Artist. Reader. Writer. Amateur Animator. Crazy Crafter. Sucked into TG. Deep in Anime Sports Hell. Nature Flight on FR. Etc, etc. Not TG:re spoiler free.
2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense - if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day - is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.
That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.
The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.
This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS.
“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”
Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera - information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application - and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.
And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”
This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea - a meme - can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”
“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”
This is the most solid explanation of our decade I have ever heard.
Oh my god
Just to add onto that, our childhood wasn’t even technology based. We grew up knowing of chalk, skateboards, jump rope, street hockey, playgrounds, butterfly collecting, etc. Slowly technology took over our lives and now there are hardly kids playing outside in the summer. We can clearly remember our childhood as it was and now we can see the clear line between it. We were the generation right smack in the middle of it all. Our parents were of non-tech and our children/young siblings will be all tech.
Not to mention, ours was the last generation that grew up with all those bright promises of “work hard, go to college, and you’ll have a successful life,” only to find those hopes abruptly dashed when the housing bubble burst. Milliennials have grown up expecting that disappointment, because for them, the problem has been there since Day One.
So 90s kids aren’t just nostalgic…we’re BITTER. And we ache for those days when we could still think that the world was boundless and full of the opportunities we were promised since the first day of kindergarten.
Every time someone adds to this i have too reblog.
This is all true. As much as I love technology and as much as it has changed my life and as much as I would not want to go back to the days before The Internets, there is a lot about my childhood that I miss. But mostly I’m just pissed off because. You see. I was there to WATCH people like my parents (born at the end of the boomer generation) raise two kids in a modest but lovely house with a yard and a dog without much financial trouble on ONE income from a state job (my dad’s). My mom supported my dad financially through law school and they were poor as hell back then, but after he got his job which is EXACTLY THE SAME JOB I HAVE NOW, he was pretty quickly able to buy a house and she was able to be a stay at home mom.
And meanwhile I’m like well uh half my net income every month goes to pay the rent in an apartment and my girlfriend has to also have a job and she pays for our food and it’s hard for me to imagine buying a house anytime soon because my office’s salaries have not been raised commensurate with the cost of living over the years. I will probably be in apartments all my life and while my life isn’t BAD by a long shot, it is not at all what I was promised by the 90s. I am privileged, and I KNOW THAT, and it is STILL not what I was promised by my parents’ generation. And then I think about all the kids in my generation and younger who have it or will have it way worse than me (I have no student debt but my brother sure does for example!!!) and I am even MORE BITTER than EVER BEFORE. I just don’t know how we’re all expected to make it in this world, and it’s a huge difference from the “you can do anything!” mantra we all learned.
Is it any wonder why “90s kids” view our childhood years of cartoons and the Disney Renaissance and weird huge phones and all that strange candy and slap bracelets and whatnot with rose colored glasses?
WARNING: This post includes a LOT of photos and content so it may load slowly. All the photos together is roughly 120 MB so far (and growing). Please be on wifi connection or unlimited data if you want to read on.
First of all, I am the type of person who likes to see exactly what I would be getting when I buy something, so hopefully this post will encourage more people to purchase the VIP package and support Cheritz. While I initially debated on whether or not to get this, I can say I am quite satisfied and think the VIP box is really worth it!! I would buy another one just to collect it since I destroyed all the books in order to get better quality scans LOL. It is definitely a great collector’s item and having only the photos doesn’t do it justice.
There is a lot of canon content in here and I believe sharing it will help inspire fans to create more content for the community, so this is for you guys!
I intentionally made the quality low enough to not be able to be reprinted for commercial use so please do not ask for the high resolution files, just use these as reference material to help you write / create / draw more MM and spread the love *w*
DEEP ROUTE BOYS GIVEAWAY! Giving away both official and fanmade MM Merch. Scroll to bottom of post to see how to enter.
