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Kirbizia, Creator Of Dogelore, OBR And Other Iconic Subreddits, Shares How She Helped To Influence The Current Meme Landscape Through Absurdist Humor

Kirbizia's avatar image overlaid on the characters of Dogelore.
Kirbizia's avatar image overlaid on the characters of Dogelore.

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Published 4 years ago

Published 4 years ago

W

ith numerous, well-known subreddits spawned from her mind, Kirbizia is a relatively unknown shaper of meme culture as we know it today. Over the last several years, Kirbizia created /r/bonehurtingjuice, /r/okbuddyretard, /r/dogelore and many more meme-based subs each with their own unique brand of unorthodox humor. Although she never intended to be a “meme trendsetter,” nor does she consider herself as such, Kirbizia’s effect on the meme world is undeniable. With a complex history of moderating communities, becoming engulfed in drama and eventually conceding some of her creations to the internet’s chaotic nature, we spoke with Kirbizia to hear the engrossing story of how she impacted memes throughout the 2010s to better understand how these once obscure corners of internet humor wound up mainstream.

Q: Hey, Kirbizia. Thanks for joining us. Would you like to introduce yourself a bit to begin?

A: My current legal name is Kelvin Francis. I’m trans MtF and still kind of deciding on a name, but Kelvin works for now. I’m currently 19 and am an introverted college student who plays too many Paradox games. I’m generally chill and slow to anger. I’m cripplingly insecure, so you could definitely manipulate me into joining your cult in exchange for positive affirmations and faux friendships. I don’t really know what I want to study, but I’m currently set as an anthropology major. I grew up as an international student because my parents worked in the foreign service and I moved around a lot as a result. It kind of sucked having to move around a lot because it takes some time for me to adjust to new environments.

For most of my life, I was a normal class-clown-type of kid, but beyond that, I was just kind of average. I did sports but wasn’t good, I did violin and was quite literally second fiddle (I was legit second best in class). After puberty, I started becoming a lot more introverted and better at classes, probably because I wasn’t goofing off all the time. I certainly am no Jimmy Neutron or anything, but I felt I was smart (bookwise at least). I was looking to apply to Ivy League colleges when I made a subreddit where you pretend to be 8 years old.

Q: To get a little context, can we start out by hearing about your online background? What were some of your earliest and most influential experiences with the internet that led to your interest in memes and internet culture?

A: My first contact with the internet was legitimately a “Your Favorite Martian” video. I was in Bangladesh at the time and the internet was so bad that it took two hours to load a single video. I kept rewatching the first minute over and over to the point that I can still recite “the stereotypes song” from memory. I feel that summarizes my online influences pretty well.

For most of my life, I was just some stupid kid who used shit like 9GAG while laughing at Rage Comics. When I became an edgy 13-year-old, I started to use the 4chan Pokemon board like a true loser. Beyond that, I think honestly I just find stupid shit the funniest thing ever. I don’t know how or why, that's just how I am.

Q: So in May 2014, you created your main account on Reddit under the username Kirbizia. Can you tell us where the name came from, what you primarily did on the account early on and some of your first subreddits, such as /r/bonehurtingjuice, you started?

A: I started using Reddit to make a stupid subreddit to make fun of one of my friends. We were in middle school and he tried to make a gaming channel branded as a “college gamer,” even though he was a squeaker. I made the subreddit as a joke “fan club” of his non-existent channel and did some amazing CSS to go along with it. I miss old Reddit.

(The satirical fan subreddit Kirbizia made for a friend's gaming channel, one of her first subs.)

It’s comforting to know that after six years of your life you’re still the same idiot you always were. From there I just lurked and browsed shitty subreddits like /r/4chan (I was an edgy 14-year-old) and /r/MontageParodies. I kind of used it sparingly as a lurker and just kind of browsed it when I was bored. The first time I became “internet famous (™)” was when there was a small subreddit known as “/r/deepfriedmemes,” which, at the time, was funny before it got overrun with shitty “hey :b:eter” memes and other forgettable garbage nobody remembers. I asked if I could create a Discord server for the subreddit to which, somehow, the owner agreed. I then asked if I could be a mod and the mod team approved because of my “high-quality memeing.”

