Simply put, a meme is a thought pattern that is spread from one person to another. Some memes are behavioral, such as the process of building a fire or brewing ale. Some are intellectual, such as religion. Some are commercial, like the Big Mac jingle.

In the tradition of the commercial meme is a phenomenon called “forced memes.” This is when somebody attempts to contrive a new pattern and propagate it for the sake of having done so. Attempts are made to short-circuit the brutal process of natural meme selection. If you have an idea and express it, then I am somehow exposed to it, absorb it, and find some value in expressing it myself and this repeats through others, you have contributed to the process by which mankind has risen up from the primordial muck and dominated the Earth. This is normal, natural, and in the grand scheme of things is the continuation of a valuable social and mental process. Posting a screenshot of Milhouse on an image board until somebody else starts doing it too, however, is just sad. Sometimes it’s so sad it’s hilarious.

A few of the blogs I frequent have fallen into a creative quagmire that not only perverts the natural meme-propagation process, but one that actually proclaims itself to be the abomination that it is, taking things further down the path of evil than normal forced memes: forced blogger memes. Logtar has been especially vulnerable to this trend, through Daniel has started a couple himself. Meesha has even gone so far as to fight back against the pervasive Fridays Feast cancer, attempting to start up a forced meme of his own in opposition. While I share his disdain for the Feast, you’ll find my forced-meme participation right next to my Adsense ads. Oh wait, I don’t participate in Adsense.

TL;DR – if you really must pollute my Internets with your prose, make it your own. Write your own content. If you see a post somewhere that you think is really cool, comment on it, write a post about it on your own site, but please for the love of all that’s holy, refuse to participate when somebody tags you. Don’t do it.

Back in early April of 1998, I was doing data entry for my mom at her accounting office, taking some classes at the SRJC, and doing sign work for my roommate and his dad. After tax season I needed another reasonably-stable stream of income aside from the sign work, so I submitted my resume to a place my friend Mori was working at at the time, Sonoma Interconnect.

According to my pay stub, May 6, 1998 was my official hire date. Ten years ago. There have been a lot of changes in the Internet Service Provider game since then; 56k dial-up has gone from a novelty to archaic, disk quotas have shot up from around 3 megabytes for most providers to practically all-you-can-eat at some places, Netscape and Eudora have been unseated by Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, titans AOL and Earthlink have been nibbled down by competition from incumbent telcos and cable companies that formed a residential broadband market. Three market bubbles have hit (two of which have since busted), the United States has seen a federal election stolen and two wars started. I’ve gotten married, had a child, buried a grandfather, and bought a home all in this time.