Cimorene

staranise

Did you know The Princess Bride needed fixing? I didn't, until we did an unauthorized unlicensed live performance of it as my high school play. I got to direct and choreograph all the fight scenes. For months, I lived and breathed that play. I got to know all the plot holes (How does Inigo know Buttercup is the man in black's true love? How does Westley know Buttercup and Humperdinck never said their vows?) and I also got to know the biggest hole, the enormous gaping void in the centre of the story. It's Buttercup. I've never been able to un-see it.

sciatrix

Gratitude lists didn't help me one bit. Writing them was a practice that drove me deeper into shame and self-loathing when I was already in a very dark place. Gratitude lists imply that those of us who are in pain are choosing misery and just aren't working hard enough and that if we just think happy thoughts we'll float up above our problems like the kids in Peter Pan.

A tiny group of mainly female psychiatrists working independently all over the world, from inside American universities and organizations like the National Institute of Mental Health to researchers working as far away as Switzerland and Spain, began to study these women. They believe that in some, the dramatic fluctuations in hormones that accompany the onset of menopause may help to trigger schizophrenia. This correlation is called “the estrogen hypothesis.”

In the fall of 1938, Wendell Johnson recruited one of his clinical psychology graduate students, 22-year-old Mary Tudor, who was avid but timorous, to undertake exactly that experiment. She was to study whether telling nonstuttering children that they stuttered would make it so. Could she talk children into a speech defect? The university had an ongoing research relationship with an orphanage in Davenport, Iowa, so Johnson suggested she base her study there. And thus, on Jan. 17, 1939, Mary Tudor drove along the high, swooping bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River to the Soldiers and Sailors Orphans' Home. She toted notepads, chalkboards, a Smedley dynamometer (to measure hand strength) and a cumbersome Dictaphone. The study she began that morning is now the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the State of Iowa and the University of Iowa.

zenolalia commented in rydra_wong's post O hivemind seeking to crowdsource a good definition of the 'shitpost':

In jokes, memes, and shitposts ALL derive their humour from a certain level of surrealism.

A meme is not funny because it's true, but because it's an accepted set of ideas and responses that is not, in fact, tied to any objective reality. Nonetheless, it is known to a great many people--people who often do not know each other, but rather, operate in a shared culture--and thus there is a familiarity in its absurdity. It's absurd, but it's absurd in a way we all known and share in, which is comforting. And the combination of unexpected/absurd, and comfort, is what creates humour (as opposed to fear, which is the unexpected/absurd without comfort).

An in-joke is basically a meme for a very small group, usually a set of friends, or other small gathering where everyone knows (at leat, is passingly familiar with) everyone else. Friends, families, military units, people working at the same office, students in a single class, etc. An in-joke tends to occur when everyone knows everyone, and thus has a very specific shared context that does not exist in the greater culture.

A shitpost exists between these two scales.

astolat posted: SignalBoost bookmarklet

Okay, here is the little bookmarklet -- it's pretty limited, but it serves my own laziness, so I share it FWIW and if anyone has the time and wants to upgrade it, go for it and drop me a comment and I'll (ha ha) signal boost any new versions!