(Two examples from /r/deepfriedmemes, one of the first big Reddit communities Kirbizia became involved with.)

From there, I was just a general Discord and subreddit moderator. I mostly just posted stupid memes and shitposted in the meme Discord. Eventually, the funny deep-fried memes became old and you would see shit on /r/dankmemes where it was basically copy-pasted from our sub and became absolute cancer. Everyone on the mod team hated what the subreddit had become and even planned to delete it. I left because I got bored and hated moderating for it. This is the “goodbye” doc for the subreddit but nobody ever actually closed it down (I don’t know why).

I remember asking around this time if I could advertise my new subreddit called “/r/bonehurtingjuice” which was based on a funny image in similar veins I found which was basically the stupidity of /r/deepfriedmemes, but instead of funny filters just being stupid via dumbass memes. Honestly, there are so many different ideas and interpretations of what “bonehurtingjuice” is but it's mostly just “so bad it's good” type of memes that made me laugh from Discord that I posted when I made it. The initial impetus was browsing /r/comedycemetary where the point was everything was supposed to be awful and unfunny, but I would browse and die of laughter. I used these initial images as a guide for when I would start making silly shitposts of my own.

Surprisingly BHJ took off too, and it was a great time moderating and I made a lot of friends, which is super depressing because I can hardly remember any of them. I’m not trying to be a dick, but when I think back it was just noise. The most surreal experience for me was when /r/bonehurtingjuice was at like 60,000 subs and there was an actual article written about the subreddit. I was in biology just chilling on my phone and one of the mods DM’d me the article. I got my phone taken in class cause I could not stop just reading this article in disbelief. The even more surreal thing about it was that I was quoted in it like some “meme expert” even though I was a 15-year-old kid who made a subreddit of funny images while I was shitting.

(The original meme that Kirbizia based /r/bonehurtingjuice on.)

Q: Easily one of your most well-known and iconic creations, you founded /r/okbuddyretard in December 2017. What was your initial concept for this subreddit, where’d the idea for the name come from, and how was the community like back then?

A: I made OBR as the idea of “/r/bonehurtingjuice but even stupider.” I wish I could fix my old phone that died a month ago because it has a massive chronicle of all the stupid shit I’ve posted all the way from /r/deepfriedmemes. The closest I can do however is just show memes posted on my account. I basically did a similar thing to BHJ and had a subset of stupid images (this time from a Facebook “cringe” page) that I found hilarious and just made memes based on that. My philosophy at the time was to imagine the stupidest person possible and to think what they would sit there clapping to — mouth agape. Some part of it was satire and shitting on current trends through parody and absurdity. I advertised it on BHJ and you saw a similar situation to the slow rise of another subreddit over time.

Honestly for almost all the subreddits I’ve made, the most fun or happiest time was always that small group from like 10,000 to 100,000 subs, and seeing just this hub of stupid shitposts rise up and take a cohesive identity was always the fun part. Typing this now, I start to feel a little sad because I do genuinely miss those fun times, but nothing lasts forever sadly. It was mostly just a shitpost hub and you could probably make articles on the histories of all the subreddits I've made and the massive amounts of lore and drama. At the time OBR hit around 50,000 subs, BHJ exploded to 200,000 members and was a pretty prominent sub. The mods had trouble keeping BHJ what BHJ was supposed to be. After seeing what had happened in BHJ, I made the determination that I wouldn’t let that happen to OBR so I made a determined effort to weed out shitty trends and garbage by banning memes.

(Some examples of early shitpost-style memes.)

Q: My personal favorite, you also founded /r/dogelore in August 2018. Can you tell us more about how and why this community was created? Why Doge specifically?

