As you all know, I have used the classic Dawson crying meme in my content—a longtime callback to the actor James Van Der Beek (March 8, 1977 – February 11, 2026).
As a teenager, I watched Dawson’s Creek and felt an instant kinship with the frustrated young man Van Der Beek portrayed in that show. I also admired his work with author Bret Easton Ellis—his role in the film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction, and his voice work as narrator of the audiobook for Ellis’s Lunar Park.
I know, it might seem like keeping the meme in play would be a better tribute, but I disagree. Van Der Beek spoke publicly about having ambivalent feelings about being known primarily as a meme, and to honor his memory, I am officially no longer using it.
My content often calls for exactly this kind of anguished reaction, so I needed a worthy replacement, and here it is.
I have decided to switch to the Tobey Maguire Peter Parker crying meme for the following scenarios:
- The difficulties of integrating open source tools
- When tools don’t work out the way you hoped they would
- When editing dotfiles becomes obsessive and distracts from real work
- When real work is not satisfying
- When your favorite open source tool is no longer supported
- When a fork or org change causes doubt, consternation, or frustration
And similar moments of tech-flavored despair. It feels like the right way to keep the spirit of the meme alive while respecting the man behind the original one.
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