Developer Slack sketch asks the eternal question: “when new meme?”

Level 1: Are We There Yet?

A scribbly, goofy face — drawn the way you'd doodle on a napkin — opens its big mouth and asks, "when new meme?" It's the internet version of a kid in the back seat asking "are we there yet?" every five minutes. The kid isn't driving, isn't reading the map, and isn't paying for gas — but they're absolutely sure the trip should be going faster. The joke is that whoever made this picture is the driver, lovingly mocking the back seat: instead of making a new funny picture, they made a picture of you asking for one. And somehow, that became the funny picture.

Level 2: When Update? — A Field Guide

A few terms that make this funnier with context:

• Rage comics were an early meme format (roughly 2008–2013): crude black-and-white faces drawn in MS Paint, each expressing one exaggerated emotion, assembled into comics. This face is drawn in that lineage — badly on purpose, because polish was never the point.
• Meta-meme: a meme about memes themselves, the way a movie about making movies works. The humor needs you to recognize the culture being referenced.
• "When update?" culture: in any community built around ongoing content — software releases, game patches, comics, meme channels — a chunk of the audience interacts only by demanding the next installment. In developer spaces you'll meet it as:

Issue #4172: when will this be fixed?
  └─ comment (2 days later): any update?
  └─ comment (4 days later): bump
  └─ comment (1 week later): is this project dead?

If you ever run anything — a side project with three GitHub stars counts — you'll experience the strange whiplash of this: people care enough to demand, but not enough to help. The standard survival advice is the maintainer's mantra: the entitled comment is a sign people want your thing, and also a sign you're allowed to ignore them and ship when ready.

Level 3: The Issue Tracker of Meme Consumption

A wobbly, deliberately hideous rage-comic face — lopsided eyes, sketchy nose, an oversized mouth mid-demand — paired with three cursive words:

when new meme?

That's the whole image, and the minimalism is the message. This is a meta-meme: a meme whose subject is the production of memes, and specifically the audience's relationship to it. Anyone who has ever maintained anything with followers — a Telegram channel, an open-source repo, a blog, a mod, a webcomic — recognizes the species instantly. It's the same organism that files any update on this? as a GitHub issue comment, three days after the last one, contributing nothing but expectation. The crypto dialect is "wen lambo?"; the gaming dialect is "when DLC?"; the open-source dialect is an issue titled "ETA?" with zero reproduction steps and zero pull requests attached.

The economics being satirized are real and asymmetric. Content droughts happen because creation costs are invisible to consumers: curating or making one good meme takes effort, taste, and time; consuming it takes four seconds, after which the consumer's appetite resets to zero and the demand resumes. Open-source maintainers know this curve intimately — the project's most engaged "community members" are often pure downstream consumers whose entire engagement model is impatience. The maintainer burnout literature basically starts here: entitlement scales with audience size while contribution doesn't.

The drawing style is doing deliberate work too. The crude MS-Paint linework is an artifact of late-2000s rage comic culture, the era when memes were hand-scrawled in five minutes and nobody pretended otherwise. Using that aesthetic to ask for new memes is a tidy little ouroboros: the demand for fresh content is itself delivered via the oldest, laziest format available — the meme equivalent of filing a feature request written in crayon. And of course there's the recursive punchline a channel admin gets for free: posting "when new meme?" is the new meme. Demand satisfied, supply chain closed, zero inventory carried.