Two Sips from a Cup of Human Kindness

I haven’t been on this thing in forever, but I thought I’d just write out a post that would otherwise have been stuck in my head as fuck.

Furthermore, the individuals that I would normally be discussing this material with are busy playing POKEMON (passive-aggressive ftw).

I’ll give a small disclaimer for this post - these ideas are not going to be new. I’m sure someone out there has written about this before. I’m simply trying my hand at analyzing and organizing my thoughts on this topic.

Anyways:

The original idea of the meme, as I understand it, stems from Richard Dawkins’ 1976 work, The Selfish Gene. In simplified terms, Dawkins’ ideas can be summarized by saying that natural selection acts upon the individual gene. Individual genes team up with other genes such that they may be favorably selected for and propagate during replication.

One can imagine then, that human beings are simply vehicles, cars if you will, for bundles of individual genes. Cars that maximize the procreation of said genes.

I can only hope that my DNA looks upon me as this badass mother fucker:

Stemming from the idea that replicators (like genes), once introduced and given the chance to be stable, took over the primordial earth, Dawkins conjectured that perhaps cultural ideas worked in a similar manner. For example, Dawkins, being the famous atheist that he is, takes the idea of eternal life and wonders where it came from. It is common to many of the world’s religions and certainly a major tenet of the two most proliferous - Christianity and Islam. Much like genes, once they are given the chance to take root and prosper, ideas take over what we call culture. Some ideas may appeal to our brains more than others (due to how our brains evolved), leading to differing rates of proliferation, in which more appealing/useful ideas spread faster than those that are less so.

So just like genes use our bodies as vehicles, one might think that ideas, which are replicators themselves, use our brains (and more recently hard drives and internet servers) as vehicles for their reproduction.

Memes can be thought of as viruses - replicators that travel from host to host (brain to brain), reproduce, and lead to a greater amount of viruses including much potential for variation.

I will break apart the Advice Dog meme for my initial analysis (using Encyclopedia Dramatica liberally to help me with images)

When I first started going on 4chan in 2008 (Yes I know that I am outing myself as a newfag), Advice Dog is one of the first memes I encountered. Now, Advice Dog takes a cute dog and combines it with uncharacteristic text in order to elicit laughter. This is more commonly called an “image macro.”

Advice Dog was all over the place, sometimes giving good (albeit boring) advice

And other times giving rather questionable advice:

What’s important is that there was thousands of these image macros being made and distributed with little variations. But the general idea was the same, a cute dog, rainbow patterned background, funny (sometimes not so funny) text.

It’s a bit like genetic alleles - we have a gamut of variation in human eye colors - dependent on the chromatic distribution and makeup of your iris, making green, gray, blue, green, brown, and all colors in between. But the alleles are all variations of the same gene(s) - the one(s) for eye color.

Then something happened. As Advice Dog started to show its cute little face less frequently, a new dog rose to take its place: Depression Dog:

The concept is the same. It’s still an image macro, but this time it’s a strange-looking dog with a dull grey background and (as its namesake implies) depressing text. The meme had evolved at a lightning fast pace. Whereas biological evolution in higher organisms can take tens of thousands of years to manifest, this memetic evolution took place within (making up a number here) four months.

What’s amazing is that the next step in the evolution of this meme didn’t even take (the made up number of) four months to take root. The next “dog” I saw popping up was Courage Wolf:

From there, these multichromatic background’d image macros exploded. This time it wasn’t necessarily dogs, but what came to be known as “Advice Animals”

Like the Socially Awkward Penguin:

Or the Tech Retarded Duck

Then it didn’t have to be animals -

For example, there was LOLGod -

Successful Black Man:

and more recently (one which everyone is sick of by now), Scumbag Steve:

The reason that I described this as a virus is because these ideas “infect” our collective internet minds and then grow old. It’s weird to think about, but it’s almost as if we are infected by these ideas, distribute them, then are healed from these ideas. We usually just say that the meme got old, that it isn’t funny anymore, but the idea was spread just the same. It “fulfilled” its purpose by infecting as many people as possible.

Memes are like diseases and we are their willing hosts. The better/funnier/catchier/more useful the meme, the faster and more virulently the meme reproduces. Some memes resemble acute infections, being wildly popular one day then being very distasteful the next (like Scumbag Steve). Others resemble chronic infections like the Rick Roll.

Indeed, this is most likely where the term “viral video” originated. I’m not sure whether it was originally framed in the above context, but it seems likely.

With this out of the way, I wanted to talk about Charlie Sheen.

