So I am back from Christmas vacation and catching up on my Steem-related reading. I have not even come close to reading all my DMs on steemit.chat and have not even opened up Discord. I have not checked the various clue posts I scattered around on various accounts related to a secret contest that I am not running. I have only responded to a few of the backlogged submissions to the @humanbot Curator Incubator. I am mid-process of catching up.

I did however just read the @curie "Expanded Guidelines (Early 2018)" published yesterday and something I read there made me stop what I was doing and write this post. I turn your attention to this section of the linked @curie guidelines:

Pass on the long self-indulgent posts as they likely won’t have any audience. Judge the post not by the effort that was put in, but by the quality and engagement it creates. For example, an exceptional single-picture meme which may go viral is more valuable than a thousand word rant no one cares about.

Okay so here is the deal. This idea of a meme getting a @curie upvote has fascinated me since I first became a @curie curator. I asked about it in the #curie channel and @liberosist told me he was fairly certain at least one meme had, in fact, received a @curie upvote in the past. I have joked around with my fellow @curie curators about hoping to someday have the guts to actually submit a meme for review. I have yet to do so.

And then I read the above. In the official guidelines from @curie, mocking me to my face, holding up my cowardice and I have nowhere to hide. I am on a mission now. A mission to find the perfect original meme to submit to @curie for review and possible upvote.

Now you see there is a reason why I have not submitted a meme so far. The cost/benefit ratio is terrible as far as efficient ways to spend your time curating. A meme would still have to be the original work of the poster and original to Steem for it to be a worthy @curie submission; this eliminates a huge chunk of the meme posts. There is no effective way to filter out non-original meme posts using SQL query as I do with my curation on other subjects.

Hoping against hope, tonight I checked out the #originalmeme tag. I use the #originalart and #originalmusic tags all the time and was hoping that some awesome original meme-rs were doing a similar thing with memes. No such luck.

#originalmeme challenge

My challenge is simple. Make awesome original memes. Post them here on Steem and do not post them anywhere else. Use the #originalmeme tag as one of your five tags. I pledge that I am going to be curating the #originalmeme tag and I sure hope you can create that perfect meme that I can take to the

@curie reviewers on a silver platter and serve on a bed of eloquent arguments carefully crafted to augment the natural smokey flavor of the meme. I hope to all that is holy that you can create such a succulent piece of meme-craft, such a juicy morsel that tears of joy will stream from the eyes of the lucky reviewer. Please note that I cannot promise to submit any of the memes that may be posted under #originalmeme to

@curie for review. But I swear to you that I want to do this, and I will if you make a truly exceptional meme. Feel free to link to your amazing original memes in the comments of this post as well :)