Day 198 – My image on a boring meme

Thumbing through Reddit yesterday evening, I spotted a post entitled “Boring Meme”.

Here it is, shared for your observation:

I’m no expert, but it appears that the creator of the piece is describing the near immediate bad fortune s/he has upon embarking on a particularly important online computer game, which s/he is unable to pause.

Look, I get it. We’ve all just begun something when something or someone demands our instant attention. It is annoying.

For some reason, they have used four images of birds to represent the potential annoyances they might face in their particular situation.

Top left: possibly a baby Great Grey Owl? I’m not big on owls.
Top right is an apparently walking Cinereous Vulture by Canon Ambassador Vladimir Medvedev.
Bottom right is a local fellow (bird and ‘tog) – A Jackal Buzzard by Clint Ralph taken in the Drakensberg Mountains in KZN, South Africa.

But that bottom left image, the one depicting “noob teammates”?
Well, that’s a Cape Vulture and I know that because I took that photograph.

Seriously:

I took it on 20th October 2013 near Plettenberg Bay – a young male who had lost his family to poisoning or poaching and now resides at Radical Raptors, raising money and awareness so that other young male Cape Vultures don’t have to go through what he has gone through.

I’ve had my images published in a few places: a German football quarterly, a UN Water Ambassador’s presentation about Climate Change, a Cape Town lifestyle magazine, a UK steam engine heritage publication – even in an actual National Geographic book – but this is my first (known) example of one being used in a meme.

Except, this guy got the images from here. I had already been memed!

Who knows – maybe this meme will “take off” (pun intended) and vast sums of money will arrive at my virtual door. Except that obviously, nobody except you and I knows that that bottom corner one is my photo, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be quietly impressed.

(Discreet) fame at last!