science

Meme Man

Meme Man is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Meme Man rather than just read about it. In short: Meme Man, sometimes also referred to as Mr. Succ or the Stonks guy, is a character often featured in internet memes.

Key takeaways

Meme Man belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Meme Man to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Meme Man from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Meme Man, sometimes also referred to as Mr. Succ or the Stonks guy, is a character often featured in internet memes. He is depicted as a 3D render of a smooth, bald, pale-skinned, and often disembodied blue-eyed male head. He was popularized in the mid-2010s by the artist "Special meme fresh" and became a common character in many surreal memes, a genre of internet humor inspired by surrealism. During the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, Meme Man was popularized by users of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets as the face of the "stonks" meme. The first usage of him as a recurring character was on the Facebook page of the artist "Special meme fresh" starting in 2014, and soon the character spread to become "one of the only consistent stylistic elements" of the surreal memes aesthetic. On June 5, 2017, the artist uploaded an image of Meme Man overlaid on top of a stock photo of a man in a business suit with arms crossed and a chart pointing upwards behind him, and the caption "Stonks", a deliberate misspelling of the word "stocks". The meme went viral and became a common reaction image on Reddit and Twitter. On February 1, 2019, Elon Musk bought the domain name "stankmemes.com" according to his tweet. In June 2020, when Tesla Inc. shares soared, he tweeted "stonks", and the website featured this meme. Elon Musk has used both Meme Man and the "stonks" meme as a reaction on Twitter, and on January 26, 2021, he tweeted the word "Gamestonk!!" with an attached link to r/wallstreetbets. Immediately afterwards, shares in GameStop rose 157 percent in extended-hours trading, which some linked with Musk's tweet. In 2021, the multiplayer video game Fortnite released a "Diamond Hanz" skin, based on the design of Meme Man, as a joke for April Fools Day.

See also Rage comic – A meme which uses copies of black-and-white Microsoft Paint illustrations to illustrate emotional states Vaporwave – A microgenre of electronic music, and visual art style characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades List of Internet phenomena – List which covers many popular internet memes

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Meme Man

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Meme Man claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Meme Man before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Meme Man ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Meme Man

In research: Meme Man appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Meme Man in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Meme Man is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2014 in Internet culture, Fictional characters introduced in 2014, Heads in the arts, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Meme Man outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Meme Man in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Meme Man means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Meme Man out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Meme Man in simple terms?

Meme Man, sometimes also referred to as Mr. Succ or the Stonks guy, is a character often featured in internet memes.

Why does Meme Man matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Meme Man?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Meme Man.