man cannot live on memes and news alone. there is a void here. news stories breed reasoned discussion, generally filled with stringent, on topic remarks. memes breed tepid remarks, a step above twitter blue check replies, but little worth reading.
what we need is rants. schizophrenic analysis of an old tv show. schizophrenic analysis of taylor swift’s private jet schedule. takes. banter. self-posts, text-posts, and OC content in general.
only about 10% of people in any given community contribute. that means 90% of you are stifling your need to post with other, healthier methods. but i implore: to post is the way. posting is light. posting will bring you a better life, posting will heal your children, grant you a healthy crop, and secure your place in the grand hum of modern discourse
What about people that need to not poop for three days, and absolutely refuse to explain why?
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They were referring to an AskLemmy post where someone asked for dieting tips to not poop for 3 days. They wouldn’t explain why, but assured us that they weren’t being smuggled or something.
That was one for the history books
banter
It won’t work. I regularly post banter, irony, sarcasm. But it just gets taken too seriously. People accuse me of having an agenda or seriously believing some of the utterly outlandish things I say.
I’ll sa stupid shit like “the Java programming language causes cancer” and people will think I’m fucking SERIOUS?!
The other day I said the VERY obviously unserious: “Only bourgeois homosexuals and gentrified lesbians use Wayland”.
Bear in mind I’m gay and my that user account has a rainbow flag in it!
One lesbian found it funny and responded. It was mostly downvoted and it lasted 4hrs before getting deleted and my account banned.
I regularly make comments that are blindingly obvious sarcasm - they use utterly ridiculous sentences like the above about “gentrified lesbians”.
Everyone takes them seriously. There’s absolutely NO fucking humour allowed unless it follows a VERY stale Reddit-esque meme format that people are used to.
When someone said they tried meth once and hated it I replied “Skill issue”.
I was battered by downvotes.
Another example: I puffed on a strong vape for the first time one morning and made a WHIMSICAL post of: “WOW! How is nicotine legal!?” - cos it almost knocked me the fuck out. I wasn’t serious!
Dog-piled by people saying - “Yeah well alcohol is legal!” or “What’s your endgame here? What’s the agenda?!”. Or “If this is bait, then you’re pretending to be an idiot. If not, you’re an actual idiot.”
What’s with assuming the fucking worst of everyone’s posts?! What happened to “que sera sera”?
“Yes I’m bragging about fucking my body you well-oiled grape.” - -9 downvotes.
“WELL OILED GRAPE!!!” Oh of course I must have absolutely meant that fuckign classic burn. I don’t even WTF it would mean if taken seriously.
“But if I dropped you in the Pacific ocean you wouldn’t live long.” to a “Hydro Homie” espousing the virtues of water. -8 downvotes (fucking sarcasm!)
“The weight of my intellect is a heavy burden to bear.” - Obvious fucking sarcasm -8 downvotes
“Java devs are the reason humanity will never have FTL drives.” - -3 downvotes. Java devs really have NO sense of fucking humour.
I refuse on principal to add the brain-dead “/s” bollocks for obvious sarcasm. It’s not my problem the world is wet lipped and loose knickered.
The entire fediverse is filled with humourless, miserable, cynical wishy-washy cunts who dont’ spot sarcasm irony or anything unless it’s written in BIG FUCKING CAPITALS.
THIS IS A FUNNY - DONT TAKE SERIOUSLY
To add:
Someone posted in a UK sub asking if a “Good News UK” community would be good.
I commented something like: “It’d make sense to set up and leave it empty while bloicking any submissions cos there’s bugger all good news about this country”
4 DAY BAN but not just from the Good News UK community - from every other community they moderated including the Nature one which pissed me off most of all cos I fucking love British nature!
Hedgehogs are my fave animal and I’ve nurtered some back to health. I love tits and especially the crested tit.
Heaven forbid anyone leave a wry comment! Christ you’ll get banned from fucking everything.
So no, banter is dead. Humour is dead unless it follows a brain-dead Reddit meme everyone understands.
set up and leave it empty
I sometimes don’t get this place. That’s hilarious.
I love tits
Shit I didn’t know we had so much in common!
I’m wholely in agreement, anyone who entertains the idea of “/s” can get in the fucking sea.
Java devs really have NO sense of fucking humour.
