Link collection 10/09/2012

I've decided to occasionally collect up a few interesting links in one place to 1) ensure that I keep posting, and 2) accurately catalogue my thoughts on the future so that I can revisit them at any point. Most of my time these days in spent in a head space of the moment +/- 10 minutes, and everything outside of that time window tends to get lost in the info-flow of daily life. So yes. For history - because tomorrow's future is next week's past., everything is history in the making, and that's how I like to view things. So yes.

Today I found out about "soft", be-tentacled robots, that can grip things delicately. Which is an amazingly complex mechanism to sort out, but in a few iterations' time, this could be medically very valuable indeed. Not to mention, perhaps in rescue situations. Beautiful stuff.


I also came across this little blighter... Remember BigDog, the "youtube sensation" from a few years ago that was officially taken up by DARPA and pretty much became the wet dreams of certain videogame fans across the globe? Well now it has a son. I am going to call it "SON OF BIGDOG" which is a much nicer name than its official title of "Legged Squad Support System (LS3)." Basically it has niftier software (it can follow you around like a big puppy!), it has a bigger body for more stuff to be packed onto it (d'aww it wants to be useful!), it has a self-righting mechanism in its barrel-shaped body (it's learning!), and it now has a definite face-like structure in a visual sensor array (a camera lol) surrounded by mesh (so cute!). I wish to purchase one and traipse it around in my mech, showing off to all the other pet owners. A few more generations down the line - when it becomes weaponised - I can teach it to "fetch" with enemies' skulls. 



Speaking of mechs... I haven't posted about this, but the world now has its first fully-functional, privately purchasable mech. I shit you not. It's a beautiful piece of engineering (albeit a bit slow) that you can pilot with your iPhone in the cab, or remotely(!). This "smile shot" thing... that's a vicious-cycle creator if there ever was one.





Out of interest, can anyone possibly have it out with me difference between hacking if you're disabled and grinding, if it's at this level? This man has fashioned some killer-looking prostheses out of scrap metal and wood, that are extraordinarily functional. 



Last little bit of gloriousness to inform you all of (and, of course, to re-inform my future self - hello you smug bastard). Whiskey. In. Space. Space whiskey. Orbital piss-up. International space station moonshine. Liquor of the outer heavens. However you want to slice it, this is fucking COOL. 

The Legacy of the "Greats" and the Legacy of Piracy

"THIS IS THE END"

Hello kids, today we're going to talk about piracy (I apologise in advance, longpost is very long).

I know every fucker in the music industry has a mouthpiece on this shit, and I also know you're sick to death of hearing about it, but I came across an article in a national (free) newspaper the other day that pissed me off.

Above is a photograph taken from a large-scale exhibition that uses artists' own CDs to create a likeness of the artists, in domestic situations. The artists themselves, Mirco Pagano and Moreno de Turco were quoted in the article as saying that "Piracy infects and destroys music, preventing artists to succeed and become idols as in the past."

My fury is two-fold: piracy of music prevents no-one from succeeding let alone infecting and destroying music, and also this (frankly outdated) notion that to be successful in music you have to be some kind of mega-stadium-level superstar money-machine. We'll come to the latter later and deal with the former now.

This first notion that music piracy crushes the dreams and streams of many an artist/band is outright false. It's safe to assume that these "greats" and "mega-stars" were on a major label - after all, that's how this media used to get heard primarily, through these labels doing a massive amount of promo work and shoving it in the public's faces enough for it to be heard, correct? If you look at the slice of record sales that the average record deal gave a musician, it's tiny. It's usually less than 5%, after the production costs, the advance, the A&R, the PR, the management, and the general profit is taken out, it's a tiny, tiny amount. Now, that usually goes towards just the people who made the album, not the individual. Then from there you've to pay performance artists and writers, producers etc (unless they were paid as part of a one-off from the advance) so that tiny slice gets shared once more again. Piracy just means that there's less of what is pretty much a pittance going around, and the ones who suffer most are major record labels (and who really cares about them, but more on this later).

