While You Were Offline: This Is What Happens When #TrumpExplainsMoviePlots

It's been a tumultuous week on the Internet, with Gawker.com announcing its imminent closure and Twitter's new "quality filter" topping off a week of... stuff. In the midst of all of this exhausting overload, you might ask yourself, has there been any entertainment or truth on offer? The answer is, thankfully, yes, although it didn't come from where you might expect. These, dear readers, are the highlights of the last week's worth of Internetting. IMBIBE THE DIGITAL JOY.

What Happened: What happens when you turn something that's already beloved on the Internet into an interactive meme? The best thing to come out of Stranger Things yet!
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media reports
What Really Happened: People sure do love that Stranger Things show, huh? If it's not the retro-1980s aesthetic or the love letter to Stephen King or the Winona Ryder obsession the show's unleashed on people, there's seemingly always something new for everyone to obsess over. Like the show's opening credits, which lead to an already iconic logo! If only there was some way people could, perhaps, use the Internet to make their own version of that logo…

Only joking! That already exists! The Stranger Things Logo Generator, which lets you make up your own logos with whatever text you want, popped up this week, much to the delight of the Internet. And, oh, what title cards have already been created using the site!

The Takeaway: There are, of course, many many more to be found across social media as a whole right now, but if you're looking for the best, this one has our vote:

What Happened: There are good ways and bad ways of trying to clarify something on live television. Donald Trump's attorney chose the bad way.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media reports
What Really Happened: Given the election to date, it'd be a stretch to point to any one moment as a sign that things are going off the rails. And yet, this week had a particularly compelling contender for "Funniest and Probably Most Concerning Interview of the Season," as CNN's Brianna Keilar found herself stymied by the Trump Organization's lawyer Michael Cohen when she tried to point out that the Trump campaign isn't doing very well in the polls:

The surreal standoff unsurprisingly made headlines as the media made fun of Cohen's obstinance in the face of facts, and then Twitter stepped in:

What is perhaps surprising is the aftereffect of this conversation: CNN took it upon itself to explain how polls work, while Fox News—yes, Fox News—reminded its audience that, as much as some people would like to think otherwise, polls are usually right when done properly.

Cohen, meanwhile, has a completely different take on what happened than the rest of the world. "I think I unraveled her," he told Yahoo! News about the interview. But then, he does have experience not understanding what everyone else alive seems to be able to grasp.
The Takeaway: Let's try and put this in a way that everyone can understand. MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin, care to take a swing?

What Happened: We might have reached peak Trump Twitter this week, thanks to a genuinely inexplicable tweet about the UK's exit from the European Union.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media reports
What Really Happened: Thursday, Donald Trump tweeted out this rather hard-to-grok message:

Sure, there's context (short version: Trump was making the argument to Fox News that, although he's down in the polls, he was really like the British EU Referendum in that no one really thought the United Kingdom would vote to leave, but then they did!), but who needs context when you can simply be confused by the whole thing? Wait? Did we say "confused"? We meant, "amused." Take it away, Twitter:

The Takeaway: The best response of the whole bunch, though, was this one:

What Happened: Remember that story about US swimmer Ryan Lochte getting mugged at the Rio Olympics? Yeah, about that…
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media reports
What Really Happened: Man, a week is a long time on the Internet. Let's try and put all of this into as clear a story as possible, shall we? On Sunday, reports started to emerge that Ryan Lochte and other members of the US Olympic swim team had been robbed at gunpoint in Rio. Lochte happily shared details from the robbery, including his understated, "I was like, 'whatever'" response. Although some were skeptical at the time, the story was generally accepted to be true, especially when humanized by such details as Lochte saying that he was afraid to tell people about it in case he got in trouble.

So, funny story. Midweek, a Brazilian judge ordered Lochte and another of the US swimmers, Jimmy Feigen, not to leave the country because their story didn't stand up to scrutiny. The problem was, Lochte had already left the country. Then two more US swimmers—Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger—were removed from their flight back to the US on order of the Brazilian authorities, while Feigen was still talking to authorities. Meanwhile, Lochte is still repeating the robbery story, but has changed some of the details.

As if things didn't look bad enough, – video of the incident showed that Lochte and teammates had fabricated the entire story, and that the gun pulled on Lochte was held not by a robber, but by a security guard at a rest stop they were visiting while drunk. At a press conference Thursday, Brazilian authorities explained what had actually happened, and called upon Lochte and his teammates to publicly apologize for lying. Lochte did so on Friday, but noticeably didn't admit to lying, only apologizing for "not being more careful and candid" in how he described what happened.

Twitter's response to the unfolding tale, of course, made everything even more gripping:

The Takeaway: Thankfully, Twitter also provided not one, but two, perfect pun summaries of the whole debacle. Are you ready?

What Happened: Wrapping up our Trump Trifecta this week, Twitter decided to imagine Donald Trump writing movie synopses. The result was magical.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter
What Really Happened: Thanks to Donald Trump's... shall we say individual way with words and outlook on the world, the Trumpian perspective has become enough of a recognizable genre that this tweet doesn't just make sense, it unleashes a comedy landslide:

To wit!

The Takeaway: OK, once this election is over, we might be in a better place as a country overall, but will the Internet be able to recover from the loss of such a productive social meme generator?