Dave Van Domelen, "But for HER, the contradictory self-perceptions of
Dave Van Domelen, "But for HER, the contradictory self-perceptions of
HOTNESS and NON-hotness can CO-EXIST as superpositioned quantum states of
HOTNESS INDETERMINACY...which COLLAPSE into a single state of either hotness
or NON-hotness when you try to compliment her BUTT." - Thugboy, Empowered vol
2, and MAJOR props for using "indeterminacy" instead of "uncertanity".
Heinieberg's Indeterminacy Principle, man.
Nancy O'Dell had lots of important suggestions, almost all of them about looking good. "You always want to be further than the celebrity from the camera, because then you'll look slimmer than them," she said. Also, she told me to focus my energies on getting the most famous, least talkative person there. This too seemed to involve looking good. "For Jack Nicholson, I wore a low-cut top," she told me.
Billy Bush's suggestions were to stay loose, have fun and wear naked-lady cuff links, which he promised to loan me. "They won't see it," he said, "but you'll feel a little dangerous."
my final piece of advice. "It's all about the women. It's a fashion parade," he said. "You can get a good laugh out of the guys because they're all dialed down because they know it's not about them."
The next 2 1/2 hours were a blur. In one corner of the C-shaped entry was a pen packed with attractive, Jewish, twentysomething women with expensive sunglasses -- the publicists. While the print reporters and photographers yelled to get their attention from behind a sun-beaten barricade, the publicists approached our swanky, shaded "Access Hollywood" cabana. I vowed to never hold a notebook again.
The power of the TV camera was even better than I first thought: It makes people pretend that they like you no matter what you say. When I bluntly asked to see the dress of very attractive "House" actress Jennifer Morrison, she said: "I will do whatever you want. I am very obedient." Then she spun around for me. When I nodded approvingly, she gave me her "dirty spin," which involved a lot more wiggling, and then she said, "I'm totally in love with you." If I'd been broadcasting live, I'm pretty sure I could have gotten a lap dance.
(click to embiggen)
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[IMG SXSW 2007, Dorkbot-Austin] While I was uploading my photos, I noticed that one photo from Dorkbot-Austin was getting way more views than the others. Then I found out through my friend Max, via Twitter, that I had been Warren Ellis blogged (again).
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The Adventures of Giles The Believer The Gideonse Bible The Middletown Expat The Nervous Breakdown The Paris Review theory my culture thiagolife Thirty-Year-Old Secretary Tin House Velvet Mafia Vu d'Ici Warren Ellis WordPress.com WordPress.org Words From The 83rd Dimension
=================
Our findings so far
There are different reasons people use eBay. Some come to browse, buy, sell, and
connect. Others simply come to research or have fun. The testing we've done has
helped us better predict when providing advertising actually helps as part of
these experiences.
Today our strategy is to identify when people are most likely to buy or bid, so
that we don't display ads that are likely to put potential transactions on eBay
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===================================================
bad signal: FREAKANGELS
August 4th, 2007
bad signal
WARREN ELLIS
Have crawled to pub briefly in
defiance of San Diego SARS (now
in Hideous Green Foam stage). So
let’s talk a little bit about
FREAKANGELS.
FREAKANGELS is a free online comic
debuting later this year, by myself
and artist Paul Duffield, via Avatar
Press. It’s an open-ended, longform
story told in the equivalent of
five pages a week. I never got to
do weekly comics, unlike many of
my British peers, so this is fun for
me. We have a shitload of pages
already done, so there’s a big
buffer in place.
=============================
The cultural scholar Dave Hickey said he always felt that the “the ice-white cube,” which became the standard kind of ascetic interior in museums and galleries by the ’60s, could be traced in part right back to NASA.
“I remember thinking at the time that, all of a sudden, we were looking at art in clean rooms like those where the astronauts suit up,” Mr. Hickey, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said in a recent interview.
===================
11) "To Hell with the Stars", Jack McDevitt (Asimov's Dec 1987)
===================
Tales of an accelerated culture.
Stella seems to have encapsulated the entire experience of virtual and real friends that peppers Pattern Recognition. Scolds, doubters, conservatives, the very old, and ingénues tell us the Internet is dangerous because it is overrun with criminals and degenerates. It is merely overrun with people, few of whom are criminals or degenerates, and most of whom do what they do in real life: Tell the truth about themselves.
Once you meet them, it is merely a question of having had the ice broken already.
But Cf. “initial telephone conversations with people you’ve gotten to know well on the Net” that are odd.
==========================================================================
Nicholas Handler
Yale University, Class of 2009
From Glen Ridge, New Jersey
The Posteverything Generation
runnerupNicholas Handler
Nicholas Handler, is a junior at Yale University majoring in history. Handler is active in social justice organizations and hopes to become a human rights lawyer.
I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my iPod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blase college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.
According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it is so …. post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it– naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism–that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism–what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself–is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.
In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11…at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.
And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say ‘here we are, and this is what we demand’? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say ‘we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right’? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.
On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning–a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.
Jameson calls it “Pastiche”–”the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means an author speaking in a style that is not his own– borrowing a voice and continuing to use it until the words lose all meaning and the chaos that is real life sets in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it seems to lack purpose or direction. For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old cliches of social change and moral outrage–a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language–the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s what young people do.
But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution? How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like moveon.org. It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.
College as America once knew it–as an incubator of radical social change– is coming to an end. To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s– it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.
==================================================================================
Reason #15 Addendum: Clichépalooza!
By Sean Lindsay
Now that you’ve begun to accept that you’re a lazy, plagiarising fanfic writer, let’s look at some of the different forms of cliché that you frequently abuse, and how you can identify them — so you can plainly see that your fiction is merely a string of old, stolen ideas held together with conjunctions.
There are clichéd words: mostly adjectives and adverbs, such as “grizzled” (usually followed by “detective”), pretty much any word that ends in -ly, and the queen of all clichéd words, “quirky”. Let me tell you now, everyone is quirky when they think no-one’s looking (for example, I find delight in ripping random pages out of books in bookstores). Resorting to using “quirky” to describe a character is a stop writing moment.
There are a couple of easy ways to spot clichéd words in your writing:
* Words that you frequently read in fiction but almost never hear anyone use in everyday speech (Do you know anyone who would appreciate being called “grizzled”?)
* Adjectives/adverbs that appear more than three times in your entire writing output
There are the clichéd phrases: ”to all intents and porpoises”, “lies, damned lies and goddamn awful fiction”, or “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw clichés”. They’re often tired similes and metaphors that no longer inspire comparative thought (”a drop in the bucket”). Others are elegant variations: using five words where one would suffice (”in the fullness of time” instead of “eventually”). Still others are little more than punctuation — think about how many writers use “let’s get out of here” because they can’t figure out how to end a scene. Even synopses have their own clichés, such as “and then they”, “it turns out” and “little did they know”.
You can determine quite simply if a particular phrase is a cliché: ask yourself if you’ve ever read those words in that exact sequence before. If you’re not sure, Google it. A few hits might be coincidence, but more than ten and you might as well contact the authors of those pages to form a bad writers’ support group.
There are clichéd characters: the bitter (”grizzled”) detective with a secret that explains his bitterness and his limp, chasing the preternaturally intelligent serial killer with the absurdly complex and predictable psychopathology who appeared as a minor character on page 50; the self-aware anthropomorphic robot who is fascinated by or yearns to be a chemically-imbalanced talking meat-bag; the school bully with latent homosexuality who winds up as a twice-divorced fry cook; the hooker who inexplicably does something nice for someone without expecting so much as a bag of crack and a shot of penicillin in return; the emotionally disconnected elf (or, indeed, any ‘elf’); the young agricultural worker who it is prophesied will rise up to save the kingdom from the tyranny of market forces; or pretty much every supporting character in your fiction that you had to make ”quirky”.
You probably know who the clichéd characters are in your fiction, because you remember the original stories they come from. You didn’t really try to hide the similarity, because although you’re ostensibly writing a WWII-era spy thriller, subconsciously you really want people to figure out it’s thinly-veiled Star Wars fanfic.
There are clichéd plots and plot elements: that one crucial forensic clue the oafish police overlooked, that the preternaturally observant amateur detective finds on page 87 but only tells you about on page 279; the paradox of travelling back in time just to explain the time-travel paradox to the one smart person in the primitive tribe who conveniently learns to speak English fluently in less than a chapter; the mysterious object imbued with the mysterious power to to remain mysterious, that must be found/rescued/destroyed at any cost but never adequately explained to anyone; and dear God, any story that is driven by, makes reference to, or includes a recipe for, a “prophecy”.
How do you find the clichéd plot elements in your writing? That’s easy. Look at page one. Or, more likely, page 27, where your plot actually starts.
There are also clichéd writing careers: there’s the sophomore slump, where the author spent six years writing their first novel, then the publisher wants a follow-up in eight months; the runaway bestseller, where the author can’t think of any story that will live up to the surprise hit of their last novel; the trend chaser, where the writer keeps writing knockoffs of current hits, hoping that the money train will hit their house when it derails; and the all-time number one, the imawriterdammit, which (roughly translated) means the person who claims all the social benefits of being a writer because they once scribbled down an idea for a story combining two clichés they saw on different episodes of The A-Team.
For those who genuinely fear they have been unwittingly infested with clichés, here are some external resources which have selectively quoted the worst parts of your own writing for you:
* Jessica Morrell, at one of the many websites called The Writing Life, has a handy list of clichéd phrases.
* TheInfo.org has an even more handy online cliché finder.
* John VanSickle, with the help of dozens of generous nerds, has compiled a spectacularly detailed and redundantly-named Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés. If you have two or more of these clichés in one story, you’re banned from even reading SF.