It's long been known that an artists' largest revenue stream is from touring. Does piracy affect an artist, signed to a major (or major-ish) record label, in terms of touring? Generally not - usually their management will take take care of this side of things, and even the most basic of torrent sites have statistics on how many times something has been downloaded (you can tell from the amount of people seeding it and leeching it). So again, you can calculate your venue size almost as well as you could without piracy. It's slightly more of a gamble, but generally you know what you're doing.

But what about an up-and-coming artist with an indie backing and no management? This is the real concerning battle ground. Indie labels take much less money from record sales, and therefore the artist tends to get more of the sales revenue, so piracy would be a bit of a kick in the proverbial balls for an up-and-coming artist. On the other hand, paradoxically, a lot of up-and-coming artists are quite flattered if their work gets pirated, because it means they're liked and their work is good enough for someone to attempt to search for it around paywalls. Furthermore, altruism starts coming into effect at this level. Although rare, some people will choose to effectively donate their money to the artist after listening to and enjoying the album. Personally, as a bit of a technology-loving future-hippie, I think this model should be encouraged. It's satisfying to know that your work is not only good enough to buy, but to donate to even if someone already has it.

Anyway, I digress. The real money AGAIN is in touring. Can you still gauge, in this day and age, through an indie label/going independent, the size of your audience even if your album has been leaked/pirated?

The simple answer is no. At least, not safely. And not solely.

But this is why digital music, and the realm of the future greats is now spread across several devices. For better or worse (read: better) piracy is here and it's changed things. These days an artist has to have a presence over data-rich streaming sites such as soundcloud and bandcamp if they accurately want to gauge the size of their audience and tour efficiently enough to get money out of it and start building a reputation. And even then, it's risky, but it negates the main problems with piracy and money can, and will, still be made. I certainly wouldn't say that piracy is killing music. In fact, it's making a lot more music more widely available, which increases the amount of different breeding grounds there are, technically (though not necessarily) increasing the amount of interesting acts and artists out there.

In fact piracy of music software has broken down boundaries even further. Not only can people hear and experience a wider range of inspirational existing music, but now musical creation has become more widely available. The creation of music is no longer the preserve of the rich. And yes, before you moan, in many ways previously it has been a class issue. Again, though, I digress, and this argument is for another time.



So onto my second point.

The notion of music needing idols is, I think, a bit false. I have no doubt that we'll make them, though - the digital age has already given us several artists that people put on a pedestal, including Lady Gaga and Burial. But I don't think it's necessarily something we should be aiming and hoping for, as consumers, or as people involved in making music.

Putting musicians on a plinth to be worshipped by the "unwashed masses" I believe is massively condescending. For a start it means in some respect putting all talent and skill in an unreachable place, beyond people, which discourages the making of art by all except the dim or the ballsy, because to be frank, they're the only people who would choose to enter into such an artistic endeavour with those glaring god-figures looking down and figuratively pissing on your attempts at a bonfire. It's hardly sympathetic to growing a culture of varied types of art, is it now?

And this is one of many reasons I really appreciate how piracy has changed the face of musical culture (along with the internet in general, of course): it has forced musicians to stop the whole rock 'n' roll, "untouchable", get-the-fuck-away-from-me attitude that beleaguered "legends" for some time, and encouraged artists to interact with their fans. This not only creates entirely new platforms for interaction other than just through audio (more on THAT later too), but has also de-fangs and de-mystifies these people, which then decreases the amount of "artist anxiety" someone faces when looking to create.

