Monthly Archives: April 2015

The Dove

When my mom died, you know, she died of cancer at home. And all of us kids were home…and she died early in the morning. Aunt Pat was screaming and we were all really upset.

But we all went outside together. And there was this uh, these tracks, this railroad, between the yards and we sat on them. All my brothers and sisters were out there.

And we looked up at the roof of our house and there was a white dove. It just sat there on top of the house.

It was a sign, you know, that she had risen…if you look up the significance of doves, you know, they mean, uh, Resurrection and life.

And that really stuck in our minds as a sign that we was watching over our house…she was okay.

It’s sad, but it’s happy, you know.

It meant that our mother was, a sign, you know that even though she had died she was living on and watching over us. Kind of like an angel…she was still there.

Why do you think we retell this story?

It actually was very comforting. It was weird, uh, we’d never seen anything like that. Just a beautiful bird just perched on the peak of our roof.

It’s true, too.

I’ll try to that for you when I die (laughs).

context: 

I went home for Easter and the informant, my father, delivered this one on one.

thoughts:

I had heard this story before, because their mom died when they were all very young, years before I was born, and they (my informant/father and his siblings) tell and retell stories about her to preserve her memory, often speaking of her like people describe saints. This is a good example of that, as she sent down the dove as a sign and his emphasis on the truth of this story.

I Told You About Stairs Bro, I Warned You Dog

Homestuck is a complicated topic to breach when it comes to cyberlore and memetic mutations. It at one point held the title of longest webcomic in existence, and as of 4/30.2015 totals over 9000 pages and nearly 18000 panels, and includes 158 animated movies that total 3 and a half hours of animation. The most notable part about the comic is the ease with which a fandom can spring up around it. It features many reused frames that call back to each other, lines said by completely unrelated characters with tweaked phrasing, and incorporation of memes originating from the fanbase in the canon material. In fact, much of the art used in the later parts webcomic and all of the music were not actually created by the writer, Andrew Hussie, but by fans of the comic who he later hired to work officially on Homestuck. It’s a classic example of the lines of authorship being blurred between creator and audience.

Early in the comic’s running, Hussie created a side comic that was written by one of the main characters in-universe, called Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. It is intentionally written to be “so bad it’s good.” with intentionally bad drawing, grammar, and nonsensical plot. The comic became a huge hit on the internet, and has contributed to the popularity of “meme comics.”

At one point in the story, one of the characters falls down some stairs while carrying a stack of video games, and the other yells the phrase, “i told you about stairs bro! i warned you dog!” after which the comic consists only of the first character continuously rolling down neverending stairs while the second shouts more warnings from off-panel. The second character never actually issued the initial warning as he claims, however.

Later, whenever anyone falls down anything, they yell out some mispelled variation of “IT KEEPS HAPPENING”.

This has since been referenced in countless other webcomics, memes, and regular communication among internet communities. Initially, this phrase was used exclusively as referencing someone falling down stairs, especially in unexpected situations, but later the phrasing came to encompass any kind of negative consequence resulting from not heeding another’s warning.

This phrasing has since infiltrated the vocabulary in the real world, even among people who had never known about the origin of the phrase. In the collection recorded here, BD and GT were having a conversation, and GT complained about having an issue with the notoriously buggy digital drawing tablet. GT said, “it keeps happening,” not intending to invoke the meme, but BD follows up with “I told you about tablet drivers, bro.”

When asked, BD admitted that he had heard of Homestuck, but never knew it had any relevance to the phrase or its origin, which he had seen in the context of reaction images on forums about completely unrelated subject matter.

Kek

“lel” is a common term used among people who frequent certain online imageboards. It is commonly used as schadenfreude in response to something bad happening to someone else, or some antic that elicits inappropriate laughter, implying the emitter of the laugh is a “troll.”

It has had a complicated history. The original acronym, “lol”, stood for “laugh out loud” and quickly replaced simulating laughter online. In the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, there are two factions, Horde and Alliance. While their chat messages appear to each other while standing nearby in-game, the two factions cannot communicate with each other, which the server facilitates by running dialogue through a coder. When a Horde player types “lol” in chat, it appears to Alliance players as “kek,” which in itself is accepted as a sound made by silly laughter, especially when repeated (kekkekkekkek).

