#FML

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About

FML is an online acronym for "fuck my life" which stems from the name of a single topic blog dedicated to the daily misfortunes of everyday people. A typical post on the site begins with "Today I…" and end with "FML," to which other users can then rate "I agree, your life sucks" or "you totally deserved it."

Today, I saw an elderly man fall in a crosswalk, so I jumped off my bike to help. As I helped him across, the light turned green. I then watched across a 6 lane street as someone stole my bike. FML.^[2]

Origin

The earliest known definition of "FML" was submitted onto Urban Dictionary on May 13th, 2005, which was later featured as the Urban Word of the Day of March 1st, 2008:

short for: Fuck My Life
I just totally dropped that pass. FML guys.

The single topic blog FMyLife^[1] was launched on January 13th, 2009 by Maxime Valette, Guillaume Passaglia and Didier Guedj, who founded the French website Vie de merde^[3], which means "life of shit," a year earlier on January 12th, 2008. VDM became an internet phenomenon in its own right, becoming the ninth-most-searched-for service on Google's French search engine, according to Wall Street Journal.^[4] The Tumblr counterpart for "FMyLife" was launched on February 11th, 2011.

Spread

The website experienced a rapid increase in traffic in February 2009, according to a breakdown of web traffic by Alexa Internet. In March 2009, FMyLife announced that they had secured a book deal, which was released in early June 2009. FML became extremely popular throughout 2009, leading to several spin-offs and further spreading the initialism "FML" and catchphrase "fuck my life" to express frustration towards a variety of situations.

FML quickly grew into a popular discussion thread on forums and imageboards like 4chan^[3], Game Trailers forum^[5] and Crackberry forum^[4] among others. The popularity of the site has inspired the launch of many anonymous, everyday anecdotal blogs centered around various expressions, from "My Life is X" spinoffs to other text-based story sharing platforms.