know your meme

The only thing I maybe like more than internet memes is the "scientification" of them, such that they are transformed into post-hip objects of analysis.  For example:  explain Advice Dog to your mother and you have participated in the un-cooling of an internet meme.  Fun!  Web-nerds are very possessive about their memes, so if they suspect them of being "exploited" in some fashion, they'll typically respond with hilariously absurd and inappropriate outrage.

As such, I love this site:  Know Your Meme.  If you're just not spending enough time on the internet to know about Ninjas vs. Pirates (and RealUltimatePower), then visit here and absorb the data kindly collected by the fine folks at the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies.  Or if you prefer the sublime laziness of video...



If the topic intrigues you, you might also want to check out this article from the latest Wired, on Ben Huh, the founder of LolCats, FAIL Blog, GraphJam, and more.  Perhaps more than anyone else, he has exploited internet memes for his own profit and selfishness, making "FAIL" usage so widespread that it makes you want to stab yourself with a pencil.  But, of course, I love it.  "Fashionable" memes spread until they become so popular that they're unpopular.  "Oh, you know about that too?  Well, I guess that Keyboard Cat is lame now."  How awesomely pretentious.  The internet has sparked a unique (and yet so played out) manifestation of the cool contest, perhaps best exemplified by the music nerds of yesteryear ("Oh, you know about King Missile?  Well, I guess they suck now.").  There's nothing more satisfying, perhaps, than watching the hipsters squirm as their fashion sense and musical taste, and now internet knowledge, are co-opted by the Oprah Winfreys of the world.

tv tropes

Spent a good hour or so this morning thoroughly enjoying TV Tropes. A web-wiki written in a (dare I say) refreshingly casual style, on all manner of narrative conventions that tend to define our modern age entertainment products. While at first glance, you might think that a perusal of TV Tropes will only fill you with a deeper sense of cynicism and repugnance at the industry status quo - further reading may allow you to appreciate the archetypal aspects of tropes, and how they serve as brutally efficient but necessary mirrors of our own absurd nature.

Hot Librarian is a fun place to start, and be aware that the joy is in the examples, especially esoteric ones from the late '80's that few (but you) remember. "Theora in Max Headroom." Ha! I remember.

Hot Scientist (not to be confused with Horny Scientist) is also amusing:

"Incidentally, the character that caused a few things to gel in this troper's head and inspire me to put this trope in the wiki in the first place was "Dr." Cataline Stone in the film Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, a film of such constant, royal stupidity that "the day would quake to look on."

I do not know this "Megalodon"... yet.

Just going through the list of Plot tropes may dizzy you.

• Anticlimactic Parent
• Badass in Distress
• Captured Super Entity
• Doorstop Baby
• Faustian Rebellion
• Inadequate Inheritor
• Macho Disaster Expedition

And so on. I suspect we all could place at least one TV episode/film into every one of these categories with just a little thought.

"Science is Useless" caught my eye:

"In a competition of science and technology versus simple hard work, science and technology will almost invariably lose. See, science finds an easier, faster way to achieve something and is therefore cheating and far less honorable than honest sweat and effort. Thus, no matter how much a scientist researches, experiments and innovates, he will never achieve what someone else can with good old practice and hard work.

This trope works because 1) hardly anyone in the audience knows much about science, and 2) people are always eager to believe that anything they don't understand couldn't possibly be important....

...Very much related to Dumb Is Good and Rock Beats Laser. Might somehow be related to Reed Richards Is Useless. See also the physical equivalents Technician Versus Performer (where The Gift overcomes intense training) and Good Old Fisticuffs (where simple fists beats flashy kicks).

Further, there are two different flavors of this trope. If the point is to stress the importance of hard work, then the technological/scientific opponent is presented as an intimidating Goliath that the plucky underdog must struggle to overcome... But if the point is, instead, to deride technology or science as unworthy of human effort and manly men, the opponent is presented as a total joke and the hard worker wins easily. A Straw Man propaganda story. Also, what this trope consistently forgets is that science is hard work, requiring considerable intelligence, as well as lengthy and difficult procedures to create anything useful. Yet rarely or never the hard work of the science-user is shown or screen in relation to the plain old guts."

