“Brace yourselves.” The memes are coming. If you’re an avid Facebook user, you probably noticed a few things showing up in your feed over the past week that weren’t there before. Pictures of Willy Wonka, some kid doing a fist pump, random “Lord of the Rings” images, that kid with the UNH sweatshirt wearing headphones, a scumbag named Steve, a good guy named Greg and so many more. The college memes are here and they’ve taken over Facebook.

For those of you who don’t know what Internet memes are — for one, they are pronounced like the word “theme,” but with an M on the front — they are an image, GIF or video that is spread via the Internet. They typically contain some form of humor or inside joke and are typically altered over time by users providing their own commentary and parodies.

Now, of course, once anything cool or funny gets into the hands of the mainstream, there’s always the naysayers and “hipsters” who become irate at its mainstream popularity. And there’s the mainstream themselves who recently discovered memes but can’t pronounce “meme,” let alone create a clever one, but that’s the beyond the point. The point of this article is that we can learn a thing or two from the memes themselves.

For one, they show the level of community and the common problems that many ISU students face on a day-to-day basis. An ongoing joke is that memes and other Internet culture seem to only address “first-world problems,” but I feel that many of them are of valid concern.

For starters, one of memes was a picture of one of the smaller CyRide buses, with the caption “Do I … get on?” A valid concern, especially if you don’t know what that bus is for. Those short buses are used by CyRide to help out the other buses on their routes for when those buses get full, and yes, you can get on them if they’re running the route you’re after.

Another meme, “One does not simply walk across the zodiac,” pulling from a “Lord of the Rings” screen capture but also raising the larger point: Freshmen, don’t walk across the zodiac. Just don’t do it. And if you’re not a freshman and you walk across it anyway, shame on you.

Another meme showed Patrick Star from “SpongeBob SquarePants” saying, “Let’s use the money we get from the parking tickets … and use it to build more parking lots!” Obviously posted by a irate parking ticket victim, but a valid concern none the less.

“Bird shit, Bird shit everywhere,” with Buzz from “Toy Story” describing the birds, the crows and their droppings to his pal Woody. I don’t have much to say on this one, but it’s really getting kind of ridiculous.

But those issues are minuscule compared to what other people have posted. “People wearing Iowa stuff on the ISU campus, Y you no leave!?!” And that’s exactly right, pick any team you’d like to cheer for. As long as it’s not Nebraska (aren’t you glad we don’t have to see them anymore?) or Iowa. Especially Iowa. So why don’t you leave?

The best yet was a picture of Willy Wonka with a look of wonder and fascination on his face “Oh, you’re an engineer? Please continue to tell me how my major is pointless,” which received close to 500 likes. And it points to the larger problem of majorism that seems to has spread across campuses nationwide. A problem that I fear has no immediate solution in sight.

These problems can be addressed in their various ways, but the point of this is that even though these are jokes, in many ways they are serious issues that plague our student body. Just remember that we’re all in this extremely cold college together, and a little camaraderie never hurt anyone, even if it does flood your Facebook feed. And with that, I’ll end on a meme we can all agree with: a picture of Sir Lancelot and Elaine with the caption, “Still a better love story than ‘Twilight.'” Real talk.