* Kathy Pulver and J.S. Burke risked a lawsuit with the Grand List of Fantasy Clichés and Amethyst Angel tries the humility defense with the Not-So-Grand List of Overused Fantasy Clichés.
* Strange Horizons provides a list of Horror Stories [They’ve] Seen Too Often.
* If you want to kill the clichés almost as they occur, check out Lake Superior State University’s annual Banished Words (and phrases) list.
* And the acme of all cliché lists, the 3,300+ strong Cliché Finder. For random demotivation, visit 10 Random Clichés often.
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* Clichépalooza: Now Taking Requests
9 Comments
1.
Nathan Bransford:
This post is better than an object protected by a secret organization concealing the existence of something that would change the world if it were exposed.
July 26th, 2007 at 3:57 am
2.
Niteowl:
This post is better than the plucky upstart with natural talent for a game/sport/fighting technique who falls by hubris but finds a cranky wonk of a mentor to help him realize that it was the love of the game/sport fighting technique that gave him all his power in the first place.
This is also better than the gifted warrior who leads his army to countless victories yet only yearns for the comfort of a nice plot of farm land, and a homestead to raise his children.
July 26th, 2007 at 5:31 am
3.
Paul Riddell:
This post is better than the science fiction magazine editor who alternates between seeking the one comic he needs to finish his collection and sleeping with a succession of models who still fuck him after seeing his action figure collection.
Oh, wait. We were talking “cliches”, not “desperate prayers”, weren’t we? Well, that, like the ignorant farmboy who saves Everything, is an example of cliche in fiction and delusion in real life.
July 26th, 2007 at 6:03 am
4.
Paul Riddell:
And I almost forgot: this post is better than the presumed good guy who’d been planning to betray his friends to the bad guys from the beginning, but who has a change of heart and sacrifices his life to give the good guys the one break they desperately need.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
5.
TV Chick:
This post is better than a talented team of forensic experts identifying the single carpet fiber that leads a killer to justice.
I was so inspired, I wrote up a short list of TV cliches in my Writing for TV blog.
www.writingfortv.blogspot.com.
July 28th, 2007 at 11:54 am
6.
Sean Lindsay:
TV Chick, you’ve nailed at least a couple of Reasons in your list.
July 28th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
7.
sex scenes at starbucks:
This post is better than a sexy, guilt-ridden vampire.
July 29th, 2007 at 12:52 am
8.
cerebral paulsy:
This post is better than the twenty something columbia univ. mfa grad. in creative writing having his first novel published about a gay punkie junkie fifteen-year-old screwing his best friend the in the back of a mini-van while thinking about his stepfather raping him on the barbie doll strewn floor of his bedroom to the sounds of alice cooper and getting a glowing blurb from Dennis Cooper.
July 29th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
9.
Annie the Superfast Reader:
This post is better than the plucky redheaded heroine who stamps her feet when told she’ll have to sleep on the ground because her kingdom’s been overrun by raping villains.
================================================================================
Language
Plus ça change? Not quite
Aug 9th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Clichés are always tired. Increasingly, they are also wrong
Illustration by Peter Schrank
TECHNOLOGY constantly overtakes language. Recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary have included po-faced entries for “Google” (the verb), “wiki” and “mash-up”. But most clichés are stubbornly indifferent to such concerns. Indeed, they often act as a linguistic fossil record, preserving objects and behaviour that have long since fallen into petrified obsolescence. Industrious sorts no longer burn the midnight oil. Flashes in the pan are common even if the flintlock muskets that gave rise to them are museum pieces. Colours are still nailed to masts, metal though they now usually are.
In a technological age ever more clichés are being untethered from their origins in this way. People write out plenty of metaphorical cheques, whether blank or bouncing. Many of them are to be found in the post, but fewer in real life (some shops no longer accept them). There is no need to keep your cards close to your chest, or indeed an ace up your sleeve, when so much gambling happens online. Thanks to reviews, awards and celebrity book-club stickers, you can in fact judge a book by its cover. If you carry a mobile phone, write e-mail or post entries on MySpace, being out of sight does not mean being out of mind. And in the age of the iPod, no one can be accused of being unable to carry a tune.
Old assumptions are stranded by other changes too. Currencies fluctuate: the dollar looks less than almighty, at least for the moment. Populations evolve: Tom, Dick and Harry make for an unrepresentative trio of everymen today; Kevin, Chloe and Muhammad would be more accurate. Trade patterns shift: turning down all the tea in China would weigh heavily, to be sure, but the European Union is more impressed by the Chinese production of bras and dressing-gowns. Today's coast is never clear but always strewn with plastic and other detritus. Rare is the athlete who can radiate Olympian calm at a modern-day Olympic games.
Earnest environmental concerns are also starting to flip well-worn phrases on their heads. Putting new wine into old bottles is now to be applauded. Where it was once desirable to trail clouds of glory, they now require emissions credits. Regulators are another threat. Hunting-grounds, happy or not, are fewer in number. Recently shelved plans by the European Commission to get rid of Britain's imperial measures endangered all manner of activities, from exacting a pound of flesh, inching forward and feeling ten feet tall to being miles away.
Being archaic does not always make a cliché redundant. People still jump on bandwagons, read the riot act, burn the candle at both ends and keep irons in fires. As long as its meaning is clear, a saying can be both historic and current.
The trouble comes when technology robs a cliché of its substance as well as its form. When love fades, the jilted may seek consolation in the thought that there are plenty more fish in the sea. But there aren't: the oceans have been plundered. “For everything there is a season” is a phrase with a ring of majestic certainty. But with air-freighted fruit and genetically modified veg, it too is wrong. And if once it was believed that the camera never lied, PhotoShop should have taught that the lens bends the truth as effortlessly as it bends light itself. As for rocket science, not long ago it was held up as the paragon of baffling complexity. Now, as tourists hurtle into space and almost every failed state seems poised to go ballistic, rocket science seems less sophisticated. Proud owners of silicon implants scoff at the notion that beauty is only skin-deep. Among the transgendered, Bob is as likely to be your auntie as your uncle.
The moral of it all? Clichés just aren't what they used to be.
Pages in category "Internet memes"
There are 196 pages in this section of this category.
* List of Internet phenomena
* Internet meme
* Talk:List of Internet phenomena/old
3
* 300-page iPhone bill
8
* 801-chan
A
* AACS encryption key controversy
* Admiral Ackbar
* All your base are belong to us
* Alyssa Alano
* The Americans (commentary)
* Anabukinchan
* Tuan Anh
* Anime music video
* Animutation
* Ate my balls
* Brian Atene
* Atlanta Nights
B
* B3ta
* Back Dorm Boys
* Backbone cabal
* Bad Day (Internet meme)
* Bad Times (computer virus hoax)
* Badger Badger Badger
* Bananaphone
* Banhammer
* Barrel roll
* Bert is Evil
* Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
* Bonsai Kitten
* Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out
* Brooke Brodack
* Gary Brolsma
* The Burger King
* The Bus Uncle
C
* CD-i games based on The Legend of Zelda series
* Call on Me (Eric Prydz song)
* Canon Rock (song)
* Captain Obvious
* Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager
* Chaos cloud
* Chocolate Rain
* Chuck Norris Facts
* Claire Swire e-mail
* Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
* Contagious media
* Bill Cosby
* Crazy Frog
D
* John Daker
* Dance Monkeyboy
* Dancing Banana
* Dancing baby
* Daniel Lyons
* Densha Otoko
* Diary of an Unborn Child
* Dick in a Box
* Diet Coke and Mentos eruption
* Ding Dong Song
* Disrobics
* Division by zero
* Dog poop girl
* Domo-kun
* Dopefish
* Dr. Tran
* Dschinghis Khan
* Dumb laws
D cont.
* Dysfunctional Family Circus
E
* Edgar's fall
* Emoticon
* Eric Conveys an Emotion
* Sid Eudy
* Eul-Yong Ta
* Every time you masturbate... God kills a kitten
* Evolution of Dance
* Exploding whale
F
* Fdtv
* Fei hua qing han
* Fensler Films
* Eric Fensler
* Vincent Ferrari
* First post
* Flash mob
* Flash-salsa
* Flashback (Flash animation)
* Flea Market Montgomery
* Flying Spaghetti Monster
* Fofudja
* Free Hugs Campaign
* The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
* Front Deutscher Äpfel
G
* Gay Fuel
* Gert Jonnys
* Get Your War On
* Giant Enemy Crab
* Lasse Gjertsen
* Gnomes (South Park episode)
* Goatse.cx
* Goodtimes virus
* Gorge of Eternal Peril
* Gröûp X
* Anton Maiden
H
* The Hampster Dance
* Happy Tree Friends
* Hare Hare Yukai
* Hatten är din
* HeadOn
* Helicopter Shark
* Hipster PDA
* Hitch50.com
* Homestar Runner
* Homokaasu
* Hong Kong 97
* Honor system virus
* Hooked on a Feeling
* Hopkin Green Frog
* Hot Hot Hot (meme)
* Hott4Hill
* How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?
* How to Kill a Mockingbird
* Hurra Torpedo
I
* I Am Not Canadian
* I Got a Crush... on Obama
* IPhree
* Ievan Polkka
* Gendo Ikari
* Impossible is Nothing (video résumé)
* Intelligent falling
* Internet slang
J
* Leeroy Jenkins
* Jesusland map
* JibJab
* John West Salmon
J cont.
* The Juggernaut Bitch!!
