Log Cabin Sunday May 4, 2025

The 4th Was Not With Me

I woke up to multiple people sharing the meme of Donald Trump looking like a bad guy Jedi*, and I just closed my apps again.

*editor’s note: we know they’re called sith but the author insists it sounds like a early twenties pop punk band and because I am unpaid we’re going with BGJ

I don’t need to see this stuff. I don’t need to see the stuff about how he wants to be pope, either. These are designed by their meme factory minions using AI prompts in order to make us angry and share online. That’s the only way this stuff gets disseminated, I think. There was a Star Wars-esque crawl in which the admin compared themselves to The Empire, and people cannot stop saying it’s such a gotcha that the Trump Administration is comparing themselves to the bad guys in that movie. What a self-own.

It’s not a self-own. It’s a trap. Someone in a movie said that once, I believe. I’m not a political expert but I’ve been on the internet since it started, pretty much. I firmly remember a pre-internet days and I remember my friends and I being on the forefront of trolling in America Online Chats. We trolled Scientologists, we pretended to be history experts and said wrong things confidently and doubled and tripled down in World War II forums to the absolute mouth-foaming of either actual experts or other teens pretending. I was trolled, too. I was once absolutely convinced that I had been in the same chatroom as David Gilmour from Pink Floyd who assured me I would get a free ticket to their next tour.

There was no financial incentive, nor political, or clout attached to trolling in those days. We did it for the LOLs, and that was even before anyone used the acronym LOL. And when you and I reshare the Trump lightsaber picture, we’re doing the thing the worst of his followers wanted us to do; we’re reacting. There is no other motivation for some people than to see someone they consider cringe cringing. Even if their guy looks stupid doing it, even if the AI art is bad. You have to have seen this online. People who are acting so cartoonishly annoying doing the Millennial humor affectations while quoting the “It’s Corn” song, or telling us what Harry Potter House they’re in while doing anime faces.

It occurs to me that maybe we all haven’t been exposed to this so allow me to give you a glimpse of what this looks like.

Now there’s always a fine line between people just having fun on the internet and being a professional weirdo who posts things like this to invoke a reaction. The best of these creators are doing both at once somehow. But I don’t think they care that you’re mad at them. There’s a similar genre of video in which a couple act out a scripted skit in which the guy is terrible. These make them thousands of dollars per post. They don’t care that someone might find out who they are and post the awful husband’s name online because it only generates more income for them. They are more or less untouchable as long as our social media algorithms feed anger and we keep falling for it. There may be long-term consequences for them, but also maybe (probably?) not. For us, though, I think it’s not great.

I’ve never really been a star wars day fan to begin with, and have threatened in the past to take the whole thing off. Is this the first holiday started purely as a meme? I suppose it may be refreshing that a holiday started as a commercial endeavor instead of eventually becoming one, I guess. I think it’s weird that we celebrate a Disney Intellectual Property for a whole day.

Anyway, after 8 years (!?) of threatening, this is the first time I did, though. Please clap.

Here’s your Log Cabin Sunday rundown, it was a busy one.

Saturday (yes I call Saturdays Log Cabin Sundays now)

I needed to get blood work done for my dumbass kidney disease (the numbers are on the high side of what’s normal for me, but within the range they’ve been in since I was diagnosed—which is good), Kristin did some dress shopping and looked cute in all of them, we watched my great(!?)-niece play soccer, and did some yard work and prep for one of my kids’ birthday parties. I read in the hammock for a long time, then made a really good spaghetti and meatballs that I think a lot of the teens wished were just pizzas instead. We hid in our room while mayhem ensued and I played Star Wars: Outlaws for may the fourth eve. This is not a connection I made until this morning.

Sunday I slept in, we went to see Thunderbolts*, and I read an entire book and made country fried chicken. Kristin made mashed potatoes and biscuits. It was a very tan, very delicious meal.

On the turntable I spun AFI’s Burials, which is my favorite of their albums, and Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook.

I finished Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn on Saturday and started and finished Emilia Hart’s Sirens on Sunday.