Soon, kek became itself used as to indicate inappropriate laughter, until it morphed back into “lel,” as k is next to l on the keyboard, and it also looks like a bastardation of “lol.”

There exists a type of Turkish snack food called “Topkek,” which the boards have since adopted as an higher-tier substitute for “kek.” Even this usage has now morphed into “Top lel” among groups of friends who have ventured deep enough into the imageboards.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

 

The informant was born and grew up in Hawaii before coming to the University of Southern California to achieve her undergraduate degree in Psychology. She is half Filipino and half Japanese.

 

She has heard this proverb many times, hither in books or advice that her parents gave her, and she has said it many times as well, and she has yet to encounter anyone who has not heard of this proverb. She reported this proverb after being asked what her favorite proverb is or what is the one that is used most often.

 

This proverb is generally explained in a story. If you are gathering eggs from your chickens, and put them all in one basket, then if you drop that basket, all of your eggs are gone. If you put the eggs in multiple eggs, you can drop one of the baskets, then you will still have other eggs to make an omelette. In other words, you must not put all of your hopes and rely entirely on just one option, because if that one thing fails, then you lose everything.

This can be applied to many different things. Stocks are a good example. This proverb recommends diversity of investments, so that if one stock does horribly, there is still money in other stocks to fall back on. It can also be used to advise apply to more than one job or college, because if you don’t get that one acceptance, then you are left with nothing.

This proverb advises always having a backup plan. This is a big idea in American culture, always having something to fall back on. This may be in large part due to the ambition of many Americans, constantly striving to be the best possible, to achieve the highest ranking, but if that is not possible, you don’t want to completely crash and burn. To prevent that, people have backup plans, something to fall back on, skills to all back on. This proverb supports this plan.

 

For another definition of this proverb, please see: “put all eggs in one basket.” Idioms by The Free Dictionary. Web. 30 April 2015. <http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/put+all+eggs+in+one+basket.>

The Loch Ness monster!

“The Loch Ness monster! He’s the creature that lives in the depths of Loch Ness, Scotland. Uh, we think we saw him when we were young. Um, and it’s really and it’s in a loch, and it’s really deep, and it’s um, hazy and fuzzy and stuff, so it seems like there’s creatures all around, and they saw that her name is Nessie.”

 

The informant is an American woman, born in California. She grew up there for the first 10 years of her life, then moved to Belgium when her father was stationed there, and stayed there for 6th through 8th grade. She stayed in an American neighborhood, but there was still interactions with European culture, and her family would take frequent trips to the nearby countries.

 

The story was provided after asking after urban legends that the informant believed in, or has perhaps even encountered at some point in her life.

 

The Loch Ness monster is one of the more infamous legends known internationally, comparable to the Chupacabra or the Yeti. Most people know at least of the monster, that some serpent, dinosaur-like creature who lives in a very deep, very murky lake in Scotland. Commonly referred to as “Nessie,” she is Scotland’s national urban legend. There are festivals related to the monster, t-shirts and knickknacks for the tourists who come trying to see the monster. The Scottish are very defensive of Nessie and a large percentage of the population believes that she exists.

There are also those who kind of believe in the legend, but with a twist. She is a common source of conspiracy theories. mostly that the government is testing submarines in the lake or something similar. For them, this is a more believable explanation than a primordial monster. Regardless of what the creature actually is, many people believe that something exists beneath the waters of Loch Ness.

The informant is one such person. She likely had heard stories about the monster when she was growing up, and when she went to the lake in Scotland, she was looking for the creature. So, whenever she saw something even vaguely resembling the monster, she was convinced that that is what she was seeing. Or she did see the creature. That’s the thing about urban legends—they might very well be true. As the informant says, the lake is very murky. It is located deep within the mountains of Scotland, a place that seems magical, where everything could be possible. There could be all sorts of wonderful creatures hidden in that lake. It is certainly possible that Nessie exists.

 

For another version of this story, please see: “Legend of Nessie.” The Ultimate Loch Ness Monster Site. Web. 30 April 2015. <http://www.nessie.co.uk.>