K
* KateModern
* Krzysztof Kononowicz
* Kuso Miso Technique
L
* LOL
* Lazy Sunday
* Leonidas I
* Line Rider
* List of common emoticons
* List of snowclones
* Little Superstar
* Loituma Girl
* Lolcat
* London Underground anagram map
* Lonelygirl15
* Lootie
* Lulu and Junior
* Lynne & Tessa
M
* MacKenzieHeartsu
* Dennis Madalone
* Mahir Çağrı
* Man-Faye
* ManBeef
* Matrix ping pong
* MeAnda - Don
* Megyeri Bridge
* Meme
* Memesphere
* Memetracker
* Microbroadcasting
* Miko Miko Nurse
* MilkandCookies
* Moe anthropomorphism
* More cowbell
* Germano Mosconi
* Moskau (Dschinghis Khan song)
* Mr. Bergis prank calls
* Mike "Nug" Nahrgang
* My Box in a Box
N
* Naked News
* Napster Bad!
* Narn Bat Squad
* Nevada-tan
* Never Gonna Give You Up
* Ninja Burger
* Ninja Spirit (video series)
* Noah Kalina
* Numa Numa
O
* O RLY?
* OS-tan
* Olympic Torch (virus hoax)
* Online quizzes
* Oolong (rabbit)
P
* Mr. Pants
* Jeffrey Pelehac
* Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006
* Pirates versus Ninjas
* Political Google bombs in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election
* PopoZão
* Porkbusters
* Preved
* Pwn
R
* Rainbow (TV series)
* Raw Tea
* Re-cut trailer
* Real Life Simpsons Intro
* Real Ultimate Power
* Jack Rebney
* Reznor's Edge
* Rosie Reid
* Rule 6
S
* SNL Digital Shorts
* Series of tubes
* Shakeel Bhat
* The Skeletor Show
* Smash Our Stuff
* John Smeaton (baggage handler)
* Smosh
* The Smurfs and communism
* Snakes on a Plane
* Snowclone
* Someecards
* Songvid
* Sorry Everybody
* Soy Sauce Warrior Kikkoman
* The Spirit of Christmas
* Spongmonkey
* Star Wars kid
* Sugar Bush Squirrel
* Liam Kyle Sullivan
* Superdickery
T
* Tailrank.com
* Tammy sex video scandal
T cont.
* Tanasinn
* Talk:Ted Stevens
* Terrible Secret of Space
* The Dildo Song
* The End of the World (animation)
* The Hands Resist Him
* The Shooting (Digital Short)
* The Spirit of Truth
* The goggles, they do nothing
* The last page of the Internet
* Tokyo Breakfast
* Tourist guy
* The Truth Laid Bear
* Tunak Tunak Tun
* Typoglycemia
U
* Über
* Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
* Undefeatable
* University of Florida Taser incident
* User:Andy29/Sandbox/Deleted/Bunchies
* User:Bronzie/Bunchies
* User:Kosmonaut/IM IN UR BASE KILLIN UR D00DZ
* User:Mathiastck/Unitarian Jihad
V
* Vacanti mouse
* The Very Secret Diaries
* Video Game Pianist
* Video clip
* Viral video
W
* W2pi
W cont.
* WDAZ-TV
* Wee Shu Min elitism scandal
* Weebl's Stuff
* Weebl's cartoons
* What Is Love (song)
* What What (In the Butt)
* When I was your age, Pluto was a Planet
* Whogasm
* Will It Blend?
* Carson Williams
X
* Xianxingzhe
* Xiao Xiao
Y
* User:Canada-kawaii/Archive2
* YTMND
* Yacht Rock
* Dawn Yang
* Yasuri Yamileth
* Yatta
* Yinchuan
* You Know What They Say, The More The Merrier!
* You're with me, leather
* YouTube celebrities
* Zhu Yu (artist)
Z
* Zinedine Zidane
* Zladko Vladcik
* Zombie walk
* Tay Zonday
List of Internet phenomena is a partial list of representative phenomena specific to Internet, such as Internet memes. Only a sampling of Internet phenomena that have achieved recognition in contexts wider than that of the Internet, such as coverage in the mainstream media, are present here.
Revisions and sourced additions are welcome
Contents
[hide]
* 1 People
* 2 Bands
* 3 Games
* 4 Videos
* 5 Animation-based
* 6 Images
* 7 Films
* 8 Web sites
o 8.1 Personal sites
* 9 Audio
* 10 See also
* 11 References
* 12 External links
People
* Chris Crocker — Semi-famous over the last year for his YouTube v-log postings, Chris' world-wide fame exploded after a video he made in support of Britney Spears became viral email and landed him on CNN, Howard Stern, ABC and numerous other shows.[1]
* Star Wars kid — A Québécois teenager became known as the "Star Wars Kid" after a video appeared on the Internet showing him swinging a golf ball retriever as if it were a lightsaber. Many parodies of the video were made and distributed through video sharing sites, and peer-to-peer sharing programs like Kazaa.[2]
* The Tourist Guy — An Internet phenomenon consisting of a photograph of a tourist that has appeared in many edited pictures after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
* Chuck Norris facts — Archetypal joke, parodying the action-film actor as the ultimate hard man with incredible attributes.[3]
* The Bus Uncle — As the name suggests, the incident took place on a bus. A Hong Kong middle-aged man reacted furiously after the young man seated behind him tapped his shoulder and asked him to lower his voice while speaking on the phone. His outburst spawned catchphrases in Hong Kong and Chinese communities around the world.[4]
* Christopher Walken — The prolific actor has long been a cult icon, but this fame culminated in 2006 with a faux campaign for President of the United States apparently perpetrated by members of a message board. The phenomenon may have been related to Walken's portrayal of a U.S. Senator with presidental ambitions in Wedding Crashers and his role in Man of the Year, released several months after the phenomenon, as the man who pushes Robin Williams' comedian character to run for president.[5]
Bands
* OK Go — An American rock band whose video for the single "Here It Goes Again" featured the band members performing an elaborate dance on treadmills. The video was taken in one shot. It has been viewed a total of 21 million times on YouTube. This internet success led them to be featured on The Colbert Report and the video won the 2006 Grammy for Best Short-Form Music Video.[6]
* Hurra Torpedo — A Norwegian band that became part of a viral ad campaign by going on a coast to coast tour in the US that was paid for by Ford in order to promote the Ford Fusion car. As part of the ad campaign, a mockumentary movie called "The Crushing Blow" is being made. By the end of November 2005 a clip from The Crushing Blow was viewed more than 500,000 times in a couple of days from the web site iFilm.[7]
* Lemon Demon — A one-man band by Neil Cicierega, most famous for Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (see below). Cicierega's "Hyakugojyuuichi" animutation was a web animation hit.[8] Neil is also the creator of the popular two series hit Potter Puppet Pals.
* JerryC — Taiwanese guitarist and composer who wrote "Canon Rock", a rock arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D.[9]
* Jeong-Hyun Lim (a.k.a. funtwo) — Guitar player from South Korea, who first played JerryC's Canon Rock and post on YouTube.[10]
* Gröûp X — Faux Arabian rock band, who first became popular when their song, 'Mario Twins' was made into a Flash video. Many other songs followed suit, but none of the videos were actually made by Group X.[11]
Games
* All Your Base Are Belong To Us — Engrish from the opening cut scene of the video game Zero Wing, which has become a catchphrase, inspiring videos and other derivative works.[12]
* Leeroy Jenkins — A World Of Warcraft player charges into a high-level dungeon with a distinctive cry of "Leeeeeeeerooooy... Jeeenkins!", ruining the meticulous attack plans of his group and getting them all killed.[13]
* Line Rider — A Flash game where the player draws lines that act as ramps and hills for a small rider on a sled.[14]
Videos
* Thriller performed by prison inmates in the Philippines — Features a recreation of Michael Jackson's hit music video, performed by prison inmates.[15]
* Boom goes the dynamite — Brian Collins, a nervous and extremely awkward sports anchor attempts to call highlights for his college's news show, fumbling through most of the segment until finally uttering this now-famous catch phrase.[16]
* Brokeback Mountain parodies — The movie Brokeback Mountain inspired many online parody trailers and has since been removed from the site.[17]
* Impossible Is Nothing — An ambitious video resume by Yale student Aleksey Vayner.[18]
* Numa Numa — Gary Brolsma sings along to the Romanian language dance song "Dragostea din tei" by O-Zone.[19]
* Evolution of Dance — A six minute video showing Judson Laipply performing various popular dances to music ranging from the early 1950s to present day. The video currently has over 57 million views on Youtube, ranking it as the most viewed video of all time on Youtube.
* "Dramatic Prairie Dog" (also "Dramatic Chipmunk", or "Drama Hog") — A brief GIF turned into a video from the website 4chan.org of a standing prairie dog turning its head suddenly toward the camera, with a quick zoom-in on its face. The clip was excerpted from an 2001 appearance by J-pop group MiniMoni on the Japanese TV show Hello! Morning.[20][21] Various spoofs have been made of the prairie dog in different situations.[22]
* Chocolate Rain — Original composition from the Minnesota singer and songwriter Tay Zonday, who has been noted for his unusually deep voice and "inimitable style."[23]
* "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" — phrase made famous from the video of the University of Florida Taser incident involving student Andrew Meyer at a campus talk by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.[24]
Animation-based
* Badger Badger Badger — A Flash animation looping while playing repeatedly "Badger badger badger...".
