Folk Valley is a new surreal meme circulating on TikTok and Instagram. It treats a fictional location as a real-world hotspot for bizarre, absurd, and increasingly horrifying events. Think of it as 2026’s evolution of the “Only in Ohio” trend, mixed with eerie digital folk horror (though it started out more comic than scary, with deadpan clips of UFOs, explosions and the now-iconic Folk Valley Cat). Videos are chaotic, inverted, or deep-fried, accompanied by minimalist or glitchy audio, like peaceful birds chirping or random sounds.
Posts Tagged → memes
As Nolan intended
The “As Nolan Intended” meme is everywhere. It mocks the director’s obsession with peak cinematic presentation — IMAX screens, 70mm film, maximum immersion — by showing his films playing on the most basic and improbable devices imaginable: iPods, Apple Watches, flip phones, smart fridges, cracked phone screens, you name it.
The joke is the gap between Nolan’s near-religious insistence on scale and fidelity and these deliberately pathetic viewing conditions. It’s currently exploding around The Odyssey, but the format actually goes back to 2017, when a Twitter user posted an image of Dunkirk playing on a vintage Game Boy.
I suspect the meme’s genealogy also runs through that clip of David Lynch getting mad at the very idea of watching a movie “on your fucking telephone.” And, of course, it echoes the “Doom runs on everything” meme, especially in the wide and improbable range of devices involved. As always, humor turns out to be the sharpest weapon: the sillier the image, the more effectively it questions the director’s snobbish authority over how his films should be seen.
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
Welcome to the TikTok Farlands
Minecraft Far Lands were a math bug at the edge of the generated world. The further you went, the more reality broke down. TikTok has its own version: doomscroll long enough and the algorithm takes you somewhere strange, a periphery of surreal, absurdist and sometimes plain scary content. It’s the latest incarnation of a very long aesthetic tradition in meme culture (YouTube Poop, weirdcore, analog horror, deep fried memes, glitch art, weirdtok), but updated to fit the brainrot era.
Shoggoths and AI
Memes that tie Lovecraftian imagery of formless monsters to contemporary Large Language Models. A curated collection by the one and only Bruce Sterling.
Childhood Creativity and Memes
This interesting article by Allegra Rosenberg explains that the viral “67” meme is just the newest expression of a long, lively tradition of children inventing and circulating their own playful lore, just like the rhymes, jokes, and games that folklorists Iona and Peter Opie documented in mid-20th-century Britain.
Sunday Nobody
I don’t know why I haven’t come across this artist before. Sunday Nobody calls himself a “meme artist”, but what he does is actually a surprising mixture of conceptual art, performance art, viral video and extremely high level craftsmanship. You can watch his videos on TikTok and Instagram.
The Grimace Shake is Dangerous
There’s a new delightful trend on TikTok about the Grimace Shake by McDonalds. I love GenZ.
I am a surgeon: classic internet meme art
I am a surgeon but it doubles every “surgeon”. Enjoy.
The Internet Aesthetics Spiral: #corecore
“Corecore refers to an aesthetic that’s prevalent on TikTok under the hashtag “#corecore,” specifically within so-called NicheTok circles of NicheTokers, that plays on the -core suffix by making a “core” out of the collective consciousness of all “cores.”
[via]
Mestre Ensinador
“Me When I Was A Baby, also known as Whimsical Little Creature, refers to videos of the TikTok account MestreEnsinador1. It features videos of a flying white puppet wearing a green hat named Tiburcio. The name translates to “master teacher” in Portuguese, with the gnome puppet being referred to as a “forest being” by the TikToker in his comment sections. The videos often show the puppet flying and twirling, sometimes doing a little dance and sometimes undertaking mysterious rituals. Maestre Ensinador went viral in the fall of 2022 after a series of duets where people showed his videos to their younger siblings and tried to convince them that the puppet was them as a baby.”
“Tibúrcio is a strong gnome,” Jhonatan Oliveira says, once belonging to his late grandmother, “and that’s why I like it very much.” He remade the puppet’s body three years ago, before he began making the videos. His uncle appears with him in the first viral TikTok — he’s the one who took Tibúrcio out of the cruse, an earthenware vessel that Oliveira refers to as a buried treasure. “But, he is not a cash treasure, but a spiritual one,” he explains. “The inspiration to make the videos comes from God!”
The Lore Zone
“The way we remember the events that happen on the internet is different than reading a book. Information circulates and gets stored in a way that incorporates personal narratives as documentation, combining textuality with elements of oral storytelling. Bits of text and image serve as artifacts that help piece together complex narratives. The Lore Zone seeks to help us all understand new interesting ways of reading, writing, and remembering the internet.”
The Lore Zone. A very interesting online research on “Memes → Memories → Micro-Mythologies”
Dracula Daily
“Dracula Daily is an email newsletter by Matt Kirkland that sends you a chapter of the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, written as a series of dated diary entries, news clippings, letters, etc., in realtime on the actual date of each entry between May 3rd and November 10th, the dates between which the novel takes place. The newsletter launched in May 2021 and became increasingly popular during its 2022 run, particularly on Tumblr, where it caused memes and posts about Dracula to trend.” – more info here
[via]
Paris Filter Trend
“A TikTok trend where users apply Instagram’s Paris filter numerous times to a selfie video of them posing while the song “Fancy” by Drake plays, the filter applied to the point where the video is obscured and washed out in pink and purple. The videos are often captioned “no filter,” a joke about people who post obviously edited photos online under the guise of being natural”.
[via]
Dancing in front of the bathroom mirror
Remember the guy skating and drinking juice on TikTok in 2020? Please meet the new TikTok “vibe setter”: Jamie Big Sorrel Horse, aka jamie32bsh. The remixes are pouring and they are pure internet magic.
The age of shitpost diplomacy
“We came of age on Twitter, Tumblr, and 4chan, and still see the world through their frames. We find it harder and harder to distinguish the actual from the image; we struggle to disentangle perception management from problem management. This is what it looks like when the terminally online ascend to positions of real responsibility. Welcome to the age of shitpost diplomacy.”
Memes that are dreams
“Thomas the Plank Engine” is the subreddit where memes are dreams.
The Internet is Magic
Ryan Broderick from The Garbage Day delivers an interesting (and hilarious) presentation titled “The Internet is Magic. How to use the powers of viral content to connect with higher levels of reality and perform powerful spells“.
Beyond Based and Cringe
Very interesting article by Nate Sloan:
“Once you understand the dark truth, that what is based and what is cringe is purely a matter of perspective, one is freed from the shackles of this juvenile dichotomy. When you realize that the self-aware wink of ironic distance does not preclude your sincere aims, you may become empowered.”
Dear imaginary audience
Marxist memes for TikTok teens
“The next generation of political radicals will have passed through some form of these online political spaces and will bring with them many of the oddities, peculiarities and baggage of internet subcultures”.
[via]
Feels Good Man
The Internet Baboons
Photographers G.K. and Vikki Hart have something to teach about copyright and remix in the Internet age: “Yes, it would be nice if they made more money, but to make people laugh and for people to take it and use it their own way… you just can’t buy that“