meme

Kyra’s Blog- you’ve probably never heard of it.

Posted on by Kyra Nelson

Hipsters. That’s right today we are discussing the ever hated on group from the social fringe. A little over a week ago, I had people submit ideas of what they wanted me to write about in my blog. Whichever got the most likes I would write about. Only one suggestion even got liked and this is it.

“Make it a photo blog/social experiment. Go and take pictures of all the hipsters that pass one spot on campus in an hour. Then comment on the fact that they all look the same, even though that destroys the very nature of the movement.”

The others were mostly scientific conundrums which I would be totally unqualified to write on. Not that being unqualified has ever stopped me from writing about something before. The bigger problem is that such topics are very hard to make very entertaining.

So here is the photographic journey of my social experiment. I include here a number of things I learned, many of which have nothing to do with hipsters.

  • I’m only slightly more qualified to talk about hipsters than I am to talk about holes in the space time continuum. As in I’m not very qualified.
  • There are not all to many hipsters running around BYU campus. At least not where I was sitting. Maybe the student center is too mainstream? Maybe I would have found more if I had turned around and faced the fine arts building.
  • I am not very good at stealth camera work. Because I was trying to look like I was taking pictures of nearby buildings and not the people walking by, I got a number of not very good shots. Like these:

I usually just got their side or back.

It's too bad I didn't get the front of this guy. His tie was so skinny it would have made a toothpick feel fat.

  • Nobody seems to care that if you look like you’re randomly snapping pictures of really uninteresting objects.
  • Apart from being bad in general stealth photography, I’m still getting used to my new camera. And I’m not really sure how to use it yet.
  • Sometimes people actually read my blog, and it always kind of surprises me. I don’t think I’m that interesting.
  • Speaking of which my blog has gotten like 20 views as I’ve been writing this. Why? I haven’t even posted anything new for a few days.
  • Reflecting on the pictures that I got that were good, most of them weren’t actually all that hipstery. Like this:

  • I may need to broaden my definition of hipster. For one thing you can’t be hipster (in my mind at least) without the glasses.
  • Confession: I kind of like the glasses. I actually kinda like a lot of the hipster style.
  • The wikipedia article on hipsters is kind of interesting. And we all know how I feel about wikipedia.
  • The origins of the word hipster are actually from a 1940’s subculture.
  • Sometimes I like to pretend that I’m not bad at stealth photography and that hipsters are just ninjas. Therefore they are able to walk out of the frame before I snap the picture and I get something that looks really dumb.

It worked out though. The guy I was trying to get a picture of walked by again. He's the guy in the picture of the hipster couple above.

  • Also sometimes I need to be better at focusing on my mission. By and far the best hipster I saw, I didn’t get a picture of because my FHE dad came up and started distracting me.

This is Chris, the guy who distracted me. I rejoined him in the Cougareat when my social experimentings were done. While we were there I noticed several of the people I snapped pictures of were sitting nearby.

  • I’m not actually very good at using wordpress. It took me forever to figure out how to make these pictures align like I wanted them too. And now that I know, it turns out it’s not actually that hard.
  • I tried to take a video, for a bit. My memory card is stupid though and wouldn’t hold more than 30 seconds.
  • My voice sounds weird to me when I hear a recording of it. But I think that happens to most people.
  • Hipsters can be nice. One of my favorite photos to snap was this guy. Not only did I manage to actually get a good picture of him, he was so convinced that I was trying to take a picture of the library (or whatever was behind him) that he apologized for accidentally walking in front of the camera and messing up the picture.

Anyway, as for hipsters themselves, I don’t actually have a problem with them. I just consider it another social group. Sure there is the irony that they pride themselves on being different when they all seem more or less alike. Still I don’t think that means they don’t identify with each other any less than members of other stereotyped cliques do. Besides, it was nice outside and I enjoyed just sitting out there, people watching, and listening to my mainstream music. Yes, most of my music is very mainstream, or at least was in the 80’s. Hipsters will be hipsters. In a a few months the general public will find something else to complain about.

And just because I like memes (and for what it’s worth, I did like those before they were cool):

Confessions of a Wikipediaholic

Posted on by Kyra Nelson

So when Wikipedia did the black out thing to protest SOPA, I realized something. I am unconditionally and irrevocably in love with Wikipedia. I reference Twilight, because Wikipedia seems to thirst after my productivity like Edward thirsts for Bella’s blood. However, in an effort to justify my time wasting, I present you with some interesting tidbits I have learned on Wikipedia. This is only a sampling of the random but interesting crap I have learned from the site.

  1. Some pranksters enjoy stealing lawn gnomes from people’s gardens and “releasing them into the wild.” There are even garden gnome liberation fronts.
  2. Austin, Minnesota holds an annual Spam Jam, a festival celebrating the food product SPAM.
  3. When Count Rugen hits Wesley in the Princess Bride. Cary Elwes (Wesley’s actor) told Christopher Guest (Rugen’s actor) to really hit him. The result was production being shut down for a day while Elwes was in the hospital.
  4. Mattel produced an Oreo Fun Barbie Doll that was criticized because Oreo is used as a derogatory term for somebody who is black on the outside and white on the inside.
  5. Sadie Hawkins was a comic book character. Girls choice dances are often named after her because in the comic her father organizes a sort of foot race in which the unmarried women of the town have the chance to chase men and potentially legally bind them to matrimony.
  6. The phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” does not appear in any of the 60 works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
  7. The word meme was coined in 1976, as a shortened form of the Greek word mimeme, which means to imitate.
  8. Platypuses (there’s no agreed upon plural) not only lay-eggs, they also produce venom.
  9. Kryptonite was not introduced in the Superman comics, but rather in the radio series. It was created to allow the voice actor time off, and was not used in comics until 1949, six years after being introduced in the radio series.
  10. The prince’s name in Beauty and the Beast is never revealed in the movie, but a CD-ROM tie in game refers to him as Prince Adam.

Wikipedia is often frowned on as an unreliable source. However, it is wonderful for random knowledge that doesn’t need to be accurate. Oh, and while I was perusing the Princess Bride  pages, I found this picture of Mandy Patinkin, the guy who played Inigo. He looks so different now!