Tumblr- A vast, uncharted area of the Internet home to countless different species of blogger. From hipsters, to fandoms, and even artists, Tumblr is a haven where no matter who you are or what you’re saying, your voice will be heard. But sometimes, such an advantage can become a liability, a perfect storm of insanity. One such storm occurred on April 1st, 2013, when the face of one man was plastered quite literally everywhere on Tumblr.

It all started on March 4th, 2013, with a humble Tumblr post. It was a simple message; a proposal for an April Fools Day prank; a call to change all the icons to a picture of Misha Collins’s stoic expression during a Comic-Con panel. Over the course of that month, the post drew more attention than was expected; even random users were willing to participate. Come April 1st, nearly every Tumblr user changed their icons to the prescribed picture of Misha Collins. But the joke didn’t stop there.

What was supposed to be a simple, flash-mob-like assault on everyone’s dashboards suddenly became an internet-wide sensation. From Tumblr, it spread to Twitter, and then to Facebook, and so on. People who were more skilled in the use of editing programs, like Adobe Photoshop, even started to edit Misha Collins’s face onto photos of movie posters, celebrities, inanimate objects, and even memes. Some famous examples include the Misha Lisa (the Mona Lisa with Misha Collins’s face), Nyan-Misha (Nyan-Cat with Misha Collins’s face), the Misha System (a photo of a solar system diagram where Misha Collins’s face stands in for all of the planets and the Sun), the Misha Supper (Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” with Misha Collins’s face photoshopped onto every person in the painting), etc.

But, the Mishapocalypse did not end there. Eventually, .gif files were modified and edited to contain Misha Collins’s face, and were then posted throughout the entirety of the interwebs. One was either a part of the Misharmy, or they couldn’t escape from the Misha-invasion. On that day, hundreds of thousands of Tumblr users sat at their computers either laughing maniacally or cringing in horror of what had become of their precious Tumblr and the rest of the Internet.

And then, as quickly as it had come, the Mishapocalypse vanished. Overnight, all activity concerning the Mishapocalypse ceased, and the usual uploads returned to people’s dashboards. The Mishapocalypse was a beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a unity unlike any other between a group of individuals who were otherwise total strangers. Unfortunately, any effort to start another Mishapocalypse has been met with criticism and hate.