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.”
“the CIA is releasing tens of thousands of files and videos from bin laden’s compound today, except his DVDs of ‘home on the range’ and ‘ice age: dawn of the dinosaurs’ and his copy of final fantasy vii, because those are copyrighted” is not a sentence i ever thought i would type, but 2017 continues to be full of surprises
Tonight I may have had an encounter with the smoothest human being on earth.
As many of you know I work as an actor in a haunted house. This is a fun job for many reasons, but witnessing people’s reactions to being scared is by far the best. I’m a scare window actor, which means I hide behind a section of the wall that is held up by a latch that I can lift and drop away suddenly, scaring people with both my scream, and the loud sound my window makes upon being dropped. I have a small hole drilled in the wall to look through to see people passing.
The smoothest human being on the planet wore a white hoodie. He came in a group with three other friends. I did not expect to scare him much. After a while you can kind of gauge just by what you can glimpse from your peephole whether someone will be a good scare or not. Men in their 20’s in a mixed group of friends typically do not get scared easily. But this guy was wearing white in my blacklight-equipped hallway, so he had made himself an easy target and I had to take advantage.
I dropped my window precisely when he was in front of it.
He leapt back toward the wall on the other side of my narrow hallway and his drew back his arm like he meant to punch me.
“This is it.” I thought. “I’m finally going to be socked in the face for scaring someone.”
But I was wrong.
His arm kept curling back behind his head. Smoothly, flawlessly, effortlessly he tucked his hand behind his head, leaned back on the wall opposite me, and propped a foot up on the plywood frame of my open window, reclining with ease.
“So, come here often?” He asked.
All of this occurred within the span of a second. Maybe two.
I was shook. I was stunned. I almost broke character.
I shrugged. “Only on the weekends.” I replied with my character voice. His group laughed. He double finger gunned me and walked on.
I will never forget him.
I cannot stress enough how perfect his transition from his fear reaction to his playboy act was. It flowed so naturally.
He is already a legend in my haunt.
Most people have a fight-or-flight instinct. This man has a third option: flirt.
Must have been a bard.
#ImagineYourOTP
We need the second part where the SmoothGuy comes back every weekend on his own to that same peephole when no one else is watching to get a scare from TheSpook but it ends up as a flirt game within the two every weekend.
And a third part fastforwarding to the future where SmoothGuy tells his children, “I met TheSpook in a haunted bouse. It was love at first fright.”
when i heard there’s only one wizarding school in america, i laughed incredulously, and i know i’m not the only one. one school for the whole huge country? obviously brits don’t have any idea how big america is! cue derisive anecdotes about visitors who thought they could visit hollywood as a day trip from new york.
but recently something’s occurred to me: what if ilvermorny IS the only ‘wizarding school’ in america, with ‘wizarding school’ being defined as a wizard-only establishment where they teach nothing but magic?
aside from how unprepared that leaves kids for the rest of life, there just isn’t the population density to support wizard-exclusive pocket-universe enclaves anywhere but the east coast and possibly los angeles. even chicago is more spread out than that, and when it comes to mid-size cities like minneapolis and st. louis, forgeddaboudit. not even wizards would choose to live crammed cheek by jowl on quaintly crooked pedestrian-only streets when they could have a three-bedroom prairie-style on a wooded half-acre in edina.
so i’m thinking, yeah, ok, most american magicals don’t send their kids to wizard school. kids go to regular school and have wizarding clubs and retreats and summer camps instead. gives new meaning to “one time at band camp.”
the pureblood prejudice never developed in america? well, of course not, no one but the hamptons set goes even a single day without interacting with muggles. most of your friends are going to be muggles. there aren’t enough magical jobs for everyone, so most people’s coworkers will be muggles. except we wouldn’t call them muggles, of course, and certainly not ‘no-maj’ – that sounds like something that was said for a while by one particular new york jet set clique in the 1920′s and got written down in an english etiquette book as ‘what americans say’. we’d probably call them ‘mundanes’ or ‘normals’ if we called them anything at all.
