Sorry for the lack of posts. Managing two blogs at once is hard for me, and I have been focusing on the BugMaster Blog, on which the most recent post has very similar content to this post. Sorry, not sorry.

You might remember that I am the BugMaster for our main homework system. Now I am also the MemeMaster! The Memestress? The title is not fully decided upon yet. Do you think that I should add “MemeMaster” to my LinkedIn profile? Is memeing a marketable skill if one has only limited experience with shitposting? As someone from Gen X, I am a little bit behind on my 21st Century skills.

surprised pikachu

As mentioned previously, we have a task management system for tracking the bugs and the projects and all the things (TRACK ALL THE THINGS). The “new task” interface has some drop-down menus for specifying some things about the tasks, and I had a strong opinion that these options could be improved.

The prevailing wisdom was that changing these options could only be done via a command line tool that I found to be somewhat terrifying in both its syntax and its potential for failing dramatically and breaking everything. Upon reading the documentation, I discovered that there is a part of the web UI that allows the updating of these settings with much less terror.

Unfortunately, I did not have high enough access privileges to change these settings. However, as I not only have a strong desire to change the setting, but I also have an ssh password for a sudoer as well as the root database password, it was decided to give me settings-changing access via the web UI.

OK, OK, we are getting to the part about the memes! I promise!

One other feature of this system is that when you are commenting on a task, you can insert a meme taken from a fixed list of image macros. Things like, “One does not simply upgrade to MySQL 8” or “If you could rewrite the entire thing in TypeScript and React, that’d be great” or whatever. No one has added anythnig to the meme list in years.

My settings-changing powers include adding more image macros to the available list of memes!

Things that I have noticed when adding the memes:

  1. Wow, a lot of memes would not be appropriate in an office environment, nor would they help foster a positive and productive conversation.

  2. While many memes represent People of Color, they is still a lack of Latinx, Asian, and other demographic groups in the meme space. Furthermore, a non-trivial fraction of the memes depict People of Color in a way that seems somewhat disrespectful to me.

  3. Lots and lots of dudes in memes. Most of the memes with women come from The Real Houswives franchise and depict strong, negative emotional moments.

  4. These days at work, I think that my spirit-meme is Kermit Drinking Tea.