* Dancing baby — A 3D-rendered dancing baby first appeared in 1997 by the creators of 3-D Studio Max, and became something of a late-'90s cultural icon, featured many times in the TV show Ally McBeal.[25]
* Hampster Dance — A page filled with animated GIFs of hamsters dancing, linking to other animated pages. It spawned a fictional band complete with its own CD album release.[25]
* Loituma Girl (also known as Leekspin)[26]
* Peanut Butter Jelly Time — A Flash animation that emerged in the early 2000s featuring the Dancing Banana and a song (based upon a song of the same name recorded by the Buckwheat Boyz). It was referenced in an episode of the TV series Family Guy. [27]
* Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny — A flash animation of a battle royale between many notable characters from fact and fiction, based on one of Lemon Demon's songs.[28]
Images
* "Little Fatty" — Beginning in 2003, a Chinese high school student from Shanghai had his face superimposed onto various other images, creating an Internet fad.[29][30]
* "Lootie" is an Associated Press photo taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, under the caption "A looter carries a bucket of beer out of a grocery store in New Orleans..."[31] The picture features a smiling, African-American male in waist deep waters carrying a large plastic tub of bottles of beer. Many Photoshop variants of the original were created.[32][33]
* The Saugeen Stripper — An 18-year-old female resident of Saugeen-Maitland Hall at the University of Western Ontario performed a striptease at a birthday party, and dozens of digital images of the party ended up on the Internet. The incident briefly attracted widespread media attention and was the subject of articles by a number of Canadian and American media outlets. The controversy sparked a discussion about just how much control that institutions of higher learning have over what goes on in their residences.[34]
* Goatse.cx — A website that featured a shock image called hello.jpg.[35]
* The "O RLY?" Owl — An owl originally posted on the Something Awful forums but later Photoshopped by an anonymous user on 4chan's random board[citation needed]
* lolcats — image macros featuring cats with humorous captions, typically in netspeak or leetspeak. [36]
* Bert is Evil — A satirical website stating Bert of Sesame Street is the root of many evils. A juxtaposition of Bert and Osama Bin Laden later entered a real poster in a Bangladesh protest.
Films
* The Blair Witch Project — The first film to notably use the internet for astroturfing, its makers spread rumors the material they shot was authentic and that the three protagonists really disappeared in Burkittsville, Maryland, which caused problems for the police department of Frederick County.[37] In addition, many websites began to feature "stolen" clips of the film later discovered to be supplied by Artisan and the filmmakers, as well as "planted" fake reviews of the film, taking pains to disguise their work through intentional spelling mistakes and poor Web design.[38] Many other filmmakers and studios accused the producers of creating a fake fan buzz to generate a real one, stating "That was an organized effort. What happened is that they tricked the press."[39]
* Snakes on a Plane — This 2006 film starring Samuel L. Jackson became an Internet phenomenon due to the film's title and premise a year before its planned release, and before any promotional material was released. Producers of the film responded to the Internet buzz by adding several scenes which catered to the fans.[40]
* 300 - This 2007 film featuring Gerard Butler inspired a meme involving digitally altering photos by juxtaposing the face of Leonidas over the face of another person, often accompanied with a (occasionally somewhat modified) quote from the film. Examples of this can be found at http://community.livejournal.com/randompictures/2209617.html?page=1 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZBA0SKmQy8 .
Web sites
* 2channel — A Japanese Internet forum (the largest in the world). The site has significant influence on Japanese culture and popular opinion.[41]
* MySpace — One of the most popular worldwide social networking websites, which offers an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos.[42][43][44]
* Facebook - A social networking website
* Real Ultimate Power — Upon which a fictional 13 year old boy obsesses about ninjas.
* YouTube — A popular website where people can view videos submitted by users.
* 4chan — The English equivalent to Futaba Channel, responsible for creating many popular images and phrases in use on the Internet.
Personal sites
* Mahir Çağrı (i kiss you) — A resident of İzmir, Turkey, Çağrı became an Internet celebrity in 1999, when his picture-laden homepage, which exclaimed in broken English his love of the accordion and travel, was visited by millions and spawned numerous fansites and parodies, one featured on Fox's MADtv (season 4, episode 20).[25]
* Randy Constan — He posted pictures of himself on his website wearing self-made Peter Pan costumes.[45]
Audio
* I Want My Western Barbecue Burger! — An irate woman places a 9-1-1 call demanding the police enter a Laguna Niguel, California-area Burger King and force the employees to make her and her kids a "Western Barbecue Burger".[46][47]
See also
* Meme — A unit of cultural information that propagates from one mind to another as a theoretical unit of cultural evolution and diffusion.
References
1. ^ Tear-stained video plea makes YouTube vlogger an Internet rock star. MSNBC (2007-09-13). Retrieved on 2007-09-13.
2. ^ Star Wars Kid is top viral video. BBC News (2006-11-27). Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
3. ^ Keegan, Rebecca Winters. "People", Time, 20 March 2006. Retrieved on 2006-06-20.
4. ^ Grumpy man on a bus becomes star of the internet. Guardian Unlimited (2006-05-26). Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
5. ^ http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-5833740-7.html
6. ^ Maney, Kevin, Blend of old, new media launched OK Go,. Retrieved on 2007-05-24
7. ^ Reinartz, Joe, What Up, Torpedo?,. Retrieved on 2007-05-24
8. ^ Salon.com, All hail Neil Cicierega, April 26, 2001
9. ^ Heffernan, Virginia, Web Guitar Wizard Revealed at Last,. Retrieved on 2007-05-24
10. ^ Scotsman.com, It's only baroque'n'roll... a star is born on the web,. Retrieved on 2007-07-07
11. ^ *Merz "Group X - Taking Over the World One Flash Video at a Time", Associated Content, May 2, 2007. Accessed July 5, 2007.
12. ^ Benner, Jeffrey (2001-02-23). When Gamer Humor Attacks. Retrieved on 2006-05-15.
13. ^ Pearson, Craig. "The Ballad of Leeroy Jenkins", PC Gamer UK, August 2005.
14. ^ Ressner, Jeffrey, The Newest Time Waster: Line Rider,. Retrieved on 2006-04-30
15. ^ "Cebu inmates going for another YouTube hit", GMA NEWS.TV, 2007-08-12. Retrieved on 2007-08-17.
16. ^ CBS Broadcasting Inc, Boom Goes The Dynamite,. Retrieved on 2007-05-24
17. ^ Heffernan, Virginia, CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Brokeback Spoofs: Tough Guys Unmasked,. Retrieved on 2007-05-24
18. ^ Ben McGrath. "Aleksey the Great", The New Yorker, October 23, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-07-05.
19. ^ "Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa", The New York Times, 2005-02-26. Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
20. ^ BREAKING: Dramatic Chipmunk - From Japanese TV Show Hello! Morning (2007-06-23). Retrieved on 2007-07-04.
21. ^ Langdon Alger (2007-06-24). Origin of the "Chipmunk" Clip. Retrieved on 2007-07-04.
22. ^ Durrett, Mike, The Dramatic Prairie Dog - Spoofs Collection,. Retrieved on 2007-06-29
23. ^ Lowe, David, Web crooner with 3m fans,. Retrieved on 2007-08-07
24. ^ Stirland, Sarah Lai, "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" Jolts the Web,. Retrieved on 2007-10-09
25. ^ a b c Wood, Molly (2005-07-15). Top 10 Web Fads. CNET. Retrieved on 2007-03-12.
26. ^ Werman, Marco (2006-08-18). Global Hit (radio). The World. Public Radio International. Retrieved on 2006-08-18.
27. ^ Ermann, Jeff. "New Chorus Lines; As Old-Time Chatter Disappears, Centennial Creates Its Own", The Washington Post, 2006-05-11.
28. ^ Copy, paste, animate. The Toronto Star.
29. ^ Clifford Coonan. "The new cultural revolution: How Little Fatty made it big", the Independent, November 16, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
30. ^ Jane Macartney. "A fat chance of saving face", the Times online, November 22, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
31. ^ THE DECATUR DAILY, Big Easy looters help themselves,. Retrieved on 2007-07-10
32. ^ Randall, Vernellia R.. The Racism of "Lootie". Retrieved on 2007-07-05.
33. ^ David P. Mikkelson; Barbara Mikkelson (September 19, 2005). Heineken Beer. Snopes. Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
34. ^ "Western Stripteaser On Internet", A-Channel News. Retrieved on 2007-02-23.
35. ^ Stewart Kirkpatrick. "Lazy Guide to Net Culture: NSFW", Scotsman.com News, 2004-06-09. Retrieved on 2007-03-15.
36. ^ Craig Wood. "Anatomy of a Viral Web Phenomenon", CraigsBlog.com, 2007-06-11. Retrieved on 2007-06-11.
37. ^ The Blair Witch Project - Marketing and method.
38. ^ Blair Witch hits the UK. BBC.
39. ^ Did "The Blair Witch Project" fake its online fan base?. Salon.com (1999-07-16).
40. ^ 'Snakes on a Plane': Phenomenon on the Net. NPR (2006-03-26). Retrieved on 2007-03-12.
41. ^ Katayama, Lisa. "2-Channel Gives Japan's Famously Quiet People a Mighty Voice", Wired News, 2007-04-19. Retrieved on 2007-04-20.
42. ^ Silverstein, Jonathon. "Is MySpace.com Really That Popular?", ABC News, 2006-02-22. Retrieved on 2007-06-30.
43. ^ Keefer, Sean. "Myspace: An Internet Phenomenon", Associated Content, 2006-06-21. Retrieved on 2007-06-30.
44. ^ Willard, Nancy E.. "The "MySpace Phenomenon"", Gale Schools. Retrieved on 2007-06-30.
45. ^ DeGregory, Lane. "On the Never-Never Net", St. Petersburg Times, August 7, 2001. Retrieved on 2007-02-22.
46. ^ snopes.com – Food 911
47. ^ thecoaches.com
External links
* Memes on the Internet Article regarding the spread of Internet memes.
* ultimatememedatabase Website about internet memes.
I was a student of Will Hindle's at USF in Tampa during the 1981-82 scholl year. I lived in L.A. and worked in the film industry from 1983 - 1991. I attended the L.A. Film Forum's career retrospective of his films in the mid to late 1980's.
Louis James
=============================================================================
Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.
By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared “zero tolerance of people breaking the law,” even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren’t getting from his administration.
HOTNESS and NON-hotness can CO-EXIST as superpositioned quantum states of
HOTNESS INDETERMINACY...which COLLAPSE into a single state of either hotness
or NON-hotness when you try to compliment her BUTT." - Thugboy, Empowered vol
2, and MAJOR props for using "indeterminacy" instead of "uncertanity".
