for "But that’s none of my business."As Know Your Meme points out, it’s a "sarcastic expression used as a postscript to an insult or disrespectful remark said towards a specific individual or group."

Basically, people post a picture of Kermit or an emoji of a frog with an emoji of tea to diss somebody else. Here are some examples:

Got it? Cool.

So then on Tuesday morning, Good Morning America’s social media team thought it was a good idea to tweet out a question to the show’s three million Twitter followers to ask if #CryingLebron is going to join other great memes like #CryingJordan and Kermit sipping tea.

The problem? Whoever sent the tweet misidentified Kermit the frog sipping tea as "#tealizard"— a weird thing no one has ever said, ever.

According to Mediate, insiders at ABC said that the error occured when the social media person was looking around for possible memes to include in the tweet and saw an account refer to the Kermit meme as "tea lizard." Unfortunately for them, it was a parody account.

And also unfortunately for them, people quickly took notice of the mistake:

And then it became it's own meme:

So now, because of a confused social media editor, the world now has #tealizard. At least GMA apologized to Kermit.

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On June 24, 2016, Twitter user @CelloMetalgirl posted a video and the internet changed forever. The video is of a vacuum cleaner being pushed up against an upright harmonica.

The resulting sound is akin to a chorus of angels. Or, as some have noticed, it also sounds like the THX audio company sound effect or the Windows 95 boot sound. It's beautiful. @CelloMetalgirl wrote "I laughed to death," and I don't blame her.

So far, it has more than 227,000 retweets and another 243,000 likes. Here it is:

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Once you reach level five in "Pokémon GO," the game prompts users to choose a team from three different options: Team Valor (Red), Team Mystic (Blue), and Team Instinct (Yellow).

Each team is sort of like the houses of Hogwarts. They each have their own philosophies about how to train and interact with Pokémon. Team Mystic approaches situations from a very logical and academic perspective, Team Instinct relies on their intuition, and Team Valor values fostering a strong bond with their Pokémon in order to be the very best trainers they can.

People are becoming quite attached to their teams, encouraging others to join, creating their own subreddits, and buying swag to display their team colors proudly. And while it’s all in good fun, one team in particular is being trolled harder than the others with lots of memes and jokes — Team Instinct.

Not only does Team Instinct seem to be the smallest team, at least according to a survey by gaming site Kotaku that has over 100,000 responses, but it’s also become a running joke in the subreddit PokémonGO.

It's also spawning a ton of memes from other pop culture favorites.

Redditor Flux83 compared the three teams to "Star Wars" characters. While Team Valor and Team Mysic were equated with (the good) Obi-Wan Kenobi and (the evil) Count Dooku respectively, Team Instinct was an Ewok. 

There were also a few "SpongeBob" references (credit goes to users SynterX and throwaway6flags):

"Being Team Instinct in [my] town be like,"user ButterBeard_ jokes:

Here’s a "Finding Dory"reference from user jinglehoogins — "My experience thus far observing gym behavior":

A classic "Arrested Development" callback by Reddit user WoodBender— "The life of a Team Instinct member":

And a silly "Simpsons" reference, by Reddit user 8bitbouncer:

Of course, there had to be a "Hamilton" reference by Alp Ozcelik, a product support specialist at BuzzFeed — accurate down to the dress colors.

But though they may be small, Team Instinct still has a lot of pride. Just look at this epic “Game of Thrones” reference to Lyanna Mormontby user Saturos47.

And while Team Instinct is certainly not afraid to throw insults back at Team Valor and Team Mystic, at the end of the day, can’t we all just get along?

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On May 28, a 3-year-old boy climbed into the enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo that held Harambe, a 17-year-old, 450-pound Western lowland gorilla. Fearing for the boy's life, the zookeepers shot and killed Harambe, sparking international outrage.

Two months later, Harambe's death is a meme. He has become a posthumous celebrity, but unlike other celebrities, people think it's okay to make fun of his death.

