Today starts the last round of voting for the Daily Dot Hall of Fame, where web_crawlr readers vote on 5 categories—each made up of 5 nominees offered up by the editorial staff—with the 5 winners becoming the inaugural Daily Dot Hall of Fame inductee class.
Today, the nominees are part of the “Vanguards” category. Check out more about the hall of fame here.
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Week 5: Vanguards
Quinta Brunson
Yes, Brunson’s Abbott Elementary is the post-Office network sitcom that binge we needed. But did you know she’s also online royalty? The now-prominent and Emmy-winning Hollywood star is a longtime meme queen, having pioneered millennial-focused webseries for BuzzFeed and YouTube Red—all after blowing up on Instagram eight years ago.
So sure, she’s a great writer-director with fantastic comedic timing. She also has a head-turning record of giving back. In 2018, after her cousin was fatally shot in Philadelphia before his prom, she provided more than a dozen high schoolers with prom dresses, accessories, shoes, and tux rentals. This year she lobbied producers of Abbott Elementary to reallocate marketing dollars toward buying supplies for school teachers. (Itself a surefire way to get good press. Genius marketing!) And in April, she partnered with Feeding America to target and support people living in food deserts.
Brunson at every turn of professional success has brought her community along with her.
Dril
Nothing compares to Dril. The enigmatic Twitter persona has been weird and ever-present for years. He writes from the perspective of a lonely adult man with delusions of grandeur.
Every tweet is an outlandish boast (“i used to be mocked for bullying my class mates. now i live in the real life mansion that Luigi’s Mansion was based off of. it get’s better”) or a wildly prophetic call to arms. He is the American Id and every thought is simultaneously unhinged and relatable. We, the weird citizens of the internet, love him for the expressive and consistent work.
When Tumblr users allegedly unmasked him in 2017, the overwhelming Twitter consensus was “I don’t want to know what he looks like. I will not let you guys ruin the last good thing on this website. Protect Dril.”
So he may not be particularly charitable (he once bragged that he “raised over $63 for raytheon to develop a brand new ITAS that can shoot down enemy prayers before they reach God” after all) but he is a modern-day Plato that you can set your watch by. A true visionary. A vanguard.
Tiffany Pollard
Some people become memes by happenstance (see: Steve, Scumbag) and some artists put their whole heart into how they present and barrel over normal people as iconoclasts… thus becoming immortal fixtures of internet culture. That would be where longtime reality TV queen Tiffany Pollard, also known as New York, lands.
From Flavor of Love contestant to hosting queer dating competition Hot Haus as a certified mogul, Pollard has been proudly herself at every turn, emboldening people to live by their truth. She’ll fundraise for animal rescues on celebrity catwalks. She’ll open up about her miscarriage, bipolar disorder, and the removal of her breast implants—all publicly.
Plus, in 2018 the Daily Dot called Pollard the “unabashed godmother of internet memes.”
Chuck Tingle
For the uninitiated: Tingle is the hailed as master of erotic gay fiction, a prolific and anonymous writer who takes every politically charged cultural topic de jure and gives it the same bold, revolutionary, and activist-minded send-up: From far-right blog Breitbart to Brexit to Gamergaters… everyone at some point gets “pounded in the butt” via Tingle’s fan-fiction.
He’s written books about “Domald Tromp” being sexually dominated by a handsome T. Rex, and the Hugo-nominated author wrote a classic Tingler about the ex-president to fundraise for the ACLU: Redacted in the Butt by Redacted Under the Tromp Administration. It’s funny, fearless, and built to uplift and celebrate historically marginalized communities. Talk about a working-class hero.
Blinking White Guy
Are you confused at someone’s bad take and want to convey, via reaction GIF, your feelings of confusion and moral superiority? Since 2017, the “Blinking White Guy” GIF has done the job, built on a 2013 YouTube clip of said blinking white guy reacting on a video game webseries to his friend saying “I’ve been doing some farming with my hoe here.”
His name is Drew Scanlon and he likes to ride bicycles.
And since 2016, he’s annually fundraised during Bike MS, a 120-mile ride in the San Francisco area for multiple sclerosis research. This year, he’s already raised more than $33,000.
In 2017, the Daily Dot called the Blinking White Guy GIF the “most applicable” GIF of the year.
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