Heinieberg's Indeterminacy Principle, man.
Nancy O'Dell had lots of important suggestions, almost all of them about looking good. "You always want to be further than the celebrity from the camera, because then you'll look slimmer than them," she said. Also, she told me to focus my energies on getting the most famous, least talkative person there. This too seemed to involve looking good. "For Jack Nicholson, I wore a low-cut top," she told me.
Billy Bush's suggestions were to stay loose, have fun and wear naked-lady cuff links, which he promised to loan me. "They won't see it," he said, "but you'll feel a little dangerous."
my final piece of advice. "It's all about the women. It's a fashion parade," he said. "You can get a good laugh out of the guys because they're all dialed down because they know it's not about them."
The next 2 1/2 hours were a blur. In one corner of the C-shaped entry was a pen packed with attractive, Jewish, twentysomething women with expensive sunglasses -- the publicists. While the print reporters and photographers yelled to get their attention from behind a sun-beaten barricade, the publicists approached our swanky, shaded "Access Hollywood" cabana. I vowed to never hold a notebook again.
The power of the TV camera was even better than I first thought: It makes people pretend that they like you no matter what you say. When I bluntly asked to see the dress of very attractive "House" actress Jennifer Morrison, she said: "I will do whatever you want. I am very obedient." Then she spun around for me. When I nodded approvingly, she gave me her "dirty spin," which involved a lot more wiggling, and then she said, "I'm totally in love with you." If I'd been broadcasting live, I'm pretty sure I could have gotten a lap dance.
(click to embiggen)
6,583 blog reactions to warrenellis.com
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[IMG SXSW 2007, Dorkbot-Austin] While I was uploading my photos, I noticed that one photo from Dorkbot-Austin was getting way more views than the others. Then I found out through my friend Max, via Twitter, that I had been Warren Ellis blogged (again).
* Photo of joamox
3 hours ago in joamox.com/blog · Authority: 1
Boing Boing CRAFT del.icio.us Digg Face Hunter Graffiti Research Lab Instructables Laughing Squid Liam Lynch MAKE Pat Guarino Pixelsumo Revision 3 Rhizome.org Sandy Skoglund This Week in Tech Warren Ellis Waxy.org Links we make money not art Wiley Wiggins
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The Adventures of Giles The Believer The Gideonse Bible The Middletown Expat The Nervous Breakdown The Paris Review theory my culture thiagolife Thirty-Year-Old Secretary Tin House Velvet Mafia Vu d'Ici Warren Ellis WordPress.com WordPress.org Words From The 83rd Dimension
=================
Our findings so far
There are different reasons people use eBay. Some come to browse, buy, sell, and
connect. Others simply come to research or have fun. The testing we've done has
helped us better predict when providing advertising actually helps as part of
these experiences.
Today our strategy is to identify when people are most likely to buy or bid, so
that we don't display ads that are likely to put potential transactions on eBay
at risk. In addition, we're working with our advertising partners to show ads
that are more relevant, so that their presence truly enhances the buying
experience. Analysis to date has shown that this approach to advertising does
not get in the way of people who intend to buy or sell items on the site.
===================================================
bad signal: FREAKANGELS
August 4th, 2007
bad signal
WARREN ELLIS
Have crawled to pub briefly in
defiance of San Diego SARS (now
in Hideous Green Foam stage). So
let’s talk a little bit about
FREAKANGELS.
FREAKANGELS is a free online comic
debuting later this year, by myself
and artist Paul Duffield, via Avatar
Press. It’s an open-ended, longform
story told in the equivalent of
five pages a week. I never got to
do weekly comics, unlike many of
my British peers, so this is fun for
me. We have a shitload of pages
already done, so there’s a big
buffer in place.
=============================
The cultural scholar Dave Hickey said he always felt that the “the ice-white cube,” which became the standard kind of ascetic interior in museums and galleries by the ’60s, could be traced in part right back to NASA.
“I remember thinking at the time that, all of a sudden, we were looking at art in clean rooms like those where the astronauts suit up,” Mr. Hickey, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said in a recent interview.
===================
11) "To Hell with the Stars", Jack McDevitt (Asimov's Dec 1987)
===================
Tales of an accelerated culture.
Stella seems to have encapsulated the entire experience of virtual and real friends that peppers Pattern Recognition. Scolds, doubters, conservatives, the very old, and ingénues tell us the Internet is dangerous because it is overrun with criminals and degenerates. It is merely overrun with people, few of whom are criminals or degenerates, and most of whom do what they do in real life: Tell the truth about themselves.
Once you meet them, it is merely a question of having had the ice broken already.
But Cf. “initial telephone conversations with people you’ve gotten to know well on the Net” that are odd.
==========================================================================
Nicholas Handler
Yale University, Class of 2009
From Glen Ridge, New Jersey
The Posteverything Generation
runnerupNicholas Handler
Nicholas Handler, is a junior at Yale University majoring in history. Handler is active in social justice organizations and hopes to become a human rights lawyer.
I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my iPod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blase college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.
According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it is so …. post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it– naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism–that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism–what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself–is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.
In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11…at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.
And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say ‘here we are, and this is what we demand’? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say ‘we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right’? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.
On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning–a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.
Jameson calls it “Pastiche”–”the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means an author speaking in a style that is not his own– borrowing a voice and continuing to use it until the words lose all meaning and the chaos that is real life sets in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it seems to lack purpose or direction. For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old cliches of social change and moral outrage–a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language–the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s what young people do.
But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution? How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like moveon.org. It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.
College as America once knew it–as an incubator of radical social change– is coming to an end. To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s– it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.
==================================================================================
Reason #15 Addendum: Clichépalooza!
By Sean Lindsay
Now that you’ve begun to accept that you’re a lazy, plagiarising fanfic writer, let’s look at some of the different forms of cliché that you frequently abuse, and how you can identify them — so you can plainly see that your fiction is merely a string of old, stolen ideas held together with conjunctions.
There are clichéd words: mostly adjectives and adverbs, such as “grizzled” (usually followed by “detective”), pretty much any word that ends in -ly, and the queen of all clichéd words, “quirky”. Let me tell you now, everyone is quirky when they think no-one’s looking (for example, I find delight in ripping random pages out of books in bookstores). Resorting to using “quirky” to describe a character is a stop writing moment.
There are a couple of easy ways to spot clichéd words in your writing:
* Words that you frequently read in fiction but almost never hear anyone use in everyday speech (Do you know anyone who would appreciate being called “grizzled”?)
* Adjectives/adverbs that appear more than three times in your entire writing output
There are the clichéd phrases: ”to all intents and porpoises”, “lies, damned lies and goddamn awful fiction”, or “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw clichés”. They’re often tired similes and metaphors that no longer inspire comparative thought (”a drop in the bucket”). Others are elegant variations: using five words where one would suffice (”in the fullness of time” instead of “eventually”). Still others are little more than punctuation — think about how many writers use “let’s get out of here” because they can’t figure out how to end a scene. Even synopses have their own clichés, such as “and then they”, “it turns out” and “little did they know”.
You can determine quite simply if a particular phrase is a cliché: ask yourself if you’ve ever read those words in that exact sequence before. If you’re not sure, Google it. A few hits might be coincidence, but more than ten and you might as well contact the authors of those pages to form a bad writers’ support group.
There are clichéd characters: the bitter (”grizzled”) detective with a secret that explains his bitterness and his limp, chasing the preternaturally intelligent serial killer with the absurdly complex and predictable psychopathology who appeared as a minor character on page 50; the self-aware anthropomorphic robot who is fascinated by or yearns to be a chemically-imbalanced talking meat-bag; the school bully with latent homosexuality who winds up as a twice-divorced fry cook; the hooker who inexplicably does something nice for someone without expecting so much as a bag of crack and a shot of penicillin in return; the emotionally disconnected elf (or, indeed, any ‘elf’); the young agricultural worker who it is prophesied will rise up to save the kingdom from the tyranny of market forces; or pretty much every supporting character in your fiction that you had to make ”quirky”.
You probably know who the clichéd characters are in your fiction, because you remember the original stories they come from. You didn’t really try to hide the similarity, because although you’re ostensibly writing a WWII-era spy thriller, subconsciously you really want people to figure out it’s thinly-veiled Star Wars fanfic.
There are clichéd plots and plot elements: that one crucial forensic clue the oafish police overlooked, that the preternaturally observant amateur detective finds on page 87 but only tells you about on page 279; the paradox of travelling back in time just to explain the time-travel paradox to the one smart person in the primitive tribe who conveniently learns to speak English fluently in less than a chapter; the mysterious object imbued with the mysterious power to to remain mysterious, that must be found/rescued/destroyed at any cost but never adequately explained to anyone; and dear God, any story that is driven by, makes reference to, or includes a recipe for, a “prophecy”.
How do you find the clichéd plot elements in your writing? That’s easy. Look at page one. Or, more likely, page 27, where your plot actually starts.
There are also clichéd writing careers: there’s the sophomore slump, where the author spent six years writing their first novel, then the publisher wants a follow-up in eight months; the runaway bestseller, where the author can’t think of any story that will live up to the surprise hit of their last novel; the trend chaser, where the writer keeps writing knockoffs of current hits, hoping that the money train will hit their house when it derails; and the all-time number one, the imawriterdammit, which (roughly translated) means the person who claims all the social benefits of being a writer because they once scribbled down an idea for a story combining two clichés they saw on different episodes of The A-Team.
For those who genuinely fear they have been unwittingly infested with clichés, here are some external resources which have selectively quoted the worst parts of your own writing for you:
* Jessica Morrell, at one of the many websites called The Writing Life, has a handy list of clichéd phrases.
