Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

Not a huge meme, but there is a picture of a cow staring out at the ocean that could use an entry:

The problem is I cannot seem to find it's origin. It appears to be a painting (however, many people have created their own paintings of this meme).

The image was posted to r/photoshopbattles on September 28th 2018 which predates most of the results I could find attempting to use Google reverse image search other than twitter links to either a user's entire activity feed or to deactivated accounts. It certainly predates that Reddit post. I found one post that is older if the date is to be believed onrom December 30th 2017. It is a spanish facebook page and the image size is so small it. The memey title "yo este verano en la playa → me this summer on the beach" is also suggestive that this is not the actual source.

Any suggestions to finding the source. I've spent a bit on Google and Bing Reverse image searches and I'm not finding much other than meme use, stolen RedBubble merch, and other paintings of the meme.

More Digging.

Found Two separate tweets in Spanish from February of 2016, one from the 12th the other from the 13th.

They both include the photo with the one cow (above), as well as another photo with multiple cows on the beach. Both state that the images were taken near Necochea, Argentina.

The one dated to the 13th says the images came from the Facebook page of "Claudio Travesias Necotata Mousseigne". I found two different Facebook pages that match this. One with photos going back to 2011, the other back to 2017: but no photos of cows in the ocean on either FB pages. The 2017 links to a now-defunct travel site. The few images on the site are not on the Wayback Machine. Might be a different page that has been deleted, or one of those pages that purged those photos.

Better than what I had earlier as there's now a location and evidence that it is a photograph and not a painting like I thought in the OP. It's a starting point at least.

its not that funny/worth of note i cant lie. not worthy of an article

popping in 2 months later lol, found the original publication

i'm trying to find the origin of the "I may be stupid" edit of the cow, the page that's on here says that it's from 2023 but i'm a 100% certain that it's earlier (maybe the edit with the Instagram sliders is from 2023). also maybe i'm misremembering, but i think i saw a "complete" version once where the text continued below, saying something like "cows aren't sea animals" or something like that.