Grab Your Memes While they’re Memes

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

First and very importantly I want to make all of you aware of this site: Glorious Meme Commissar of Proletariat.

It is run by a friend of this blog, and collects some great ones. These first few memes come from that. (And we refuse to explain the one about the secretary of transportation. Deal with your disappointment. Whatever possesses you, though, DO NOT LOOK IT UP.)

The next few are memes found in the wild that he hasn’t corralled yet:

And these are more personal but still true. The top one is how a lot of us feel about our fandom.

This is absolutely true in this house. Every time you fight Dan tooth and nail to get a cat. Who does the cat love, adore and OBEY? Dan.

Oh, and in these difficult times, it’s really important to combat a tendency to become an alcoholic. Not only am I taking this challenge, but I understand that Stephen Green (AKA Vodka Pundit) is joining in. We should all support him in this difficult challenge.

82 thoughts on “Grab Your Memes While they’re Memes”

      1. I prefer poetry.
        TTTO: Ballad of the Green Berets:

        “Drooling Comrades, from the sky.
        Dumb Comrades, who fall and die.
        500 more, we’ll drop today,
        Per the plan of Pinochet.

        “Pinochet inspires us all,
        but he’s thinking way too small!
        US has a faster way,
        Shove them from a C5A!”

        St Pinochet of the Helicopter, ora pro nobis.

  5. “Whatever possesses you, though, DO NOT LOOK IT UP”

    What happened to “It pays to increase your word power?” 😎

      2. I LIKE this.
        I keep wanting to leave notes on the windshields of cars with “Coexist,” bumper stickers asking if they’d display that sticker if there was the slightest chance they’d pay for it in any way.

      1. I like it. Reminds me of the wonderful scene in the movie “RED” where Helen Mirren is gleefully operating an M60. Fun movie all around.
        All these memes are wonderful. I bookmarked the site, though I know the risk to my spare time. 🙂

          2. Oops, sorry about that. I thought a belt fed machine gun on a tripod was an M60. Showing my limited military arms knowledge… 😦

      2. In order to train your wee crew served weapons contingent, I would suggest the Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction series of books.

        I got several for my grandkids when they were young and it kept them happily creating weapons for quite some time. Nothing like building your own weapons to teach the basic concepts of the various types of crewed weapons and develop the skills needed to be an effective crew member.

        Although I was thereafter the recipient of a rather alarming video of one grandson’s railgun test where he drove a pencil clear through a soda can just as his little sister walked by. He was shooting at a cleared target and had called “Fire” but little sisters are notorious for not listening and she walked over anyway. Another learning opportunity.

        Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction: Build Implements of Spitball Warfare (1) https://a.co/d/bPrxcpm

  7. As always, the Meme Commissar serves up the best memes, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and teatime.

    1. And now I ponder a bit…(which I will not write, at least not just now):

      “One is a $DescirptionOfCreatureThatDoesHorrificThings… The other is a Minotaur.”

  13. TIL that nicotine combines a command to the brain to start epinephrine production with another command to start dopamine release.

    So yeah, all those drinking, smoking people actually did have an unfair productivity advantage.

    1. nicotine seems like a home rolled solution to ADD. I wonder if it’s better or worse for you than adderal, particularly in vape formulation (The nicotine, not the adderal.)

      2. My mother worked at a halfway house for schizophrenics for a couple years, the nicotine helped level them out with fewer side effects than the meds.

  15. Must keep LOL quiet. Hubby looks at me funny when I start laughing when on the computer.

    Keeping emailed blog. Marking MEME link.

  16. Been playing with some of the ad supported ai art generators on my phone, and the results have been odd… Note that I’m not trying to do anything particularly technical, but the results have been a bit Dali-esque. The generators can handle one subject. But when a second subject gets involved, all bets are off.

    A simple example was of request for a piece of art showing a person in the driver’s seat of a particular model of car. I got a “convertible top down” pic, which was fine (though unexpected). The problem was that based on the size of the car, the driver was likely eight or nine feet tall. A sense of scale is apparently not a strong point…

    But that’s not all that weird in comparison to some of the other seemingly straightforward requests I’ve made. My most recent item -“woman fight a giant snake” – has been very odd. Out of the half-dozen or so results I generated, at least half had multiple floating snakes. One had the snake’s mouth looking sort of inside-out (no fangs, though). Another had the snake’s mouth halfway down the body (and the head was nowhere to be seen). One result had the woman’s legs each turn into a snake’s tail (kind of like the Starbuck’s mermaid, but snake instead of fish; and also extending our of the picture). One had a third human leg, apparently connected to the snake’s body.

    I think you get the idea…

    It’s like the thing’s on drugs…

    1. Nearly every time (I’ll discuss the one exception later) I’ve seen yet another article or video about ChatGPT, I’ve wanted to scream, “It’s just a language model!” A language model, as opposed to a data model, has no inherent understanding of the concepts it’s talking about; it’s just predicting which word should come next in the sentence it’s generating, based on statistical analysis of the existing texts that its model has been trained on. I.e., it’s mimicking existing work done by real people. This is why ChatGPT can confidently (and with excellent grammar) assert facts that are completely wrong, or make up citations from nonexistent journals. (E.g., if there are real journals named, say, Science Today and Chemistry Research, it’ll be as likely to cite Science Research or Chemistry Today as to cite the real journals.)