My biggest gripe with the whole "legends" argument, however, is that there needs to be some form of monopoly on 1) record sales, and 2) the public consciousness in terms of music. The second point, I fear, is the impulse of monoculture - that same impulse that abhorred subcultures in times past (which is slowly also being eroded, thankfully - be who you want! choose your friends! etc. - another wondrous example of what technology can bring you). Either way the suggestion is that, the way musical culture has been headed for the past few years is utterly wrong. That you shouldn't have your specific tastes catered for by a small number of musicians who either work for a hobby with a few bonus bits of cash, or otherwise work for a modest living through touring and recording with only occasional holidays. Granted, musical culture and money are in a strange state of flux at the moment, but the trends have been leaning towards a more aware, more (arguably) moral state of business: that you pay for what you enjoy so that these musicians - who generally tend to be very thankful - get if not all the cash you gave them, then at least a fairly sizeable chunk. The key element is that it doesn't generally go to some massive faceless business that will throw pocket change at the artists and keep the rest.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: fuck your idols, forget the horrid "traditional" view of record labels and SUPPORT YOUR (LOCAL?) ARTISTS.

As a reward for sticking with me this far, here's a musical treat from a dear friend (it dropped last week and I'm finding it hard to listen to much else):

Music History Lesson for the Digital Age 2.0

Fresh thoughts fermented from the blackened pool of rotting ideas and information that live in my brain.

I'm entirely obsessed with patterns. Human beings are good at patterns, but filtering out the inefficient ones and seeing working patterns is the sign of true human intelligence. Science exists to accurately predict and measure mechanisms which can be, to all intents and purposes, abstracted to the level of patterns. Examples are notable in Nobel prize winners. Einstein defined that energy and matter are the same thing - he discovered that pattern and expressed it elegantly. Ditto DNA. Ditto evolution.

Patterns, right?

My biggest hobby in life is to spot patterns in history - musical and social to be precise. Someone pointed out to me today that the rap game appears to have finally changed. Instead of vivid dreams of ice ‘n’ asses, there is more meaning in the music. He pointed to Lil B in particular. It’s worth quoting in full:

“As I listen to the new Lil B, it’s become clear that the rap game is finally changing. He’s not the greatest rapper by far and wouldn’t last a second in cypher (old school rules) but the cypher has changed. It’s not on the street, it’s on the internet and if you have substance of some kind that resonates, you’re the hot one. I can’t believe it’s taken this long for people to stop eating the bullshit ice fantasies.” - John Michael Garcia of CREEPING WAVE
creepingwave.tumblr.com 

He’s got a point. But like I always contest - this has happened before. It’s taken roughly 25-30 years to get to this point in what could be termed the modern era of hip-hop. Obviously there’s not a clear cut-off - there never is with these things - but we’ll put the timeline there for arguments’ sake.

The same thing happened in rock music. For convenience we’ll put the timeline at about 1952 - basically when Rock began to move away from Skiffle and Blues and become a distinct art form. The basic rock song was always about dancing, getting in with the girls, fast cars drinking, and later on drugs. Outsiders that were popular generally remarked upon social issues too. Roughly the same pattern as hip-hop - you had radicals writing protest songs but they were usually ghetto-ised and singular characters. These groups and individuals were frowned upon in their own community for becoming “serious” when their youthful music was about getting teens to have a good time - right?

(Bear with me - it’s going somewhere, honest)

Instead of being completely static, people always wanted MORE. Bigger tours, bigger stage shows, bigger songs, bigger concepts. Big. Aspirational. larger than life. Lots of people would argue that these ebbs and flows had more to do with sexuality and economics than anything to do with musical culture - largely because those people don’t understand musical culture in the least. People involved in music scenes get bored - this is rule number one of being involved in making music. The people in the rock scene got bored with three chords and songs about rockin’ around the clock, or Californian girls etc.

Enter David Bowie and Black Sabbath - bizarrely around the same time. Sabbath came in with big fucking slabs of guitar noise and scary imagery. Bowie came with visions of space and the future as predicted by George Orwell - bigger concepts than those of gettin’ drunk ‘n’ gettin’ laid, right?

Move further down the line - prog rock, EVEN BIGGER. EVERYTHING HAD TO BE BIG WITH POINTY HATS, ALL THE INSTRUMENTS IN THE WORLD AND DRAGONS! Decadence of the highest order - from concept to full-blown fantasy.