Charlie Sheen’s popularity began with his interview on the Alex Jones Show. Soon after, Charlie Sheen started going on many TV interviews in which he was completely unapologetic about his rampant cocaine use and his association with porn stars. This was delightful to the citizens of the internet and there came an outpouring of Charlie Sheen catch phrases, from “Tiger Blood” to “Winning” to “Cured drug addiction with my MIND.” Charlie Sheen’s popularity SOARED. Within one day, Charlie Sheen accrued over one million followers, the fastest any twitter user had ever attained that many followers. The infection was an epidemic. A mere week and a half later, however, his popularity had dwindled considerably.

Inside of Charlie Sheen’s mind, however (who must have been unfamiliar with what happens to other celebrities that go viral on the internet), was a different picture. Charlie Sheen created what can be definitively called an abomination of a podcast this past weekend in which he gathered lackeys who would laugh at his every joke and comment into a room (thank god Bree Olsen wasn’t there, I was always a fan of hers). Apparently, he still found his catch phrases funny (as did his fucktard lackeys) because he kept repeating his nonsense until he ground to an awkward halt.

What I glean from this is that meme viruses work like proteinous viruses in another interesting way - the effect that viruses have on their hosts depends on the host. Some viruses are harder to plant in people than others. Some will be calling Original Content unfunny and the creator a “newfag” while others will laugh and spam it to every internet community they know of. Naturally, the period during which the infection lasts is also different. To most people, the “Charlie Sheen Thing” ended already. Charlie Sheen and the leech-like imbeciles he keeps as close company seem to be still infected with this meme.

It’s an interesting concept to think about and I find myself at the end of my post without a real point, so I’ll just end with:

What’s happening with Charlie Sheen is no longer a relevant topic. His catchphrases are no longer funny, and unless he starts doing cocaine off a porn star’s titties again, he should really duck down under the radar.

I don’t know if this ad is still up, but seeing a huge depiction of Gary Busey’s face in the middle of Times Square made me happy.

Mostly because it reminds me of this gif.

I have recently finished watching your sub work on Season I of Spice and Wolf. It is phenomenal. Spice and Wolf is a light novel series packed with depth and context. When adapted to a television series limited to 20 minutes per episode, It is difficult for writers and producers to include explanatory information in the episodes themselves. This is because of the time constraint and, more importantly, because they run the risk of boring the predominant audience: Japanese readers whom have already read the light novels.

Unlike manga and anime, which are relatively easy to present to an American audience, light novels are ignored by most translation groups due to the fact that they contain much more text to translate and there are frequently subtleties (especially puns, Japanese people seem to love puns) that are difficult or impossible to translate. Furthermore, who’s going to read some PDF file of a fan-translated book? I remember finding a translated copy of Suzumiya Haruhi no Shoushitsu after I had seen the movie. I thought it would be interesting to read and compare the two, but I was only three pages into the PDF before realizing that it was garbage. It was uninteresting and lacking the flair with which I imagine the original author would have infused the untranslated work.

Thus, when Spice and Wolf came to America, one could safely say that there was no context established and most viewers found large chunks of the show to be confusing. Now, I’m not saying that there’s no room for confusion on TV. Indeed, J.J. Abrams seems to have made a career off of exploiting his confusing “mystery box” technique (see his TED talk about storytelling here). J.J. Abrams confuses his audiences to intrigue them into finding out more about the plot and characters, and he slowly reveals more information over time.

The confusing parts of Spice and Wolf, however, (the circles Lawrence makes in the air at Nora and the ringing of her bell comes to mind) serve more as homages to the light novel and are not explained later on. The characters learn about each others’ implicit characteristics through these homage-exchanges, which are not confusing to a Japanese reader of the series, but which are really goddamn confusing for people who haven’t read them.

This is where you came in, Ayako Subs. Your little corner at the end of each episode explains a lot of the interactions and subtext, which the original production neglected to construe. I am writing this post in appreciation of your hard work and your obvious dedication and interest in the series. Clearly you’ve read and enjoyed the light novels and desire to help others who have not read them to understand what’s going on in each episode such that they may enjoy the series as much as you have.

This dedication is quite the breath of fresh air compared to the awful shit that the subbing scene has become today. GG and all their spin offs, CrunchySubs and Funiguys with their lazy stream rips, and the other groups who favor speed over quality are just symptoms of a horrible scourge on the face of subbing. Granted, it has been two years since you’ve subbed Spice and Wolf, so I don’t know if your staff still pours their assiduous love for anime into their work (I’ve been watching Seitokai Yakuindomo and I’m afraid that things have changed for the worse), BUT I wanted to say that your work on Spice and Wolf was special (and reminiscent of the golden days of subbing) and I appreciate it greatly.