A: Inside of OBR, there was rising popularity and niche of the Doge meme resurging. Early OBR and dogelore were practically inseparable as the philosophy of stupid shitty memes applied pretty well to using the dead Doge meme. I believe the first instances where I found some Doge memes were in the OBR Discord at the time. I remember from like 1,000 to 10,000 subs there was a massive backlash as dogelore started to grow from these weird iFunny edgelords who were pissed that Reddit “stole” Doge memes and literally spammed gore almost daily on it “for the lulz.” I’ve made this clear in almost every AMA I’ve ever done, but I never consider myself as the “creator” of this type of humor … more so just a person who made shitty memes in that style. Considering how 90 percent of the internet is just people cynically stealing from each other, I don’t really think that what I did was as blatant as “stealing” as opposed to making memes based on things I liked at the time.

Dogelore slowly evolved into a more story-based, grounded type of sub as opposed to an absurdist shitpost parody of everything like OBR was. A big thing I noticed, especially on dogelore, was the amount of gay shitposting goblins it was popular with for some reason. I don’t say “gay” as a pejorative but as a legitimate statement — almost all early subs I made were crawling with queer and gay people for some reason. I remember Phoebe (trans Doge) as a character was super popular at the start and slowly people just kind of stopped caring about it. It became a running joke with /r/dogelore mods that “there is no straight dogelore mod” because almost everyone who modded either already was or discovered they were a gay bitch. This isn’t a major point, but I thought it was always a strange phenomenon.

(Two example memes from /r/dogelore.)

Q: After launching these three famous subreddits, how quickly did you notice they were picking up steam and becoming popular on Reddit? What was your initial reaction once they’d really become phenomena?

A: Almost all of the big subs I made or modded had about six good months to a year where they grew from a small shitposting hub into a whole category of funnies that had notoriety across the site. Moderation of that first zero to 100,000 subs was always so much fun and a genuine blast with people. But after that point is when drama and power struggles would rise up. People who I would see as friends would seemingly turn against me over creative differences, and it became almost a full-time job with all the stupid menial bullshit you needed to deal with. Behind the scenes of any subreddit is so much drama and pedantic meaningless bullshit that has no bearing in the grand scheme of things.

When it would become bigger, mods would panic over the loss of the sub’s identity and there would be so many fights over how to preserve it. Some argued over the banning, the specifics of when and how long to why and what to say and explain was essentially a never-ending fight. For me personally, it was disheartening to see a place where I expressed my stupid sense of humor be changed into something unrecognizable to me. I would always panic and fear that there was something I should be doing to fix it or to “save it” to the point I would spend almost eight hours a day just moderating a stupid meme subreddit. I had very few friends in real life due to moving around a lot, and in retrospect, I took it WAY too seriously. Beyond my personal mental health issues that popped up, it was very stressful and disheartening.

In addition, the larger it became, there were more eyes watching and criticizing every move I made. I’m already an insecure person, so when somebody had well-founded, legitimate criticism, I would have a crisis of conscience and fear I was doing something wrong and that I needed to fix it … but I couldn’t cause I already did it. The constant internal struggle in my mind was nearly unbearable, as I considered that my creative outlet at the time. But I had so little control and saw people change and, in my viewpoint back then, ruin it. In retrospect, it didn’t mean as much and I should’ve been confident enough to know when to put my foot down, when not to listen and when to listen to feedback.

Q: Did any of your friends or family know about your involvement in creating these meme subreddits and trends? What did they make of that and how did they react?

A: I told my most immediate family about it, but as you’d expect, they couldn’t really understand it and were supportive if they had no knowledge. The only real poignant thing that happened was my sister once looked at my Reddit account, stared out the window for a good minute and said, “It sounds exactly like you.” In terms of friends, I couldn’t really tell them because I was openly trans on my Reddit account back then while I was also going to an all-boys Catholic school. I was already getting bullied for being gay, so I didn’t really want to give anyone actual, expellable dirt beyond people I was close friends with.

Most of the people who I told said it was stupid and made no sense. One of my friends sent me Big Chungus unironically and got mad when I didn’t find it funny. Ironically now they send me memes drenched in irony and go “wow isn’t this funny” as I go on a rant over how they said it was shit. Marcellus, if you’re out there, go suck my nuts nerd; go back to playing Wizard 101.

Q: Most of the meme subs you’ve founded are somewhat “weird” humor to many people, especially those not well-versed in internet culture. Why do you think that style of humor found in places like /r/bonehurtingjuice and /r/okbuddyretard has taken off in recent years? What’s driving it, and why did this style of absurd, non-sequitur humor take off with meme culture?