Harambe's death is an outlet for a brand of internet humor that usually feels taboo. The internet has a dark sense of humor. Making jokes about murder is the best expression of that. But it's not acceptable when it's about a human death. It feels okay to make fun of Harambe, though, because he's not a human being.

One Twitter user nailed it when he noted: "The popularity of Harambe jokes proves that people want to laugh about murder but feel bad about it. Ape murder is the perfect compromise."

Making fun of the death of human celebrities, in contrast, is a major no-no. For one thing, social media exists, and their family members and friends are almost certainly there. We can relate to those people because they are human and we, too, may know what it's like to lose a loved one.

Harambe, though, is a gorilla. We can't really relate to him, and don't really need to. He doesn't have a little sister on Twitter who would be devastated by jokes about his death. 

Harambe's meme-ification can also be blamed on the context behind his fame. Unlike Cecil the Lion, who was killed by a big-game hunter, Harambe wasn't famous before his death.

Instead, Harambe became well-known because the news and social media cycle blew his death way out of proportion. The usual internet outrage cycle is swift. News spreads, people get mad, think-pieces clog your Facebook feed, and the whole thing is forgotten as soon as there's something else to get mad about. But Harambe's death was different. The circumstances surrounding it were not so black-and-white, and everyone had an opinion.

Half a million people signed a Change.org petition that sought prosecution for the parents of the child involved in Harambe's death. Slate argued that Harambe was dangerous, and The Atlantic asked why we need zoos at all. Famed zoo fan Newt Gingrich called the event "tragic, but unavoidable."Piers Morgan blamed the zoo. Even Jane Goodall weighed in with a nuanced argument that Harambe was trying to protect the child, but still needed to be killed.

Just as Harambe's death received outsized attention, the memes have turned the gorilla into a mythical creature.

People made songparodies with Harambe's story in the lyrics, as if he were a folk hero.

The gorilla became a martyr: A church that happened to share his name was flooded with attention on Facebook.

Harambe became a stand-in for "serious news" as a subject.

For some people, the death of one critically endangered gorilla is serious business. For others, the seriousness of the question itself was absurd, especially when compared to the safety of a human child. The attention given to the whole situation was completely out of proportion. It's sad that a gorilla died, but we can still laugh about it.

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I watched the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump while chatting online with an alt-right(ish) teen — let's call him NS.

I report on web culture for VICE News and had been interviewing alt-right types about Pepe the Frog, a decade-old meme now associated with Trump's Twitter fans.

NS reached out to me late Saturday night with a very long Tumblr message explaining the meme's entire internet evolution.

As I sat in a cab on the way to a party, we debated via direct messages the relevance of social anxiety to the alt-right culture — he felt I was a "normie" more interested in psychoanalyzing the alt-right than engaging with its ideas, which is partly but not entirely true. It was fun.

He said he was 19, from England, and going back to college — but of course, in this particularly trolly part of the internet, you never know. We started chatting again on Monday, and I asked him to send me the best debate memes. "im not your meme slut," he protested. But he gave me his meme theories anyway.

He was excited. The debate would be a major event in the meme war. "100 million people watching. no mic mute. no breaks," he said. "trump should offer clinton a cough drop. just place a packet of them on his podium in sight. and just smile at her... 'one cough bitch and it's over.'" At one point, NS paused for reflection: "fuck this is like reality tv but more is at stake."

The young memer offered some insights into the election's meme war. It's important to understand that the core concepts in this subculture have been folded into uncountable layers of irony. Memes have become campaign tools, with Clinton employing a highly organized group of designers to make attractive graphics to push out her message, and Trump occasionally retweeting an alt-right Twitter account, or his son retweeting an alt-right meme.

Clinton's campaign declared Pepe the Frog a white nationalist symbol, which is both true and not true. Pepe is used by many alt-right accounts, but he wasn't invented by them, and the whole point is to provoke a reaction from people who take the memes too seriously.

