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#anthropology meme
ochipi · 2 years
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Weird things I have done as an archaeologist
Washing cannonballs
Comparing human leg bones to my leg
Balancing knee caps to see if they’re left or right
Smashed my head on a drill handle while I tried to look cool dropping 3 meters of stainless steel down a hole
Trying to rescue mice out of the trench using a shovel and screaming how you’re trying to help
Glass still cuts skin, even after 500 years. And me being the dumbass I am to swipe my finger across to clean it
Getting distracted because you’re convinced these two pottery shards match in some place
Pushing my thumb into the decorative indentation a potter has made 300 years ago cuz I’m still a child
Trying to match shoe prints to one of your colleagues
Surely google knows the brand name on this 100 year old shoe shine can
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Heheheehehehe
[id in alt text]
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wybbit · 1 year
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the anthropologists of the future do not care about me. they are looking at my blurry-inked little journals and going “ugh, ANOTHER 100 pages of mental illness? how dull.” they are laughing scornfully at the feminine nature of my pelvic bones. they think i own too many shockingly durable carharrt sweatshirts. but they forget me in less than a day
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iknowmorethanyou · 7 days
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Follow me for more ❤️
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prokopetz · 21 days
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Most of the Internet memes of the Mr. T Ate My Balls era are now lost media because the Wayback Machine's archive only goes back to mid-1996 and the idea of preserving shitposty image macros for posterity wasn't on anybody else's radar.
On the one hand, this is a loss of cultural legacy just as keenly felt as the loss of literature or film.
On the other hand, historians having to speculatively reconstruct Internet memes based on the verbal accounts of people who remember seeing them one time is very, very funny.
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er-cryptid · 3 months
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I can cite memes in my cultural anthropology class
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bi-krama-dick-ya · 10 months
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doctorsiren · 2 months
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silly little monster au country gavin?
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fish guy just like his brothers
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kjpurplepineapple · 1 year
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Had to make a meme for an assignment in my anthropology class. Can I count on y'all to help spread this around so I can get that extra credit?
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hoardingpuffin · 2 months
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In case anyone was wondering what anthropologists do -
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gay-caveman · 1 year
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*grabs you by your chest hair* you WILL look at memes about my special interest
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ochipi · 2 years
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What nobody tells you about archaeology
Dear tumblr people. Archaeology sounds like it’s the most exiting job on the planet. And while I think that’s true for me personally, let us not think Indiana Jones and promises during job interviews or what your professors will try to convince you of. If you want to keep living in dreams, don’t read further (I’m sorry)
You’ll get a new sense of hygiene. Eating with dirty hands? Sure. Clean nails? On what planet even? What you mean my car is dirty? Grocery shopping covering in mud? It’s just soil. Nothing disgusting about it. Sand throughout your house? Just part of the life as an archaeologist
The stereotype says that people ask about dinosaurs, but all they truly want to hear from you is the words “gold” and “treasure”. And you can answer jokingly about two times and than you will be absolutely done with the dumbness of the public
There are a lot of women in archaeology and we do the same manual labor a man does. But construction site workers and the public sometimes too will question your abilities. A woman in a digger is like a theatre show. Women wearing working gear clothes is weird. People will be (overly) worried. Sometimes to the point the public is relieved when you say you’re an archaeologist. Not that they would know if it’s better or not. But is sounds better than sewer pipe cleaner or construction worker or demolition worker. Like hey. We do medieval sewage systems. Respect other peoples jobs please.
I graduated under the promising words that archaeology is a science and you make the world better with your research results and you need to do a good job because you can only do it once or it will be gone forever. No. Archaeology is subject to politics and economics more than the academic world. You are part of a company that has to make money in the end of the day. Everything can be turned into the most ideal outcome for your client or your boss as well. Things can and will be faked. And laws and heritage services are just plain shit
You work terrible hours of manual labor for a very low paycheck. Most work at private companies, they have competition, they have to go cheaper than the other one. And you will suffer for it. Either personally or by the materials you work with i.e. everything is broken and will never be replaced
You will always be subject of impossible expectations. Be it by your boss, the client, the landowner or the heritage department. They are all people with no idea how or why we do what we do. And it sucks. It’s like talking to a brick wall. They will not bend, they can only crack (their ego’s).
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krakenartificer · 10 months
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Basics of Tumblr-based memetics for reddit refugees
When people arrive at Tumblr, they are generally unsure about how to handle themselves. The buttons are easy enough (I mean, the UI sucks, but it's 2023, we're all used to sucky UIs by now, so....), but what are the social implications of each one? What does a reblog mean?
This is very difficult to explain to people for whom this is their first social media site, or are arriving here from (eg) Facebook. But for this round of refugees, from Reddit specifically, I actually can explain. Because!...