Then punk appeared. 3 chords and the truth. Outsiders. Back to the old days. Only not - it was all still massively external. This is where post-punk really outshines to this day, roughly 25-30 years on from the start of the modern era of rock. 

Post-punk/goth/new wave/new romantics/industrialists/whatever came along. They made it OK to write about personal shit - shit inside your head. None of this going out and stuff. Freudian music about battles of the psyche, about things that bother them, not that they SHOULD bother anyone else (John Lennon I’m looking at you).

This is roughly - give or take a few memes - what has happened with hip-hop and rap. Early days took wrote about social issues (generally outsider groups) but also about getting fucked up. The latter quickly became the most prominent until bitches and cash and dissin’ and cussin’ etc really was the soup of the day for most rap artists. More and more it’s been OK to rap about personal fucked up shit about what’s inside your head.

Everything goes from external to internal expression content within music (and from sparsity to decadence to a violent reaction against decadence and back again). Take any period, any genre, any fucking YEAR and I you can see this pattern manifest in a scene, regardless of economic wellbeing of a scene and the gender issues of the day. Everything begins with posturing and moves on to personalisation.

Any problems with the above, let me know. Or questions (I have an “ask me” button for a reason). I will kindly provide several more examples in depth.

PS. Next time we’re gonna talk about styles and melting pots in music. Or the death of the CD (since it’s pretty plain that vinyl is now here to stay and no-one thinks a CD is pretty).

PPS. Honestly this could’ve been better I just got bored towards the end.

Music History Lesson for the Digital Age 1.0 (recycled post from elsewhere)

Fresh thoughts fermented from the blackened pool of rotting ideas and information that live in my brain.

This is going to seem ramble-y but I swear it goes somewhere so just bear with me. 

So I was talking to a ‘net friend today, im passim, about the state of digital culture and in particular listening preferences when it comes to muzak. He was saying how the album had become passe and that he now preferred to listen to music in singular form for the most part anyway.

Not many people know this: I am an analogue freak. I love the pops and crackles of my very early home stereo, 1969 model Dansette-style record player, and the masses of vinyl I have picked and rooted and smelled around for, the long hours of research as to which version it was best to get etc. - vinyl freaks will know what I mean. And thus I found myself in the familiar position of defending the album, with all the familiar remarks of purity of vision, the experience to be treasured over a longer time period, the comfortability and completeness of inter- and meta-textual reference usually included within albums of a certain nature.

And then I realised the growing fear of digital culture that has begun amongst audiophiles of a certain bent: OH NOES! DA BIG MEAN BITZ IZ GONNA DESTROY QUALITY CONTROL! WHARR IS DA PHYSICALITY ANDSENSUALITY OV HOLDIN’ DA FING!… 

But this is an unnecessary fear. This has happened before. People taking these same stances, crowded over different technology, different methods of musical dissemination. At least three times to my musical history memory have the musical “purists” descended on new technologies.

The first came around the time of the first printing presses, circa 1800 when the middle classes were able to afford sheet music, and composers began adopting a new employment system (pioneered by Mozart, in which composers were now no longer employed by persons of official - mostly royal or ecclesiastical - position, but instead employed on a piece-by-piece basis or fuelled - as Beethoven mostly was - by a patronage scheme). These changes meant that music was not only largely secular (pre-1650 it was mostly not), but also widely-available to a burgeoning middle class. This led to the fear the music would devolve into a serious of short (meaning cheap: less paper to use) secular pieces, composed for the home with little or no musical expression, progression, or vision. Sound familiar?

The same again appears when we take a look at the early 20th century. The invention of the phonograph again made people terrified that music would be condensed into easy-to-swallow short loads. An injection of speed into the veins of public that craved ever more pop and crackle to their music. This coincident with the ascent of Jazz and Blues - a double pronged attack on the “supremacy” of “high art” and longer forms. 

