Prize Blogging

It's morning...

Hello everybody.  Nice to see you today.

I'm really starting to get annoyed by memes.  I never expected them to last as long as they have since the internet is a pretty fluid place but they're still out there.  Normally things like memes evolve and change then disappear once people become bored with them.  They have not done so...and I'm grumpy about it.  

Why haven't they gone away?  Why have they become a terrible blight on the world wide webs?  Why do I continue to read them anyway?  It's because they're easy and quick.  They are a new form of comic that is compressed and compacted into a single panel, easily read on a smartphone screen without scrolling and new ones are easily made in a short amount of time.  

The meme itself is the internet's version of the inside joke.  They are built on a single picture that was incredibly entertaining once and now with each subsequent version they become watered down versions of that original.  Even though the new text on a certain meme may not be that witty, the humor of the original still echoes in our mind and we find it pleasing.  When a new one is made it's a lot like when old friends get together and someone says, "Remember that one night where we went to Taco Bell?"  Which causes the group to bust out laughing.  There is nothing funny about Taco Bell but if you're part of the group you suddenly get the joke.  (Yes...I just explained inside jokes.  Deal with it.)  

The problem with this format is that the meme inside joke system is like having all of your groups good times archived on Wikipedia.  Now anyone can learn what happened to Frank that night and then sit down and make some awkward joke about it and make everyone chuckle uneasily.  Way back before they were really 'memes' they were just fun things people put together to share with their internet friends.  Over 9000?  Unless you were actually a Dragon Ball Z fan back in the day that meant nothing to you.  Sure you can find the clip on YouTube but it's still not as funny if you don't know the show and the characters.  The inside part of the joke was just more complex back in the day I guess.

So...I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I'm a little disappointed in you internet.  I'm not feeling special and geeky anymore...and that makes me sad.

Clue #4:

Hack the Planet!  (Mathew Lillard is awesome.  SLC Punk, Hackers, Wing Commander.  Watch them.)