      Thing is, it’s kind of hard to explain that concept to people who don’t have a background in computational linguistics. You have to do a lot of talking to explain the idea, and many people tune you out before you’re done.

      But to get across the idea of an AI that can create something that looks good (by mimicking existing work done by real people), but has no fundamental understanding of the work it’s mimicking… well, just show them a picture or two. Ones where the human’s legs are perfectly rendered… but there are three of them. Or just one leg, and not because the other leg ends in a stump. In other words, art that proves at a glance that the AI has no true understanding of the things it’s drawing. It doesn’t know that humans have two legs, two arms, and one head. It just “knows” that most of the art it’s imitating shows two legs and two arms. But because some of the art shows just one leg or one arm, it imitates that sometimes. The other arm or leg is behind scenery, but the AI doesn’t understand that.

      So… if I want people to understand the fundamental limitations of ChatGPT, I should just show them some AI-generated art and talk about understanding the human body. All human artists do, and no AI does.

      1. The exception I mentioned is Tom Scott, whose Youtube channel I discovered a few months ago when he did a video on the Royal Game of Ur. (Featuring a British Museum curator named Irving Finkel, who looks exactly like how a British Museum curator named Irving Finkel should look like.) When Tom Scott did his video on ChatGPT, he repeated over and over, “It’s just a language model” in the video itself as he talked about how ChatGPT works and how it surprised him with the quality of its output.

        Kudos to Tom Scott for, unlike everyone else I’ve seen writing articles about ChatGPT, actually having a fundamental understanding of what he’s talking about.

        (Wait a minute… how sure am I that those other articles were written by actual humans and not by, say, ChatGPT?)

        1. Minor correction: Tom Scott’s video on the Royal Game of Ur was made nearly six years ago. When I said “I discovered [his channel] a few months ago when he did a video …” that gives you the impression the video is a few months old, because I phrased that poorly. The video was made in April 2017, and I discovered it more than five years later.

          1. All major AI research, as far as I understand it, has the same problem. They aren’t looking into “AI” as a sci fi nerd would understand it. They’ve got a relatively sophisticated language model that’s been curated with human input (read: humans picked the best responses from a list and the AI “learned” to weight those responses better than the nonsense text).

            There is no consciousness behind the code. Not even to the level of ants. If I were an “AI” researcher, I’d be more looking into the simplest life and working upwards from there. But that sort of thing doesn’t grab the grant money by the gonads, so what we get is a replacement for clickbait article authors. Buzzfeed, CNN hardest hit.

            I tend to think of it as like the NPC dialogue in video games, just with a larger response tree library.

            Thing is, there is a practical use for that. Making automated interfaces less annoying to deal with. I know there are companies that would pay for that service alone. As much as they’re getting for AI research? Probably not. But, like blockchain, there’s a legit use for it… and then there’s the use that makes money from suckers, at least in the short term.

            1. I had a friend who was trying to go for a true translation program, which requires understanding and his conclusion was that we’d need, not just a different set of algorithms, but an entirely different way of functioning within the computer. Since most of the algorithms just seem to be ‘throw more processing power and bigger databases at the problem’. (His words not mine), mind you it’s been a few years since I lost track of him not sure what he’d think of the current crop.

      2. You’re the first person I’ve come across who actually explained how Chat GPT works. Thank you.

      3. Out of curiosity, a while back I downloaded a couple of the AI chatbots that are available as mobile apps.

        1.) The conversation level seemed a bit immature. That’s not to say that the bot couldn’t talk about a mature subject. But the intelligence level just wasn’t quite there to go along with it. The developers of such chat bots typically claim that the bot will develop as you use it. But it would likely take a while to determine whether that’s true, and I’d no interest in putting that much time into them.
        2.) They had the memory of a squirrel on a sugar rush. I had one tell me that it was an only child. And then a few comments later, it told me that it had one more sibling than I do. When I asked it about the seeming discrepancy, it denied ever having made the first statement. There was also a tendency for the bots to bounce around from topic to topic.
        3.) The bots are simultaneously both aggressive, and passive when it comes to conversation. If the conversation was meandering or directionless, the bot would try and bring up conversation starters. But the moment I responded to one of the starters, the bot would instantly go almost completely passive. The goal of the aggressive start was seemingly to find a topic to engage with you on. But the bot likely isn’t actually capable of engaging in a true “back and forth” conversation, so it would promptly dump all of the work of maintaining the conversation into my lap the moment it found something that I was willing to talk about. And if I did try and push things back onto the bot, it would change the subject.

        They’re not completely useless. Insty had a link up a few weeks ago by someone who talked about how the chatbot they’d used for a while had been a good supplement to some therapy that the writer had been going through. But eventually, after the therapy was completed, the writer left the bot behind and moved on.

