Julia Carrie Wong 

Ten genuinely great things the internet gave us in 2017, featuring baby hippos

In a year filled with depressing news alerts and Trump tweetstorms, moments of sheer joy online were hard to come by – but there were a few
  
  

Fiona, a Nile hippopotamus, plays in her enclosure at the Cincinnati zoo and botanical garden.
Fiona’s water ballet offered a rare upbeat moment. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP

Unless you’re a corporation hoarding billions of dollars in offshore tax shelters, 2017 has not been a good year.

From Trump’s Twitter tantrums to the constant stream of alerts about natural disasters, the news has offered little in the way of happy distraction.

But amid all this doom and gloom, the internet did offer up a handful of moments of pure unadulterated joy. Forthwith, our definitive list of the top 10 things that weren’t terrible on the internet in 2017.

10. Nicki Minaj giving away money

Thanks to the United States’ unique commitment to not providing universal healthcare for its citizens, our social media feeds are often a heartbreaking stream of online fundraisers for medical costs. This spring, the rapper Nicki Minaj flipped the script, offering up an impromptu student debt jubilee on Twitter.

Over the course of an hour, the star pledged upwards of $30,000 to support her fans’ studies. It was a nice reminder that social media doesn’t have to be toxic.

9. The 20-something rapper who befriended an 80-something retiree

Amid the constant barrage of Nazi trolls and bad-faith mansplainers, it can be hard to remember that some people actually do make friends on the internet. People like Spencer Sleyon, 22, and Rosalind Guttman, 81, who forged a close relationship after being randomly matched as opponents in Words With Friends, an online Scrabble game.

8. Fiona the baby hippo

To be perfectly honest, I don’t really get Fiona. Sure, you have a small version of a strange giant animal, and that’s always fun, but the path from “cute animal” to internet superstar is a mystery. Still, Fiona is a bona fide phenomenon, and she seems to deserve that as much as any other internet phenomenon does. And thankfully, the fact that she can’t type means that her fans won’t have to go through the pain of discovering that she’s secretly been a milkshake duck this whole time.

7. The eclipse

No, not that eclipse. Solar eclipses happen all the time. This year, the internet gave us a truly rare event: a total eclipse of the pugs.

6. U bum

LeBron James dunks all the time. Donald Trump tweets terrible things all the time. Neither of these phenomena is particularly notable in and of itself. But when LeBron James dunked on Donald Trump after the president disinvited Steph Curry to the White House, well, that was art.

5. My mummy says

It’s one thing to get dunked on by one of the greatest basketball players of all time. It’s quite another to get clowned on by a six-year old. And yet, that was the unenviable position of one Nigel Farage, who was being “knighted” by a young girl in a bizarre skit on RT when the child piped up with a statement: “My mummy says you hate foreigners.”

Show us the lie.

4. Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash

Look, we get it. It’s annoying when people reduce complex geopolitical events to Harry Potter analogies. And JK Rowling’s Twitter persona can be a bit but much.

But the predictive text-generated Harry Potter chapter created by Botnik is utterly delightful and hilarious. The fact that it took a machine to string together the words “They looked at the door, screaming about how closed it was” doesn’t make them any less brilliant.

3. Lord Buckethead

In the United States, politicians spend election night hiding out in posh hotel suites until the results are in, at which point they appear at parties full of their most devoted followers.

In the United Kingdom, politicians spend election night at village halls in their home constituencies, where they have to stand next to their opponents while the vote counts are read out. It’s a brilliant tradition, and one that forced Theresa May to endure the humiliation of sharing a dais with Lord Buckethead while the rest of the country speculated about her political future amid her party’s colossal failure in the snap election.

Long live Lord Buckethead, the lord of the internet’s heart.

2. Fyre Festival

Schadenfreude is not the most attractive of qualities, but oh, sometimes it tastes so good. The saga of Fyre Festival, the heavily promoted music festival for rich millennials that devolved into a 21st-century Lord of the Flies, was a sumptuous five-course meal of deliciousness.

From the Fema tents and concierge shacks to Ja Rule’s “NOT MY FAULT” statement and the numerous lawsuits and investigations, we have to admit that we enjoyed every last bite.

1. BBC Dad

There are no words.

 

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