i accidentally became a meme and this is
that story
my name is ted dorfay but you may know
me as disappointed black guy
this was a really crazy experience that
definitely showed me a darker side of
the internet
so this all started in the year 2011.
growing up my main interests were video
games my dad had a ps1 that he got for
himself basically to play madden and
eventually i talked him into letting me
play on a system sometimes when he's not
playing video games
final fantasy is a series of
role-playing games from japan there are
a lot of them final fantasy like 1-13
each of them has a different protagonist
in final fantasy
these heroes and villains from all these
final fantasy universes face off for the
fate of everything so me and my friend
jonah were playing i don't want to say
competitively because we were like
sophomores in high school but we were
getting pretty serious and he would beat
me
almost consistently at one point with
this one character i didn't like her
name was preesh i thought she was broken
she was unfun to play against i had an
internet blog at the time and i felt
like writing a tier list of all the
characters based off of how fun these
characters were to play against no
surprise my friend's favorite character
was at the top and i kind of just made
this post and this post didn't get any
interactions at all but i think the day
after i got an anonymous message from
someone initially i was excited because
i wasn't really popular on the internet
so a few times i would get a message i
would be excited but then i was like
surprised by the actual content
why are you talking about this game you
don't know anything about these
characters you're not playing it right
what would a stupid
know about doing these combos and stuff
and i was like why is this dude so mad
about
my tearless on a handheld fighting game
so i thought it would be funny to play
off my emotional roller coaster of me
getting this message and then being
upset about it
it was a big day because i think i got
like maybe like 12 interactions by the
end of the day i got big on twitter and
facebook and then
thousands and then like hundreds of
thousands
within like a week or two i think the
first few weeks going viral was kind of
exciting but then after like a month i
was like you know what is internet pain
i think the internet is like fake it's
not not even a real place everyone at my
high school knows me but they don't know
me for like any good reasons like my
character or like my abilities
once high school was over and i started
going to college i was distanced enough
from the meme people would like ask if
the meme was me and i would say no
obviously not and it would work i'd get
away with it a lot of the time but some
sometime down the line um i realized
that pretending like this person's not
me was affecting other people negatively
there was this brazilian actor that
would get mistaken for me all the time
he would have to explain every year how
this person in the meme is not him he
inspired me to own up to it because
there were lots of videos of him like
having to reject it and i think after a
certain point i was like you know it
would make more sense to just say it's
me because if i truly don't care about
it i have to also not care that it's me
i think the only reason i made
the meme in the first place was because
of internet racism that was pointed at
me
and then i think even like the meme name
itself disappointed black guy
is like another
factor in it because there's like
there's no disappointed like white guy
there's no disappointed guy there's only
the one disappointed guy and
i happened to be black and it kind of
changed how i approached the internet
like from then on on some levels i do
regret becoming a meme because a lot of
unwanted attention and stuff happened in
my life but i did make a lot of friends
along the way that i
don't regret getting i do have this core
of friends that i met on the internet
because of the meme that i never met in
real life that i wouldn't have without
it
so if i had to do it all over again i
guess
i would because
i think
more good stuff came out of it than bad
stuff
[Music]
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