A poorly edited essay on memes.

Last time we talked a little about my growing interests in cocktail mixing and dumpster diving. Neither of these interests have yet waned, and resultantly I have spent more this month on alcohol than I have on food.

I've been trying to memorise the IBA's official cocktail list; so far I'm on about thirteen out of eighty. Progress has slowed down a little now that the semester is under way proper. Last week I made a clover club from memory. That felt pretty good. This evening I tried to make a boozier variant of the Scotch Solace by taking out some of the milk and cream. It still needs work: the Cointreau was a little too noticeable for my taste. People who love me have been asking about my drinking habits. I'm grateful for that support.

Dumpster diving has been getting increasingly exciting. The last couple of trips yielded (among other things) an almost unmanageable number of eggs, some pork belly and a chicken. I ate a massive omelette today. Also about seven tiny cakes. And a hot cross bun.

Here are some of the best finds of my career so far:

• Record player
• 11 bottles of beer
• Two bottles cologne, almost unused
• Lots of chocolate
• Novelty heart shaped crumpets, which I ate alone.

------anyway----that's----enough----of---that----------------------------------------------------

It's the CU's events week. All of the CU guests were asked their favourite meme. Their collective meme knowledge was shocking.

Here is a meme I have enjoyed:

This meme is about memes
It means I've made it

------No------for------real-----nobody------even------cares----about---that-----==nonsense-----

I'll try again tomorrow. I will try harder I promise.

                                *                                                                      .           *                
  *                  .                                      .                            
                                     *     <-- .="" nbsp="" p="" star="">*               .                          .                      *                               .  [moon]
           .                                                                          *                            
 ____-------___           *    ______________------_
{                       ------------                                       }
{______________cloud_____________________}   (this is a visual aid to help you understand that I am going to sleep now)

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You know what let's talk about memes some more. I'm tired of pretending that I don't find them fascinating.

[author is distracted by memes for like twenty minutes]

ｍｅｍｅｓ
In real life, the objective quality of a joke is often quite secondary to the interpersonal connection it facilitates: The archetypal child secretly savours the opportunity to groan loudly at incoming 'dad jokes'. Friends will rally low quality puns between themselves long after they have ceased to be amusing in their own right.

Not so with the internet.

[[This blog has an avid and diverse readership. For the benefit of otherwise bewildered readers, let's define the word 'meme':

• A meme is basically just a joke on the internet. AKA:
• 'funny'
• 'e-joke, my dude]]

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Mildly Interesting Aside: The philosopher biologist Richard Dawkins actually invented the word 'meme' to describe a unit of information which mutates in a manner analogous to DNA. It's all part of this theory that's supposed to explain sociological constructs like morality as the product of the human fight for survival (or something idk). People don't go mad for it anymore, but I think it's pretty cool that the word 'meme' has itself taken on an adapted meaning.

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If you've ever wasted three minutes of your life watching one of those ubiquitous spoken word videos on the subject of social media, you will be ((woke)) to the fact that interaction on the internet often lacks the depth and sincerity of its real life counterpart. As such, the only only real measure of a joke's value on the world wide web is how funny it is. But what makes a joke funny? I consulted a respectable joke expert, and he told me it's all about:

• 
  
•  
•  Novelty / Familiarity
• 
  
• 
  

Jokes are normally funny because they involve a familiar context or structure being juxtaposed with some illogical or surprising element. Doctor-doctor jokes are a prime example of this interaction of the novel with the mundane: But for the sobriety of the doctor's office, this myriad of delightful punchlines would lose all comedic value. Additionally, it has been my experience that the familiarity of the build-up somehow increases the funniness of the punchline, as though the memory of jokes previously told enhances the experience of listening to the one being told presently. [[joke scientists call this the subversion of expectation or something idk]]

We've already looked at how memes, unlike conventional jokes, cannot depend on the pleasure of connecting with people in order to warrant their own existence. The internet is a fast paced, disconnected place. Memes must be funny. Combined with the ridiculous volume of generated content and relentless pace of propagation that the internet enables, this criterion fuels a kind of non-stop arms race in which only the funniest of memes can survive. This is the memosphere.

Here is an important meme diagram:

figure 1 (credit: Welcome to my meme page [f])

This diagram is pretty useless, but the meme itself is useful. It is the work of meme pioneer 'Welcome to my meme page'. WTMMP is a self described distributor of 'absurdist' memes:

But what is an 'absurdist' meme? How did we get here? You'll be pleased to know I've been doing my meme research, so I can help you learn. Let's start at the beginning, in the 'pre-ironic' meme era.

[[by the way I stole most of these ideas from a fascinating presentation]]

This is a pre-ironic meme:

This meme is dead. It's about seven years old. It is part of a library of similar memes, which all share the key elements of top text, bottom text and a central animal. A small alphabet of animals is used to divide the memes into functional categories. The top text provides the context of the joke / idea, and the bottom text serves as a kind of punchline. In this example, the central animal is a 'socially awkward penguin', and the text is describing a socially awkward situation. No irony here. Notice, though, the importance of exclusive language - the fullness of the meme's meaning is only really available to one with the cultural toolkit required to decipher it.

Memes like this were okay, but they got pretty boring in the end. Certain online forums were always one step ahead of others in terms of meme generation, creating the language that others were merely learning. Over time, the cultural rift between those who actively sought spicy memes and those who passively enjoyed them grew wider. Those who prided themselves in their meme taste assigned increased value to novelty, and began referring to the unenlightened as 'normies'. Predictably, memes about memes began to emerge, often berating or impersonating mainstream meme practices. Just as the impressionists had deliberately painted with visible brushstrokes, so now meme makers were conveying concepts using the form of the meme itself. These were ironic memes.

^^ ironic meme

This is a deep fried meme. Deep fried memes are a particular kind of ironic meme in which low quality, 'normie' memes are stolen or invented and then heavily edited to reflect their low quality. A lot of these edits are exaggerations of naturally occurring phenomena, such as the presence of water-marks and the distortion that occurs when images are downloaded and subsequently re-uploaded. The above meme is belittling online content that uses existing franchises (Minecraft and Family Guy) to create unimaginative content that appeals to a mainstream audience whilst desperately self promoting. 

Ironic memes can be funny, but at times they can be just as formulaic and tiresome as the memes that they set out to replace. This has lead to a new meme movement, the meme-world's answer to postmodernism: post-ironic memes.

credit: NEEM

The above meme is like my favourite meme of the month. I'm not really even sure if it's a meta-ironic meme, I've sort of lost track of what all the different words mean. In the above image, a trending meme template has been deconstructed and turned on itself: Conventionally, the images in one column serve as nonsensical indicators of the quality of the ideas denoted in the other. Here, each image is aligned with another image, creating an infinite, nonsensical loop. The comedy is largely contextual - this meme comes from our friends at 'Non-Existent Existentialist Memes', who use meme comedy to satirize / celebrate nihilistic philosophy. The meme in question is effectively saying 'Nothing has any objective value or worth, lol".

Anyway apparently there's like meta-ironic memes and stuff, but to be honest I don't think this kind of linear system is adequate to categorize memes any more.

This has gone far enough. I'll leave you with a selection of memes I have enjoyed.

BMfBBwBP

Is that a meme? Dunno defining terms is for dummies.

Add caption

SMF

SIJBT

CBM

What a catastrophic waste of time