How+to+Suceed+at+Failure

media type="youtube" key="KT--CsBh5TM?fs=1" height="385" width="640"
 * Know Your Meme: The Rickroll**

//Segment by Michael Graham//
The Rickroll was an immensely popular meme that circulated primarily on YouTube and other video sharing sites around 2007-2008. This meme was basically the act of putting up a video of a topic, usually a topic that would attract a lot of attention, and having the video display an interesting or relevant thumbnail pertaining to the fake subject. Once the user clicked on the video, however, the video that would appear would be Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." The process of a user falling for this switch was known as being "Rickrolled". We can identify that this switch technique has a huge potential for becoming viral, and during a time when it was, pretty much every video titled or concerning "new, never before seen footage of..." was inevitably a link to "Never Gonna Give You Up."

The official channel of Rick Astley marks the song as having an astounding 27, 139, 006 views, but its perpetual use during the era of the Rickroll undoubtedly ranks it much higher than that. The effectiveness of this meme was evident in its widespread appearances across YouTube and other video sites as well as even real-life appearances (including an entire float dedicated to the song in a Macy's Day parade, lip-synched by Rick Astley himself). The Rickroll phenomenon also earned Mr. Astley an award by MTV Europe for his song as a result of its rekindled popularity online, as well as being featured on one of YouTube's April Fools pages. Additionally, the meme itself has been included in other works and remixed extensively by other artists, as exemplified on [|this] page.

How to Succeed at Failure

The idea is to create a picture-comic or flowchart depicting a series of steps, driven by yes or no answer prompts, regarding ways in which a person could make the act of failing a task or missing an achievement or goal less painful, though in the end the result is still a failure, no matter how diligently the user follows the steps. Several of these step-based models have been used in memes before, such as a currently popular meme introducing 4 steps as to how a person can acquire "PROFIT" following an activity marked "???". The idea of How to Succeed at Failure is similar to this kind of meme, in which a series of steps are taken to produce a humourous or interesting result. The potential for this kind of memes and memes similar to it are that they can be applied to already existing failure-related content quite easily.