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Out of context Loss is actually pretty good, frankly. The thing is the context it was found in doesn't deserve it. It came from a sub-boner humor gamer comic that suddenly got really dramatic. The tone whiplash just struck a nerve at the time, which is why the comic came to wide attention.

Then there's the "is this Loss" meme, which is kind of a prank game where you encode the layout of Loss as abstractly as possible, often with one line, to represent the character walking through the door alone, two lines, one tall and one short to represent him standing and the sitting nurse, two tall lines for him and the doctor standing, and then one vertical and one horizontal line to represent him standing and her lying down. The joke here lies in reminding people of this stupid thing in as abstract and distant a way as possible.

Do you "get" rickrolling? It's the same thing

I'd agree.

But saying "a part of younger millenials" just wouldn't have the same impact as a joke

Nothing ever happens.

The earliest recollection I have about The Game is a friend texting me a chicken with a sign that spelled The Game. I had absolutely no idea what that was supposed to mean so I very eloquently asked him "wtf". "You lost the game", he replied. "What game? Dude, what are you talking about?".

He then explained what the game was and how I had lost it by reading the sign on the chicken, something that I thought, and made sure to tell him, was one of the stupidest things to have come out of the Internet. About an hour later he sent me a screenshot from an old conversation where I originally told him about The Game. I somehow had completely erased it from my memory. I won The Game.

Fuck you lmao

Fuck you.

I lost.

How long before this is an emoji or otherwise included in Unicode?

You have to be over 30 now

Rick roll refers to tricking someone into opening the YouTube video for Rick Ashley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. Knives are used to cut things, and in this case the father was arranging them to look like the loss comic. Without the context, the layout of the knives appears to just be a hieroglyph, which is a symbol used to convey information.

When you bring this all together, you get a dad having fun with his kids by ironically referencing memes he doesn’t understand. Kind of like how grandma used to call every video game console a Nintendo or every Pokémon a pikachu.

In case, you're not familiar with the Loss comic, it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_(Ctrl%2BAlt%2BDel)

TL;DR: It's an unexpectedly dark comic (hence the psychic damage), and it turned into somewhat of a meme to try to remind people of it, by producing ever more abstract representations of it.
For example, you can post ~~:.|:;~~ here on Lemmy and someone will probably recognize it.

The dad is creating such an abstract representation by arranging knives.

The father used knives to create the Loss shorthand on the countertop. He called it "Rick-rolling" because he knows that word is associated with online trolling. He's never seen the original Loss comic, so the arrangement of knives on the counter is more akin to hieroglyphics than anything; an arrangement of symbols to convey an idea.