A: The discussion and classification of humor always make you sound pretentious and up your own ass, but the way I see it, humor is all about the subversion of expectations at a fundamental level. I don’t mean somebody runs out to you and scares you or anything, but that there is a created expectation that becomes subverted intentionally. Stand-up comedy is a great example. The whole Jerry Seinfeld “bitches be eating airplane food shopping” schtick works because our expectations are that society is ordered and rational, and they break it down and show the hidden irrational patterns we never see that are so true.

The way I see it and understand OBR and the others like it are plainly just absurdist humor. The expectations of memes on the internet at the time of the creation of OBR were all /r/blackpersontwitter reaction memes. I feel that in like early 2016 and on, we had a huge deluge of memes based on relatability and “TRUE!!!” I feel the absurd non-sequitur-ness comes from the reaction to the prevalence of these types of jokes. It was so bad to the point it was just stupid shit like “when you nut and she keep sucking” and a picture of a man who looks happy. The point is to make you laugh and go “OMG that is so true!!!” It’s the Seinfield bit but for memes. I think this type of humor parodies and satirizes that by making them intentionally meaningless and non-relatable.

I was kind of sick of the shitty Instagram “WHO DID THIS (crying emoji crying emoji)” and made purposefully stupid and absurd content. To a person that isn’t sick of that type of relatability-based comedy, seeing something purposefully stupid might just not make sense because there’s an inherent disconnect with the expectation of the joke. That, or I am just a manchild who thinks acting like a 5-year-old is funny.

(An example of a stereotypical Instagram meme, which inspired the creation of /r/okbuddyretard.)

Q: Seeing how you’ve founded several successful subreddits, what do you think is your secret to growing these communities and getting them to go from unknown to well-known?

A: This is probably the question I get most asked the most, and the answer is that there is no answer. I can tell you what I did and why I think my subreddits grew, but there is no big secret I can tell you. I remember one time a person on Discord thought I was a 30-year-old college professor because I was so “mature and wizened” in the creation of the child roleplay subreddit. What made my subreddits succeed was that it was something new and had room for growth. It certainly grew into a cohesive singular idea eventually, but the most important thing was that it was something that you didn’t see.

That isn’t enough however, you could post images of goblins with comically large fingers, which is new but isn’t really replicable or funny. If it’s just an image you think is funny it doesn’t really work because there needs to be room for growth and replication. The power of memes is literally in their shareability and ability to change and be replicated. If your subreddit doesn’t do anything new, doesn’t have room for growth and isn’t funny, then you won’t have a good subreddit. I don’t think there was anything exceptional I did beyond just sticking to this idea and making shitty jokes I found funny. If anything, it was just a symptom of being online too much and knowing the internet too well to know the shitty jokes people like.

Q: For dogelore specifically, this community really revitalized the Doge meme and saved it in a way from dying out and becoming irrelevant. Was this merely a coincidence or something that you wanted to happen?

A: I don’t think there was ever a specific concerted effort to try to “revive doge,” in fact, at the start a lot of the jokes and memes were intended to make fun of how awful of a meme old Doge was. “Oh wow dude you put a funny dog and made him go ‘wow such doge’” and that somehow became an internet trend. Not to mention the fact that we have legitimate forms of cryptocurrency based on this shitty joke from 2012. When people, in general, were looking for things to parody and satire for being overtly bad and stupid, it makes sense that they would reach back into the memory of “oh god that was awful wasn’t it.” Honestly, I appreciate the way it’s been changed in modern times because it at least has some substance and is basically Rage Comics 2.0 as opposed to one singular joke you are to guffaw and laugh at.

(An early Doge meme vs. an ironic Doge meme.)

Q: I know for some of the subreddits, such as /r/okbuddyretard, you sorta stepped back from your involvement or left them after some time. Can you explain what led you to walk away from being so involved in these and if there were any major events or causes?

