lamentations of the pop cultural kind

[freckles_and_doubt]

My sf class is beginning to horrify me somewhat. 19 students and not one of them knows what a LOLcat is! How can we possibly discuss cyberpunk, Neal Stephenson, Sumerian mythology and memes if they don't know what a LOLcat is? Honestly. Modern youth.

Today I also ended up having to explain fan fiction, anime, viral marketing and yaoi, the last being particularly surreal because I couldn't remember the term. I think my students think I'm terminally weird, and perhaps I should be worried about my possible levels of geekdom, given that I'm not a programmer. Like khoi_boi, I cracked up at yesterday's XKCD. While database programming is a creature of enigma to me, at least I recognise the principles involved, and the rest is simply me resonating with the sheer bloody-mindedness.

I should post more owls. Neil Gaiman has an endearingly small, fluffy one in his garden. Head-bobbing and all. Owl head-bobbing is killer cute. Had I an actual income, I might be bidding in Ursula Vernon's bird commission auction. She'd do an amazing owl.

Also, just because: Lollipop!David Bowie!.



Other amusing band versions at http://www.flipflopflyin.com/lollipops/index.html. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers one made me laugh.

Last Night I Dreamed: more epic apocalypse, this time alien invasion. Lots of alien spacecraft popped up all over the world, including landing messily on major cities, and over a deserted Zimbabwean road where I was busy turning into a bird. Some of them looked like air filters, torus-shaped, others were classic flying saucers (a couple horizontal rather than vertical, and rather plastic). They were rather enigmatic: they tended to land and simply sit, while strange murky things moved mysteriously within them. Then I discovered that they'd already infiltrated human society, leading to an involved episode in which I was trapped in an old house in a city somewhere with two guys who were busy cocooning themselves for transformation into alien form. They stuck me and some other guy into a corner with sticky alien spit and went happily about their transformation while we tried feebly to escape. We'd just broken free and were being chased through the house when I realised that my fellow prisoner had grown an alien head in place of his own.

For some reason I'm particularly tired this morning...

Comments

[nimnod.livejournal.com]

That is an awesome owl. Also, who under 30 doesn't know what a LOLcat is in this day and age? Or, in fact, any of those things you had to explain?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Well, my students, clearly. Humanities students are odd, they tend to use the Internet for researching essays, sending e-mail and... well, not much else, actually. The idea of the Internet as a cultural space is, I suspect, mentally filed under "odd things done by weird geeky types with whom I would not be seen dead."

I hang out with way too many programmers to be a true child of Humanities.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Wait, large aspects of human culture are a closed book to them because they study ... culture not computers?
Mind boggles <geek>Take that, smarmy well-spoken, well-dressed humanities students! Who's out of the loop now? </geek>

To me, saying "The internet is a cultural space" is as crashingly obvious as saying "people do cultural things". but I suspect that I'm living in a different century to them.