Loss

On June 2, 2008, Tim Buckley decided his gaming webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del needed a miscarriage storyline. The internet decided otherwise.

The strip—four panels of a man rushing to a hospital, finding the front desk, walking down a hallway, and standing beside his partner in a hospital bed—was meant to be a gut-punch of dramatic sincerity. Instead, it became the gut-punch that launched a thousand parodies. The tonal whiplash from dick jokes to dead babies was simply too absurd to process with a straight face.

What followed was one of the most elaborate, sustained acts of mockery in meme history. First came the crude edits. Then the minimalist interpretations. Then the realization that the entire comic could be reduced to | || || |_—one vertical lines, two vertical lines, two vertical lines, one vertical line and one horizontal. Suddenly, Loss was everywhere. Hidden in architecture. Disguised in sheet music. Concealed in constellation maps. The internet had invented a visual rickroll.

Seventeen years later, people are still hiding Loss in their work. They're still asking "Is this Loss?" at every four-panel arrangement they encounter. Tim Buckley has made peace with it—even posting his own meta-parody on the ten-year anniversary. The meme outlived the comic's cultural relevance by at least a decade.

We're not saying Loss earned its immortality. We're saying the internet collectively decided that one man's earnest attempt at gravitas would be mocked until the heat death of the universe. And honestly? We respect the commitment.

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