the new days of the week
advice for anchoring yourself in time
Much handwringing has happened over the past couple of months regarding the process of time. Without a workplace to head into or social plans on the weekends, the days seem to blend together. Some have referred to this as “the infinite present.” Yesterday was the first time since lockdown stuff went into effect that I had to constantly remind myself that it was Monday. “Oh wow, it’s Monday. Huh.”
I credit some of this temporal stasis to the fact that all of the TV shows are ending their seasons and there are no new movies coming out. Without these anchors, I am left with nothing to measure the passage of time (my life pre-pandemic was very cool and continues to be). I guess this twice-weekly newsletter is helpful in that regard.
Social media can be useful for anyone struggling with this issue. On Twitter, for example, you might find it useful to participate in the daily hashtags that always seem to trend. Maybe you have a #MondayMotivation or a #ThursdayThought. Maybe it’s 5:00 somewhere and you’ve got that #FridayFeeling.
On Tumblr, users have other ways of tracking the march of time, and these ways are considerably more nonsensical than Twitter’s. Still, they are useful. As the user indiffribot put it, “Out of touch Thursday is genuinely the only thing keeping my concept of time stable while in quarantine.”
Indiffribot is referring to Out of Touch Thursday, an ad-hoc Tumblr tradition where, every Thursday, users reblog a clip of the anime series Lucky Star set Hall & Oates’s song “Out of Touch” (this type of video is known as an “anime music video” or “AMV” and has been a staple of web video for decades, though the genre actually predates the web itself). Out of Touch Thursday has been going on since at least mid-November of last year.
Out of Touch Thursday is not the only fixed point on the internet’s calendar that one can use to anchor themselves. Consider this chart made by the user sociallyawkwardtoaster:
From left to right, we have…
Energy Sword Sunday
Miku Monday
Tuesday again?
Wednesday, my dudes
Out of Touch Thursday
Alone on a Friday night?
Radical Saturday
Like Twitter’s trending hashtags, Tumblr has a silly running joke for every day of the week, and when that day of the week rolls around, the joke pops up again.
Energy Sword Sunday
On Sundays, users posts photos of people with the Energy Sword from the Halo series photoshopped in. The tradition was established a couple of years ago by user 10soup. (Sidenote: Steve from Blues Clues is aware of Energy Sword Sunday.)
Miku Monday
Users post pictures of Hatsune Miku, a vocaloid. Miku is a completely virtual pop star whose vocals are synthesized from software and whose holographic stage shows regularly sell out. There is a lot of Hatsune Miku fan art online. “She” was supposed to play Coachella this year.
Miku Monday is also, relatedly, the name of a Hatsune Miku fanzine.
Tuesday again? No problem
In 2014, the Tumblr user chickensnack uploaded this incredible two-panel comic of a dog taking no issue with the current day of the week. It quickly became a refrain on the platform, and is arguably the first of the canonical weekday memes we are going through now.
(Here is Tuesday Dog redrawn to celebrate Energy Sword Sunday.)
It is Wednesday, my dudes
The Wednesday that dudes generally recognize comes from a Vine posted in 2016 by a user named JimmyHere. He’s wearing a Spider-Man outfit and goggles. He says “It is Wednesday, my dudes,” and then unleashes a guttural scream in his bathroom. This Vine is incredibly popular, and it is frequently reenacted by kids who celebrated “Meme Day” during their school’s Spirit Week.
In reality, “It is Wednesday, my dudes” as a phrase originated on Tumblr, where it was applied to a picture of a fat frog. I am not sure how it transmogrified into a Vine of spider-man screaming in a bathroom and at this point I’m too afraid to ask. (Some say he’s “imitating” the frog but I can’t find anything to corroborate that.)
Out of Touch Thursday
See above.
Alone on a Friday night?
This is based on a well-traveled image macro of an edited Sonic the Hedgehog comic, likely originating on 4chan or some other image board. Here it is:
Seems pretty self-explanatory. Sonic, you abject piece of shit. I find this iterative edit from Animated Text in 2017 to be more relevant to the current situation.
Radical Saturday
This day of the week is based on this Tumblr post of a cool-ass dude playing Nintendo in his room:
The post was made even more infamous by this reblog reply.
Okay!
So those are the Tumblr days of the week and as the pandemic situation continues to drag out, I hope this cycle of an exceedingly minor holiday every day provides some stability in your life.
Elsewhere…
Ironically, I lost track of time, so the section’s gonna be brief. Oops!
Can’t stop thinking about the adult-age Disney freak who is mad about the virus and also believes in QAnon
The internet platform Facebook bought the GIF search tool/repository Giphy for $400 million and if you’re curious why that sucks, here’s something you can read