If You Wait Just One More Day, ○○ Will Come Out

Origin

The template comes from a post made in January 2024 on the FromSoftware minor gallery of the Korean forum DCInside, where users were waiting for news of the major Elden Ring DLC. The title reads like a cheerful announcement — “Just wait one more day and ○○ will be out!” — but the body says the opposite. The writer declares that every day until the release he will hit himself in the head to erase the memory and start waiting for “one more day” all over again. The joke is not the thrill of anticipation but the mental state that waiting has reduced him to.

Waiting also drove its spread. At first it was a way to kill time before a video scheduled for a specific hour; when the hour passed with nothing posted, users poured out variations. One of them turned the format into an emoticon, which made it usable outside the board and sharply widened its range.

What the pottery image actually is

The image attached to the post is usually described as a face clutching its head in despair, but the object itself is nothing of the sort. Following the source cited in the original post leads to a sixth-century BCE Greek vessel from Boeotia held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, catalogued as a caricature of a man standing and clasping a kantharos — a two-handled wine cup — to his chest. It is not a grieving woman but a man hugging a drinking cup, and it was drawn as a comic exaggeration in antiquity to begin with. The record notes it was bought in Athens by E. P. Warren and acquired by the museum by 1901.

Part of the meme’s incidental charm is that a caricature from 2,600 years ago now reads as the face of someone whose mind has snapped. That it was already meant to be funny is generally not known to the people using it.

How it is used

It fits the moment when a release or announcement is nearly here and the wait has become unbearable. There need not literally be one day left; whatever is being awaited goes in the “○○” slot.