Two people in Antarctica looking at an emperor penguin chick. The bird has its beak open. Some wit has captioned the image: “Excuse me… what the fuck are you doing here?”
In thirty years I’ll be myself in early 2009.
Hmm… Apparently I get a sex change, change my name to Margaret and become the first woman doctor in New Zealand.
“The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft contains all the original stories which Lovecraft wrote as an adult. It begins in 1917 with “The Tomb” and ends in 1935 with his last original work “The Haunter of the Dark.” The book is ordered chronologically by the date the story was written.”
Excellent! Well done Cthulhuchick.
And this is why the world needs librarians - because when we live in a world of “facts" that aren’t true, we hurt and erase living people.
nem sirok csak 65ezren belementek a szemembe
THIS. IS. PERFECTION.
Amazing!
1. how the fuck did Green Day follow that
2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense - if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day - is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.
That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.
The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.
This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS.
“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”
Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera - information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application - and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.
And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”
This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea - a meme - can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”
“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”
Man I just fucking love people.
I worked very hard for 10 years to build an audience here on Tumblr. It’s weird watching it crumble before my eyes. I’m not really sure how to process this. I no longer have the energy to build somewhere else. So I am kinda stuck on this sinking ship.
I understand why people are compelled to leave. But it is all still depressing.
I just wish Tumblr cared enough about its user base to come up with a different solution.
They basically said, “Be gone, pervs!” and that’s not cool.
Enjoying adult content does not necessarily make someone a pervert. It just makes someone a human being. There is art and beauty in so many of the things being flagged. And apparently dinosaurs and legs and dogs are being flagged too.
They told us they were only coming for our nipples.
They lied.
Perhaps Tumblr should change its motto.
I do hope some of you will stick around with me. I still have things to share here. And I will continue to write essays and post way too many corgis over @sirfrogsworth
I’m sorry Tumblr no longer cares about you.
But… I do.
Thank you all for changing my life and giving me a purpose. You are the best.
Personally, I’m not sure who runs Tumblr anymore; is it Yahoo or Apple? And I’m not that thrilled about the loss of all the porn blogs. They’ll just become someone else’s problem.
Frankly I’m not that fussed; my tumblr isn’t NSFW, and if absreruns goes down I won’t be shedding tears. It was an impulse project that’s worn itself out, and there’s always subgenius.com for the Art Mines of alt.binaries.slack.
I have been considering restarting a personal website for a couple of months now, but never managed to figure it out. What theme? (Not exactly the design, I’m talking overall.) If I make it into just the official Cranky Rabbit website, then any other pursuits will get skewed into Shit Cranky Does. And that’s a website design that I consider important if I’m to get a music/production career off the ground.
At the moment I’m pondering what CMS to use in the back end, and whether or not to retire the old domain. I don’t really need it and it’s too callow. It might be better to let it lapse and get a new one. Something I can use as a generic top level domain; *.[something professional sounding].nz.
I have a Phaser install on my localhost, and a test game with a crude “Desperate Fun Productions” splash screen (it’s from “Lowlands” by the Tall Dwarfs.) My zines are mostly issued under the Desperate Fun Productions name. So at the moment desperatefun[productions].[co].nz is the front-runner. If I can think of something else a bit more optimistic and a bit more timeless that’d be good.
(Something that lends itself to an easier to draw logo would be nice too.)
There’s a moon in the sky. It’s called the moon, but that’s probably fake news. /s
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bqg8t4xFUZC/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ij58whvhsi28