And again, repeat picture with radio and the 3-minute pop song. Rock and roll. The Moog. The DX7. Tapes. The sequencer. Computers. Audio software. And now .mp3’s, .flac, and the deadliest of all - streaming music.

The thing is - people find a way to make everything complex after a certain period of ubiquity. The chorus of the choir became augmented with instruments and, eventually lost the voice altogether. This was chamber music, which expanded to become the symphony. The symphony was then again augmented with voice and became the opera. Which became a total entity and became Wagner’s “total art work”. Then came Jazz, with longer and longer improvs, til we hit Charlie Parker with entire hour-long shows dedicated to one jazz header. Then we hit rock and roll, resent, until the Beach Boy’s “Pet Sounds” closely followed by the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. Longform albums. Complexity.

Now you have mixtapes. The art of using interconnecting strings to link from one bit of appropriated or changed music to another. Mater Suspiria Vision’s “Zombie Rave” mixtapes are the next step towards totally original streaming mixtape-type albums or interconnected material. 

And the thing is this: there is always an audience for complexity - people always want more. More of the same, more different, juxtaposition, new contexts, more inter/intra/metacontexts. More content.

It’s what human’s do. It’s why we’re never happy. It’s how we’re still here. Whatever new technologies are on the horizon there will always emerge complexity, as well as simplicity. Two modes that will coexist, not necessarily harmoniously, but indifferently.

So there’s nothing to fear, really.

IT'S TIME FOR ANOTHER SPELLCAST

Hello, fiends. 

It's been some time since I've messed around with this particular name, the "Spellcast"... AH THE NOSTALGIA! Speaking of which, a friend of mine recently had a bash at identifying one of the central tenets of nostalgia and attraction in nerds which y'all should have a goosey at. It points out that nostalgia – even nostalgia for imaginary and unreal events – creeps into our every day lives and makes a difference not only to our preferences but also to our perceptions. In all likelihood I'll cover a topic like that in the future myself, in that it crosses over delightfully into the twin territories of music and memetics.

I mean, I SAY that I'll write about it, but actually finding the time to write at the moment is a little difficult. Expect a little more time before I get into the swing of things.

RIGHT! On to business!

So, for now I'm going to call this shit the Spellcast, since the last regular mix I did was called that, and because it's a semi-decent name, and because I'll be delving into witch house at intervals - especially what the witch house artists have been up to AFTER that scene had sort of collapsed and exhausted itself - and yada yada yada....

However, this doesn't mean that this podcast thingy is in any connected to the label I run - although I am liable to drop exclusives in the future if I want to - this podcast is NOT AFFILIATED WITH AURAL SECTS AT ALL. Got that? Yeah? OKAY THEN,

This is just going to be a thing where I force tracks upon you that I think are good and important. In that order. Sometimes you'll hear my voice. I'll sometimes tell stories, I'll sometimes make jokes, I'll sometimes deliver gossip and sometimes (only very occasionally) I may rant for short, intense bursts. Though you get none of these this time, because there are no inebriates in the house.

I want y'all to get in touch if'n you can and or want to, about this or that or whatever. Send me links to shit, and I'll check them out, don't like a track? Tell me why. Thing my stories are bullshit? Get at me. I'm looking for Utopian-levels of involvement, here.

Tracklistings can be found wherever I sodding damn well please to put them, and I'll try to provide links to places that you can either download from for free, or purchase for monies.