* TheInfo.org has an even more handy online cliché finder.
* John VanSickle, with the help of dozens of generous nerds, has compiled a spectacularly detailed and redundantly-named Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés. If you have two or more of these clichés in one story, you’re banned from even reading SF.
* Kathy Pulver and J.S. Burke risked a lawsuit with the Grand List of Fantasy Clichés and Amethyst Angel tries the humility defense with the Not-So-Grand List of Overused Fantasy Clichés.
* Strange Horizons provides a list of Horror Stories [They’ve] Seen Too Often.
* If you want to kill the clichés almost as they occur, check out Lake Superior State University’s annual Banished Words (and phrases) list.
* And the acme of all cliché lists, the 3,300+ strong Cliché Finder. For random demotivation, visit 10 Random Clichés often.
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Entries That May Be Related
* The Reasons
* Poll: The Worst Cliché
* Interview: Mike Toot on NaNoWriMo
* Interview: Daniel Hatadi on NaNoWriMo
* Clichépalooza: Now Taking Requests
9 Comments
1.
Nathan Bransford:
This post is better than an object protected by a secret organization concealing the existence of something that would change the world if it were exposed.
July 26th, 2007 at 3:57 am
2.
Niteowl:
This post is better than the plucky upstart with natural talent for a game/sport/fighting technique who falls by hubris but finds a cranky wonk of a mentor to help him realize that it was the love of the game/sport fighting technique that gave him all his power in the first place.
This is also better than the gifted warrior who leads his army to countless victories yet only yearns for the comfort of a nice plot of farm land, and a homestead to raise his children.
July 26th, 2007 at 5:31 am
3.
Paul Riddell:
This post is better than the science fiction magazine editor who alternates between seeking the one comic he needs to finish his collection and sleeping with a succession of models who still fuck him after seeing his action figure collection.
Oh, wait. We were talking “cliches”, not “desperate prayers”, weren’t we? Well, that, like the ignorant farmboy who saves Everything, is an example of cliche in fiction and delusion in real life.
July 26th, 2007 at 6:03 am
4.
Paul Riddell:
And I almost forgot: this post is better than the presumed good guy who’d been planning to betray his friends to the bad guys from the beginning, but who has a change of heart and sacrifices his life to give the good guys the one break they desperately need.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
5.
TV Chick:
This post is better than a talented team of forensic experts identifying the single carpet fiber that leads a killer to justice.
I was so inspired, I wrote up a short list of TV cliches in my Writing for TV blog.
www.writingfortv.blogspot.com.
July 28th, 2007 at 11:54 am
6.
Sean Lindsay:
TV Chick, you’ve nailed at least a couple of Reasons in your list.
July 28th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
7.
sex scenes at starbucks:
This post is better than a sexy, guilt-ridden vampire.
July 29th, 2007 at 12:52 am
8.
cerebral paulsy:
This post is better than the twenty something columbia univ. mfa grad. in creative writing having his first novel published about a gay punkie junkie fifteen-year-old screwing his best friend the in the back of a mini-van while thinking about his stepfather raping him on the barbie doll strewn floor of his bedroom to the sounds of alice cooper and getting a glowing blurb from Dennis Cooper.
July 29th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
9.
Annie the Superfast Reader:
This post is better than the plucky redheaded heroine who stamps her feet when told she’ll have to sleep on the ground because her kingdom’s been overrun by raping villains.
================================================================================
Language
Plus ça change? Not quite
Aug 9th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Clichés are always tired. Increasingly, they are also wrong
Illustration by Peter Schrank
TECHNOLOGY constantly overtakes language. Recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary have included po-faced entries for “Google” (the verb), “wiki” and “mash-up”. But most clichés are stubbornly indifferent to such concerns. Indeed, they often act as a linguistic fossil record, preserving objects and behaviour that have long since fallen into petrified obsolescence. Industrious sorts no longer burn the midnight oil. Flashes in the pan are common even if the flintlock muskets that gave rise to them are museum pieces. Colours are still nailed to masts, metal though they now usually are.
In a technological age ever more clichés are being untethered from their origins in this way. People write out plenty of metaphorical cheques, whether blank or bouncing. Many of them are to be found in the post, but fewer in real life (some shops no longer accept them). There is no need to keep your cards close to your chest, or indeed an ace up your sleeve, when so much gambling happens online. Thanks to reviews, awards and celebrity book-club stickers, you can in fact judge a book by its cover. If you carry a mobile phone, write e-mail or post entries on MySpace, being out of sight does not mean being out of mind. And in the age of the iPod, no one can be accused of being unable to carry a tune.
Old assumptions are stranded by other changes too. Currencies fluctuate: the dollar looks less than almighty, at least for the moment. Populations evolve: Tom, Dick and Harry make for an unrepresentative trio of everymen today; Kevin, Chloe and Muhammad would be more accurate. Trade patterns shift: turning down all the tea in China would weigh heavily, to be sure, but the European Union is more impressed by the Chinese production of bras and dressing-gowns. Today's coast is never clear but always strewn with plastic and other detritus. Rare is the athlete who can radiate Olympian calm at a modern-day Olympic games.
Earnest environmental concerns are also starting to flip well-worn phrases on their heads. Putting new wine into old bottles is now to be applauded. Where it was once desirable to trail clouds of glory, they now require emissions credits. Regulators are another threat. Hunting-grounds, happy or not, are fewer in number. Recently shelved plans by the European Commission to get rid of Britain's imperial measures endangered all manner of activities, from exacting a pound of flesh, inching forward and feeling ten feet tall to being miles away.
Being archaic does not always make a cliché redundant. People still jump on bandwagons, read the riot act, burn the candle at both ends and keep irons in fires. As long as its meaning is clear, a saying can be both historic and current.
The trouble comes when technology robs a cliché of its substance as well as its form. When love fades, the jilted may seek consolation in the thought that there are plenty more fish in the sea. But there aren't: the oceans have been plundered. “For everything there is a season” is a phrase with a ring of majestic certainty. But with air-freighted fruit and genetically modified veg, it too is wrong. And if once it was believed that the camera never lied, PhotoShop should have taught that the lens bends the truth as effortlessly as it bends light itself. As for rocket science, not long ago it was held up as the paragon of baffling complexity. Now, as tourists hurtle into space and almost every failed state seems poised to go ballistic, rocket science seems less sophisticated. Proud owners of silicon implants scoff at the notion that beauty is only skin-deep. Among the transgendered, Bob is as likely to be your auntie as your uncle.
The moral of it all? Clichés just aren't what they used to be.
Pages in category "Internet memes"
There are 196 pages in this section of this category.
* List of Internet phenomena
* Internet meme
* Talk:List of Internet phenomena/old
3
* 300-page iPhone bill
8
* 801-chan
A
* AACS encryption key controversy
* Admiral Ackbar
* All your base are belong to us
* Alyssa Alano
* The Americans (commentary)
* Anabukinchan
* Tuan Anh
* Anime music video
* Animutation
* Ate my balls
* Brian Atene
* Atlanta Nights
B
* B3ta
* Back Dorm Boys
* Backbone cabal
* Bad Day (Internet meme)
* Bad Times (computer virus hoax)
* Badger Badger Badger
* Bananaphone
* Banhammer
* Barrel roll
* Bert is Evil
* Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
* Bonsai Kitten
* Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out
* Brooke Brodack
* Gary Brolsma
* The Burger King
* The Bus Uncle
C
* CD-i games based on The Legend of Zelda series
* Call on Me (Eric Prydz song)
* Canon Rock (song)
* Captain Obvious
* Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager
* Chaos cloud
* Chocolate Rain
* Chuck Norris Facts
* Claire Swire e-mail
* Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
* Contagious media
* Bill Cosby
* Crazy Frog
D
* John Daker
* Dance Monkeyboy
* Dancing Banana
* Dancing baby
* Daniel Lyons
* Densha Otoko
* Diary of an Unborn Child
* Dick in a Box
* Diet Coke and Mentos eruption
* Ding Dong Song
* Disrobics
* Division by zero
* Dog poop girl
* Domo-kun
* Dopefish
* Dr. Tran
* Dschinghis Khan
* Dumb laws
D cont.
* Dysfunctional Family Circus
E
* Edgar's fall
* Emoticon
* Eric Conveys an Emotion
* Sid Eudy
* Eul-Yong Ta
* Every time you masturbate... God kills a kitten
* Evolution of Dance
* Exploding whale
F
* Fdtv
* Fei hua qing han
* Fensler Films
* Eric Fensler
* Vincent Ferrari
* First post
* Flash mob
* Flash-salsa
* Flashback (Flash animation)
* Flea Market Montgomery
* Flying Spaghetti Monster
* Fofudja
* Free Hugs Campaign
* The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
* Front Deutscher Äpfel
G
* Gay Fuel
* Gert Jonnys
* Get Your War On
* Giant Enemy Crab
* Lasse Gjertsen
* Gnomes (South Park episode)
* Goatse.cx
* Goodtimes virus
* Gorge of Eternal Peril
* Gröûp X
* Anton Maiden
H
* The Hampster Dance
* Happy Tree Friends
* Hare Hare Yukai
* Hatten är din
* HeadOn
* Helicopter Shark
* Hipster PDA
* Hitch50.com
* Homestar Runner
* Homokaasu
* Hong Kong 97
* Honor system virus
* Hooked on a Feeling
* Hopkin Green Frog
* Hot Hot Hot (meme)
* Hott4Hill
* How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?
* How to Kill a Mockingbird
* Hurra Torpedo
I
* I Am Not Canadian
* I Got a Crush... on Obama
* IPhree
* Ievan Polkka
* Gendo Ikari
* Impossible is Nothing (video résumé)
* Intelligent falling
* Internet slang
J
* Leeroy Jenkins
* Jesusland map
* JibJab
* John West Salmon
J cont.
