@lindsay.at

ROFLCon is slipping away into old news now, but for all my posts on the topic, I didn't get to talk much about my own panel (which, incidentally, has just been released on video). So, I shall navel-gaze upon the nature of memehood. My blog, my prerogative.

As I've alluded to in my guest post on the Digital Natives blog, the LOLCats panel moved quickly, to great effect. I had imagined a much more chin-stroking, pipe-smoking, deliberate affair, but Alexis Ohanian of the LOLMagnetz and of the big hands knew to keep it moving and light.

However, as a result, there was a bunch of stuff I thought I'd get a chance to talk about, but didn't get to say while on the panel. As we're at LOLCODE's anniversary, I thought I may as well collect those thoughts now.

On the panel and the one preceding it, everyone got to comment on success being a fluke. I expanded upon that, and was quoted quite extensively, that you can't own the idea. I felt it very acutely because there was an inevitability to LOLCODE. If not me, anyone could have come up with it. If I hadn't've put LOLCODE out into the world, someone else would have within the month. Variations on the theme already existed.

I also have strong feelings on the meme-ownership issue because of the issue of standardization. A computer language doesn't really prosper when it varies from implementation to implementation. On the other hand, I think the LOLCODE meme would be strangled at its infancy had I taken hard line with the specifications. "Ye canna call native functions tha' way! We haven't defined it yet," would have been foolish. LOLCODE is a much stronger meme than it is a programming language.

And that's a key change in how I've viewed LOLCODE over the past year. I thought it could be a nifty, fun, teaching language, but it hasn't been that. What it has been is a fantastic, fun "Hello World" for compiler writers. I'm pleased as punch that LOLCODE gets mentioned next to Microsoft's DLR and Perl's Parrot virtual machine now. That in itself makes me think that LOLCODE-as-meme will be around for a fairly long time, being so embedded in the computing tools of the future.

During the LOLPanel I also thought there might've been an opportunity for more shout-outs. While I thanked most of them personally for the inspiration, I thought it should be done more publically. I did get to thank Stephen Granades personally for his LOLTrek for inspiration. Although I had been seeing cat macros around the place for months, and they amused me, LOLTrek was the first variant on the LOLs that made me think there was really something to LOLCats. I've long acknowledged the analytic role Anil Dash's and David McRaney's articles played, but regretted not approaching Anil in person.

I also wanted to say here, for the record, that the people I really admire in the web and meme sphere are the web-cartoonists. The LOLpanel were recognized for their contributions to humor over the past year or so, but I really think the people who bring teh lulz day after day, week after week, really don't get the recognition they deserve in that community. (Of course, they probably don't cry too much about it, having sussed profitability from free content on the web ages ago.)

I will need to discuss traffic more some other time. It's an incredibly rich topic. I know one of the first overwhelming moments with LOLCODE was "Oh, shit. I had no idea there were so many people on the internet." It's pretty overwhelming when thousands of people march through your front door each minute, as happened on the first day of LOLCODE's launch. Now, a year later, after interacting with people incredibly versed in the internet at ROFLCon, and seeing a steady march of new blog and forum posts introducing new people to the language, my thought was "good lord, so many people haven't heard of LOLCODE yet."

That keeps me in my place, but I also see it as an opportunity.

ROFLCon felt like a life-changing event. I don't know if the effects will really be that long-lasting, but it feels good for now. What really affected me was the massive outpouring of positive energy from nearly everyone: the enthusiasm of the organizers was infectious, and the attendees were touched with a sense of childlike wonder upon learning that the conference was really real. At first I was concerned about the dynamics of 600 introverts in the same room as 100 extroverts (largely from the marketing contingent), but it worked. People found their respective crews, and there were enough good will and shared reference points that misfits like me could wander from group to group with no resistance and lots of good will.

I was blown away by all the kind words said and blogged about the LOL panel. I actually couldn't explain the effusive praise from such worthies as David Weinberger. Alexis Ohanian, our moderator, certainly kept things moving and varied, and the panel seemed pretty well-balanced in their contributions. What really helped the panel, however, was the overwhelming goodwill from the audience. LOLCats were simply a fun, silly thing to talk about, because kittens make everything better.

This is relevant to my interests

What surprised me most about ROFLCon is how much I was supposed to be there. I thought it was right to attend completely separate from my professional duties at the university: LOLCODE has always been a separate thing, a lark ostensibly done in my spare time. For so long I've said my personal shtick was about tools for creativity, and the day job was more about multimedia content distribution, shading towards metadata, user-generated content, and vernacular creativity. I can be myopic sometimes. The biggest facepalm moment was learning that new pal Kenyatta was 'yatta' from the unmediated blog, from which I nabbed loads of articles for an old work blog. Of course, I didn't learn this until an hour after he left.

I loved how nearly every interaction could be memorable. I think the energy behind this was down to how young the participants were: starry-eyed youths were still in their teens, and the majority of the panelists who had done something tended to their twenties and thirties, with only a few incursions northward. This was in sharp contrast with the professional and academic conferences I'm used to: the young ones are comfortably into their early-to-mid twenties, and the accomplished ones are far older. And yet it seems I'm still most impressed with the youngest set at those same conferences.

I spoke with a fair few young people there. By the end of Saturday afternoon, I was pretty tired, emotional, and perhaps a bit full of myself. I ran into a young man named Dixon, describing himself as a Smosh fan. He "so wanted" to come to a school like MIT, and I told him of the relief I felt at MIT and other similar-tier universities recommitting to need-based financial aid. Once again, if you show up as a desirable student, they will make it possible to attend. And if you're there, there's no problem with who you are, regardless of color of skin: the MIT I know is one of the ultimate meritocracies. He seemed a bit relieved and... hopeful. I have hope for him, too.

