Following the success of the Fyre Festival documentary, particularly the @fuckjerry produced Netflix version, it’s come to my attention that people spend a great deal of time talking about memes and don’t really seem to know what they are. Your tweet is not a meme. An image with a caption is NOT a meme! Those are posts, and they are as common as they are singular. A single idea cannot be a meme. The backlash around unfollowing the desperately unfunny @fuckjerry rejects this shameless thievery as “meme aggregation”. A screenshot of a joke stolen from a professional comedian’s twitter and posted on instagram, this is going to shock you, is NOT a meme. This is not true for all of his posts, and there are certainly memes (albeit stolen ones) to be found in his feed.

I once made a mocking Spongebob post (note: this IS a meme) on a branded twitter account, but one woman took great offense to it. I had used a #RIP hashtag to honor recently deceased creator Stephen Hillenburg, to which this person conflated as using Hillenburg’s death to promote a product. This was clearly not my intention. I should also point out she referred to him as R. Hillenburg, so the outrage seemed somewhat manufactured in my opinion. She obviously doesn’t understand the meme, and more likely, probably doesn’t understand how memes work.

So what the hell is a MEME? What makes this an egg, and this egg a meme? A meme is a punchline to a joke that no one told. It’s the modern day equivalent of walking into a room and hearing “So I says to him ‘THAT AIN’T MY LEG!’” The image is the punchline. The caption provides context. There doesn’t necessarily need to be context, which is a joke unto itself. “They did surgery on a grape” as a comment on a random ESPN post is as much a meme as the screencap of the actual grape surgery. A fake screencap of a famous person’s tweet is a meme. A meme requires something recognizable, which is why memes morph through countless photoshop adaptations. Envisioning every context in which a single punchline can be presented is part of the challenge. It’s a cultural thought exercise. It shows us who is paying attention, it shows who is in on the joke.

In a strange turn of events, I’m moving to our Nation’s Capital. I was looking forward to visiting some Smithsonian museums while I was there last week, but then our Government shut down entirely. Trash piled up on the National Mall, and TSA agents started calling in sick for fear of working without guaranteed back pay. Let me speak on behalf of the American people when I say: “NEVER COME BACK TO WORK, K THX.”

Statistics show that TSA agents are only capable of stopping 5% of weapons from getting on board. If you bought birth control with a 5% success rate, that would be grounds for a massive class action lawsuit. But since this incompetence is at the Federal level, we are supposed to accept this ineptitude as the status quo. We similarly don’t expect any level of customer service at the DMV. For all the calls to abolish ICE, its interesting that rarely do I hear anyone on TV rallying against the TSA.

We spend more money for these inept agents to waste our precious two weeks of American vacation than we do on a Starbucks coffee. Look next time you buy a ticket in the fine print, its right there “9/11 Security Fee”. Somehow we’ve been tricked into thinking $6 per leg of a flight will prevent terrorism within our borders. Do you ever notice how the TSA rules seem to change day by day, airport by airport? Some laptops stay in the bag, sometimes iPads aren’t laptops. There is no rhyme or reason to this logic, it’s just an arbitrary decision made by someone wielding the power to waste everyone’s time.

Once before a flight to Denver, my wife was stopped by a TSA agent who was very angry that she was trying to sneak a cat shaped keychain onto a flight, which he had deemed was a brass knuckles type weapon (it wasn’t). He made us wait for forty minutes while he filled out some paperwork, and assured that we’d get some kind of citation in the mail. We barely made the flight, and my wife was happy to give up the keychain in exchange for our ability to leave. The vacation ended, months went by, but no citation EVER arrived. The TSA isn’t capable of catching 95% of what’s smuggled on to flights, apparently they are also too incompetent to even follow up with citations. The monumental undertaking of running this agency only amounts to, yet again, a complete waste of time.

On another flight from Nashville, one agent decided my wife was hiding something in her bra, despite no reaction from the bazillion dollar x ray machine. They proceeded to perform an eighth grade style “over the clothes” pat down, which in any workplace would be grounds for sexual harassment. They found nothing of course, and offered no apology for completely violating one’s right to not be searched unjustly.

While I feel for those being stiffed by the Government for their paycheck, I encourage you to look elsewhere for employment. Never work for free and never work against freedom.

I was driving around hunting arrowheads with my dad and brother, and listened to a Dan Carlin podcast on pain and suffering. He talked about how human beings are willing spectators in public executions, even clamoring for an unimpeded view of torture. Even today, people watch through glass as inmates are given lethal injection drugs. What's wrong with us?

