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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

UC Davis first-year student’s viral Twitter account lets followers know it’s finally the weekend

@CraigWeekend account owner Miles Riehle’s followers look forward to the same post every Friday

Miles Riehle, a first-year student majoring in environmental policy analysis and planning, runs a Twitter account (@CraigWeekend) with nearly 500k followers, where he posts the same four-second video clip every Friday. As Twitter users scroll down the feed of @CraigWeekend, all that can be seen is an out-of-context clip of Daniel Craig introducing Canadian singer The Weeknd, while hosting Saturday Night Live (SNL). The same exact clip is posted on every Friday — the only factors that change are the time of day Riehle posts it and the captions accompanying it. 

Before Riehle started his account, he had admired other accounts on social media that offered followers the same picture or clip on a reliable calendar basis. However, Riehle said, he wasn’t sure right away which piece of media to choose that would be worthy of his own audience. 

One afternoon, as he was watching SNL, Riehle said he saw potential in a particular moment of the show: 007 star Daniel Craig looks to the camera, and with a slight shrug of his shoulders, makes his now-famous announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, The Weeknd.”

Riehle said that this clip opened his eyes to the possibility of giving Twitter users a light-hearted reminder that it’s the end of the workweek every Friday. 

“It’s kind of a double-entendre,” Riehle said, “He’s welcoming The Weeknd, and it’s even funnier if people don’t know who The Weeknd is, because it just sounds like he’s welcoming in the weekend.”

Some of the account’s followers have mentioned in the comments that there’s a specific manner to Craig’s movements and the tone in his voice that make the clip especially funny and keep them coming back to the account every Friday. Others follow the account purely for the ‘vibes.’

“Not to get too mushy about it, but it’s kind of wholesome that people are just sharing good vibes around,” Riehle said. “I think that the community of good vibes that was created is really cool and unexpected.”

Riehle has now received numerous media requests from major publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Telegraph, and the New York Times, all seeking to cover Riehle’s famous Twitter account. A professional photographer for The New York Times was even sent out to have a shoot with Riehle at his home in Laguna Beach. 

“When I got this email from the New York Times, I was like, ‘OK, this is probably where I’m going to peak,’” Riehle said.

According to Riehle, he intends to continue posting on @CraigWeekend every Friday for as long as he can — until either his following decreases or until posting starts to affect his mental health.

“I don’t know if it will ever die out,” Riehle said. “At some point, I feel like everyone will get tired of seeing it on their timeline and be like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to stop tweeting the same video out, it’s getting old,’ but at the same time, this has been going on for almost a year at this popularity.”

As a newly-arrived freshman at UC Davis, Riehle hasn’t yet gotten the opportunity to let many other UC Davis students know about @CraigWeekend. 

 “I haven’t done any icebreakers yet where I have to share a fun fact about myself — if I ever did, I think my fun fact would be this account,” Riehle said. “But it’s not something I like to bring up when I’m just chatting with people.”

Riehle said he didn’t initially start the account to give Twitter users a wholesome environment free from the toxicity of the internet, but regardless, this is how it was received by many over time. 

“I’m more happy that it turned out that way than anything else, and I think that that sort of community of good vibes and joy is certainly rare on the internet today,” Riehle said.

Written by: Lyra Farrell — features@theaggie.org 

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