The fuckin bong joke is majestic. I assume he was pulling these out of his ass at signings, too. Nice handwriting, Mark.
I could never be famous enough to sign stuff, people would get it back like what the fuck is this? My sig would be all inconsistent, too. Hamill is a pro, though. Even back then.
You know? He handled going from nobody to Luke Skywalker pretty damned well all things considered.
I saw mark Hamill perform in a play once called Six dance lessons in six weeks. Rue Mclanahan from the Golden Girls played the female lead. This was like 20+ years ago now I guess.
It was actually a really good play and I got to meet him during the opening night party afterwards. I was an idiot kid and asked him to sign the playbill with a MTFBWY or something dumb like that. He was visibly miffed, understandably, but still politely signed it “forcefully yours.”
It wasn’t until years later that I realized it was kind of rude of me to ask for that at the opening night party of a play he just worked really hard on. Must be real annoying having fanboys pestering you about a shitty movie you did decades ago. Anyway he seemed nice enough and it was a really good play. I got a pic with him around here somewhere, maybe I’ll post if there’s any interest.
Wew. Lots of Lucas and Disney fanbois it looks like based on the vitriol. I’m GenX. We lived through the “Gap of SW” where we made do with mid-good SW novels, toys, games, cameos and the occasional SW-related tv movies. We were so hyped to the heavens for the Prequels that we didn’t see the warning signs when Lucas shat on SW by making the Special Editions. I walked out of the cinema in confusion after watching TPM. It’s like a Believer being told by God himself that your religion is a sham. Lucas is a sfx visionary and world builder but he is a hack in script writing and needed people to tell him off. The actors like Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford frequently refused to act out the lines Lucas wrote. Carrie Fisher even became a script doctor due to her experience with Lucas’ terrible scripts.
I think my favorite Star Wars experiences overall are still the Dark Forces series and the X-Wing / Tie Fighter series. They expanded so well on what we had at the time and definitely messed with my expectations when the newer trilogies came out.
He learned from the best… George Lucas did everything he could with Bill Moyers to open source the whole humanity meme pattern inspiration in Star Wars. He was trying to tie pre-film, pre-cinema, patterns to film. Passing down the meat and potatoes of society to each generation.
But he’s too famous of an actor to write funny things, everybody knows that after you’ve been in a couple of big movies, you aren’t allowed to do funny bits on the Internet anymore.
Maybe he’s one of those “meme accounts” or something.
You got my meme response now you get my academic reply.
A meme is a remix of an existing idea/joke/image. Unless you are creating something new whole cloth it could be considered a meme. Even though the term hadn’t been coined, what Mark was doing with 3/4 of those autographs was altering the context of the card image, thus he did create memes.
Actually the term was coined all the way back in the 70s, by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene.
It means a cultural gene. It’s a piece of culture that is so pervasive it can be said to be a part of the genetic code of the society. Examples are the smiley face, tic tac toe or other simple common games, that S thing we all drew as kids, etc.
Not all jokes are memes, and not all memes are jokes.
This is the only well articulated rebuttal I have gotten so thank you for that. I still disagree on the usage of pervasive in the definition especially in the context of internet memes. A meme is culture spread person to person and while traditional memes such as the ones you listed are defined by their longevity, internet memes are often flash in the pan or incredibly niche.
It bugs me when people call any stupid little picture or comic a meme. It also bugs me when people say they are making a meme. One does not simply “make” a meme. It must become a meme on its own. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some clouds to yell at.
I’ve even seen recent writers struggle to describe self-replicating ideas as “mind-viruses” and the like. I dunno, if only there was already a word for that guys!
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
Per Wikipedia, emphasis on what I consider the relevant bits. What way do you use it?
By your own highlighted parts, the cards in the OP are not memes. People don’t alter pictures of those signed cards and they don’t mutate. They don’t change via selective pressures as we don’t see new versions where people change the image or the text. Additionally, those pictures of the trading cards are not remixed. They’re shared unaltered. The OP is missing key traits of being a meme. The OP is a picture of some funny jokes that Mark Hamil wrote on some trading cards he autographed. They’re certainly entertaining, but they’re not memes.
I don’t think you understand what the concept of mutation/remix is then. “A horrified Luke sees his family killed” and then writing over it something cheeky about newfound freedom vastly alters (mutates) how the image is interpreted. “Selectice Pressures” could be something like a topical joke based on current events, in this case it’s the fact that he was signing cards at a convention, so the fan boy joke was informed by that situation.
A meme doesn’t need a multitude of variations to be considered a meme, that’s just going viral. It also doesn’t need to be a photoshopped image, changing the text is creation of a new meme, think advice animals. Simply changing how the image is received by a viewer is enough to be a meme, it’s nothing more complicated than that.
For it to be a meme, other people should also be doing something similar optimally in different variations - either before or after he signed these. For example to burn a funny message + signature in wood.
If this happened, idk. Potentially, this was/became a meme
I am pretty sure you still fail to understand the difference between the original meaning of the word and the meaning that you are using. www.tfd.com/meme.
By the original definition, no, it’s not a meme. By the definition that you appear to be using, an image that has been modified, then sure, it’s a meme.
I think you’re getting really tunnel visioned on a single definition and not taking into account the context to which we are interacting, which is on the internet. An internet meme is not the same exact concept as what Dawkins originally was conveying when he coined the term meme. I’m not out here in academia so you’ll have to forgive my shorthand of internet meme to just meme. In my defense before all you meme Scholars got on my case, the internet was included in my thesis title. Are the card signatures memes in a generational sense? No, but yet here we are discussing them four decades later, so maybe?
An internet meme has two defining characteristics in reproduction and intertextuality. Were they reproduced? Before today not to my knowledge, they could have been as I have demonstrated. However not every gene strain reproduces, are they less of a gene than others that do? If memes are the cultural analogues to genes then the capability to reproduce is what is needed. If the original image is a template then do his jokes count as a single reproduction? As for intertextuality well Mark did that by changing the context of the original image.
I use the first definition. To use the word simply to mean a picture that is shared doesn’t really match the original usage of this word. The act of sharing pictures is a meme. Some pictures that get shared a lot are memes. Mark Hamill writing on a picture is something obviously some people call a meme, but I think those people are using a new, and as far as I can tell, pointless, meaning of the word.
I went to Star Wars Celebration VI back in 2012 and it was $225 to get Mark Hammil’s autograph. I opted instead to get Peter Mayhew’s for $60. RIP Mr. Mayhew.
Hover your mouse pointer over those numbers on the webpage (which was coded by the Lemmy devs) - It says things like “2 points • 4 Upvotes • 2 Downvotes”
I assume the intended purpose is the same here as it is on Reddit - to flag spam, bots, and other intentional misuses of the platform. Maybe there are instances that don’t utilize the feature?
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