"You deliberately are trying to offend as many people as possible," the moderator of one Pepe subreddit told me. Half the fun of a Nazi-frog meme is not knowing whether its creator is ironically or seriously committed to national socialism. The mod said, "If people are telling you, 'You can't say that,' what are you going to do? The rules are there to be broken."

Instead of asking whether an idea is ironic or sincere, understand that it's more satisfying if it's both. One such concept is "meme magic"— a mystical belief/joke among meme purveyors that they can meme things into reality. As for his own views, NS said he enjoys the dark jokes and arcane internet history of the alt-right world without actually believing the ideology. "i dont associate with the alt right ideologically. i just connect people within it and find it interesting," he said.

 He mostly posts about philosophy. But NS does believe there are inherent genetic differences between racial groups, and that political correctness is preventing people from talking about them. When he made a joke about the liberal media, "'trump bullies hilary into an early grave, proof of toxic sexist culture' - buzzfeed,"

I replied with a joke about an alt-right conspiracy theory: "hillary owns trump, proof of jewish global conspiracy to crush white identity." NS wanted to clarify on that: "No one actually believes that pls ... some people are retards but the idea is more nuanced than that when properly expressed."

As for the election, "i dont support trump in the sense i believe in him. I just think he would be bantz and fuck hilary. Trump is the unofficial third party and fucking up the way elections are supposed to work for the parties. so im all for that." (Bantz is slang for funny banter.)

Just before the debate began, NS was joking about meme magic and willing Clinton to cough. "omg she must be wearing two catheter bags for all the shitting her pants she is doing." I asked what he would do if Trump died on stage instead. "laugh. it will only make the bantz better. imagine the shitstorm. ahahahah. 'did clinton assasinate trump???'"

And yet, in the opening minutes of the debate, those expectations were upended. Trump sounded like he had a runny nose. NS was in ironic agony. He typed:

trump is sniffing

too much

aaaagh

its all over

fuck

He was right.Supercuts of Trump'ssniffles quickly spread. NS was worried: "meme magic is backfiring. trump is sniffing instead of clinton coughing."

 NS thought Trump made a comeback when he made fun of Clinton for being in public service for 30 years. When Trump floated the idea that the recent hack of the Democratic National Committee could have been done by "somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds," I asked NS if that hurt his feelings. He sent me a post on 4chan: "WHICH ONE OF YOU 400LB ASS HOLES HACKED THE DNC."

But as the debate ended, he was nervous:

really only matters now who is better at making memes

the losers like me

or professional memesters of hillary

...

its all about the memes now

thats literally all that matters

what memes will emerge, that is the question

no doubt trumps memes will be better

because they have the power of a thousand wizard level virgins to power them

Still, he thought his side had the upper hand. Hillary would try to capitalize on "SNIFF SNIFF," he said. "thats literally the best anti-Trump meme she could do. but it won't spread. because they go after his content and try to make informative memes. while other side [goes] 'diaper bag lady,' 'cough cough.' " Clinton's sincerity was no match for the alt-right's irony.

In a sense, he was right. Substantive memes don't really stick. But the meme that seems to have spread the farthest isthe one where Clinton is looking directly at the camera, likeJim Halpert from TheOffice. Because it was Hillary looking into our eyes from the stage and acknowledging just how crazy this election is.

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(Reuters) - The mayor of a small town in Pennsylvania has been censured by the local council and is facing calls to resign after he posted an image on his Facebook page comparing President Barack Obama and his family to apes.

Mayor Charles Wasko has so far declined to step down from his post in West York, about 100 miles (160 km) west of Philadelphia, despite being accused of racism for the image and others on his page.

At a meeting on Monday night, the West York Borough Council voted 7-0 to censure Wasko, a clerk said.

Wasko, whose Facebook page is filled with political commentary, posted an image in June of five orangutans in a wheelbarrow with the caption, "Aww... moving day at the Whitehouse has finally arrived."

The image began receiving media attention last week, leading to the censure vote.

"We do not condone this activity. It doesn't speak for us. It doesn't speak for you," Borough Council President Shawn Mauck said at the meeting, according to video posted on Twitter.