This is just a universal truth. If they had the intelligence for understanding humour, they’d not need such a verbose language.
HumorFactory broke
I think wit is hard over text. To you it’s obvious you’re joking, and that your joke is that this comment is ridiculous.
To others it can read as someone making a joke with little respect for the Original post.
Take the meth one for example, I can see you being downvoted for that if the original post was serious.
The UK one just sounds stupid though, but then again mods of a Lemmy instance are likely to be people that take things (like Reddit fucking their API) quite seriously. This means our population pool may be a little skewed towards the serious.
On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of humour here. Especially from the AI generated community with their, a’hem, themes.
I’ll have you know I’m developing an FTL drive in Java, asshole!
No really, I agree with your sentiment. Joking around here is taken at literal face value. Makes it feel a bit stale.
Maybe you forgot the “/s”
I feel like lemmy was a lot funner a few months ago. Imo, the weeks between the reddit protests and the actual app ban were peak. People were so optimistic and friendly! It really felt like a better reddit. I know that the honeymoon feeling wouldn’t have lasted, but I think the social dynamic here really took a turn for the worse when hexbear first federated. After a few weeks of putting up with them for the sake of giving them a chance, I finally had enough and blocked them, but I feel like their general sense of unhappiness and combativeness has spread. I’m considering laying off this place because it’s getting toxic and I don’t think it’s good for me.
This is the real answer. :(
I think I have an idea. When you post/comment, there should be a checkmark for “are you being serious?”. The default value should be chosen on a sub-per-sub basis, so all comments non-serious by default on, say, c/memes, and serious on c/news, for example. Then that information should be hidden unless you downvote or reply to a comment/post of the opposite seriousness to the default of the sub you’re in (I guess there could also be an option to see the warning always or on demand).
I think I should post this properly somewhere but idk where…
Is that why I wasn’t let into Wayland? It all makes sense now
Unfortunately it’s because the sheer amount of stupidity in the real world means you can never be sure if someone is being serious. Also unfortunately, when a platform has a wide enough audience there will always be people that have a vested interest in topics no matter how potentially outlandish it might seem. So they will react emotionally to things that for most people aren’t that serious. That’s just my take though. Also add in trolls and that tops it all off.
Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the post on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.
You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.
But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.
And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.
It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.
Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.
In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.
Fuck, out of space. Okay, the illustration on page 46 is fucking useless; I’ll see you there.
But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.
Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents. Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic.
οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι.
“Don’t you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?” “What do you mean?” he said. “This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.”
Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s fucking right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.
But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one fucking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding motherfucking ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon.
But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is.
The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret, Jane. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing.
The First Meme.
Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge.
Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on. Go play.
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SUBSCRIBE
Perfect. 👌
Finally somebody who gets it.
But if I do, I’ll hurt people’s feelings somehow and they won’t like me anymore!
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Pensioners?
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That hurt my visual cortex holders.
I posted two OCs and got zero comments and little upvotes, so it’s not encouraging me to post what I think is cool. But I agree, I think it’d give Lemmy much more personality.
I do give a lot of unhinged takes on comments though so that’s colourful enough.
Thanks for participating… Yeah I post photos I’ve taken to my local city communities. If I posted to !pics@lemmy.world they’d likely get more traction but seeing 8 upvotes makes me happy enough that someone liked it.
I also vote more people should drink mercury and lead shots, and take one too many tabs and shit post.
This post was not unhinged enough. Would not read again.
I’ll have a good one on Easter.
It’s a bit of a tradition at this point, and while the previous ones were on Reddit, I’m no longer on Reddit and so they’ll be coming to Lemmy. I was planning on posting only in the !simulationtheory@lemmy.world community, but if you want it cross posted somewhere else I’m open to it as long as allowed by the community rules.
The previous ones so you know if it’s up your alley:
Massive curation of your feed, I.E. subscribing to TONS of small communities and leaving out Menes and news, may help achieve this, and boost traffic to those communities, thus up voting them into All.
It only takes ~100 to make it.
I have debated on setting up Lemmy Community Seeder in reverse on an instance by itself, to only subscribe to small communities with new posts, to see what happens.
No kidding. I mean I
tried to stack donuts on my dickused donuts to measuremy dickhow many she could stackah fuck I can’t strike through because it was my dickjust for the sake of dedication to the shit post.Posting is the way.