Intonamorous Spellcast 1.o by Intonamarous on Mixcloud

Tracklisting:
Maribel – Jezebel Jive (Keep Shelly In Athens Remix)

https://soundcloud.com/keepshellyinathens/maribel-jezebel-jive-keep 

Ritualz featuring How I Quit Crack – Eye (Smashing Pumpkins cover) 

https://soundcloud.com/rrritualzzz/eye-featuring-how-i-quit-crack 

VEILS – SOULMATES

https://soundcloud.com/veils/soulmates 

VS//YOUTHCLUB – INFINITY

http://auralsects.bandcamp.com/album/waves

Holy Other – Know Where (Andy Stott Remix)

https://soundcloud.com/tri_angle_records/holy-other-know-where-andy 

Emika – 3 Hours (Ghosts Remix) 

https://soundcloud.com/ghostsmusic/emika-3-hours-ghosts-rework

Four Tet – Jupiters (Drvg Cvltvre Remix) 

https://soundcloud.com/drvgcvltvre/four-tet-jupiters-drvg-cvltvre 

Playground - Spleen (Jérôme Laufer's Zabriskie Point Remix) 

http://stellarkinematics.com/

Poor Spirits – !N3V3R SL33P! 

https://soundcloud.com/poor-spirits/n3v3r-sl33p 

Vitiligo – Requiem

http://vitiligo.bandcamp.com/

Memory Ghost – Challenger 

https://soundcloud.com/memoryghost/challenger

PEACHBLACK – NORTHERN WINDs 

[forthcoming on auralsects.bandcamp.com]

/please/ - Heartbeats (the Knife cover) 

https://soundcloud.com/pleasepleaseplease/anothe

????? - Dog Days (Cover) – 

IF ANYONE KNOWS WHERE THIS CAME FROM PLS HALP

Grimes – Visiting Statue (M¥rrĦ Ka Ba remix) 

https://soundcloud.com/myrrh-ka-ba/m-rr-ka-ba-grimes-visiting 

Meddicine – Lost Control 

http://music.meddicine.net/album/meddicine-blood-split/ 

Mark Noyes + The Operators – Eat Yr Face Off 

https://soundcloud.com/caden-moore/mark-noyes-the-operators-eat

Fluorescent Records Summer Vacation compilation

It's been a while since my last transmission (2.5 weeks to be exact) which is pretty terrible of me... HOWEVER! I bring with me joyous sounds for you to enjoy. I have, for your aural pleasure, a compilation, brought to you be the glorious Fluorescent Records, based loosely around the the theme of Summer Vacation. Fluorescent Records are a relatively new label, but after having started in October 2011, they are garnering a solid reputation for harvesting some very fresh and beautifully produced beats. It's fair to say at this point that this label, for me, is second only to Tri-Angle in providing music that I consistently love.

The label is run by two of the artists (POLYHYMNIΔ and fathomm) who set up the label initially to share their friends' music out of their geographical locale, however since getting online, they've opened themselves up to artists across this blue-green ball we call Earth. Much like my own efforts in the record whoring business, they firmly believe that digital music should be free to share, if not free to download. Which brings us neatly back to this FREE compilation. At 30 tracks, it's a rapturous slog of a listen, so I've brought you a few tidbits to help ease your journey through it...

Khan Kurra – Nadjya – this track revolves around recurring beat and noise patterns that honestly sound like a walk through a marketplace, looped and toned down, while gentle and un-intrusive percussion underlines the pitched up vox. Imagine if Demdike Stare toned it all down a bit. Beautiful music.


ARPPEGI8 – CHOIR GIRLZ/PRAISE POSEIDON – sounds like a chillout/holy/watery day by the ocean. Fusing dreamy pads, soft percussion and bouncy arpeggios, combining with abstract vocals it creates a softer, more beautiful and hazy form of techno.

Chris Rehm – Coming Up Roses – coming across like lo-fi noisey gothic pop. I hesitate to use the word “Shoegaze” but it's there in this creature's genetic make-up. Bonus points for creating a greatly catchy singalong chorus.

Other notables: VS//YOUTHCLUB coming across like M83 with a case of the blues and a taste for bouncy techno. Okay, maybe that's a crap description. VS//YOUTHCLUB tend to make music I often find difficult to classify easily... PrettyFacesSplitOpen delivers a quietly stunning track, based around carefully glitched beats and abstract crystalline synth sounds that flow easily from movement to movement and moment to moment. ”Coffins” displays BL▲CK CEILING's own take on the traditional Witch House sound as per usual, with gliding bass synths and a melancholy piano melody that demonstrates why many consider hima t the top of his game at the minute. Other points of interest include :The Ceremonial Dagger, Koda, DARK MOTHER, and, of course the labelheads themselves, POLYHYMNIΔ and fathomm.