A: At a baseline, a person who can spend this much time talking about internet memes is not going to be mentally stable. I started using Reddit mainly because I had recently moved and had no friends, so I substituted that lack of social interaction with meaningless internet-point-based relationships. Outside of funny meme subreddit moderation, I had a life. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety out of nowhere after having a panic attack in school (I never had this problem growing up). This depression and anxiety were not some quirky little “oh I get sad sometimes” but a legitimate, awful, life-ruining, stay-in-bed-all-day, cut-yourself-to-cope-with-your-self-hatred, have-panic-attacks-at-the-drop-of-a-hat type of mental illness.

I don’t say this to try to garner pity points or pretend to be a good person, but I was certainly struggling outside of funny meme subreddit stuff. As mentioned before, it was stressful moderating a subreddit of such a size that I constantly worried about 24/7. Putting myself into this so much and stressing about what I could do all the time was probably one of the worst things for my mental health. One of the major things that putting myself into things so much had an effect on was that I was gaining internet notoriety. It got to the point that some people called me the “figurehead” of OBR. Think about 100 people you know. Personally, I would say that out of that 100 probably one person is a legitimately horrible person. Now amplify that by 1000 and you suddenly get a good understanding of what happened next.

I was already mentally unstable and struggling enough, but then I started to get constant, just antagonistic hatred from those 1,000 people. People went on long rants about why I was a sack of shit for banning Ben Shapiro memes a day too early or some other meaningless garbage, and because I was too insecure to not listen to them, I would try to defend myself constantly for the sake of “open-mindedness” only to further this meaningless conflict for no reason. I was already hating myself enough without their help, and it only made things worse.

Then, after I came out as transgender, it became sooo much worse. Before it was just random petty drama people would start, but now it became ideology and hate-based instead. I remember constant raids on the Discord of gore videos telling me to kill myself. I remember having to straight up end the OBR chatroom because this one kid would not stop pinging me all day 24/7, and when I would ban him, he would make an account and start again. He made a hate subreddit of me which included lots of transphobic shit telling me to kill myself. I remember one comment from a dude called “SiegWehrmacht1488” who found the town I lived in, my name, said he lived close by and was going to kill me. People began making hate threads on me trying to dox me and find all my personal information, which, thankfully, I was smart enough to not have anything important shown.

I know it’s the internet and the fat nerds living vicariously through “anti-degeneracy” crusades probably wouldn’t have actually done anything, but it still made me very miserable. If I ever showed any signs of weakness, it was suddenly a new thing to be laughed at. I had a panic attack because these people would not leave me alone, and, like an idiot, I tried to call them out for their garbage behavior and that suddenly became a new funny thing to make fun of me for. I’m certain one of these weirdos will read this and see my openness about my experiences as another sign of weakness to make fun of, but at this point, I honestly don't care anymore. I resigned from OBR to firstly stop the constant hatred I was receiving, and secondly because I didn’t think the subreddit was what I saw anyway. Why would I hold onto something that is no longer mine and actively causes pain? So I took a break, vowing internally to one day return, holding onto some sense of me “saving the subreddit,” which was an absolute mistake. I honestly should’ve never tried to come back in the first place to a setting that had nothing for me, and my attempts to do so only caused so much more drama and controversy.

In my mind, I still had some idea that I could somehow “save my creation” despite how much pain it had caused me in my attempts to do so. At this point, I did become unreasonable and began to view anybody who had anything to say as somehow being a “me vs. the world” situation. After talking to some of the old subreddit mods, I understand how this hurt them and how I lashed out at them for no good reason. In all honesty, I hold no hate towards them, but in fact regret how I used them as personal antagonists who stood in my way. The person I tried to demonize as the core of the conspiracy and I have reconciled, and we hold no bad blood towards each other. In the grand scheme of things, it was certainly so much drama and stress over absolutely nothing.

Q: During one of your AMAs, you described how some of the subs like /r/bonehurtingjuice have changed considerably or been “normified” since you initially founded them. Could you elaborate more on this and explain how they’ve transformed or been misconstrued since their creation?

