nostrich: Yet another web service that can’t handle my...

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:31:54 -0400

Yet another web service that can’t handle my double-barrelled surname.

Okay, call off this ‘first-world problem’ business. Nostrich wins.

Postmaster General.

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:56:00 -0400

“What Would Merlin Mann Do?” is my productivity mantra. Now what do I do with all these videos of his kid?

To me, the joke was funny because it lampoons Mann’s conflicting reputations as productivity maven and father-with-a-flip-camera-seemingly-glued-to-his-hand. It also mocks myself(or at least the character I tweet as) because, for the joke to work, “I” have to be stupid enough to ignore all of Mann’s 43 Folders advice and simply copy his every move instead.

Apparently this did not sit well with a certain target of that joke(hint: the one who wasn’t me.) I was messaged and told it was creepy. My apology did nothing to salve the wound, and I got blocked.

I’m still trying to work out if I did something wrong or not. Clearly, it’s a sensitive subject. But is it any more sensitive than the other stuff I talk about? Strokes? Death? Segways?

What are your i chings?

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:39:38 -0400

nickdouglas:

“The Godfather answers all of life’s questions. What should I pack for my summer vacation? ‘Leave the gun, take the cannoli.’” — Tom Hanks, You’ve Got Mail There are your favorite works, and then there are the works that you apply to everything.

Penny Arcade - I re-read PA every six months or so, and I pick up all the books and podcasts. It’s great to watch the evolution of the PA universe, as well as their notes(in the books) on how that worked and how they continue to define it. The podcasts are masterclasses in writing, and the development of comedic ideas. I quote PA in daily life a lot, too, although people never understand my plaintive cries of “Jesus FUCK my EYE CHRIST!”
Ze Frank’s ‘The Show’ - I’m currently in the process of churning through all the episodes for the third time this year. I find ‘The Show’ endlessly inspiring, enriching and enjoyable. It’s a remarkable achievement, not only because it helped me learn the names of the past four White House press secretaries(Fleisher, McClellan, Snow, Perino.)
Never Not Funny, Season 1 - This is the podcast that got me interested in comedy again. Season one is still the golden age to me, and I quote the shows daily(“You are a haunted house.” being a particular fave.)

A comprehensive analysis of our FAILings

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:49:00 -0400

Before I delve into what exactly happened during yesterday’s EPIC occurrences, I should clarify a term I intend to use with regularity in this post: ‘meme’.

Richard Dawkins is the originator of the word ‘meme’, and his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ was instrumental in popularizing its use. A meme is a cultural trait - a thought, a catchphrase, a joke - that spreads amongst people similar to the way a virus spreads through the body. Memes replicate themselves(e.g. by one person telling another a joke) and evolve(e.g. that joke being changed slightly when told further.)

The web, and Twitter especially, are superb vessels for watching the process of evolution among memes, because with enough detective work one can trace every step of a meme’s journey, even if one wasn’t there at its birth or indeed death(to the extent that a meme ever can ‘die’.)

In this post I’ll be discussing at length(oh, the length!) yesterday’s fascinating outbreak of the “EPIC FAIL” meme. For clarification, the meme involved Twitterers taking the popular internet put-down of “epic fail!!111” and twisting it to create a pun or wordplay. Whilst the meme has been in its infant stages for some time now, it began propagating at blistering speed yesterday.

Whilst this is the internet and therefore anyone can be an armchair professor about any topic they like, I would like to assert some sort of authority in this discussion on the grounds that I have been, in some circles, blamed for the outbreak:

The tweet linked to above was:

Which was, in turn, a reply to :

I think @tj holds us both accountable, since in a direct message to me he wrote “you helped start this EPIC TALE”(I can remove that quote if you’d like, @tj, since it WAS a DM and all.)

This wasn’t @tj’s first meme, of course. Recently he’s been responsible for the runaway hit “Hobo Vagina” meme and the somewhat less successful “CineRemix” meme. Of course, neither or these memes generated anywhere near the participation level of the “EPIC FAIL” meme.