MOAR

ROFLCon itself might be best termed a symposium: it was neither a conference in a traditional academic sense, nor was it like a convention, with the usual commercial bent (I wanted to get schwag from a number of creators, but there was no way of grabbing it.) Rather, it was a gathering of practitioners (meme creators), theorists (like the keynotes and Josh Green's session), and some engaged commercial interests (e.g., marketers) about the economy of ideas and internet micro-celebrity. It was an alchemical combination, not least because the practitioners were humble, introspective, and tended to be thoughtful about what led to their being there.

I would love to see another ROFLCon happen. I will do what I can to help make it so. I think there's more room for an academic track, not only in the social science of memes and microcelebrity, but on more technical subjects on the dissemination of ideas and traffic analysis, and even on practical technical matters like scaling to handle such traffic.

Can I imagine ROFLCon being a yearly thing? An institution? I'm a bit more dubious about that. What made ROFLCon so wonderful was that sense of childlike wonder from everyone, a hovering sense of disbelief just over everyone's shoulder that it actually happened. The positive vibes that grew from that disbelief permeated all the ecstatic interactions described above. Once the event gets taken for granted, I think it will be time to move on.

And if/when negativity or jadedness invades ROFLCon, it won't be pretty. This year, anonymous was in full force during the final two sessions. Props to them and their session about Scientology: I really think it's a brilliant social hack they hit upon in targeting the CoS. But when they're a masked mob causing havoc with no answerability... not so much. Not clever and not funny, and it really encroached on the good will that permeated the rest of ROFLCon. If ROFLCon can stay on the sunny side of the street, it has a bright future.

A photocopier has been jamming almost constantly here at work, and I'm the sort of guy who will muck in and help clear the jam when I notice it. There was yet another complaint of it jamming. I cleared it, and decided to give a mini-lecture on paper curl to my colleagues:

For future reference, when the paper jams again, (after you clear the jam) figure out which tray it was feeding from, and flip the paper over.

Why? It's about paper curl. It's been a long time since I've had to worry about this, but with 1) cheap/thin paper, 2) cheap copiers/printers, and/or 3) high-performance copying (seriously), the "endianness" of the paper really matters. With this batch of paper, the ream should be placed in the copier paper tray "seam-side up" where the seam is on the packaging.

Uh, that's hard to describe, but dead simple when you see it. Email me if you want a demonstration.

I actually refrained from going into further, scarier detail. Y'see, paper is manufactured and stored as massive rolls before being cut into sheets. The natural curl is always going to be present, and (naturally) more pronounced with thinner sheets. Add heat and pressure to the mix (such as the fusing stage of Xerography), and a thin sheet of paper is going to show its curl.

Well, that's a bit of nostalgia from my misspent youth. The smell of high school to me was the smell of ozone from the school district's Xerox 9900 copier (yes, high-performance copying, indeed), which I operated for four years as a part-time job, during lunch and after school. I very rarely sat in study hall – all my spare time was spent making copies, doing spare bits of desktop publishing on the mac there, doing paste-up for my Model UN club's newsletter, or videotaping sports events. Then there was my paper delivery route, once I got home. Is it a wonder I still have an abiding love of paper, printing, typography, and multimedia?

Yesterday marked my ten-year anniversary of living and working in Europe. On 19 October 1996, I got off an overnight Sabena/Delta flight in Zaventem airport, and took started on an adventure that at the time was framed as, "a year contract to be paid to live in Europe? What's the downside?"

Well, here I am, fairly well ensconced in a job, with a house and a family. The years of living on the continent have taken their toll: I'm certainly carrying a lot more weight around than ten years ago. I'm still using Macs, and am still surrounding myself with fun work on multimedia. I hand-coded my html then, and I still prefer to do so, now, only with a bit of CMS help on the boring, repetitive bits.

Although I have (a couple) iPods, I listen to music a lot less often than I did when I was dragging huge stacks of CDs from place to place. That's going to have to change.

The majority of my adult life has been spent away from my country of origin. I have always felt an outsider, anyway. Before 1996, I had never been outside of North America, or even on the west coast. Now, I am a seasoned (some might even say jaded) traveller, who can hit the ground running in any of four continents.

So, here I am. I don't think I want to turn it into ten more, right away.

The ever-excellent Guardian gives a nice overview (and eulogy) of where Tower Records stands today:

Tower Records, once a sign of the vitality of the US music retail market, a multinational purveyor of musical knowledge and influence, has gone under. Two years ago the company filed for bankruptcy. It recovered and at the start of this year a new chief executive, a bankruptcy and crisis management specialist, was brought in. But on August 20 the company again filed for bankruptcy and three leading record labels stopped supplying the chain, saying that it had not paid its bills.

It's a bit of a shock to be reminded of yet another fondness of my past in America being destroyed. My whole time at MIT, I lived within a decent walking distance from large Tower Records outlets: across the river as an undergrad at Baker House, and in Harvard Square while living in north Cambridge as a Masters student. They made for a great (if not necessarily cheap) evening out, with Tower's late hours. I think a very sizable proportion of my CD collection came from Tower (probably second to Newbury Comics' wicked deep discounts), and a lot of my most treasured finds were from there.

With the force of their retail presence in the Boston area, I always thought of Tower as representing the solid establishment, with enough sway to have a definitive catalogue alongside the popular stuff. It turns out this was just a product of the times, and since I left America ten years ago, the landscape has changed dramatically. I don't think I can work up the energy for an anti-globalisation/homogenation rant at the moment. It's more of a melancholy recognition that America really has changed, and each time I return, I know it less and less.

[Update: I had no idea this was such a popular topic.]