A: I hold caution with this question out of pure fear of becoming some pretentious twat who thinks memes are somehow my magnum opus, and I have done this in the past. My idea of the problem with the type of absurdist satirization that was going on is that, over the course of time, the expectation changes. What once was a counter-culture shit on the popularly established format ironically, in itself, becomes a popularly established format. Your expectation is no longer that it’s required to make sense, but the expectation becomes that there is no sense. So you slowly and slowly over the course of time laugh less and less. The idea of “normiefication” is not a matter of “it became popular so I hate it” but a fundamental shift in expectations thanks to the law of diminishing returns. No joke is funny forever, and it’s inevitable that it dies out and is replaced with something else. If you’ve been there from day one, moderating the same joke daily, there is no doubt that the humor will sour and no longer be funny.

That’s where a lot of bitterness towards a subreddit can happen — when it’s perceived to have changed for the worse but, in reality, the joke is just no longer funny. The concept of “normiefication” goes further into driving into reactionary tendencies to change. This isn’t what it used to be, therefore it is bad. I personally think changes that happened to things like /r/dogelore have been positive, albeit the same problem of the same joke becoming less and less funny each time you tell it. It’s funny to see the wacky dog do uncharacteristic things with the thing changed to be even more wacky and uncharacteristic things, but to wallow in it as the only source of humor is intentionally brazen and myopic. As you can tell, I did take AP Lang and passed, so yeah, I’m cool B.

Q: With Reddit’s increasing tendency to ban or quarantine communities they deem offensive, even more confusing ones like /r/BigChungus, are you worried at all about any of your big subreddits getting the banhammer? Additionally, what are your thoughts on Reddit’s recent bans and crackdown?

A: Speaking personally as a former mod of /r/BigChungus, the banning itself was not some arbitrary target of removing hate subreddits, it quite literally had become a hate subreddit. I remember the week before it got banned there were so many racist jokes and gore videos that had popped up for some reason that I’m not confused as to why it was banned. I never condone that type of shit. I was quite literally just there as a mod in name and did nothing. In all honesty, I don’t particularly think Reddit’s current policy has been too bad in terms of quarantining legitimate hate subreddits, except for maybe some shitposty places like Chapo which will probably get some right-winger mad because leftist shitposting is literally communism Venezuela 100. Reddit has had the problem subs of awful, purposefully shocking and hateful content for some time now, and it’s good they’re containing it. If you want to be an edgelord, go to Parler or /pol/ you fucking 14-year-old.

Q: Of all the thousands of memes and coinciding trends you’ve inspired over the years, which are some of your particular favorites and why? Can you share a few of those?

A: In my personal opinion most all trends are called “trends” because they aren’t good enough to have holding power beyond a short period of time. I can certainly recall some stupid events and jokes I liked, but they were just that, shitty events I liked. I remember for a time in OBR we shitposted about Garfield for a week and how awful “lasagna” was through classic OBR means.

I remember one time I and the BHJ mods tried to do a purposefully stupid mod event where we pretended we got hacked by the famous internet character “racist Mario.” For some reason, despite the fact that a character called “racist Mario” somehow hacked a huge 100,000 subreddit, people were pissed and did not like the joke. Internally with the mods, we thought it was the funniest shit ever because of how seriously people were taking “racist Mario” to the point people were threatening the character to give back the subreddit, or else … Sadly Reddit mods had to step in for compromising site-wide security and claiming a big subreddit got hacked and reset everything, which is honestly understandable. The rest of the BHJ “events” since then, however, have generally been pretty short-sided and purposefully antagonistic of the audience for no good reason.

Q: Aside from those you helped shape, what are some other memes going around currently that are personal favorites? Got any you can share with us?

A: I’ve been doing better mentally, so I haven’t been invested in meme culture 24/7. I’m currently personally a fan of /r/196 for the sole fact it’s a chill shitposting hub that is surprisingly and generally trans-positive which, as you imagine, kind of matters to me. Can’t wait to see how in five months it’s “ruined by normies” and my statement makes me look like a failure of a quirky dank wholesome 100 memer.

(An example meme from /r/196, one of Kirbizia's current favorite subs.)

Q: Given your expertise in meme culture, where do you see memes headed in the next few years? Do you think we’ll see any consistent trends, such as decreasing longevity, the encroachment of politics, or anything along those lines in the memes of the near future?