(BTW - The Reed Richards is Useless entry is amazing.)

I also enjoy the amusing connections between tropes that the contributors have attempted to integrate whenever possible.

From Attack of the Killer Whatevers: "A caveat: if it's a killer animal, there's about a 70% chance that it'll also be giant. If it grows too large, it becomes Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever."













Worth browsing.

trippy-bizarro dancing animations

An oldie but a goodie...



Will stick in your head...

lolcat

I don't know why I find them funny but I do. Really, it's beyond whether lolcats are humorous - it's the principle. Lolcat is but one aspect of this wacky, crazy interweb I love so very much. I like pondering why certain internet memes take off, what they say about the American collective unconscious. What is it about lolcat that made it such a phenomenon? Why did this particular absurdity catch on? If you have the answers, I need to know.

In case you're clueless about such virtual nonsense (and that's perfectly reasonable, mind you), I suggest a quick glance at the Wikipedia entry for lolcat. Here's a brief excerpt with the relevant info:

"A lolcat is an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as “lolspeak,” ”kitteh,” or “kitty pidgin” and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang. The name "lolcat" is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation "LOL" and the word "cat." A synonym for "lolcat" is cat macro, since the images are a type of image macro. Lolcats are designed for photo sharing imageboards and other internet forums."

Apparently, it all started on on image-board, 4chan.org, where users started posting "cat macros" sometimes involving immoral and disturbing acts. Very nerd-core, if you will. But lolcat first hit the public eye with this G-rated guy, circa 2007:

I know. It's not funny. Maybe it's cute, if you're a cat kinda person, but it's definitely not funny.

Then there was this one, which is a bit funnier and certainly more uncomfortable:

Now note that "Ceiling cat" doesn't make use of the kitty pidgin which I love so dearly.

If you google search, you'll find 1000's, possibly millions, of these images. They used to pop up in the most annoying places, like message boards and comment lists, but nowadays seem to cluster on web-sites dedicated to the phenomenon: like the appropriately named icanhascheezburger.com and lolcats.com. However, picking through lolcats on these sites really demeans the experience - I find lolcat much more powerful and affecting when I encounter one randomly, in a place I otherwise wouldn't expect. Like when I was doing a google search the other day for "Force Field" and got this image:

I copy and collect ones I encounter that amuse me. They don't do much for anyone else, I suspect, but I'm bored today and decided it might lessen my boredom by boring whomever visits this blog.



Here's one that our friend LS found a little while ago and has been making the virtual rounds:

This is pretty brilliant. I mean, it's offensive, cute, horrific, and modern all in one. Well done.

Some are self-referential and angry, which is cool in a post-modern, cynical kind of way:


Here's one that I would call "uber-nerdy": it combines lolcat, esoteric video game knowledge, and The Settlers of Catan boardgame. Holy fuck, I'm embarrassed.


Then there's this one, which was inevitable...

And just so you get a taste of the range of possibilities, some people really break from the whole "cat" thing and have taken this meme in other directions.


Again, I don't know why but the very idea of combining lolcat with Cthulhu is just funny to me.

Finally, you should probably check out the Lolcat Bible Translation Project, where community users are attempting to translate every book, chapter and verse of the bible into lol-speak. Here's how it begins - Genesis 1:

"1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.
2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.
4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.
5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1
6 An Ceiling Cat sayed, im in ur waterz makin a ceiling. But he no yet make a ur. An he maded a hole in teh Ceiling.
7 An Ceiling Cat doed teh skiez with waterz down An waterz up. It happen.
8 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so wuz teh twoth day."

If you read further, you'll eventually encounter "Basement Cat." Yes, annoying and pointless. But also awesome. Really, if we can't celebrate this kind of human endeavor, aren't we missing out on a whole aspect of artistic creation and time-wasting that begs for analysis?

twist

It remains to be seen whether Twitter is simply another passing tech-fad, the ultimate voyeuristic experiment, or a herald of something far more disturbing to come. Clearly, it's the height of obsessive narcissism and a cry out for social comfort in the deafening loneliness of our time - oh wait, that's blogging. Regardless, I'm not one to care much about people's micro-updates ("I'm taking a crap!" "I'm eating a burrito!" "I'm having sex with your girlfriend!") on an individual level, but once you start letting me compile data from thousands of cyberhipsters (did I just coin that term?) I might start thinking Twitter is a scientific tool.