the stuff about wand permits and other odd regulations makes sense for a small bureaucracy that doesn’t really understand why it can’t control things the way european magical governments do. it’s kind of a cargo cult legislation. probably most americans don’t even use a wand most of the time. european wand-focused magic might be the Done Thing among the WASP contingent, but everyone else undoubtedly knows at least something about navajo healing ritual, haitian voodoo, lakota dance magic, chinese feng-shui warding techniques, etcetera. taking away a person’s wand doesn’t take away their magic. you can’t say ‘corn pollen permit’ with a straight face and they sell chalk at the corner store.
i expect american wizards look at the hogwarts set as kind of a weird sect with weird restrictions and weird costumes. like the amish, but instead of furniture and quilts, they export clueless young men.
if I lick your brain will I gain your creativity?
i don’t know but it’s worth a try
also no one else will be able to eat it because it’s got your germs on it, which will be handy if zombies
this has always pretty much been my whole exact understanding of the hp universe
i also figured a lot of american magic is in english instead of the pseudo greek/latin British spells since, unlike British schools, most Americans never study those, so our spells are like ‘Fire’, ‘Unlock", “Magic Missile’
also american wands have gun grips or are baseball bats
when i was a kid i made a wand out of a piece of copper pipe with brass end caps, and carried it around with me for most of a year; i know a lot of kids who had walking sticks from summer camp or hiking, and pretended they were magic. hell, i bet a lot of wizard kids learn to cast with a #2 pencil, just from idly messing around.
also, spells based on superhero powers: definitely a thing.
imagine some baddie trying to AK someone and getting hit by SHAZAM in return.
american wizards learn how to do spider-man webbing out of wands the way kids learn to do that one S symbol
source: remember those dumb/racist comics ron had in his room? that’s all they got. britwizards don’t know a single spider-man
spells based on d&d too, i bet. and not nearly as much distinction between ‘dark arts’ and the rest, largely because a lot of the nonwhite arts got classified as Ebil Scary Bad by anglos, and the rest of america wasn’t having it. in louisiana, knowing the voodoo lady can raise the dead just speaks to the high quality of her marching powder.
florida wizards can use pool noodles as wands
not a single british wizard has ever returned from florida
dude florida is just one big messy cryptid zone, the ‘florida man’ phenomenon is real and ‘hold my beer’ is a very powerful spell
edit: ok, wizarding america IS silly, just not the way rowling thought
“Which author would you want to bring into 2015″ is such a hard question to answer I mean you could watch Arthur Conan Doyle despair over everything Sherlock Holmes within the last century or you could present Douglas Adams with an iPad
I would quite like to unleash Dickens on the Tories.
imagine William Shakespeare in the age of social media. 24/7 supreme dick jokes and the world celebrates.
Victor Hugo vs Twitter’s 140 character limit
Okay but Oscar Wilde on Instagram
Give Asimov an actual real robot
Show Lovecraft a mixed-race president and watch him shit himself in fear and anger
Poor George Orwell. “I wasn’t writing a fucking instruction manual.”
I would like Jesus to clear up a few things
Jane Austen devouring all the romance novels she can get her hands on.
y’all are missing a perfectly good opportunity to punch lord byron.
In the days following, the seven Kingdoms fell apart.
It seemed as though Ned’s discovery had doomed them all.
The King Robert Baratheon had been badly gored during a hunt, and was confined to his deathbed. In a matter of days, Ned Stark was imprisoned for treason, Y/N alongside him (charged with conspiring with the traitor).
Not to be that gal but Winona (you know which one) has been someone who has been constantly vilified by Hollywood int he past 1 and a half decade to see her rise in limelight again with Stranger Things is like exhilarating after everything but also I wanna point out the fact that before all these leaks and all Winona very openly spoke about people like Johnny Depp being abusive assholes and Mel Gibson being an anti Semitic and homophobic bastard so like, half of the people who are now writing reports on Hollywood abuse scandals made fun of her claims or belittled her before
‘I was with my friend, who’s gay. [Mel Gibson] made a really horrible gay joke. And somehow it came up that I was Jewish. He said something about “oven dodgers,” but I didn’t get it [right away],’ Ryder admits of the slur, an ugly reference to the gas chambers employed to murder millions of Jewish prisoners at the camps during the Holocaust. “I’d never heard that before. It was just this weird, weird moment. I was like, “He’s anti-Semitic and he’s homophobic.” No one believed me!’
andtheytoldustotellyouhello 