In 2016 I was watching an episode of the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. One of the guests on the show was Samuel L. Jackson, and as he made his entrance he struck a pose where he made a letter “L” with one of his hands before bringing it up to his chin.

I thought “Well I guess his enantiomer would have to make a “D” with his hands.”.

I immediately went to my computer, found an image of SLJ, took a screen shot and 10 mins later I posted this on Twitter and Facebook, which were the only two platforms I used at the time (see below). I was still trying to find my way in Twitter and had a limited following, so ~230 likes and 168 shares was really good for me. On Facebook things went crazy – 3.7k shares for the meme and 2.4 k likes – the most engagement I ever had.

Facebook Fiasco

The next day on Facebook I had 500+ friend requests, many of which were from Europe and South America. I started to accept all the requests and accepted hundreds before taking a break. In those days I ran ChemScrapes as a personal account because I wasn’t aware of the page function. What I didn’t realise at the time was that when I accepted requests on this account, I also followed back the person automatically. My timeline filled up with Spanish, Portuguese, German and French posts which had nothing to do with chemistry. My own stuff was barely visible. So, I started unfriending everyone – one at a time. Next thing I know my account gets locked because it has received a report I am running a “Page” as a personal account. The instruction was that I had to run this account under my real name and not as ChemScrapes.

This took three days to resolve and involved ID verification steps, and a deal of waiting due to time zone differences. Once my account was re-instated under my real name I started to invite all the people who had like the post, making sure I unselected “follow”. I got locked out again due to spam like behaviour. So I had to write to Facebook to unlock my account, which took another couple of days.

My account was locked down a third time as I started experimenting with new ways of sharing from my website. I gave up trying to run ChemScrapes from my personal page, and started the current ChemScrapes Facebook Page.

Meanwhile, on Twitter…..

Within a day of posting the meme, I found a couple of posts by people in the community posting the meme without any attribution. One had added the words “I hope this goes chiral” to the top of the image (I wish I had thought of that). Some of these tweets had over 10k likes.

The ChemTwitter community jumped in and “atted” me wherever they saw someone sharing without an attribution. Some also alerted in private, and for the first day or two I contacted and asked people to make sure the image was properly credited. In the end, I gave up trying to track the meme and just let it go.

Out of this situation came the suggestion that I should “stamp” a logo on my material, and not just sign the work. So I took this advice, and it was at that time @ChemScrapes (with a red S) started appearing on all my material. It was a harsh lesson in branding for me.

Mind you, even though I signed this meme (on Samuel D. Jackson), it hasn’t stopped people removing it, either by touching the image up, or more annoyingly, sticking their own logo on top of it. This is content theft, pure and simple. I did receive feedback when I complained about this that I had basically stolen the images of Samuel L. Jackson, so people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I didn’t try to explain that appropriation is a valid form of art – I was not claiming I took the pic of Samuel L. Jackson and I modified it to create a new piece of original work.

In 2016, the tweet for the Samuel L. Jackson was voted one of the Twitter moments of the year by Chemical and Engineering News, so I was pretty chuffed with that. This meme pops up every now and again, and it’s quite cool to see it out and about living its best life.

All in all I am very proud of this meme. Best 30 seconds of Jimmy Fallon I ever watched!