A: Honestly the scariest and most depressing thing is that we’re seeing the increasing power of memes in society as a whole, with the whole world at large consuming some type of funny “meemays” to convey information. It’s just very depressing to see what once was silly Rage Comics you shared in middle school slowly become a major power in the spread of information throughout society. I don’t know if “surreal” is the word because it’s always felt like it was bound to happen. At this point, I can’t really tell you “the hot new trend” like some hedge fund manager using mathematical formulas to guarantee a return on investment. Most of the time, memes are attention-seeking screams into the void through the usage of comedy and they’re essentially impossible to predict. However, I would personally invest all my Dogecoin and Reddit Gold into the term “googis.” I don’t know what it means, but it sounds funny I think.

Q: In addition to your presence on Reddit, you also stream on Twitch and create videos on your YouTube channel. Would you mind telling us more about those two endeavors and what they’re all about? Are there any other projects or things of that nature you’re working on that we should keep on our radar?

A: I feel the issue with using subreddits as a creative outlet is the fact that it’s out of your control to a point. It relies on others to make it into something. All you can do is just sit back and yell and hope somebody listens. I personally have always been a creative person and have recently been doing different creative outlets to express that. I’ve written poetry, short stories and attempted writing a novel as a way to express emotions and thoughts. Mentally it’s been very helpful to essentially be able to vent all I want.

In terms of things I think are good enough to share with others because they’re funny enough or make a poignant point, I generally upload them to YouTube. I try to convey information that I find important or underlooked and, at the same time, make things that make me laugh. It’s a good creative outlet for me considering I now have actual control over what I put my time into and I enjoy doing it. I stream on Twitch generally when I feel funny enough to be entertaining to other people and be goofy, which is another fun outlet for me. Check them out if you care enough. I’ve done lots of AMAs to some other questions you might have, as well as a lot more transgender focused content, which I didn’t really have an outlet for on Reddit. Names for both my Twitch and YouTube are just “Kirbizia.”

Q: Alright, so to end things here, I’d like to take a step back and look at your online history over the last several years. Knowing everything that’s transpired since you joined Reddit, kicked off all these meme trends and communities, do you reflect positively on this whole experience? If given the chance to change anything, would you handle things differently or simply let them be?

A: Despite a lot of the hardships that have occurred, I would generally say that it’s been overall good. I've met and had great times with so many people, as superficial as the encounters were. I don’t really care if making some funny subreddit is my 15 minutes of fame because I’ve been able to meet and talk to so many unique people, for better and worse. Another upside of having notoriety was that once people found out I was trans, I’ve been able to meet and talk to so many like-minded individuals in similar situations as me. I’ve also been able to help and talk to other trans people going through similarly rough situations, which has probably been the biggest upside number one. If one person doesn’t suffer as much as I did, then it was all worth it.

In retrospect, I would’ve not taken things so seriously and just enjoyed it while it lasted. Don’t go scrambling to save all the ashes. Smile while it all burns to the ground. The one certainty in this world is the fact that entropy always wins.

Q: Any final word or additional info to add?

A: Follow my Twitter @kirnixis if you want to follow my doings or need help, as I generally am most active there. I am also pretty active on my Discord “transgenderboob.com” (that’s the actual Discord link I paid $20 for it), and it’s very trans-positive while still remaining a shitpost hub for all to see. So, if you need people or a community to talk to, trans or not, I would love to be helpful in some capacity to someone. Oh uh, I don’t know if this fits here, but google this cool new indie game called Operation Condor. It’s SO underrated and more people need to play it, my god.


Kirbizia is the creator of several well-known meme communities on Reddit, namely /r/bonehurtingjuice, /r/okbuddyretard and /r/dogelore. You can find more of her memes on Twitter @kirnixis and Reddit or see her content on YouTube and Twitch.

Tags: kirbizia, kelvin francis, okbuddyretard, r/okbuddyretard, doge, dogelore, r/dogelore, bonehurtingjuice, anti-memes, r/bonehurtingjuice, big chungus, r/bigchungus, reddit, memes, absurdist humor, zoomer humor, shitposting, interviews, editorials,



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