Twist (or Twitter Trends) allows you to see the % of twitters that mention particular words over the course of a week or month. So, for example, if you type in "Darwin," you'll see a peak (nearly 1% of twitters) yesterday around 10:00am. Boring.

I'm more curious about cursing frequency. So, for kicks, I put in "fuck," "shit," and "cat" (my control group). These are the data:

(click for larger image)

So there's clearly a circadian pattern in use of both fuck and shit. The vertical gray lines represent midnight, so the daily peaks for these two words occur around midnight or soon thereafter (I am assuming that these times are "local" to the person tweeting). Also, the weekly peak for "fuck" and "shit" occurs right around midnight between Sunday and Monday. Why don't I find that surprising.

Twist also lets you see some of the Tweets it's sampling. Here are some examples from my experiment for you to ponder and contemplate:

"my roommates show up with groceries and start cooking lunch as soon as i start recording. fuck the kitchen. i wish i still lived alone"

"So angry, gonna punch a cat inna mouf. Fuck yeah."
(this one contributed to 2 of my trends - amazing!)

"When one of these rap niggas finally kills another rap nigga, I'm going to be RIGHT THERE to say, 'I AINT SEE SHIT.'" (Damn!)

"When you install an Adobe product, they really put so much shit on your computer you don't want."

True that.

kingdom of loathing

Although my sabbatical is fast becoming a distant memory and the school semester has begun, I have been lucky enough to stumble upon a couple "casual gaming" gems as of late. Casual games allow you to blow off some steam after a long day without taxing your brain too much, and take a break from writing without wasting hours of your time. You should be able to get in and get out quickly and safely. Ya know?

Today I'll tell you about Kingdom of Loathing, which just might be a unique experience in the gaming world. First off, it's completely free (although the hosts do accept donations to keep the site up and running). You can visit here now and get started immediately. Ostensibly, KoL (shorthand) is a browser-based role-playing game with loads of content, pop-culture references, and absurd humor. It borrows (and mocks) heavily from classic RPG-systems, like Dungeons & Dragons, allowing for character creation, development (levelling), questing, and item collection. But trust me, you'll never take it too seriously - and if you do, it just means you're probably having one hell of a good time.

So, you're an advtenurer ("An Adventurer is You!") in the Kingdom of Loathing. You can choose one of six classes: Seal Clubber, Turtle Tamer, Pastamancer, Sauceror, Disco Bandit, or Accordion Thief. These sound meaningless, but it turns out that the first two are melee-oriented, the next two magic-oriented, and the last two, roguish. Your interface looks like this:


This is all browser-based, so you'll be playing in Firefox or Safari or whatever you use. To visit a location, or check your inventory, you simply click on the corresponding icon. Pretty intuitive. Once you start playing, you'll soon find yourself on a quest, fighting monsters, looting items. Everything in this game is tongue-in-cheek, and the humor is obscure and witty. I often find myself looking up pop-culture references that I don't recognize. For example...


Can you place the "I'm comin', Elizabeth!" reference?

You'll also note that the artwork is predominantly of the stick-figure variety, which suits the experience perfectly. Remember, this is a casual game - not a multi-million dollar effort like Fallout 3. Here's another example of a recent scenario I encountered, in a location called "South of the Border"...


So, who are the two roosters fighting in this cock-fight? And who would you bet on? I decided to opt out, walking away in disgust and this is what you get...

Great. This is what I mean by clever writing that keeps you smirking all the way through. There is so much of this, you almost can't believe it - but then you realize that the creators have been adding content to this since 2003 and the process is still going on. It's the ultimate in expandable, modifiable content.

Even the descriptions of items and your equipment are amusing:




















Warning: KoL does possess some serious "adventure-game" obscurity. If you don't know what that means, think back to Zork - or Myst - and remember some of the wacky things you needed to do to move the game forward. As in "climb the tree to find the key in the bird's nest which you then use to open the fireplace to find the zombie finger which you use to poke the dragon...etc..." KoL isn't quite that bad, but you will have to think outside-the-box on occasion and engage in some trusty trial-and-error.