A week earlier I was in the National Portrait Gallery, looking at an old lithograph of PT Barnum. It blew my mind that Barnum was smart enough to realize human beings will gather to view literally anything, so long as it was interesting and marketed in such a way to pique our innate curiosities. As human beings we have a thirst for knowledge, and the unexpected serves as another color to paint our vivid realities. At the very least it gives us something to talk about. 

Carlin goes on to talk about how the Romans gathered in the Coliseum to watch men battle lions, lions battle bears, and a thousand other violent matchups presented in the guise of sport and entertainment. With the entire world at our fingertips, what will continue to compel us to gather in crowds as observers? Is there any future for real shared experience, or are we replacing it entirely with an internet based groupthink? 

Think about the cost of sporting events. The Roman Coliseum was an epicenter of plebeian entertainment.  There was a time when almost anyone could afford to take in a game, now you'd be pressed to find parking for less than $25. A handful players make almost $1m a week, all at the cost of the spectator. ESPN likes to use these huge contract signings as headlines, but they truly are a giant middle finger to the fans. Try to find a seat in an NBA arena for less than $100 that provides even half as good a view of the court as TV. That being said, an entire game without the steady mindless chatter of announcing might be worth the cost of admission. 

MoviePass is almost dead, but theater chains are still hanging on, mostly by operating more like restaurants ($$$hello beer money$$$). But we've hit peak-stupid in moviemaking, swinging from one franchise to the next trying to manufacture hits and recapture the blockbusting magic of the 1980s. You may disagree with this, but we don't need any more Jurassic Park movies. Hollywood is dredging up nostalgia in an attempt to fill seats, but the movies themselves are secondary to the marketing. It stands to reason to think that theaters will likely go the way of bookstores in my lifetime. I can get a 70" 4K tv right now for the cost of seeing 5 movies in the theater, all of which are sequels. (This is completely inevitable, right???)

Live music is the last holdout. The recording industry was completely gutted by piracy, and the streaming services don't offer near the same financial benefits that album sales once did. Artists now need to hit the road more than ever to make ends meet. But the music itself, is increasingly pre-recorded. In Vegas, superstar DJs are the new Wayne-Newtonian attraction to get foot traffic in the casino. So we still show up for concerts, there's just less Marshall stacks and more Macbooks on stage.

We get on the internet to feel social connection, and we are social creatures, I am hopeful that we won't become too distracted to gather and partake in the spectacle, PT Barnum would agree.

There are countless "pocket cinema" cameras on the market, but its near impossible to beat the camera you have with you at all times. Here's a thought exercise: decouple your mind from the notion that what is in your pocket is a sophisticated phone that has other features. Replace the thought with "I have a futuristic camera that can order lunch". See how easy that was? The engineers who design smartphones (now i'm hesitating to even use the word phone here) spend a great deal of time improving the camera and display, whereas the telecom technology in your devices has stayed relatively the same.

There's something inherently gimmicky about a feature length film shot entirely on a phone. The act of shooting on consumer technology should be a means to speed up process. Faster setups, smaller rigs, time is money etc. If the plan is to shoot a long form narrative project one must consider battery life, lens options, and audio input limitations. Despite those limitations, maybe you should still shoot your movie on a "phone". Here's why.

It looks nice.

There's a unique quality to the image itself. It's sharp where it needs to be, and in the right lighting environment it really does look velvety. You can achieve decent background separation just by moving a bit closer to the subject. The minimum focusing distance makes it possible to get incredibly tight shots, and much more quickly than with a conventional video/film set up.

Low light performance? Nope! Your image is going to get mega grainy in low light. The sensor is tiny. The noise almost looks like film grain, especially so in B&W. Luckily you've spent $0 renting a camera rig, so you can splurge on lighting. You will need it.

It's flexible.

Getting macro shots and b-roll in tight spaces (inside the refrigerator, overhead, car scenes) is a breeze. The camera is so small you can really get it anywhere it needs to be. Most of the better capture apps like Filmic and ProMovie have built in stabilization, so a grip/rig isn't necessary. Or you can go crazy on accessories! Gimbals, filters, anamorphic adapters will all add to your production value, while costing much (muuuuch) less than their professional counterparts. 

Workflow, bro.

I would venture to say that even the worst smartphone interface is still superior to the best production camera firmware. You can begin auditioning clips before you ever sit down behind an editing station, quickly flagging the best clips to import. When I work on a 5k iMac, the machine regularly slows down when scrubbing through 4k footage. Not so on my smartphone.

It's good enough.

The resolution exceeds expectations, and the files hold up decently to color correction. Having a fixed lens initially first feels like a limitation, but the ability to toggle between wide and telephoto lenses on the camera covers a decent range of shooting scenarios. Why fight it?

(update: I'm trying to transfer a 35gb clip over airdrop. Maybe not recommended for long interviews)