....As you have no doubt noticed ....
.... in a world where we all use 4 websites, and each of them consists of content screenshotted from the other 3....
...there is not an equal distribution of who's making content and who's copying it. Facebook generates almost none of the content for other websites; Twitter generates some; but nearly all of the content on the modern internet is generate on Reddit or on Tumblr.
There is a reason for this: all "web 2.0" sites have the ability to generate new memes, and new variants on those memes. But only Reddit and Tumblr have an evolutionary pressure that forces those memes through a natural-selection process. On Reddit, that pressure is applied by the voting system: if an addition to a post doesn't get enough upvotes, it's hidden from view, which means it has limited ability to affect the next generation of posts.
On Tumblr, the equivalent evolutionary pressure is applied by reblogs: each version of a post, each set of additions, is seen in proportion to how many people reblog it, and thus cause other people to see it. Lack of reblogs -> lack of visibility -> limited ability to affect the next generation of posts.
So with that in mind, let's look at some nuances that are specific to the Tumblr ecosystem.
1) Reblogs are direct visibility; upvotes are indirect
On Reddit, when you upvote something, it's a signal to the algorithm that -- in your opinion -- this thing is useful/valuable/funny or in some other way worthwhile. The algorithm takes that into account along with everyone else's votes, time since it was posted, and so on, and makes a decision about what to show by default vs what to hide by default, and how to sort things. Upvoting does affect visibility, but it's only one factor.
Whereas on Tumblr, reblogging puts the post on your followers' dashboards directly (assuming your followers have chronological order turned on, which most of them probably do because fuck corporate decisions about what I should and shouldn't see). One reblog = one post on everyone's dashboard; it's as simple as that.
Reblogging is therefore a much stronger evolutionary boost than upvoting is.
2) Likes have very little impact on visibility
Most people have "based on your likes" turned off. Even for those that keep it on, it doesn't affect what other people see, it only gives Tumblr some idea of what you might like to see. Of course behind the scenes that's somehow accomplished with some kind of correlation coefficient about which posts are most likely to be "liked" by the same person, and in that sense a "like" on this post increases the likelihood that someone else who has "liked" other posts that you have "liked" will see this post as well, but it's a very tenuous and wispy impact,.
Liking is therefore a much weaker evolutionary boost than upvoting is, and should be considered more along the lines of a high-five, or a hug, or a "I would give you gold for this if I could afford any" comment.
(Also, you cannot "like" only one section of a post. When you "like", the notification goes to everyone in the chain, from OP to the latest reblog. If you wish to give specific high-fives, the mechanism you're looking for is replies.)
3) Replies have no impact on visibility one way or the other.
Only OP gets notifications for replies, but you can tag people in the reply to notify them. This is the place for "@most-recent-commenter I would give you gold if I could" or for tagging a friend that you think would enjoy the post.
So, with the underlying mechanics of the ecosystem out of the way, let's look at
memetic engineering
There are two ways you can add your thoughts/ideas/opinions/snarky commentary to a post: in the text of the post, or in the tags.
a digression on tags
Tags -- of course -- can theoretically be used to organize content, although if we're being completely honest here, they're not ... great. for that. Tags can be handy as a textual handle to simplify your google search when you use an external search engine to search your own tumblr blog, but their use as an archival tool is mediocre at best. Likewise, no matter what the Tumblr UI says in the tag section, they're not gonna be that helpful in allowing people to find your content.
Tags can also, as sometimes they do on Twitter or Instagram, provide context to a post. This is less important here, since without a character limit there's no need to trim down your commentary and trust #wgastrike2023 to fill in the missing details, but it can be very handy when you're trying to determine whether this "Bruce and his buddies" post is talking about The Hulk or about Batman, or whether this thread is dissing Harry Potter, Harry Styles, or Harry Prince of Wales.
Tags are also very handy for allowing people to continue following you even when there's some sort of interest incompatibility. If you love spiders -- especially pictures of spiders -- and I'm arachnophobic, then I'm probably not going to be able to keep following you, no matter how excellent your Anarchist Star Wars takes are. But if you love pictures of spiders and you tag every single one of them #spiders, then I can block that tag and still keep following you. Similarly, a temporary block on #The Witcher Spoilers can allow the fandom to all discuss a new episode at whatever time they're able to watch it, without having to completely avoid online spaces in the meantime.