Wasko could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday.

On Friday, he told a local ABC affiliate that he did not regret his posts and that the council was targeting him for unspecified, unrelated disagreements.

"The racist stuff? I admit, yeah, I did that, and I don't care what people label me as," Wasko told the TV station.

There have been instances across the country of local government officials spreading racist images and jokes since Obama took office in 2009 as the first black U.S. president. He ends his second term in January 2017.

In 2013, a federal judge in Montana retired after acknowledging that he had used official court email to circulate a racist joke about Obama. 

(Reporting by David Ingram in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Frances Kerry)

SEE ALSO: A Pennsylvania college suspended 2 students over a blackface video

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A new online color controversy has Twitter users in a heated debate, but this time it involves a purse instead of a dress. A woman named Taylor Corso uploaded a picture of her new Kate Spade bag and it quickly erupted into a battle over whether it was actually white or blue. She eventually confirmed the color in a separate tweet, but that doesn't seem to have convinced people of the truth. Take a look and decide for yourself.

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The INSIDER Summary:

• Ken Bone became a meme during Saturday night's presidential debate.
• His red sweater is iconic.
• You can buy it for Halloween for $50.

UPDATE: The sweater is sold out.

The winner of Sunday night's presidential debate was clear: Ken Bone. With his bright red sweater, winning demeanor, and astute question to the candidates about energy policy, he became an instant meme.

This was his moment.

GQ did some research, and his now-iconic sweater was sold on Amazon. It was originally $50, but it's now sold out.

If you did buy the sweater, pairing it with glasses, a moustache, and a microphone would give you the perfect Ken Bone costume.

The red sweater wasn't Bone's original plan.

"I had a really nice olive suit, and my mother would have been very proud to see me wearing on television, but apparently I have gained about 30 pounds,"Bone told CNN Monday morning. "And when I went to get in my car the morning of the debate I split the seat of my pants all the way open. So the red sweater is plan B. I’m glad it worked out."

Bone's memedom seems to be lasting. He's outpacing third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein in search interest, and he seems poised to become an easy last-minute Halloween costume.

 His name has been carved in the annals of the internet.

Now go buy the sweater before everyone beats you to it.

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There's a stupid, absolutely false myth circulating on the racist internet: the idea that black men disproportionately rape white women, and white men never rape black women. Again, this claim is demonstrably untrue.

And yet it's popular enough, as the sociologist Philip Cohen noted in a recent blog post, to have turned into a repugnant meme:

Now of course, it's not worth responding to every idiotic meme that circulates in the backwater swamps of the racist internet. But, as Cohen notes, this one seems to have become unusually viral. And we're in an election year that racists have claimed as a victory for their violent imaginations. David Duke, America's most famous ex-KKK leader, recently repeated a version of the meme's central lie in a video streamed live to 8,000 people on Facebook.

The meme has likely gone viral because it deals in an old, blood-soaked lie of white supremacists — that black men pose a particular, sexual threat to white women — and because it cites an official government document as its source.

So how did a US Department of Justice report end up the sole citation on a meme circulating on the white supremacist internet?

Fuzzy math.

A 2008 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) really does seem to state that zero black women were raped by white men in the US that year, and imply that 19,293 white women (that's the 16.4% in the chart below) were raped by black men. (The chart below also seems to show that many more white women — about 88,000 — were raped by white men.)

As Cohen notes, there are tiny little asterisks sprinkled all over this table. But you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to figure out what they mean.

You read that right. Just 10 or fewer women made up some of the samples surveyed for this report, and their small number of experiences has been extrapolated to represent tens of thousands of assaults.

Here's what Cohen has to say about this:

I can’t believe we’re talking about this. The most important bottom line is that the BJS should not report extrapolations to the whole population from samples this small. These population numbers should not be on this table. At best these numbers are estimated with very large standard errors. (Using a standard confident interval calculator, that 16% of White women, based on a sample of 69, yields a confidence interval of +/- 9%.) It’s irresponsible, and it’s inadvertently (I assume) feeding White supremacist propaganda.