When planning this post(that’s right, guys -planning) I did want to create a jpeg showcasing every single participatory tweet from yesterday. Sure, it would have taken a long time, but it is(as ever) important to note that I am unemployed. The problem? Summize doesn’t allow you to search back that far. It’ll only let you go back 99 pages, with 15 tweets per page. Even accounting for a 25% false-positive rate, that’s still 1,000 tweets with some sort of role in the “EPIC” story. That doesn’t even include the tweets Summize won’t let us look at. And it doesn’t include the puns on the word ‘epic’, or alternate spellings of either word.

In fact, it was so successful that the ‘trending topics’ section of Summize had our little meme right up front:

Click for bigger.

Photo from luomat’s Flickr stream.

To re-iterate(perhaps needlessly), clicking here will take you to a snapshot of less than an hour’s activity, four hours into the meme’s “rampage”:

Here’s the issue: even a cursory glance over that massive jpeg will reveal that there really aren’t that many words that rhyme with ‘fail’ or ‘epic’. After the first flush of tweets, it got harder and harder to come up with an original joke based on the meme. Whilst no-one purposefully copied anyone else, the fact that no two follow-lists are alike(especially today) meant that people didn’t realize that their hilarious pun had already been made by another tweep. Yet conversely, if you followed a diverse enough group of Twitterers, there was a high likelihood you could be seeing the same joke over and over, getting shittier each time.

Some Twitterers got more than a little pissed off, and the backlash began, and is still continuing to some extent:

I like to think that some people were just playing up the anger as part of their own contribution to the meme, playing devil’s advocate, if you will. But I can understand why people would actually feel some resentment towards the meme and those who took part in it- I think it was caused by disappointment. Let me back-track a little.

The ‘Hobo Vagina’ meme I mentioned earlier was started by an offhand tweet by @tj, but I think that at its heart the meme was all about playing with a new toy - Summize. Obviously, Summize had been around for quite some time, but the day before it had been bought by Twitter. Now it was legitimately part of the system - and it had to be ‘welcomed’.

The point of ‘Hobo Vagina’ quickly became about showing up in the trending topics on the front page of Summize(or search.twitter.com, which is just as eloquent). I think the widespread dissemination of the term ‘hobo vagina’ was tolerated even by those who didn’t particularly enjoy its use because it was recognized as an expression of Twitterers having fun with the platform, testing its limits and experimenting. There was a kind of innovation at work.

“Epic Fail” had no such innovation or childlike playfulness to it. At its worst, it was a failed game of one-upmanship; people trying to out-pun each other with a base phrase that was all too easy to be lazy with. One of the most popular repeated puns was “Epic Flail”, literally the easiest rhyme available- just add one little letter! It goes to show how far the meme spread from its original participants, given that @tj’s opening shot was an ‘epic flail’ gag.

Whilst the meme was undoubtedly successful in terms of reproduction, that success seemingly ensured its downfall. We saw too much of “EPIC FAIL” and it didn’t continue to amuse as the jokes became either more obvious, or outright repetitions of earlier tweets.

I personally am a little sad about how all this went down. I really like “FAIL!” as a punchline to a tweet. Paired with an articulate set-up, it can be quite funny(‘articulate set-up vs. monosyllabic punchline’ is a great violation of expectations.) I think “FAIL!” has been ruined, at least for a little while. A detox is definitely in order.

There is something positive to take away from this incident, though. For a few hours thousands of us became involved in a single joke. As I tweeted before I went to bed:

Ironically, that tweet is its own little mini-meme, at least in my mind(based on the derision-is-bad theme); it’s an adaptation of @Moltz’s:

Finally, I’d like to note that I beat you all at this, five days ago with:

So there.

Written on an Airbed

nostrich: Yet another web service that can’t handle my...

Postmaster General.

What are your i chings?

A comprehensive analysis of our FAILings