MINNEAPOLIS, Min. — Brian Howard, 40, spent upwards of an hour fruitlessly explaining to his nephew that brain rot videos did not exist when he was a teenager, in spite of the fact he could easily recite every meme and sound clip from the website You’re the Man Now Dog, family members have confirmed.
“See, our irreverent and weird memes had substance. Not this mindless skibidi toilet or creepy YouTube family crap where there’s no subtext or commentary. Back in my day you could spend all day looking at memes online and feel more intelligent than when you started,” said Howard, whose pop culture references are made up entirely of YTMND quotes. “You kids today just regurgitate whatever crap you watch on TikTok and don’t even question how stupid it is! Seriously, look at all these Office Space pages I made in my teens. It’s called variations on a theme, buddy. This is a lost art.”
Howard’s nephew, Noah, was less than pleased to receive a lecture from someone he perceived as a brazen hypocrite.
“Uncle Brian thinks stuff like Ohio, rizz, and gooning are killing my brain? I don’t think he realizes I have access to the same websites he used to visit and what I’ve seen is shocking. He is one ‘Moon Man’ quote in a public setting away from being cancelled, and I’m not going to bail him out when it happens,” said Noah Howard. “He literally cannot read anything out loud without reciting like the Dramatic Reading of a Breakup Letter. I wish we just did normal things together, like look at new YTMND stuff, but he always complains it’s not the same. His brain isn’t capable of acknowledging internet content past 2011.”
Internet historians acknowledged that Brian’s situation is just a cycle repeating itself.
“Having been present for the immense expansion of the early internet, millennials look at their mindless indulgences and vernacular as still being relevant. But the oldest running joke in civilization is that you’ll wake up one day and believe all the kids are wrong,” said Mark Wallace. “And yeah, that does include believing 3D text over meatspin GIFs and random audio from Star Trek: TNG was the pinnacle of internet humor and shouldn’t have evolved before that. Which, as an older millennial myself, is completely valid. You just had to be there, okay?”
Brian spent the rest of the afternoon under intense pressure from his nephew to admit whether or not he participated in the Tide pod challenge.