In other words, a sample size this tiny simply cannot be understood to tell us anything about what's going on at the population level. The odds of picking any 10 or fewer women out of a crowd whose experiences have nothing to do with what's typical are far, far too high.

In an email to Business Insider, Lynn Langton, the researcher who oversees victimization statistics for BJS, acknowledged that the methods of the 2008 report no longer meet the Bureau's standards.

"These posts and memes rely on data that is eight years old," she wrote, "because 2008 was the last year that BJS published Criminal Victimization in the US - Statistical Tables. Many of the estimates in the 100+ tables (not limited to Table 42) do not meet our current standards for reporting so we no longer report out this information on an annual basis. "

As Cohen writes in his blog post, there are also a number of reasons why this table would tell a misleading story even if the data-gathering methods were improved.

First of all, the report uses a household sample. That means that at least one demographic is left out entirely: prisoners. A 2011 to 2012 survey of inmates found that about 3,500 women are subjected to "staff sexual misconduct" in jails and prisons every year — with black women 50% more likely to report this than white women.

"So I’m guessing the true number of Black women sexually assaulted by White men is somewhat greater than zero, and that’s just in prisons and jails," Cohen writes.

Second, most perpetrators of sexual assault are close to their victims. And a full 27% are current or former partners of their victims.

As Cohen notes, 2% of white women are married to black men, and 5% of black women are married to white men. Because of differences in population sizes, that means there are far more white women married to black men than black women married to white men. That means that even if white men and black men raped their spouses at exactly symmetrical rates, we'd expect more white women to report rapes by black men than black women by white men.

All of which is to say: If you hear that lie parroted around that black men are targeting white women with sexual violence you should know that it's 100% false. And despite the citation, the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not exactly stand by the numbers, which are based on samples far too small to apply to the general population.

In 2017, Langton wrote, the BJS will release a new report, based on firmer data gathered over the last eight years.

SEE ALSO: I was raped in college. Here are 4 reasons why I never reported my rapist

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It is not often that a meme inspires an entirely new and exciting tech product.

But it did for Min-Liang Tan, CEO and cofounder of the $1.5 billion (£1.23 billion) hardcore gaming tech company Razer.

In an interview with Business Insider, Tan told us how this meme kickstarted the company into creating a laptop to "eradicate all other laptops" on the market to date — the new Razer Blade Pro— which launched on Thursday.

This is the meme:

The picture is of Travis Wannlund (left, holding the PC), global director of community marketing at Razer, and Josh Collins, a global community manager at Razer. The picture went viral and is used as a meme to call out laptop gamers that are not seen as hardcore or serious as gamers that use a desktop computer.

"This meme has been doing the rounds for few years. It's been an attitude in the gaming community that desktop users have more power than those with puny laptops and we wanted to change that dichtomy. We wanted to change this attitude and that is why we created the first new line of desktop replacements, with power, portability, and everything a desktop has but as thin and as light as a Razer Blade laptop," said Tan to BI.

On Thursday, Razer launched a new laptop to "eradicate every other laptop" on the market – the Razer Blade Pro. It is the first laptop aimed at blowing powerful desktops out of the water in terms of speed, performance, audio, and graphics. Despite its 17.3-inch screen, the laptop is incredibly thin and light.

To read about the full product and the interview with Tan, check out the story here.

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The INSIDER Summary:

• A YouTuber realized most songs are better with the lyrics from "All Star" by Smash Mouth.
• It has brought me much mirth.

Since it hit the airwaves in 1999, and then made it into the "Shrek" soundtrack in 2001, "All Star" by Smash Mouth has rocked the internet as one of the best songs ever.

It's invaded the music world by being remixed into everything from Eminem's "Mom's Spaghetti" to "Wake Me Up When September Ends." Web artist Neil Cicierega made an entire album, called "Mouth Sounds," that remixed the iconic song into Top 40 hits.