But I still haven't mentioned the best part of KoL. To do anything meaningful in the game (like fight a monster, or craft an item, or make some food), you need to spend an "adventure" point. You only get 40 of these adventure points per day. And that's a real day, like our own 24 hour cycle. This puts a brilliant, creative limit on how much time you can actually waste playing KoL on a daily basis. You can usually breeze through your allotted 40 adventures in under an hour. Of course, you can drink cocktails and eat meals to gain adventures, but ultimately you'll have to put it all aside and wait until tomorrow (or the next day). I actually wish more games had some kind of built-in time limit like this. It extends the experience, and forces you to appreciate every moment the game offers you - much like slowly chewing every morsel of a delicious meal.

Overall, I give it a hearty recommendation, even if you decide to give up on it after a few sessions. And thanks to RPS and FP for pointing me in the direction of KoL.

miserable much?

AM linked me to this a while ago, but it's so astute I have to meme it for y'all. From Cracked.com:

7 Reasons the 21st Century is making you miserable

Some excerpts to whet your palate:

"Lots of us were born into towns full of people we couldn't stand. As a kid, maybe you found yourself in an elementary school classroom, packed in with two dozen kids you did not choose and who shared none of your tastes or interests. Maybe you got beat up a lot. But, you've grown up. And if you're, say, a huge DragonForce fan, you can go find their forum and meet a dozen people just like you. Or even better, start a private room with your favorite few and lock everybody else out. Say goodbye to the tedious, awkward, painful process of dealing with somebody who's truly different. That's another Old World inconvenience, like having to wash your clothes in a creek or wait for a raccoon to wander by the outhouse so you can wipe your ass with it. The problem is that peacefully dealing with incompatible people is crucial to living in a society. In fact, if you think about it, peacefully dealing with people you can't stand is society. Just people with opposite tastes and conflicting personalities sharing space and cooperating, often through gritted teeth."


I love reason #3: "Texting is a shitty way to communicate."

After reading inane flames from some internet trolls over coffee this morning, I also love the following graph, posted by the blog's author:


"In my time online I've been called 'fag' approximately 104,165 times. I keep an Excel spreadsheet. I've also been called 'asshole' and 'cockweasel' and 'fuckcamel' and 'cuntwaffle' and 'shitglutton' and 'porksword' and 'wangbasket' and 'shitwhistle' and 'thundercunt' and 'fartminge' and 'shitflannel' and 'knobgoblin' and 'boring.' And none of it mattered, because none of those people knew me well enough to really hit the target. I've been insulted lots, but I've been criticized very little. And don't ever confuse the two."


"The problem is you are hard-wired by evolution to need to do things for people. Everybody for the last five thousand years seemed to realize this and then we suddenly forgot it in the last few decades. We get suicidal teens and scramble to teach them self-esteem. Well, unfortunately, self-esteem and the ability to like yourself only come after you've done something that makes you likable. You can't bullshit yourself. If I think Todd over here is worthless for sitting in his room all day, drinking Pabst and playing video games one-handed because he's masturbating with the other one, what will I think of myself if I do the same thing?

You want to break out of that black tar pit of self-hatred? Brush the black hair out of your eyes, step away from the computer and buy a nice gift for someone you loathe. Send a card to your worst enemy. Make dinner for your mom and dad. Or just do something simple, with an tangible result. Go clean the leaves out of the gutter. Grow a damn plant."

trippin' balls

From the ever-excellent, Married to the Sea. Thanks to FP for sending me these:

perry bible fellowship

The Perry Bible Fellowship by living genius, Nicholas Gurewitch. Some of my favorites (click on image for full-size):

goobees

Just because it's kind of amusing to watch candy engage in slaughter. Sort of like a darker version of that "inside the coke-machine" ad from a couple years ago.

For high-res version (which I recommend) visit the designers' site.

geek humor

This (from a t-shirt) reminded me of a dinner once with FP when he said that every time he saw the word "hadron," he couldn't help but see/think "hard-on." Once you're primed for this, your perceptual interpretation is screwed.

Some more geek humor...

Left: a Stephen Colbert World of Warcraft TCG card
Right: some eerily good fan-created Magic the Gathering cards, based on the work of Daniel Johnston