And finally, tags can, and are, used for commentary that you don't want to put in the main post. Where that line is -- what to put in the post and what to put in tags -- is something you'll have to decide for yourself as you get experience, but as a general rule, the post is for something that you believe contributes to the memetic fitness of this post, and the tags are for things that you believe are not necessarily of memetic value. Additions to the post are integrated into the DNA, and will be passed on with subsequent reblogs; tags are only added to your instantiation of the post, and will not be included on future reblogs (unless the person who reblogs it from you is on iOS Tumblr Mobile app and hasn't adjusted their settings, in which case it'll go into their tags... but at any rate it'll die out in a generation or two.) This feature makes it good for adding meta-commentary that will be interesting/funny/valuable to your immediate circle of friends, but won't be useful to the population as a whole -- it allows you to be as snarky, in-joke-y, and obscure as you'd like, without having to spend any of your mental RAM calculating what will and won't have an impact on your Brand as an Influencer.
Influencers
There is no easy mechanism for people to see your follower count. There are many easy mechanisms for people to make it impossible to see their follower count. No one cares about how many followers you have or how far your "influence" spreads. No one is going to offer you a Tumblr sponsorship deal.
However, for assorted underlying-code reasons, Tumblr blogs are disproportionately useful for manipulating search engines. So.... we have an ongoing problem with SEO scum making a whole bunch of bots and using reblogs etc to generate fake signals to Google.
The combination of those two things leads to a general Tumblr tradition of Block Bots On Sight. The extra followers aren't helping you, and the mere fact of their existence is hurting all of us. If you've seen people strongly urging you to change your profile picture, add a bio, and reblog a couple things, that's why -- because we don't want you to get caught in the crossfire of our ongoing guerilla warfare.
Other Notes
One of the places that Reddit is much better than Tumblr is in the viewing of an entire memetic population as a whole: you just look at a post, scroll through the page, and Reddit helpfully shows you want you want to see, and hides what you don't.
On Tumblr, each memetic variation is functionally an entirely separate entity. This is great for memetic diversity, but it means there's a LOT of duplication, and it means there's really no good way to get all the variants together. The closest you can get is to "check the notes" -- click on that number at the bottom left of a post, and look through the replies, reblogs, and tags. Those are in chronological order and in no way threaded, so it's not very useful, but it is what we've got.
Let's see ...
One thing Tumblr does much better than Reddit is the ability (because of aforementioned fragmentation) to have an arbitrary number of any fandom. No more "Well I don't like the takes in r/polyamory but it's the only place where I can talk about it so idk" ... nope! Here we can have as many Spider-Man fandoms as there are Spider-Man fans. Really like someone's headcanons? Follow them! Really dislike someone's OTP? Unfollow them! Really hate someone's take on your favorite character? Block them! This is a fabulous feature of Tumblr and I encourage you to take advantage of it.
uh...
tags can be 140 characters, but they can't contain double quotes (") or commas (,) because those are delimiter characters and Tumblr will break your tag at those points in the string
...
If you think someone has mis-judged the value of their tags, you can copy them from their post and paste them into the main comment of your reblog. This is known as the tags "passing peer review". Copy-paste is preferred to screenshotting for accessibility reasons (and also the fact that sometimes Tumblr just doesn't feel like loading pictures), and it's considered polite to credit the person whose tags you promoted.
...
Contrariwise, if you think they mis-judged the value of their comment, you can go back to the person they reblogged from, and reblog without their addition. Tumblr made this harder recently, but I have confidence that we'll defeat them eventually.
...
I know that I said reblogs are much stronger than upvotes, but when you've got infinite monkeys generating infinite reblog streams, it all gets lost in the noise. Reblog anything and everything you feel like upvoting -- if people don’t want to be subjected to a bunch of random shit that lights up the dopamine receptors in your brain, they shouldn’t be following you on Tumblr.
...
IDK what to tell you about Tumblr polls. We're just like this 🤷‍♂️
...
...
That's all I can think of. Deities bless and keep you for seeing a problem in our online ecosystem and actually doing something about it. Looking forward to seeing what we can do together.
(Author's Note: All statements about how Tumblr works ("works") are as of 14 June 2023. God only knows what changes staff will have rolled out by time time you read this)
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piratesexmachine420 · 10 months
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iknowmorethanyou · 3 days
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Follow for more ❤️
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feraliminal · 3 months
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Titan TVman and Beowulf are Basically the Same Character: Why Skibidi Toilet Is Folklore
It’s been a long time since I’ve touched the hellsite (I used to doodle and write dirty fic), but I’m fascinated by the silly toilet men videos, their popularity, and the confusion about their popularity. And because I’m a huge nerd and always want to know why people do things, I wrote something. It’s too long to leave on my Notes app and forget about, and I’m also not letting skibidi toilets anywhere near my serious blog. So I actually came back to Tumblr for this.
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(Also the first stupid doodle I’ve done in forever, here’s the original meme.)
