It seemed simple enough, at first: A fairly innocuous post from Twitter user @brainmage—a.k.a. comic and voice actor Guy Kelly—asking users to read through his social media timeline, noting the first word of every tweet. It might not have even made sense at first; it’s not like, “Hey,” “Hey,” “You,” and “You” necessarily even register as proper sentence construction. But then the horror starts to dawn (some time around “Don’t,” “like,” “girl,” or “friend,” probably), and you realize that this madman has constructed what may very well be the most elaborate Avril Lavigne joke in social media history.
Kelly’s tweets over the last month do, indeed, contain all 500-plus words from Lavigne’s 2007 hit “Girlfriend,” in order, complete with all the repetitive choruses about how it’s not a secret. This would be impressively stupid in any case, but Kelly really went the extra mile here by a) making each entry in his project an actual tweet, the better to camouflage his ultimate intent, and b), because of the way Twitter’s timeline works, doing the whole thing backwards, posting the song’s final lyric (“Hey,” natch) all the way back on March 6. All told, it’s a pretty amazing achievement in…something…although we’d be damned if we know what; in any case, here’s to him and all his new followers (even if we recommend they start running for the hills if they start seeing words like “later,” “skater,” or “boi” start popping up in his TL).