How about you, Blake, now that you can speak? Blake: Well, since you asked, my name is Blake Boston, a. And I'm just, you know, doing my thing, raising my kids, having a good time while doing it. You know,. Susan: I gotta remember this one thing or else I'll forget. Blake: This is why you don't do an interview with your mom. Blake: Why make their jobs harder?
Let's make this as smooth as possible. Which is like a century in internet years. And he has remained ubiquitous.
Ben: But Scumbag Steve was among the first modern-day memes, reaching all corners of the globe simultaneously. Pockets dollar. Speeds up when you try to pass him. Steals pain meds. Blake: Note to everybody: do not conceive a baby in the back of a muscle car because I'm the result. Amory: Susan says Blake was a true mischief maker. Hyperactive, predictably unpredictable — a riot and a parental panic attack, all in one.
Susan: I remember one time we went to the Boston home show and I said to my parents, go to the other end because you could go in and go out. There's no way he'll get lost. But he wants to go through by himself.
So he went through. I come around to the other side. Um, my parents are looking. I'm like, where is he? Where is he? He freaking climbed out the window. And started going beeline to where they were selling like candy. And I was I thought he was gone. I was like, this is he's the type of kid that, I was at one point thinking of having a leash on him.
Everywhere we went, he was the kid that everybody loved. Everybody thought was hysterical and caused me, like, just so much angst. You have no idea. But I adored him.
Ben: Blake was a handful, and Susan brought in professional help pretty early on. Blake: Well, my first ever therapy session was after I got bit in the eye by a dog. Susan: So he was identified like this is how he was identifying with the dog instead of the victim. So I had to take him to this therapist, his play therapist, because he was biting all the kids at the preschool.
Amory: Blake was only 4 years old at the time. He had to have facial reconstructive surgery. But instead of becoming afraid of dogs as a result, Blake started acting like one around his classmates. Blake: I was like tackling them, growling, growling, biting the dog. And so my brother and I started punching people. I'd like claw at them like I was a leopard. Susan: He said in trauma with kids that age. He said sometimes they're going to identify you there. It's a victim, you know, and be afraid of dogs or whatever or the rarely.
But sometimes it does happen. They become the dog and he became the dog. Ben: Susan says therapy helped her son a lot. But as he got older, nothing could stop this teenage boy from being, well, a teenage boy. I put jello in her toilet, saran-wrapped her toilet. I put it it was so funny.
I got her one day. I put it, I put it, obviously not a used condom, but I put soap in it, so it made it look used and I Amory: This became a common refrain throughout our conversation with Blake and Susan. Ben: Every time her son said something outrageous — not safe for work or for broadcast — Susan would yell…. Blake: Do you not realize half the romance books out there are more graphic than a porno?
Ben: We should admit, a four year old biting other school kids? Covering your mother's toilet with Saran Wrap? Or at least future scumbag material. Blake: You're forgetting the whole point where you dress up and put on a fake beard and like cool disguise so you can watch me perform.
Ben: Blake has pretty much always wanted to be a musician. He started playing in bands in high school. And yes, one time, a friend of his helped sneak Susan into one of his shows so she could cheer him on without, you know, being the mom at the show. Susan: He put a whole beard on me and a doo-rag, remember? Susan: And I was dressed in like these big chains. And I was like walking, and he never even saw me until I had, like, didn't have a camera or something —. Blake: I was on stage and I almost stop rapping because I was like, oh Amory: Susan has done many things out of love for Blake that have ended up being kind of mortifying for him.
But the most mortifying of all is the reason the Scumbag Steve meme exists. Susan: You know, do we have to really, like, rub it in? Ben: The story goes like this: In , around the time Blake was playing shows with his high school band, Susan was getting into photography.
Susan: I thought it was so cool, OK, I thought I was-- And they would humor me because I'd use the same filter and I just do a blue red light and coming through and I'd be like, look at this. And he's like, good, mom, keep at it, keep at it while they're downstairs probably making out with girls. She thought he needed some promo photos.
So one day, as Blake is trying to leave the house, she snaps a picture of him in the doorway. Susan: And I said to him, give me your MySpace. And he's like, Mom! I'm like, you going to do all of the stuff you have to promote yourself! So he gave me the thing I put the pictures up. But not for a while. Which makes the origins of Scumbag Steve all the more mysterious…. Amory: Susan posted the photo on MySpace in Within days, someone had made a website: scumbagsteve.
Blake and Susan have no idea who started the meme. They barely knew what a meme was at the time. Blake: All I know is he kept calling. But let's not talk about excuse because every time you go in donuts, you and your croissant. Susan: People would be like, oh, you front paged on Reddit again this week.
I'd be like, so? Blake: But then there would be other people, like we go to your mom's house and then there would be your sister, like not my sister, but a distant cousin saying, oh, I don't think he should come.
He's been stealing pain meds. And I'm like, first of all, I've never blown coke day in my life, you know what I mean? I don't do hard drugs. I smoke weed, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol. I've taken mushrooms. Amory: So this was because someone had put a caption on the picture that had to do with like stealing drugs?
Susan: Right. But no but one of the things that I will tell you is that when we used to go up, go on the Internet and we'd see them, we would be in hysterics laughing. Oh yeah. Total hysterics. Until then, every once in a while, then we'd look at each other and say, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Amory: Do you remember any of the captions that you thought were funny? Blake: Oh, what the hell was it? Steals your keys, spends twenty minutes helping you look for him.
Oh my God. Sleeps on your couch. Steals all the change inside or the change inside the cushions. Blake: I still do that now because like if you go go on a night of drinking now, don't go out with one lighter and I'll wake up the next morning with three.