The genius of YouTube's new star Jon Sudano is that he realized: Why not just replace the lyrics of every song with "All Star"?

It works really well. Take a look at his cover of Adele's "Hello."

His cover of "Bring Me to Life" by Evanescence is a joy.

Sudano also finds places for Easter eggs in the closed captions. This is from his "Hello" cover:

Sometimes Sudano reverts to the song's original lyrics, and he gets them wrong. For instance, he sang "hello from the outside" instead of "hello from the other side," Adele's original lyrics. It's this author's humble opinion, however, that the original lyrics don't matter anyway — only Smash Mouth's do.

Speaking with INSIDER, Sudano explained why he chose Smash Mouth's iconic song to sample.

"Smash Mouth's 'All Star' is a great example of a stripped down, minimalist piece of music that is easy to like and recognize," he told INSIDER. "It was manufactured in a way where it'll fit structurally with almost any major pop/rock hit. Smash Mouth have influenced me as a musician and continue to influence up and coming artists that will rise to fame long after me."

Sudano started posting his covers with an update of "Imagine" by John Lennon one week ago. After being posted to Reddit, he's gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of views and about 24,000 subscribers.

As for future projects, Sundano couldn't disclose too much but told fans to keep an eye on his YouTube channel.

"I am not at liberty to discuss at length my future projects, but I can say that there will be some classics from this most recent era as well as some golden oldies, so be on the lookout on my YouTube channel," he said.

At least for now, he's enjoying his fame.

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The INSIDER Summary:

• An optical illusion makes these legs look like they're covered in oil.
• The original poster says it's unintentional.

Do these legs look oily to you?

An Instagram post from Hunter Culverhouse is going viral after they posted a picture of their legs to social media. But nobody can agree if these legs are covered in some type of shiny, oily substance — or not.

Take a look:

People are freaking out. In a bizarre optical illusion, some people see the legs as weirdly glossy, and other people notice the trick right away. Just take a look at some of the comments on Culverhouse's post:

It turns out that the legs aren't covered in oil or plastic. The white streaks are paint, playing tricks on your eyes.

The way people are seeing it is reminiscent of The Dress from last year, which some people saw as blue and black and others as white and gold (it's blue and black). 

Culverhouse told INSIDER that the effect was completely unintentional. They took the photo after finishing up some homework for an art class.

"[I] had some white paint left on my brush and put random lines on my legs, turned out to be a completely confusing picture for everyone on the internet," Culverhouse wrote in an email. They didn't realize the picture was going viral until other people started commenting on it and sharing it with their friends.

"The first time I posted it, it didnt go completely crazy," Culverhouse wrote in an email. "But then I reposted it again and other big accounts started to post it and share it. Then it took to Twitter and YouTubers started tweeting about it as well."

Since Culverhouse posted the photo, it's been ripped by other meme accounts and written up on The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. The original post has more than 5,700 likes.

But now you know the truth: it's only paint.

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The INSIDER Summary:

• People are pretending to be mannequins in a new meme. 
• It's understandably called "The Mannequin Challenge."
• A Twitter user called @pvrity____ appears to have started the meme.

Now that the #MannequinChallenge is sweeping the nation so unstoppably that even Hillary Clinton and her crew have taken it, a lot of people are wondering: where did the mannequin challenge come from?

As it turns out, the origins of the mannequin challenge aren't that hard to trace — although they do remain a little difficult to explain. The mannequin challenge consists of a group of individuals freezing in dramatic or often difficult-to-maintain poses, acting like literal mannequins as a camera pans around the room. Curiously, all of them are backed by the song "Black Beatles," by hip hop duo Rae Sremmurd.

The first of these videos is believed to have been uploaded by Twitter user @pvrity___, a high school student at Ed White High School in Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 26. (Bustle has reached out to @pvrity___ for comment and will update upon hearing back.)

