Saturday, June 22, 2013

My Love/Hate relationship with Meme-world

If you spend any amount of time on the internet these days (and I'm sort of assuming that you do, since you're here - and hey, this is a good time as any to give a shout out to that one pageview in Pakistan.  As a result of you, I am totally going to claim credit for having healed international tension in that region.  You're welcome, planet.)

Let me start that again.

If you spend any time at all on the internet then you're probably familiar with the concept of 'memes', even if you're not familiar with the term. 

These are those graphics that you see over and over and over again with variations of text printed on them.  For example, the 'One does not simply' meme that references Boromir from Lord of the Rings

 
Boromir.  He kinda owns the internet now...
 
or the inimicable Sweet Brown who famously decreed that nobody got time for that.
 
Which led to the inevitable combination of the two :
 
 
Pop culture - Never afraid to climb up it's own ass...
 
There's also the dinosaur face meme:
 
 
Insert a thought that a dinosaur would be unlikely to verbalize here...
 
 
The 'Sweet Jesus' meme:
 
 
 
And The Commemorative Wangs of the Founding Fathers meme:
 

Not Picture
But I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by Jefferson.
 
 
 
And here's the thing;  I love that meme's exist because it allows me to tell people how it comes from the Greek root and expresses a self replicating or duplicating concept or image, and shares an etymological root with 'Mime', 'Mimic', and the now long forgotten 'mimiograph'.  Because the vizsla will take any opportunity to go on about the evolution of language.  (and as alwasy, Vizsla = knowledge)
 
What I hate about memes is this:  We've goine out of our way to make it as easy as possible for us all to do exactly the same thing, over and over and over again.  And pretend that it remains funny every time.  It's like we're going out of our way to remove as much funny from the world as possible, and we already had Bob Saget for that.
 
That's all I'm saying.





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