Blake: Those, I don't like those. There's a certain line you don't cross. Amory: But Blake had no control over when the line was crossed online, who was crossing it, and who was seeing all of these memes. And if the line between Blake Boston and Scumbag Steve was getting blurry for even his family members — who thought he might be stealing pain meds because of a caption online — what did the rest of the world think of him?
Blake: You know, I go try to go on dates and then girls wouldn't want to date me because they'd be like, oh, you're just going to try to have sex with my best friend. And I'm like, what are you talking about? This is our first date. You know, people could not they could not separate it. They couldn't remember. No, I lost a lot of my, you know, high school friends around this area. And a lot of them stopped talking to me and, you know, thought that I was that person.
Ben: Susan went full Mama Bear. So she waded into the various online forums where Scumbag Steve was circulating to try to set the record straight. Susan: I was new to everything, OK? I had no knowledge of the Internet, no knowledge of Reddit, and I literally thought that I could rescue his reputation. And I was on there all night. I'd be writing something and I signed it as Blake Boston's real mom or something like that.
And they'd say, Hi, Blake, but what are you trying to do? And really, she never had a chance. Going viral is brief. Everybody talks about it for a day and then mostly never again. But as any internet cat knows, memes can have 9 lives, 9 thousand lives, 9 million lives!
And suddenly Blake had been catapulted not just into a new level of recognition, but into a new identity as a scumbag.
The image is perfect. You immediately want to caption it yourself. It became so iconic that it inspired spinoffs. Someone stuck it on a map of the US to criticize Guantanamo, for instance. And, unlike most of the other memes from the advice animal genre, Scumbag Steve is alive and well. Amory: Remember our meme chorus — the group of experts we talked to about memes more generally? Well, as the meme chorus explains, the most iconic memes are the ones that perfectly, uniquely, instantly capture an intangible idea — in this case, Scumbag.
Joan Donovan: They're really ways in which we structure and then create a shorthand for a whole set of ideas. Gianluca Stringhini: So, you know, if you want to convey a certain message online, you know that you can use a certain meme and people will get it. His options were limited at this point.
Susan: And he, like, go to these performances acting like a complete asshole. Blake: Oh, yeah. New York City walking down the street punchin' limos while the driving by, they beep at them, jaywalking. And I'll just punch the limo. I mean, thinking it was my job because I was there as Scumbag Steve. Susan: And I'd be like, that's but it's not you. And he's like, Mom, I got to either go with this or not.
Ben: And for a while, Blake went with it. He thought it might be good for his music career. He posted music videos on YouTube that seemed to fully embrace the identity the internet had given him. Scumbag Steve, Scumbag Steve. Who showed up and drank all your beer?
Amory: Doors did open for Blake. He got to perform at South by Southwest in , he was invited to internet conventions like ROFL-Con where he was received like a celebrity. He appeared on WWE. Ben: But there were doors threatening to close, too. Blake had always struggled with what he calls a void in his heart. And then, all of a sudden, right when they were reaching out to introduce Blake to his birth mother, he'd become internationally known as a scumbag.
Would she even answer their messages now? Susan: I was crestfallen. I was like. They're going to think-- her whole family, the embarrassment actually of it and the right. And and and they're being not who he is at all. But, you know, how do you explain something like that? I didn't know if they knew what a meme was. I mean, we certainly didn't. You know, there were so many things that were built into that. Amory: Including the fact that Blake himself was a parent now.
And his alter ego Scumbag Steve just happened to be spreading in the middle of a custody battle with the mother of his children. Blake: More or less her angle was, oh, yeah, he's a scumbag and he's, you know, out doing all these crazy drugs and this and that where it's not the case. You know, like I said before, I don't use drugs, you know, marijuana. But I don't really consider that the marijuana, you know. And like that kind of messes with me, too, because, like, I've tried always hard to stay away from crap like that because, you know, I've not personally dealt with addiction, but like a lot of my friends have and I've lost some friends because of addiction.
It's like that alone just kind of touches me the wrong way. Susan: And you have a limited amount of time to stand in front of a judge to say who you are and how you can be a great parent and and why it's right for your children to be with you.
And if you can imagine the fear of going in there and thinking that limited amount of time is when somebody holds up his picture. With all these sayings on them over and over and over again or here, go on, Google, Google his name, there's seven million over seven million memes of him.
So how do you explain that to somebody that's not, you know, aware of what a meme is and what it is so vital to his character and in his life. That's where. That's really the crux of what was me wanting to really make everything all right along with for his reputation, but I just I knew that if this went that far and he ended up losing his children over meme, I don't know how he would have come back from that.
And neither Blake nor Susan wants to talk very much about what happened and why. Here are 20 images of things that weren't meant to be funny at all, but definitely are. Know Your Meme is an advertising supported site and we noticed that you're using an ad-blocking solution. Read Edit History.
About Scumbag Stacy , also referred to as Scumbag Girl and Scumbag Girlfriend , is an Advice Animal style image macro series featuring a photo of a scantily clad young woman posing in a bedroom. Origin The origin of the photo of the girl comes from a post on the single topic blog HottestGirlsOnCampus , entitled "North Carolina Hat Girl" [1] , posted on the 26th of January Spread Following the post on the HottestGirlsOnCampus, the photo of the hat girl has been used as an avatar in adult dating sites and was posted in various forums.
Top entries this week. Latest Editorial And News. Related Entries 2 Meme Scumbag Hat. Meme Scoundrel Stefano. Recent Videos There are no videos currently available. Add a Video. There are no images currently available. Image uploads have been disabled for this entry. Tags scumbag girl advice animal image macro scumbag steve scumbag. View More Editors. Add a Comment. View More Comments. The latest from KYM. Photo Duke of Nukem.
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