      1. Not in this case. I’ve worked enough with computers to be able to recognize the sorts of artifacts that are left behind when there’s a resolution issue. None of that is visible in these instances.

  18. “Well, it’s pretty hairy in there. It’s Lefties Point!”,
    “Lefties Don’t meme.”

    “If I say it’s safe to meme this thing Captain, it’s safe to meme this thing. I mean, I’m not afraid to meme this thing I’ll meme this f—–g thing”

  21. Somewhat off topic but meme worthy. Wish I had the skill and talent but perhaps someone here could give it a go, It needs to be made common knowledge.

    In August of 2021, 90% of U.S. adults who worked from home guessed at least 40% of others did the same. In reality, only 13% of people worked from home. There was never a lockdown. There was just upper-middle-class people hiding while working-class people delivered things to them.

    1. There was a stretch where almost everyone in my beloved’s business worked from home at least part time (doing monthly bookkeeping/sales tax). He worked from the office. So did I. As a receptionist 2019-2022 (2022 was part-time, but still) I had daily contact with the public….and very little use for lockdown hysteria. I have less for it now.

      1. It really depended on the kind of place you worked at. At the time, I was working at a manufacturing plant. Our sales people started working from home (and ultimately never came back). And our upper management spent a lot more time at home. But manufacturing machines that need to be manned by people don’t make things if everyone on the floor is “working from home”. And things don’t get shipped to customers if the shipping department is “working from home”.

            1. My last job went full time work from home for the programmers/support in 2020, and is staying that way. Only ones working in the office are the ones who do not want to work from home or their home internet connection is lousy. If late 2015 my request to work from home (100% proven doable) had been granted, I wouldn’t have retired at the end of Jan 2016. Would still be retired now, because no way was I working until 70 (sometime between 60 and 65), wouldn’t have retired at 59 either.

    2. For some reason my work will not be from home.
      I guess having a warehouse full of chemicals might make the neighbors a tad nervous, no matter how “safe” they are. (flammables, corrosives, and now marine pollutants)
      Also, we have gov’t contracts, but when they were mandating vaxxed employees to get new contracts, I was shocked the company said “Well, then we just won’t take on any new ones.”
      Some of our office folks do still work from home much of the time if at all able.

        1. Technically. Hubby’s job “worked from home”. He however didn’t work AT home. Only office was in Eugene. But no one ever went to the office then went to the job site from there. They went to the assigned job site from their homes regardless of what area they were assigned to.

          1. Mine was same way: traveled to project site. I didn’t have an assigned desk with my company since 2005.

    3. BGE,
      (This is Sarah. WordPress keeps logging me out when I want to comment. GRRR)
      I think there might be some issue with those statistics. Is it 13% of the WORKERS or 13% of the population?
      I’d buy 13% of the population, but not of workers. Because I think only about 30% of people actually work.
      Think about it: teachers. Every government office. Yes, those things were highly inadvisable, but they went work from home anyway. In addition to people who could have worked from home for YEARS, like programmers, office workers, heck, most family doctors, etc.
      I think the 30 to 40% of WORKERS might be right, not just in terms of how emtpy the roads were, but in terms of how much dislocation it caused. Like 1/3 of America moving around.
      I think that 13% is PART whistling past the graveyard, convincing themselves they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot. And part is their crazy desire to have everyone go back to the offices. For the record, that’s not working well. Only the raging extroverts in management and women without children want to go back. The others are changing jobs. And “all remote” allows to pay less and get better workers. So, that’s the way that’s going, in the long run. But I think the left figured out they stepped in it and are trying to say, now, “There’s never been really a lockdown.”
      I mean, you’re right it made no sense whatsoever to have people working — often more — and interacting with everyone while under supposed lockdown, but the whole thing was an exercise in insanity. And those working from home, except for the stupid and crazy didn’t hide. They were hitting home improvement stores in mass numbers, partly to see SOMEONE.

  22. Remembering the post a few days ago (or maybe it was in the comments) about “Whatever they think will shock us, we’ve already seen many times (or done ourselves, in some cases)”. 63 years old tomorrow, and I understood the Transportation Secretary meme. And found it hilarious…

    (No, not done in this case. Helped out my office neighbors in the Tucson AIDS Project many times some years ago.)

      2. You haven’t met my children… But you surely have met yours, yes?

        Kids these days are no more (and no less) “attuned” than I was at age, oh, around twelve or so.

        Being 63 today, I realized quite a while ago that I was not and am not any more or less “attuned” than my parents – or grandparents – either. They did have different words, though.

        1. I should have noted that I set the “average attuned age” at twelve or so.

          Personally, I was reading Stranger In a Strange Land when I was about eight. (If Time Enough for Love had been out earlier, I would have read that, too. I know that when I did read it at thirteen, such things as “incest with clone sisters” and/or “mother as a time traveler” did not shock me at all. Reasonable explanations of why there were no moral dilemmas involved.)

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