* The Juggernaut Bitch!!
K
* KateModern
* Krzysztof Kononowicz
* Kuso Miso Technique
L
* LOL
* Lazy Sunday
* Leonidas I
* Line Rider
* List of common emoticons
* List of snowclones
* Little Superstar
* Loituma Girl
* Lolcat
* London Underground anagram map
* Lonelygirl15
* Lootie
* Lulu and Junior
* Lynne & Tessa
M
* MacKenzieHeartsu
* Dennis Madalone
* Mahir Çağrı
* Man-Faye
* ManBeef
* Matrix ping pong
* MeAnda - Don
* Megyeri Bridge
* Meme
* Memesphere
* Memetracker
* Microbroadcasting
* Miko Miko Nurse
* MilkandCookies
* Moe anthropomorphism
* More cowbell
* Germano Mosconi
* Moskau (Dschinghis Khan song)
* Mr. Bergis prank calls
* Mike "Nug" Nahrgang
* My Box in a Box
N
* Naked News
* Napster Bad!
* Narn Bat Squad
* Nevada-tan
* Never Gonna Give You Up
* Ninja Burger
* Ninja Spirit (video series)
* Noah Kalina
* Numa Numa
O
* O RLY?
* OS-tan
* Olympic Torch (virus hoax)
* Online quizzes
* Oolong (rabbit)
P
* Mr. Pants
* Jeffrey Pelehac
* Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006
* Pirates versus Ninjas
* Political Google bombs in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election
* PopoZão
* Porkbusters
* Preved
* Pwn
R
* Rainbow (TV series)
* Raw Tea
* Re-cut trailer
* Real Life Simpsons Intro
* Real Ultimate Power
* Jack Rebney
* Reznor's Edge
* Rosie Reid
* Rule 6
S
* SNL Digital Shorts
* Series of tubes
* Shakeel Bhat
* The Skeletor Show
* Smash Our Stuff
* John Smeaton (baggage handler)
* Smosh
* The Smurfs and communism
* Snakes on a Plane
* Snowclone
* Someecards
* Songvid
* Sorry Everybody
* Soy Sauce Warrior Kikkoman
* The Spirit of Christmas
* Spongmonkey
* Star Wars kid
* Sugar Bush Squirrel
* Liam Kyle Sullivan
* Superdickery
T
* Tailrank.com
* Tammy sex video scandal
T cont.
* Tanasinn
* Talk:Ted Stevens
* Terrible Secret of Space
* The Dildo Song
* The End of the World (animation)
* The Hands Resist Him
* The Shooting (Digital Short)
* The Spirit of Truth
* The goggles, they do nothing
* The last page of the Internet
* Tokyo Breakfast
* Tourist guy
* The Truth Laid Bear
* Tunak Tunak Tun
* Typoglycemia
U
* Über
* Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
* Undefeatable
* University of Florida Taser incident
* User:Andy29/Sandbox/Deleted/Bunchies
* User:Bronzie/Bunchies
* User:Kosmonaut/IM IN UR BASE KILLIN UR D00DZ
* User:Mathiastck/Unitarian Jihad
V
* Vacanti mouse
* The Very Secret Diaries
* Video Game Pianist
* Video clip
* Viral video
W
* W2pi
W cont.
* WDAZ-TV
* Wee Shu Min elitism scandal
* Weebl's Stuff
* Weebl's cartoons
* What Is Love (song)
* What What (In the Butt)
* When I was your age, Pluto was a Planet
* Whogasm
* Will It Blend?
* Carson Williams
X
* Xianxingzhe
* Xiao Xiao
Y
* User:Canada-kawaii/Archive2
* YTMND
* Yacht Rock
* Dawn Yang
* Yasuri Yamileth
* Yatta
* Yinchuan
* You Know What They Say, The More The Merrier!
* You're with me, leather
* YouTube celebrities
* Zhu Yu (artist)
Z
* Zinedine Zidane
* Zladko Vladcik
* Zombie walk
* Tay Zonday
List of Internet phenomena is a partial list of representative phenomena specific to Internet, such as Internet memes. Only a sampling of Internet phenomena that have achieved recognition in contexts wider than that of the Internet, such as coverage in the mainstream media, are present here.
Revisions and sourced additions are welcome
Contents
[hide]
* 1 People
* 2 Bands
* 3 Games
* 4 Videos
* 5 Animation-based
* 6 Images
* 7 Films
* 8 Web sites
o 8.1 Personal sites
* 9 Audio
* 10 See also
* 11 References
* 12 External links
People
* Chris Crocker — Semi-famous over the last year for his YouTube v-log postings, Chris' world-wide fame exploded after a video he made in support of Britney Spears became viral email and landed him on CNN, Howard Stern, ABC and numerous other shows.[1]
* Star Wars kid — A Québécois teenager became known as the "Star Wars Kid" after a video appeared on the Internet showing him swinging a golf ball retriever as if it were a lightsaber. Many parodies of the video were made and distributed through video sharing sites, and peer-to-peer sharing programs like Kazaa.[2]
* The Tourist Guy — An Internet phenomenon consisting of a photograph of a tourist that has appeared in many edited pictures after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
* Chuck Norris facts — Archetypal joke, parodying the action-film actor as the ultimate hard man with incredible attributes.[3]
* The Bus Uncle — As the name suggests, the incident took place on a bus. A Hong Kong middle-aged man reacted furiously after the young man seated behind him tapped his shoulder and asked him to lower his voice while speaking on the phone. His outburst spawned catchphrases in Hong Kong and Chinese communities around the world.[4]
* Christopher Walken — The prolific actor has long been a cult icon, but this fame culminated in 2006 with a faux campaign for President of the United States apparently perpetrated by members of a message board. The phenomenon may have been related to Walken's portrayal of a U.S. Senator with presidental ambitions in Wedding Crashers and his role in Man of the Year, released several months after the phenomenon, as the man who pushes Robin Williams' comedian character to run for president.[5]
Bands
* OK Go — An American rock band whose video for the single "Here It Goes Again" featured the band members performing an elaborate dance on treadmills. The video was taken in one shot. It has been viewed a total of 21 million times on YouTube. This internet success led them to be featured on The Colbert Report and the video won the 2006 Grammy for Best Short-Form Music Video.[6]
* Hurra Torpedo — A Norwegian band that became part of a viral ad campaign by going on a coast to coast tour in the US that was paid for by Ford in order to promote the Ford Fusion car. As part of the ad campaign, a mockumentary movie called "The Crushing Blow" is being made. By the end of November 2005 a clip from The Crushing Blow was viewed more than 500,000 times in a couple of days from the web site iFilm.[7]
* Lemon Demon — A one-man band by Neil Cicierega, most famous for Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (see below). Cicierega's "Hyakugojyuuichi" animutation was a web animation hit.[8] Neil is also the creator of the popular two series hit Potter Puppet Pals.
* JerryC — Taiwanese guitarist and composer who wrote "Canon Rock", a rock arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D.[9]
* Jeong-Hyun Lim (a.k.a. funtwo) — Guitar player from South Korea, who first played JerryC's Canon Rock and post on YouTube.[10]
* Gröûp X — Faux Arabian rock band, who first became popular when their song, 'Mario Twins' was made into a Flash video. Many other songs followed suit, but none of the videos were actually made by Group X.[11]
Games
* All Your Base Are Belong To Us — Engrish from the opening cut scene of the video game Zero Wing, which has become a catchphrase, inspiring videos and other derivative works.[12]
* Leeroy Jenkins — A World Of Warcraft player charges into a high-level dungeon with a distinctive cry of "Leeeeeeeerooooy... Jeeenkins!", ruining the meticulous attack plans of his group and getting them all killed.[13]
* Line Rider — A Flash game where the player draws lines that act as ramps and hills for a small rider on a sled.[14]
Videos
* Thriller performed by prison inmates in the Philippines — Features a recreation of Michael Jackson's hit music video, performed by prison inmates.[15]
* Boom goes the dynamite — Brian Collins, a nervous and extremely awkward sports anchor attempts to call highlights for his college's news show, fumbling through most of the segment until finally uttering this now-famous catch phrase.[16]
* Brokeback Mountain parodies — The movie Brokeback Mountain inspired many online parody trailers and has since been removed from the site.[17]
* Impossible Is Nothing — An ambitious video resume by Yale student Aleksey Vayner.[18]
* Numa Numa — Gary Brolsma sings along to the Romanian language dance song "Dragostea din tei" by O-Zone.[19]
* Evolution of Dance — A six minute video showing Judson Laipply performing various popular dances to music ranging from the early 1950s to present day. The video currently has over 57 million views on Youtube, ranking it as the most viewed video of all time on Youtube.
* "Dramatic Prairie Dog" (also "Dramatic Chipmunk", or "Drama Hog") — A brief GIF turned into a video from the website 4chan.org of a standing prairie dog turning its head suddenly toward the camera, with a quick zoom-in on its face. The clip was excerpted from an 2001 appearance by J-pop group MiniMoni on the Japanese TV show Hello! Morning.[20][21] Various spoofs have been made of the prairie dog in different situations.[22]
* Chocolate Rain — Original composition from the Minnesota singer and songwriter Tay Zonday, who has been noted for his unusually deep voice and "inimitable style."[23]
* "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" — phrase made famous from the video of the University of Florida Taser incident involving student Andrew Meyer at a campus talk by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.[24]
Animation-based
* Badger Badger Badger — A Flash animation looping while playing repeatedly "Badger badger badger...".
