One of the very first shots of Ben Affleck in his new sports drama The Way Back is familiar. Affleck, in character as former high school basketball star Jack Cunningham, smokes a cigarette outside a construction site. He looks weary, as if the cigarette is the only thing keeping him from complete, abject misery. The image has a meta quality to it: Paparazzi photos of Affleck, the human man, smoking have been central to the star's troubled public persona. In 2016, The Cut published a gallery of Affleck with cigarettes titled, "A Miserable Gallery of Ben Affleck Smoking Through the Pain of Existence." 

When an actor is as big a star as Ben Affleck, it's nearly impossible to ignore the off-screen narrative of his career. The Way Back, however, almost actively engages with the idea of Sadfleck, the portmanteau he earned after one during the promotion for Batman v Superman that hung over him beyond the memes. Beyond just being a fascinating part of the Affleck saga, The Way Back, directed by Gavin O'Connor, is an understated portrait of a man battling his demons and trauma that never succumbs to maudlin emotion. It's also a satisfying sports movie offering all the requisite triumphs without overshadowing the more upsetting tale it's telling. It's already the dad movie of the year.

Following an internet trend's virality is almost as complex and random as the forces that drive something to go viral in the first place. With the half-life of memes getting shorter and shorter by the month as social platforms like Twitter and TikTok provide an endlessly refreshing stream of new stuff to read, watch, and interact with, it's rare when one really catches on. The longevity of Rage Comics and LongCat is a product of a much slower, much older era; nowadays, as soon as presidential candidates start doing the "Renegade," the majority of the internet's trendiest teens (all of them) have already moved on to something else. Virality is also the least labor-intensive way of becoming famous, which is exactly how the singer and rapper Doja Cat began building her budding empire, months before the meteoric rise of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" was even a thing. 

Doja Cat recently made headlines for her "Say So" music video, which features a dance during the chorus that went viral on TikTok at the end of last year, but her viral fame started long before that. In August of 2018 -- she had released a debut EP, Purrr!, in 2013, and her first album, Amala, in early 2018, and had already signed with RCA Records -- Doja Cat posted a video she made in about half a day for her song "Mooo!", which is about, obviously, being a cow and doing cow things. It's the weirdest song she's ever done, but it was a hit, the bizarre combination of bovine lyricism ("Bitch, I'm a cow / I'm not a cat / I don't say 'meow'") and lo-fi green-screened video effects layered behind Doja Cat herself dancing languidly in a black and white spotted cow costume making its instant meme-ification inevitable.