You don’t need to be tripping on Sherwin-Williams samples to agree: the techno-optimism of Y2K style (see Gen Z’s recent fascination with flip phones) is tired. “Orbpilled wizardcore is on the come-up- possibly displacing Y2Kesque reduxwave as the aesthetic du jour of the hyperpop aficionado,” another popular recent tweet reads. A subreddit for orb-pondering launched mid-November. “I made this orb,” tweeted actor Seth Rogen on Tuesday above a handmade sculpture which, while not perfectly spherical, matched the spirit of the shape. Mysterious spheres hovered over alien cities a watery orb dangled above a desert in an illustration from Dune, the sci-fi epic that recently became a nostalgia-powered Hollywood blockbuster. “Eventually people were like ‘You have to stop projecting photos of glowing Donald Trump at your party, it is very bad vibes’.”ħ0s Sci-Fi Art, a large Twitter account that shares illustrations from the halcyon days of pulp paperbacks, made a now-viral thread of notable orbs in science fiction. The unhappy man is labeled with a caption of something unenjoyable (“being a Jets fan”) while the happy man represents something pleasant (“not being a Jets fan”). As evidence, the Twitter user cited one of the moment’s insurgent memes: a cartoon of a happy man and an unhappy man on a bus. We are, a mega-viral tweet theorized last week, stuck in a “meme recession,” filled with phoned-in jokes and recycled concepts. As an extremely online year draws to a close and the season’s memes limp through our timelines, web-weary internet users are flocking to the warm, offline nostalgia of basic shapes. This is no coincidence: orbs are the internet’s hot new three-dimensional shape, supplanting the cube, which saw a surge in popularity among cryptocurrency aficionados last month. Maybe you’ve observed an influx in spherical content on social media, or a conspicuous increase in images of wizards contemplating crystal balls.

How about a nice orb in these trying times?

I am da one da one rap meme