* Dancing baby — A 3D-rendered dancing baby first appeared in 1997 by the creators of 3-D Studio Max, and became something of a late-'90s cultural icon, featured many times in the TV show Ally McBeal.[25]
* Hampster Dance — A page filled with animated GIFs of hamsters dancing, linking to other animated pages. It spawned a fictional band complete with its own CD album release.[25]
* Loituma Girl (also known as Leekspin)[26]
* Peanut Butter Jelly Time — A Flash animation that emerged in the early 2000s featuring the Dancing Banana and a song (based upon a song of the same name recorded by the Buckwheat Boyz). It was referenced in an episode of the TV series Family Guy. [27]
* Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny — A flash animation of a battle royale between many notable characters from fact and fiction, based on one of Lemon Demon's songs.[28]
Images
* "Little Fatty" — Beginning in 2003, a Chinese high school student from Shanghai had his face superimposed onto various other images, creating an Internet fad.[29][30]
* "Lootie" is an Associated Press photo taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, under the caption "A looter carries a bucket of beer out of a grocery store in New Orleans..."[31] The picture features a smiling, African-American male in waist deep waters carrying a large plastic tub of bottles of beer. Many Photoshop variants of the original were created.[32][33]
* The Saugeen Stripper — An 18-year-old female resident of Saugeen-Maitland Hall at the University of Western Ontario performed a striptease at a birthday party, and dozens of digital images of the party ended up on the Internet. The incident briefly attracted widespread media attention and was the subject of articles by a number of Canadian and American media outlets. The controversy sparked a discussion about just how much control that institutions of higher learning have over what goes on in their residences.[34]
* Goatse.cx — A website that featured a shock image called hello.jpg.[35]
* The "O RLY?" Owl — An owl originally posted on the Something Awful forums but later Photoshopped by an anonymous user on 4chan's random board[citation needed]
* lolcats — image macros featuring cats with humorous captions, typically in netspeak or leetspeak. [36]
* Bert is Evil — A satirical website stating Bert of Sesame Street is the root of many evils. A juxtaposition of Bert and Osama Bin Laden later entered a real poster in a Bangladesh protest.
Films
* The Blair Witch Project — The first film to notably use the internet for astroturfing, its makers spread rumors the material they shot was authentic and that the three protagonists really disappeared in Burkittsville, Maryland, which caused problems for the police department of Frederick County.[37] In addition, many websites began to feature "stolen" clips of the film later discovered to be supplied by Artisan and the filmmakers, as well as "planted" fake reviews of the film, taking pains to disguise their work through intentional spelling mistakes and poor Web design.[38] Many other filmmakers and studios accused the producers of creating a fake fan buzz to generate a real one, stating "That was an organized effort. What happened is that they tricked the press."[39]
* Snakes on a Plane — This 2006 film starring Samuel L. Jackson became an Internet phenomenon due to the film's title and premise a year before its planned release, and before any promotional material was released. Producers of the film responded to the Internet buzz by adding several scenes which catered to the fans.[40]
* 300 - This 2007 film featuring Gerard Butler inspired a meme involving digitally altering photos by juxtaposing the face of Leonidas over the face of another person, often accompanied with a (occasionally somewhat modified) quote from the film. Examples of this can be found at http://community.livejournal.com/randompictures/2209617.html?page=1 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZBA0SKmQy8 .
Web sites
* 2channel — A Japanese Internet forum (the largest in the world). The site has significant influence on Japanese culture and popular opinion.[41]
* MySpace — One of the most popular worldwide social networking websites, which offers an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos.[42][43][44]
* Facebook - A social networking website
* Real Ultimate Power — Upon which a fictional 13 year old boy obsesses about ninjas.
* YouTube — A popular website where people can view videos submitted by users.
* 4chan — The English equivalent to Futaba Channel, responsible for creating many popular images and phrases in use on the Internet.
Personal sites
* Mahir Çağrı (i kiss you) — A resident of İzmir, Turkey, Çağrı became an Internet celebrity in 1999, when his picture-laden homepage, which exclaimed in broken English his love of the accordion and travel, was visited by millions and spawned numerous fansites and parodies, one featured on Fox's MADtv (season 4, episode 20).[25]
* Randy Constan — He posted pictures of himself on his website wearing self-made Peter Pan costumes.[45]
Audio
* I Want My Western Barbecue Burger! — An irate woman places a 9-1-1 call demanding the police enter a Laguna Niguel, California-area Burger King and force the employees to make her and her kids a "Western Barbecue Burger".[46][47]
See also
* Meme — A unit of cultural information that propagates from one mind to another as a theoretical unit of cultural evolution and diffusion.
References
1. ^ Tear-stained video plea makes YouTube vlogger an Internet rock star. MSNBC (2007-09-13). Retrieved on 2007-09-13.
2. ^ Star Wars Kid is top viral video. BBC News (2006-11-27). Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
3. ^ Keegan, Rebecca Winters. "People", Time, 20 March 2006. Retrieved on 2006-06-20.
4. ^ Grumpy man on a bus becomes star of the internet. Guardian Unlimited (2006-05-26). Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
5. ^ http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-5833740-7.html
6. ^ Maney, Kevin, Blend of old, new media launched OK Go,
7. ^ Reinartz, Joe, What Up, Torpedo?,
8. ^ Salon.com, All hail Neil Cicierega, April 26, 2001
9. ^ Heffernan, Virginia, Web Guitar Wizard Revealed at Last,
10. ^ Scotsman.com, It's only baroque'n'roll... a star is born on the web,
11. ^ *Merz "Group X - Taking Over the World One Flash Video at a Time", Associated Content, May 2, 2007. Accessed July 5, 2007.
12. ^ Benner, Jeffrey (2001-02-23). When Gamer Humor Attacks. Retrieved on 2006-05-15.
13. ^ Pearson, Craig. "The Ballad of Leeroy Jenkins", PC Gamer UK, August 2005.
14. ^ Ressner, Jeffrey, The Newest Time Waster: Line Rider,
15. ^ "Cebu inmates going for another YouTube hit", GMA NEWS.TV, 2007-08-12. Retrieved on 2007-08-17.
16. ^ CBS Broadcasting Inc, Boom Goes The Dynamite,
17. ^ Heffernan, Virginia, CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Brokeback Spoofs: Tough Guys Unmasked,
18. ^ Ben McGrath. "Aleksey the Great", The New Yorker, October 23, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-07-05.
19. ^ "Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa", The New York Times, 2005-02-26. Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
20. ^ BREAKING: Dramatic Chipmunk - From Japanese TV Show Hello! Morning (2007-06-23). Retrieved on 2007-07-04.
21. ^ Langdon Alger (2007-06-24). Origin of the "Chipmunk" Clip. Retrieved on 2007-07-04.
22. ^ Durrett, Mike, The Dramatic Prairie Dog - Spoofs Collection,
23. ^ Lowe, David, Web crooner with 3m fans,
24. ^ Stirland, Sarah Lai, "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" Jolts the Web,
25. ^ a b c Wood, Molly (2005-07-15). Top 10 Web Fads. CNET. Retrieved on 2007-03-12.
26. ^ Werman, Marco (2006-08-18). Global Hit (radio). The World. Public Radio International. Retrieved on 2006-08-18.
27. ^ Ermann, Jeff. "New Chorus Lines; As Old-Time Chatter Disappears, Centennial Creates Its Own", The Washington Post, 2006-05-11.
28. ^ Copy, paste, animate. The Toronto Star.
29. ^ Clifford Coonan. "The new cultural revolution: How Little Fatty made it big", the Independent, November 16, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
30. ^ Jane Macartney. "A fat chance of saving face", the Times online, November 22, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-02-21.
31. ^ THE DECATUR DAILY, Big Easy looters help themselves,
32. ^ Randall, Vernellia R.. The Racism of "Lootie". Retrieved on 2007-07-05.
33. ^ David P. Mikkelson; Barbara Mikkelson (September 19, 2005). Heineken Beer. Snopes. Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
34. ^ "Western Stripteaser On Internet", A-Channel News. Retrieved on 2007-02-23.
35. ^ Stewart Kirkpatrick. "Lazy Guide to Net Culture: NSFW", Scotsman.com News, 2004-06-09. Retrieved on 2007-03-15.
36. ^ Craig Wood. "Anatomy of a Viral Web Phenomenon", CraigsBlog.com, 2007-06-11. Retrieved on 2007-06-11.
37. ^ The Blair Witch Project - Marketing and method.
38. ^ Blair Witch hits the UK. BBC.
39. ^ Did "The Blair Witch Project" fake its online fan base?. Salon.com (1999-07-16).
40. ^ 'Snakes on a Plane': Phenomenon on the Net. NPR (2006-03-26). Retrieved on 2007-03-12.
41. ^ Katayama, Lisa. "2-Channel Gives Japan's Famously Quiet People a Mighty Voice", Wired News, 2007-04-19. Retrieved on 2007-04-20.
42. ^ Silverstein, Jonathon. "Is MySpace.com Really That Popular?", ABC News, 2006-02-22. Retrieved on 2007-06-30.
43. ^ Keefer, Sean. "Myspace: An Internet Phenomenon", Associated Content, 2006-06-21. Retrieved on 2007-06-30.
44. ^ Willard, Nancy E.. "The "MySpace Phenomenon"", Gale Schools. Retrieved on 2007-06-30.
45. ^ DeGregory, Lane. "On the Never-Never Net", St. Petersburg Times, August 7, 2001. Retrieved on 2007-02-22.
46. ^ snopes.com – Food 911
47. ^ thecoaches.com
External links
* Memes on the Internet Article regarding the spread of Internet memes.
* ultimatememedatabase Website about internet memes.
I was a student of Will Hindle's at USF in Tampa during the 1981-82 scholl year. I lived in L.A. and worked in the film industry from 1983 - 1991. I attended the L.A. Film Forum's career retrospective of his films in the mid to late 1980's.
Louis James
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Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.
By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared “zero tolerance of people breaking the law,” even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren’t getting from his administration.
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