this apple picture lol

I haven't made any actual friends online besides one guy named Hammy. He's one of the only people my age that I've met that is as good at fighting games as I am. We first met each other through mutual friends who told us to play a game called Guilty Gear together, since we were similarly skilled. I've never met him in real life, but I call him a friend since we know a good amount about each other. Unless I'm being elaborately catphished, we're both Korean, both run the same track events, both like basketball but aren't good at it, both play the same video games, and have extremely similar senses of humor.

I first saw this image when I was playing against Hammy in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the first time. We were playing online between our states, not on a voice call, only texting through Discord when we needed to. He lost a round by making one of the most confusing decisions I had ever seen in the game, and before I could ask what he did, he sent me that picture through Discord.

The image itself has many layers, with an already-confusing photo of an apple captioned "Jonathan." On top of that is a snapchat caption repeating "jonathan," as if there was something in the image that needed to be cleared up. The low-resolution, compressed look of the photo makes it funnier. To top it off, there's a lingering scroll bar on the right side of the screen, meaning at some point someone had been scrolling something on their iPhone and had screenshotted the picture. There's also extremely small black corners on the photo, like there was once a border and it was cropped out. I don't even know myself what makes the photo funny. I think it's because it uses a human name "Jonathan" to label not a human, but an apple. A Jonathan apple is an actual type of apple, but presenting it in this absurd kind of way makes it funny to look at, especially since it has all these artifacts from being shared around on the internet, as if it had some value. It's tough for me to even understand why it's funny myself, it just is. This description took me an extremely long time to write - in my head I kind of just thought you either "get it" or you don't. Is this considered "gen z humor?"

For some reason, I decided to save this image to my computer. I saved it to the "Pictures 2" folder, which is the same as the default Windows "Pictures" folder but on a different drive that has more space. I have a folder on my laptop for files I can send in reaction to something someone else sends, whether to portray my disgust, surprise, or joy, but this photo just went in my default Pictures folder. I'm not sure when I will ever need this photo, or why I decided to keep it. It represents confusion for me, and considering the amount of confusing things that happen among my friends, I may not end up having much trouble finding a place to use it.

It's funny how the backstory behind this crappy picture of an apple gives such a concrete look at my life and what kinds of interactions I have online. I couldn't help but post about it. Sorry. I hope you at least enjoyed reading this blog, or maybe learned something about me.

(Update: I recently used this picture! People were waiting eagerly for my response about something in a group chat and I sent this picture instead. I couldn't tell if they were confused at all)