Toilet humour is obviously a huge part of why it’s so popular, and imho it’s a poop joke that got bigger than the creator intended it to. Toilets are endlessly amusing, particularly for kids, because learning to manage your waste is essential to being a civilised person but something that no one really wants to do. Some of the first conflicts between kids and their parents are often around cleanliness and potty training, and as we get older, the toilet is one of the few places where we’re first alone, particularly if we share a bedroom with siblings. Childlore and fiction about childhood is full of toilets: bullies that strike in school toilets, toilet ghosts like Bloody Mary and Hanako-san, people who died on the loo, and rats or spiders that bite your bum. It’s a classic example of a liminal space that looks mundane but could be full of scary shit.
So that’s my first smart theory, Skibidi Toilet is a contemporary haunted toilet story with something to do with dirt and discomfort vs tech. Clever theories about symbolism are fun and I think symbolism that feels relevant and familiar might be why something first attracts someone’s attention, but I don’t think it can explain the thing having fandom.
The only thing people love as much as poop jokes is stories about cool guys having punch ups, and there’s plenty of that as well. Visually and thematically, Skibidi uses all the tropes that we love in serious popular media - fights, explosions, monsters, giants, noise, the aforementioned cool robots. Swap out skibidi toilets for alien invaders, and cameramen with plungers for cyborgs with swords, and we’d have a respectable alien apocalypse story that’s identical to five other summer blockbusters. But as it is, it’s so ridiculous that it can only be a silly little internet video.
There’s a video by MatPat making a convincing argument that it’s actually about the conflict between independent content creators and the conventional media industry. But again, I think it’s also probably only indirectly what’s turning curious views into millions of subscriptions, especially since the earlier netlore was pretty niche. I think what viewers are picking up on is the dissonance between cool robots, apocalypse horror, and silly toilets, evidenced by most of the comments on YouTube being variation of “why is this actually good”. It’s got the same vibe as other stuff I’d classify as creepypasta-style or meme-style horror: Five Nights at Freddy’s, Among Us, Homestuck, and so on. In meme horror, there is an in-universe threat to characters that’s not played for laughs. However, something like a ridiculous gimmick, a parody of pop culture, or a dissonantly cute art style makes it clear that adult viewers who understand it as fiction don’t have to respect the threat.
The line between feared and respected has always been thin. A cool example of this is the word aglæca in Beowulf and other Old English texts. Aglæca is a debated word because it’s mainly used to describe monsters and demons, but is sometimes used to describe heroes and saints. Both the human hero Beowulf and his monster opponent Grendel are called aglæca. Based on this use and its etymology, some medieval studies scholars think it means something more like an uncanny and powerful outsider. I think a big part of meme horror’s appeal is that it’s still got heroes who are more or less serious characters fighting serious battles. We can respect the characters and their struggles even if we don’t fear the absurd stuff. I’ve chosen Titan TVman for my silly title because they’re the character that best embodies the “uncanny hero” aspect for me, but tbh I think that most meme horror heroes/anti-heroes seem to be these character types.
We know that enjoying horror fiction helps some people manage anxiety and fear, and comedy horror can help us laugh at fear. With the retained seriousness besides the playfulness, meme horror might be more beneficial than basic serious or comedy horror as a comfortably uncomfortable middle ground between the two. Cringe is currently having a cultural moment too, where concerns about and celebrations of being cringe are everywhere, so it might also give us a way of exploring and processing our feelings about embarrassment as well as fear.
Memes, and therefore meme horror, are very amenable to being collaboratively and spontaneously adapted and spread by regular folk. They’re a new form of folklore, essentially. They address stuff that’s relevant to the lives of regular folk, including ugly and uncomfortable things. There’s even a theory that the culture of the very online has began an era of “secondary orality” where how we spread stories on the internet replicates how we used to spread folk stories by word-of-mouth. Secondary orality is a double-edged sword, as it can build creative and supportive communities, but also spreads conspiracy theories and hate. No wonder some of us might not be having our needs fulfilled by regular horror fiction, if we’re facing the bad kind of secondary orality as well as everything else that’s going on in the world. (More allegories! An increasingly absurd and hostile world is another theme in Skibidi Toilet.)
The 1938 book Homo Ludens argued that doing things just for fun has defined features and benefits: play gives us freedom to express ourselves, it’s separate from everyday life, it allows us to construct new worlds with new rules, and it’s never compulsory or for profit. When we’re bombarded by media that’s designed to extract the maximum amount of profit from us, engaging with mainstream entertainment might sometimes feel not as playful or as voluntary. But by being a bit cringe, meme horror retains the appearance of being indie and just for fun even if it becomes obscenely popular.
So, for me, this is what Skibidi Toilet is about. It’s about new folklore playing the same role as old folklore, even if it looks like silly toilet men videos, because we’re essentially the same people as our ancestors telling monster stories around the fire.
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