I finally bothered to check Know Your Meme to figure out what "The(y) cake is a lie" is all about. As a reminder, here's a photo from a walk down to Bundang from back in 2021. It was February—just a couple months before my stroke:
The line comes from a game called Portal. Its meaning slowly evolved over time. Originally, the cake in question represented a way to coax someone to do something, but the lie meant that the cake would never actually be rewarded. The sentence now refers to a vain, empty pursuit or the seeking of an unreachable or unattainable goal.
If you look carefully at the graffito, you see that the vandal started off writing "they," indicating that he (probably not a she) wasn't a native English-speaker. By the time we get to the third appearance of the sentence, though, we see that the "y" in "they" is being shoehorned in as an afterthought. It's almost as if the writer suddenly realized the correct way to write the sentence, then deliberately reverted to the incorrect Konglish, insisting on wrongness.
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