Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Monday, November 30, 2009

Draw Something Meme!

First, it really cheeses me off to call these things memes. A meme is a self-replicating thought or idea that catches on and spreads throughout an intellectual population by virtue of its intrinsic catchiness! A meme is not (in my view) a chain letter. A thought or idea that only propagates through the addition of a coercive element should not properly be regarded as a meme. At best, the coercive element could itself be looked at as the meme - it is severable. The rest of the idea content is inert, non-memetic material, merely along for the hijacked ride.

So anyway, it cheeses me off to call these things memes, except when I'm making fun of the idea. But I'm not making fun of this one. I'm participating in earnest! Why? Because I can, because its originator wrote it up so as to be non-coercive. The tagging clause was optional, you could tag a few as -12 people. I suspect, this was a deliberate experiment to see if it could catch on without the arm-twisting. Well, I'm on board with that! I've kind of streamlined the rules a bit but I believe the spirit is super-intact.

The rules are these:

  1. Take the drawing below.
  2. Draw something on it. Anything you wish, using any tool you wish. You may print out, draw, and scan back in; or you may use MS Paint or some other doodling app. HINT: TRY TO LEAVE SOME ROOM FOR FUTURE ARTISTS
  3. Post it onto your blog with these same 4 rules, plus a list of all the artists who have gone before (adding your name at the bottom of the list).
  4. Anyone who chooses to pick up where you left off can do so, adding their own element to the drawing!

Here's the list of artists so far:

1. Allie from http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/
2. dogimo from http://asurfaceofinfiniteshallowness.blogspot.com/
3. YOU???

memeofindescribablyawesomeness

If you take up the gauntlet and let me know in comments, I'll also link you here. I'll link to as many "artist #3s" as participate!:

3. Alice from http://www.skyblue-pink.com/
3. limom from The Flat Tire! http://theflattire.blogspot.com/2009/11/blogger-special.html

5 comments:

Allie said...

Joe, it is everything that I could have ever hoped for! That bear is like Christmas morning every time I see it. It is the best bear. I love it.

dogimo said...

Thank you Allie! I thought you might like it.

Note: that's not just Bearial the Bear, that's you wearing a Bearial the Bear mask!

Women can be bears after all.

limom said...

Do we get to see what this turns into or does it just float out there immortal with unknown origin?

Lunarchick said...

I am ON it! :-)

dogimo said...

@Alice: awesome! I will link yours in my post!

@limom: well, if they're doing it right, each person down the chain will include the previous artists, but in effect each new participant is also starting their own chain. So there will be no one single 'what it turns into,' but rather, a multiplicity of them!