In @prvrity___'s original video, several students are frozen in position as the camera pans around them, until eventually one student unfreezes and lifts another who is still frozen in mannequin form. The original is still up on Twitter, where it has generated over 4,000 retweets since it was posted two weeks ago.

From there, there seems to be a disconnect in exactly how it inspired spinoffs, and why the song "Black Beatles" is involved. Even the pop duo themselves can't seem to supply an answer, although they did respond to the challenge by doing one of their own at a recent concert.

Since the launch of the meme, it has inspired thousands of spinoffs, ranging from groups of friends to entire football stadiums.

People are putting their own spins on them — this pole dancing class, for instance, managed to get everyone in midair.

The meme usually starts with the hook of the song "Black Beatles," specifically on the lines:

That girl is a real crowd pleaser
Small world, all her friends know of me
Young bull living like an old geezer
Quick release the cash, watch it fall slowly
Frat girls still tryna get even
Haters mad for whatever reason
Smoke in the air, binge drinking
They lose it when the DJ drops the needle

That being said, the song itself is hardly new — it came out on Sept. 22 of this year on Rae Sremmurd's second album, "SremmLife 2." It had already achieved marked popularity before the challenge went viral, racking up over 40 million views on YouTube.

As you can see from watching the music video, though, there is very little in the song that explains why it would be the one used across the board in this viral meme. Even Rae Sremmurd is flummoxed, although the pop duo have both been retweeting versions of the meme from their personal accounts the past few days.

Nonetheless, it's caught on like wildfire — seeming to reaching Peak Internet when Tuesday morning, the morning of Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton posted one of her own (featuring Bon Jovi, because of course).

Bustle will update this post when we hear back from Twitter user @pvrity___ about what inspired the challenge to begin with, but until then we can chalk this meme up to what we usually do — high school kids who are way, way cooler than we'll ever be.

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The INSIDER Summary:

• A bunch of celebrities did the Mannequin Challenge at the White House today. 
• Though a solid attempt, many of them blinked.
• It was still pretty cute — watch the video below.

Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom today, given to American icons like Bill and Melinda Gates, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, and Ellen DeGeneres.

It was a time to celebrate internet memes, too. Even if, as Obama noted in the case of Michael Jordan, America's best heroes are "more than just an internet meme."

But after the award ceremony, the 21 awardees posed for the Mannequin Challenge. Everyone who was present froze in place, pretending to mingle, as someone roamed around the room with a camera.

"Blackish" star Tracee Ellis Ross — who was there to accompany her mother Diana Ross, who received an award — posted a video on Instagram.

For the Mannequin Challenge, you're supposed to stand totally still, staging an elaborate scene as a camera roams around. But if you watch, you'll see a lot of honorees blinked.

Robert De Niro blinking is understandable because he can't be bothered, but DeGeneres? She's usually better at memes. And I don't even know what Frank Gehry is doing there at the end.

While Kareem and Jordan may be bigger basketball legends, I have to say, LeBron James's Mannequin Challenge in the White House with Michelle Obama was better.

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A woman whose rare condition was mocked in a series of memes has received an outpouring of support after she called on people to stop sharing the images.

US motivational speaker and author Lizzie Velasquez, 27, spoke out after trolls poked fun at her rare congenital disease, which leaves her body unable to store fat. 

She is also diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, which affects the length of a person’s limbs and their body shape.

Thousands of people posted messages of support after Ms Velasquez hit back at bullies when memes using her photo emerged on Facebook.

Some of the images had been used to target plus-size women, older people and the severely disabled.

Writing on her Instagram page, she said: “I'm writing this post not as someone who is a victim but as someone who is using their voice.

“No matter what we look like or what size we are, at the end of the day we are all human.

“I ask that you keep that in mind the next time you see a viral meme of a random stranger.

"At the time you might find it hilarious but the human in the photo is probably feeling the exact opposite."

More than 28,000 Instagram users liked the post while nearly 3,000 posted comments with many describing her an “inspiration”.

One group which appeared responsible for promoting the memes was shut down by Facebook following a flood of complaints.

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