Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Memes Memes Bloody Memes

Note of clarification - for the purposes of the following, "meme" is taken to mean "viral survey thing which produces results for pasting into your weblog", or at least "snippet of code which the reader is encouraged to post into their own weblog without adding any value". I'm not having a go at, say, posting links to interesting things, just having a go at blind repetition for the sake of it.

I dunno about you, but I'm just sick and tired of memes. Memes memes bloody memes. They're the spam of the weblog and online journalling and blogging or whatever the hell you want to call it world. "Hey", I think, "I'll go and see if anyone's posted any interesting insights, philosophical takes on recent events or maybe evidence of a potentially award-winning literary talent". 95% of the time, they haven't. They've just posted something about what kind of dragon or Underground map or haemorrhoid cream or character from Shrek or condom or fast-food chain or whatever blah blah ad infinitum they are.

These memes are usually generated by filling in a little survey that returns one of a number of results, or generates a little map, or whatever, before providing a dinky little graphic explaining what the filler-in apparently is. You know the kind of thing - for our mythical condom meme (and by God, I hope it is mythical) the result could be "You're spermicidally lubricated! You are careful in what you do and take great care to avoid accidents. You would be well-suited for a career as a health and safety inspector.", or maybe "You're ribbed! Flamboyant and stylish, you shun conservatism and throw caution to the wind. Have you thought about becoming a celebrity chef?". This provides a nice little snippet of code that can simply be posted as a weblog entry, thus fulfilling the desire to post something without the need for any actual, well, writing.

Now, I'm not saying the occasional meme isn't fun. But when I go and look at, say, someone's Livejournal friends list and 80% of it is memes, I think "enough! enough! even rambling paragraphs about how your GP doesn't understand you or what colour toothbrush you bought today are more interesting than this!". So I've decided to stand up for the unmemed, and what better way to do that than with a meme?

I'm sure someone must have done this already, but in case they haven't, here's my very own meme - the No More Memes Meme. Want to join in? Easy! There's no surveys, no names, no pack drill, just an image:

Take this image, post it to your weblog/journal/whatever (with a link back here if you're feeling kind), and relax in the knowledge that you no longer have to fill in any daft wee surveys about what sort of Toblerone you are. Enjoy!

Feel free to take the image and put it on your own server to save my meagre bandwidth allocation. If you're too lazy to do that (or if your hosting service doesn't allow you to), feel free to just paste in the following HTML:
<a href="http://uffish.net/archives/000108.html"><img src="http://uffish.net/images/nomorememes.png" alt="[No More Memes!]" width=250 height=140></a>

And that's it! Couldn't be easier, could it? Posted by mpk at May 26, 2004 4:31 PM | TrackBack