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Thanks, Denny's, for one of the best tweets of the week

Well played, pancake purveyors. The restaurant chain takes the zoom-in social media meme and makes it butter. Er, better.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
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Gael Cooper
2 min read

Various Twitter accounts have been playing with the zoom-in concept lately, sharing a photo with a hidden message you have to zoom in to see, like this cute dog nose that knows a secret.

Get a corporation involved, though, and you usually end up with the kind of trying-too-hard failures that populate the subreddit "How do you do, fellow kids?" Which is to say, corny and dad-jokey.

Kudos, then, to an unexpected contender -- US-based restaurant chain Denny's. The tweet sent from its Denny's Diner account on Wednesday took the zoom-in concept and turned it on its syrupy ear. Check it out here, and if you're too impatient, we'll spoil it below the embed.

OK, ready for spoilers? The instructions embedded in the pancakes send you from corner to corner, finally landing you smack in the pat of whipped butter, with this message: "has this distracted you from overwhelming existential dread lol."

A Denny's spokesperson confirmed to Adweek that the tweet, just a day old, is already the company's most liked and most shared ever. Thursday morning, the pile o' pancakes had 116,000 likes and 85,000 retweets.

It's no Nihilist Arby's, but let's just say it's much better than I expected from the restaurant chain famed for such groan-inducing pun menu items as "Moons Over My Hammy." (No one under 40 gets that reference any more, do they? Play us out, Bing.)

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