NOW KISS!
“Flies, Maggots, Rats, and Lots of Poop” would be a terrible name for an album.
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Quite right. It simply doesn’t scan. “Flies, Maggots, Rats and Poop” has a better rhythm to it, and is probably a bargain bin compilation of the more imitative and nihilistic forms of punk rock.
1.) Open Google. 2.) Search your LAST name, only your last name. 3.) Take the first picture that comes up. 4.)Put this on Tumblr 5.) This is you in 30 years.
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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.
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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?”
nem sirok csak 65ezren belementek a szemembe
A crowd of 65,000 sings ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ perfectly while waiting for a Green Day concert
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.
bemused-geek-nz answered your question: If you were building your own escape vessel, what…
Board via Moravec machine. Full-blast VR/VT system. Nanotech fabricators build exploration androids on the fly (or out of same).
How many of these techs exist? Maybe I need to start looking beyond the local big box stores and garage sales for Escape Vessel parts.
Most of this tech is still in the conceptual stage.
Hans Moravec, if I remember right, posited the notion of a machine that read the neural patterns in the human brain and uploaded them to a computer modelling system. Because of the destructive nature of the reading, it’s a one-way street.
Once ‘aboard’, all senses are tickled by a full-immersion VR system with variable timescale (the VT bit). Who needs relativistic speeds when you can simply slow yourself down to wait out the trip from, oh, Sol to Vega? (Or speed up to answer all that e-mail that’s built up.)
And of course Earth nanotechnology hasn’t moved past buzzwords and shoving loose atoms around with scanning tunnelling microscopy. But in this ideal, the ship can construct a version of my meatspace self that can explore any environment and/or carry out any repair work that’s required.
The vessel then, seen from outside, has but few open spaces, generally leaks like a sieve, and otherwise is all engine and computing capacity. The interior heaven of shagpile ceilings, plaid lightbulbs and stereophonic telephone (or whatever) is all a digital dream.
Ah, Xmas… when thinking about killing everyone changes to actually drawing up detailed plans to kill everyone.
This tweet by Warren Ellis. Good evening.
Making a killing off vital common goods like education and healthcare and public infrastructure is venal, anti-social conduct, to be condemned and not indemnified. The money we borrowed from banks was not theirs to begin with—it was created as interest-bearing debt, only when we signed the loan agreement. The long record of fraud and deceit on the part of bankers disqualifies their right to be made whole—it is more moral to deny them than to pay them back.
Andrew Ross, Creditocracy. (via utnereader)
Boom. Fucking BOOM.
Markets are wonderful when it comes to luxuries - which is to say, non-essentials. But when it comes to necessities, things that people need regardless of their social or economic status or ability, they’re hopeless. Only a state can provide that (assuming that the people are sufficiently aware of the need for one, as opposed to romantic notions of isolationist individual liberty.)
And that’s why I lean towards anarcho-socialism.
Oh, look, it’s one of those Minecraft video jobbies by TheFamousEccles. This week, how to get started the Eccles way: Lots of cobble and killing sheep.
Ah, Xmas… when thinking about killing everyone changes to actually drawing up detailed plans to kill everyone.
This tweet by Warren Ellis. Good evening.