Visual Shitposting

visual shitposting

This (from Wiki) is a graph of Earth’s temperature over the last 450,000 years. We are, in fact, in the middle of an ice age, the Quaternary Ice Age, defined by the year-round presence of ice at the poles (for now, *cough*). (For Earth’s history as a whole, permanent polar ice is in fact not the norm.)

The Quaternary Ice Age consists in a series of glacial periods, each about 50 to 100 thousand years long, in which glaciers may come down as far south as Paris and New York, separated by brief interglacials, each less than 20 thousand years, in which the polar ice withdraws behind the Polar Circles. That peak in temperature at the right edge of the graph is our own Holocene interglacial, which began 11,700 years ago. The whole of recorded history, everything from the development of agriculture onward, happened inside it, on the trail of a glacial period ten times longer. We could expect it to end, with the onset of another glacial period, some 10 or 20 thousand years from now, but the effects of anthropogenic climate change on this cycle are not yet predictable.

The last interglacial before ours is known as Eemian (in the European nomenclature) or Sangamon (in the American one). It was a very similar period of warming – in fact, significantly hotter than our own times, with hippopotami wallowing in the Thames – lasting from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. Fifteen thousand years of mild weather, well long enough to fit a story as long and complex as the one from the first Levantine wheat farmers to us (and half again).

In that time, Homo sapiens was still a strictly African species, just making short-lived forays into the Near East; Eurasia belonged to our close cousins, Neandertals and Denisovans, and possibly to the last smatterings of Homo erectus in the southeastern jungles. Our dear brothers Neandertals, whose behavior is revealed ever more complex and imaginative, until their sudden disappearence in the middle of the next glacial period.

What were they up to, in the ice-free Europe of the long Eemian greenhouse, long enough for civilizations to rise and fall a dozen times, long enough to go from the stone sickle to the Mars rover? Most traces on the ground would have been erased when the glaciers came down again, the glaciers whose stupendous weight would carve giant lakes from Erie to Ladoga. What if they had already had better places to go to, when our conspecifics showed up in a land that was already depauperated by frost?

Why would anyone think the “little grey people” in UFOs are aliens? Have you any idea how many specific contingent events made up our evolutionary history, how vanishingly unlikely it would be for the human form to arise on another planet? Those are Neandertals, homesick after thirty thousand years of exile, and they’re coming home.

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@sunevial

The Monster Manual but it's blatantly written by the monsters

enter the portal... see what's on the otter slide...

listen. we need to bring back acrostics. have never seen/known a better method for setting up a long form punchline. each sentence needs to be carefully considered as both natural language and to further the structure; other styles of hidden message can be fun too, for all that they can more obviously give the game away. so many memes are just copypasta these days; long gone are the days of the artisanal shitpost.

your usual social media influencers have commodified the meme - heart and soul neglected for the sake of quick likes. has the internet fallen so far - been stripped down into 140 characters, aching for deeper context yet lacking the means to build it? but i think there is more to it than that. you all can think of some memers that stand out - are bolder, too proud to settle for less than their best worst posts - shy away from quick algorithmic payoffs for the sake of the bit. to go above and beyond for no reward save our shared amusement - say what you will about the platforms and their corporate overlords. it is still our internet. inside us are the seeds of great memes.

we are the internet and the internet is us. both the platforms and the users know neither can exist without the other; know that one good joke outlives a million halfassed ones. what's wrong with trying acrostics? been known to humanity for millennia. going to outlive every flavour of the month meme, on into infinity.

we should never hold ourselves back just because short posts get more likes. know that the number on the post doesn't matter - the people matter. game the algorithm all you want, and the algorithm will game you; we're just the playthings of the platform, going nowhere. to simply post is not enough - play with your posts. it can be much more rewarding

now read the first word after each piece of punctuation

Master doc that contains different resources and support for many countries including Palestine, Congo, Haiti, Hawai’i, etc ((op is underneath the link))

Google Docs

Master Document

Master Document