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Jack Donaghy walked into Liz Lemon’s office, ready to launch in a diatribe about Jenna’s latest stint as a spokeswoman for the Mexican tampon company, ¡Entrar!, but Lemon was apparently occupied at her computer and paying no attention to him. He crept around quietly – his time spent hunting polar bears had taught him a lot about stealth. Those assholes were light sleepers, unlike Lemon, who could sleep through a 9.5 earthquake.
True enough, she was engrossed in the screen, looking at some site with pictures – random pictures, organized into individual posts, it looked like – food, crudely drawn comics, celebrity photo montages – “Good God, Lemon, what is this?”
She nearly jumped up a foot in the air at the sound of his voice. Instinctively, her finger clicked the mouse and the window minimized. She must do this often, he mused.
“Jack!” she said, giving him a stern look that didn’t appear as much stern, as it did constipated. She really wasn’t great at looking angry.
“What was that, Lemon? It reminded me of my days interning for Kennedy when my job description was literally to just feed him hallucinogens. This is what I imagined he was seeing.” He paused briefly. “Not that I would know anything about that.”
“Right,” Liz said slowly. She moved her head back and forth slightly, as if considering, and then: “OK, fine. I’ll tell you.” She opened up the window again, and scrolled down. “It’s a new blogging platform called Tumblr; Criss told me about it!” She clicked on a picture of a submarine sandwich, and it opened in a larger window. “These are my people, Jack! I can post pictures of all the things I love, and no one judges!”
“My God,” Jack whispered. “Is this where modern hippies go to rot?”
“This isn’t a hippie thing,” Liz said, waving her hand dismissively. “Most of the people on here are younger – it’s making me feel so young again! For instance,” and she clicks on a picture of two young girls posing with fingers pointed in the air. Is this the new thing young people are doing? He wonders. “This is Mandy, she’s 14, and normally, I wouldn’t say I’d have anything in common with a 14 year old girl, except that she posts all these Glee pictures, and –“
“Ah, yes, Glee. Fox’s reason to live another day.” He snorted to himself.
Liz clicked out of the window and it went back to the main screen. “See?” she said, scrolling down. “Food porn, reality TV, regular TV … plus, I can post about all the things I like and people actually like it! I have 60 followers on my personal site!”
“60 people follow you to see what you have to say?” Jack grimaced.
“Very funny, Jack. Besides—“ she started again, but Jack cut her off.
“Wait … what is that?” he asked, pointing at the screen.
“Oh, it’s a picture of John Watson and Sherlock Holmes – you know, from that BBC Sherlock remake—“
“I know what Sherlock is, Lemon, Kabletown bought out the BBC several years ago when the Queen was hard up for cash.”
“The monarchy isn’t connected to the English government, anymore,” Liz said.
“That’s what they want you to think,” Jack said. “Anyway, what is that?”
“Oh,” Liz said, and he swore a little blush came up on her cheeks. “That’s what they call a photo manip – er, manipulation. See, watsonlover069 –“ She started to blush again, “—that’s the person’s nickname, you know – um, anyway, they just photoshopped it to make it look like they’re making out. You know, because everyone thinks that they should get together, because their chemistry is so obvious, but for some reason they just don’t, and it drives the fans nuts.”
“Huh,” Jack said. “So people actually use this site as a way to promote the shows that they like to watch?”
Liz shrugged. “Basically.”
“That’s genius, Lemon. It’s like free viral advertising! Have you considered setting up, an, erm – blog for TGS?”
“Yeah, about that,” Liz said. “There’s already a pretty huge TGS-hate community online, mostly focusing the on misogyny and low humor level of the sketches. We’re getting more hate graphics than Whitney.”
“Wow. That is bad. Well, maybe we can make it work for some of our better NBC shows.”
“Already there, Jack – I help moderate this awesome Parks and Recreation gif community – we have almost 10,000 followers.”
“Impressive – but what’s a gif?”
“It is amazing that a person that is second-in-command of a multi-billion dollar corporation has no idea what a gif is,” Liz scoffed.
“Careful, Lemon. Your nerd is showing.”
She pulled up another page, featuring a number of animated picture sets, each different scenes from the latest episode. Some were subtitled, some had 3rd grade level commentary underneath them, but honestly, he had to admit, it was brilliant. It had been happening right under his nose, and he had no idea. He wondered if he was becoming out of touch. After all, Liddy already could type faster on her iPad than he could.
“I need to go tell Hank about this,” Jack said, and ran out of her office.
===
“Are you kiddin’ me, Jack?” Hank Hooper, president of Kabletown, chuckled from the other end of the phone. “I’ve known about Tumblr for years! I co-manage a Parks and Recreation blog with some weird girl who calls herself Sandwich Queen.”
Jack smirked, finishing off the rest of the scotch in his glass. “Yeah, the internet’s full of weirdos,” he said.