A Journey of Memes

By Chewy

When I initially started stacking on StackChain, no one was doing memes —we were mostly focused on trying to find the tip and place our stack as fast as possible! You could tell that some people were trying their hardest and were really laying their conviction on the line. Wanting to celebrate their stacks with them and amplify the excitement at the same time, I asked myself. What better way than a personalized meme? I quickly realized that people would be twice as excited if they were the ones featured in the meme rather than the meme maker. So I started doing personalized memes on what I considered to be special blocks. This seemed to lead to more stacking so that was my early motivation. Most of the early ones were just a simple Gif, but with the stacker’s pfp. I can’t tell you how many times I heard, “this is the first time anyone has ever made a meme of me!!” Also I noticed that if there was a fork, people would tend to go with the block that had the best memes validating it. My goals were updated to try to make a meme so fantastic that the crew would want to include it in the chain! I was able to achieve this a few times, but it was very unpredictable. Ultimately I figured out the play was to drop a meme in the block itself; these particular blocks were special and people didn’t want to fork them (we all knew anything not on chain wouldn’t last) 

Using Piñata Farms was a bridge from the Gif memes and allowed for adding more plebs into a single meme. The simplicity of Piñata made it pretty easy to quickly craft up something before the chain had moved on to the next block. Eventually I figured out that one could add lots of additional faces to a single character, could change the size of the head and even gave the ability to add laser eyes at pivotal moments in the meme. Unfortunately Piñata was so easy to use that it turned into chain spam. 

As I memed like it was a full-time job, others began their meme journey as well. Initially most of our crew had never even done a meme before, much less a personalized one. They were a quick study and I had to work hard to stay one step ahead. As they learned gifs, I moved to Piñata; when they figured out Piñata I moved to adding music into the Gif memes. When they figured out the music piece I moved into cutting movie clips and adding dialogue. After they mastered this piece I was close to the limits of what I could craft on a phone! The iPhone dropped an update allowing for a perfect Clip Art of a face — this helped me craft some static memes that almost looked real at times. 

The crew got so good with their memes that we ended up challenging another meme crew to a battle. We took the Stone clan head on and buried them with four custom memes for every one that they made…after just a couple of days they gave up as they were completely mismatched with our eager and talented crew. When they quit, we moved to battling each other to sharpen our swords. At the time of this writing we have 10+ people that can craft some of the best memes you have ever seen. In fact, they got so good I was no longer needed at all! Some of the memes I would put up against Yellow’s best (and that’s saying a lot). On the other hand, there were also many really terrible ones too. You could tell it was a first attempt and some of those were so bad they became some of my favorites! So hilarious looking at those box head memes has me laughing just thinking about it!! 

What have we used memes for on the chain? Almost everything at this point…Recognizing great deeds. Creating Legends around specific StackChainers. Winning fork wars. Creating a mood shift. Attacking bad actors. Making complex ideas easy to quickly digest. Changing the narrative. Celebrating a new stacker. Making light of a serious situation. The best memes always had some truth in them, even if it was a hard truth.

To me, the memes became the most important part of StackChain. I imagine that will be what people look at the most when looking back on StackChain in a few years. The stacks themselves are great, but it’s the memes that really stir up an emotion. How many fork wars would still be raging if we hadn’t had some fire memes to settle them? I’m proud of our Master Class Meme Crew, and Twitter is better for it as well. Should I name names? LoKo with his custom rap songs, Doc and Vee with their movie quality memes, Waldo and Psy with their expert miniature edits, Buddha was the Piñata guru, Freeborn with his unreal validation memes, Dr John with his comedy cuts, Bob Art Chain, Bob with his insightful videos, Rat Poison going next level with his masterpiece, Jaime and his azz, Billy Bread and his amazing songs, George and Block 1776, Lauren flirting nonstop with Buddha via emes, even Peter discovered his blocks were safer with a quality meme leading the way. Bitcoin is the King and memes lead the way to hyberbitcoinization. Happy stacking Friends.

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Note from Stackchain Magazine: No Bitcoin (or inferior monies) were exchanged for this article. Chewy is dope AF though and if you felt like tipping the memelord that taught Stackchain how to meme you can do so at chewybtc@strike.me