Kill me before I finally snap…

So a friend of mine who I completely love is – well – he’s not really at the cutting-edge of what’s happening online. He normally chucks me links that have been around the web a couple of times in the previous few weeks. I’m not particularly well connected these days, to be honest, so sometimes they’re a discovery for me too. Today, however, he has excelled himself by sending me an awed link to (wait for it) All your base are belong to us! I’m trying not to mock him, but it’s so so very hard to resist. Nnngh. Nngh! Must resist temptation!

I hear what you’re thinking and yes yes – I too was startled by his hideous lapse into the clunky humour of 2001, but I guess we should be more forgiving – he works in the film/tv industry after all and it’s not like they’re particualrly down with the kids. Also they probably have way more important things to do during the day than look at funny flash movies and bitch about Microsoft products. Still, as a result of this discussion I have decided that the world needs a new scale upon which to measure how quickly an individual hears about big memes. We need a Beaufort/Richter scale for memetic clue. I am calling it the RHINE system (based directly on the river in Europe) and using the clunky old metaphor of the memestream (that also probably reached its height in the musty nostalgia of 2001). Essentially, the longer it takes you to hear about rilly cool things on the interweb, the further downstream you are considered to be – with all the commensurate anxieties about who has peed in your drinking water that involves. The novel factor in the scale is that your relative position can be identified with key cities along the Rhine! What fun! Which means, dear old close friend (Kerry), that if the memestream were the Rhine you would live in bloody Rotterdam. I’m more of a Cologne man, myself…