What is Desert Dilemma?

Desert Dilemma is an exploitable image macro of a thirsty cartoon man crawling through a desert who reaches two signs at a fork and picks the one 21 miles away instead of the water a quarter mile away.

Where did Desert Dilemma come from?

The cartoon has no known artist and first surfaced online in 2006, but the exploitable phase started with an NSFW recaption posted on the JustUsBoys.com forum on December 15th, 2015.

What does Desert Dilemma mean?

The format is used to depict someone making an obviously bad decision, with the joke being that the character picks a long, stupid walk over immediate salvation, as shown in the 'Thots' Tumblr edit that helped popularize it.

How do you use Desert Dilemma?

Rewrite the two signs so the closer one is the sensible option and the farther '21 miles' sign is what the character irrationally wants more, following the template pattern set by posts like dooptown's 2017 Tumblr edit.

Is Desert Dilemma still popular?

Desert Dilemma had its viral run on Tumblr through late 2016 and early 2017, with the fartgallery Urinal Etiquette mashup pulling around 20,000 notes over five years, and it's now treated as a classic exploitable rather than a currently trending format.

Desert Dilemma

2006image macroclassic

Published August 14, 2026

Desert Dilemma is an exploitable image macro of a thirsty cartoon man crawling toward two desert signs and gleefully picking the one 21 miles away over water a quarter mile away. The comic surfaced online in 2006 and the recaption format took off on Tumblr in late 2016.

exploitable templates choice dilemma memes webcomic memes tumblr memes delayed virality memes

Overview

Desert Dilemma is an image macro built from a cartoon of a blond man on all fours in a desert, reaching a fork with two signs pointing opposite ways. One sign offers fresh water a quarter mile away, and the other points to something the man wants much more, usually 21 miles in the wrong direction5. He picks the long walk and looks gleeful about it, and that gap between obvious survival and clearly bad judgment is the whole joke.

Desert Dilemma edits swap the text on either sign to script whatever stupid decision the creator wants to mock. Later versions sometimes replace the man or the background, but the two signs and the crawling pose are the fixed parts of the format.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Blogspot / Tumblr (viral spread)

Date

2006

The cartoon's original artist is unknown, and a watermark in the corner of early copies pointed to pakwatan.com as the likely host site5. The earliest surviving repost is a Blogspot post from September 20th, 2006, which also carried a second version of the comic with a female character choosing a '1/2 Price Sale' sign over water. That female-character version was credited to a now-defunct site called funnyinside.com.

How It Spread

Desert Dilemma stayed niche through the 2000s and early 2010s. A cropped square version turned up in February 2008 with the left sign rewritten as 'Chicks With Great Big Breasts,' and it circulated on Photobucket for years5. Many reposts going into the 2010s carried Photobucket watermarks and drifted through niche forums, but the format stayed obscure.

The exploitable phase kicked off on December 15th, 2015, when a user on the JustUsBoys.com forum posted an NSFW recaption of the image1. A year later, on December 20th, 2016, a Tumblr blog called majikuru posted a version with the left sign reading 'Thots,' and the recaption format broke onto English-speaking Tumblr in earnest2. On December 23rd, 2016, Tumblr blog fartgallery posted a mashup with the Urinal Etiquette template that pulled roughly 20,000 notes over the following five years3. By January 2017, Desert Dilemma edits were regular content on Tumblr, including a January 7th post from user dooptown that picked up more than 320 notes4.

How to Use This Meme

Making a Desert Dilemma edit typically means keeping the crawling man and both signs, then rewriting each one so the closer sign is the sensible choice and the farther sign is what the character clearly wants more, as with the 'Thots' recaption from Tumblr2. Common convention keeps the original '1/4 mile' and '21 miles' distances so the punchline reads at a glance.