In the interests of full disclosure, I also produced a track for compilation using a vocal sample that PrettyFacesSplitOpen thankfully provided, but I could hardly write about THAT could I?

Go get this stunning bit of compilation below.

DOWNLOAD

Memetics and what you should know so we can get to the fun stuff.

Having imbibed a great deal of exceedingly cheap alcohol, I decided to not let this reprieve from the everyday artist anxieties that beriddle my being on a daily basis go to waste and actually put some words on (digital) paper. This is something I generally intend to do every day but never “get round to it” when in fact both OpenOffice Writer (laugh if you want but I like it more than the alternatives) and Ableton sit in that little horrid bar thingy that lies at the bottom of my screen in windows all day and I never touch the fucker.

SO. What the fuck have I finally started to harp up about? Artist anxiety? Fuck no, that side of art is depressing as fuck: it ruins the romance, the feeling that the end product just popped out, fully formed, from the head of Zeus. No, class, today we are going to talk about MEMETICS.

Why, you ask, does it deserve both bold and italics? Surely you mean memes, those delightful text-and-visual posts that crawl all over the internet, mutating and mating with each other and making people the world over laugh? I say NO! Although these beauteous things fall under the remit of memetics, they are not the long and short of it.

Potted history of memetics: Richard Dawkins posited in his book The Selfish Gene that genes are, at base, the replicators involved in both evolution (ie genes are the things that really desire to be passed on and drive their “vehicles” [read: us] to reproduce so the genes can survive) and at an individual level, but that this may also have a counterpart in human culture. He invented the term “meme”, from the word “mime”, to copy an action from another individual, to be analogous to the word gene. And thus the word lay pretty dormant until the early part of the first age of the internet, when Neal Stephenson picked up on the idea. He posited that Dawkins' idea, thrown in at the end of an otherwise era-defining book, actually had travel in it. It wasn't until much later that Susan Blackmore picked up on the idea and produced a crystallized formation of the theory in her book “the Meme Machine.”

But this is is mere history. The theory is a beauteous one indeed. When a person interacts with someone else, information is transferred. The information that is transferred can be called a meme. However, memes are selfish quasi-creatures, that exist in an ecosystem analogous to one in nature. They have to evolve to cope with environmental factors, just as individuals do in nature. A successful meme has to be memorable, or else it'll be forgotten and pushed out. It has to be flexible, to be able to survive and cohabit with other (potentially complementary, potentially hazardous) memes in the surrounding “meme-pool” (analogous to a gene pool). It has to be adaptable to change. It can sometimes combine itself with other, complementary memes to create what we call a memeplex. Its transference is virus-like, jumping from one individual's brain to another, by having a mechanism that makes the individual want to share it.

Have you ever wanted to share a piece of music or news with a friend? That is because the information you picked up isn't easily forgettable and we are a sharing species, not to mention the fact that that information has written into it that you should want to share it. Even this entire mini-essay is an exercise in memetics. I am sharing this information with you, dear reader, precisely because as a human being, geared very specifically towards memetics, believes that this information is important to share. A prime example of a memeplex is religion, and it does spread like a virus, from one individual to another. 

Mostly I'm sharing this with you because this theory has informed the basis of my thinking for many years, and if you're going to read about the (frankly far more entertaining) posts I intend to put up later on, you'd do well to understand this base level. Capiche? It's a bit of a dry post, but it's gonna get a lot more Weird from this point forward... Read more on the above at wikipedia if you want, k?

WE ARE GO

Launch codes input. Fuel levels configured. Payload armed. Navigation systems operational.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have liftoff.