this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Memes

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

This one is also nice and true until today

https://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/3428/103-Year-Old-Comic-Describes-What-Would-Happen-If-Pocket-Telephones-Are-Invented

Same with Musk's "revolutionary" Hyperloop, nothing new with the same people

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

truly amazing meme

thanks!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Pocket phone prediction is more spot on than the cartoonist themselves realized, Amish men got shunned because of the emergency alert test going off

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Their hyper loop drawing is missing the Costco tube communication sound, a nice "thoonk!" Noise.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The thing he didn't foresee was the ability to turn the phone on silent mode.

We can put it on silent,, but that doesn't mean everybody does when they should!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The atmospheric railway! Patent US 21,652, system for turning rats into viscera.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's not a political cartoon.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think that OP's sentiment is more against gatekeeping what a meme is. Like if this is a meme, than political cartoons are too

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Defining words properly isn't gatekeeping, it's categorization.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well, defining words narrowly is pretty much the definition of gatekeeping. I hope you're not gatekeeping what gatekeeping means?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You aren't a real gatekeeper if you haven't gatekept gatekeeping before

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ah yes, no true gatekeeper.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Defining things properly isn't gatekeeping. You said narrow. I didn't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But who decides what the proper definition is? Your proper definition is for me a narrow if it doesn't take into account the common usage. The definition of meme is widening. Cope with it.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not only is it a great origin, that's a fantastic article on it

Thank you so much for sharing

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Literally all the things here including comments are memes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Correct

So basically what I'm saying is that there's a lot of people gatekeeping what a meme is without understanding what a meme is

Or if they're referring to the first of the definitions in the screenshot I shared, not understanding that different people can find things humorous

The biggest meme of all is our spoken languages

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

People no longer understand what meme means. Memes are old as time. Stories, jokes, funny images. Pretty much every form of information can be a meme.

So, yes, this is a slightly older meme.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Eh, what "meme" actually means and what it currently means in popular culture are two different things. People never understood what it really means, but the most commonly used meaning of it is constantly changing.

The word itself was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976. But it wasn't a commonly used term until around 2005, even then it was used exclusively for specific things and few people knew its actual meaning. But memes in their literal sense have almost always been a thing, and they're common among many species.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What species aside from Homo Sapiens use memes?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

In Dawkins' sense of the word, memes are 'units of cultural inheritance'. So melodic movements in bird song, that birds teach each other, could be considered memes. Any other place you might find cultural inheritance, you could describe it in terms of memes. Memes were simply meant to be a cultural analogy to genes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Your post is an "uh, actually" version of what I said. You are not disagreeing with me but still somehow making it sound like you do.

I meant the term meme never applied to only sharing "image macros" but to inside jokes, coming shared references, common cultural knowledge. It is an absolutely fascinating term and concept if used like that, and I wish more people would understand it and use it in the same way.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The chad vs. virgin meme was originally the reverse. Virgin did things the way you would expect them to be done, and Chad did things in a reckless or incorrect way.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

There's a much longer use case now for "chad good" and that must make the originally intended users seethe. gigachad

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The sheer gall required to condemn "yellow press" while pulling this naked manipulative baloney. "Oh yeah well your customers are like this, 'Durrr! Duhhh!' That's what you sound like! Yes-huh!"

The smarm was less thick when Colbert opened a show with "Hey America, have you lost weight?"

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Were photos really called flashlights in 1920?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes. Or rather, it was flashlight photography, as opposed to "old fashioned" photography where you had to hold perfectly still for several seconds. Of course, flash powder existed before, but it was messy, dangerous, flammable and left a layer of white ash everywhere. Most people today would only recognise the pan full of magnesium flash powder from cartoons, but you can probably guess it wasn't popular at parties or with hobbyists.

In the 1920s, flash bulbs were the awesome new thing, meaning you could take split second photos, and those could be action shots, and not staged and posed portraits. Taking a flashlight was doable quickly and easily, and of course as we all know, most random photos by random people aren't great.

The name photograph was already used for the old thing, so "flashlight" became the obvious abbreviation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Memes are truly as old as the human race.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Hell one could argue that memes are as old as social constructs

So they could in all likelihood predate moden humans

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Language is an in-joke that got wildly out of hand.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Are animal paintings in caves memes too?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Meme has come to mean cartoon. Your usage is no different.

Meme doesn't NOT originally mean cartoon, it just means a viral idea.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Richard Dawkins, is it you?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

The gods are memes. Ideas that have reproduced and evolved to secure their own existence, so much so that they can accurately be said to have their own agency, as forces directing the will of society. This proves the existence of gods.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'd argue that the "modern meme" of photo with caption are just a modification of demotivational posters

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Meme from the American Civil War

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Meme actually means something and isn't just "funny image." We no longer have a word for what a meme actually is. I didn't care about the meaning of ironic changing because there's still words for that but this is different.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Going to be hard to beat fire and pointy sticks for old memes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Always dipping on the chinless...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Define meme, does the Sator Square count?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

So, uh, yes.

Yes (IMO) it does count.

It was passed down for centuries in a non-gene based way among people

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A C A B
C A B A
A B A C
B A C A

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

For anyone unaware:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

A grammatical but boring sentence in Latin which is like eight different kinds of palindrome. It was the "cool S" of ancient Rome.

I got nerd-sniped by this a while back and tried finding any English equivalents, and long story short, there really aren't any. It takes one palindromic word, two words which are also words when reversed, and some implications about matching letters between words. I just wrote a function that recognized when a fifteen-letter string matched the requirements (the latter ten letters being a reversal of the first ten) and trimmed down a dictionary.

The results still rely on a lot of... almost-words. Like "apart paler alala relap trapa." Some of these are loanwords and some of these are nonsense. "Darts apart radar trapa strad" is closer. "Farad acara radar araca daraf" highlights two things: ACARA is an Australian agency, because my dictionary was a spellcheck file, and the daraf is a unit proposed by one guy who was explicitly spelling farad backwards, because us STEM types are all huge dorks.

After some editing, here's a list of what didn't seem like complete bullshit: Asses stime siris emits sessa. Cares amene refer enema serac. Damon animo minim omina nomad. Darts apart radar trapa strad. Dedal enema dewed amene laded. Detar enema tenet amene rated. Farad amora rotor aroma daraf. Gater amene tebet enema retag. Gnats nonet anana tenon stang. Hales amene level enema selah. Kayak amapa yaray apama kayak. Lasso amahs sagas shama ossal. Lasso artus stats sutra ossal. Laton animo tipit omina notal. Marts apart radar trapa stram. Mural ulema rever amelu larum. Namer amene mesem enema reman. Paler amene lemel enema relap. Parts apart radar trapa strap. Rater amene tenet enema retar. Redes edile divid elide seder. Sarah aroma rotor amora haras. Stats tenet anana tenet stats. Straw trapa radar apart warts. Sumac ulema mesem amelu Camus.

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