My first video blog

By Rachel Haywire | Published: December 4, 2010
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I’m gonna start video blogging. I’m a blogger who makes videos so why not? I filmed this alone on my iPhone so the camera might be a little off. What do you guys think? If these videos start getting more views I’m gonna work on getting some better equipment.

[ Making music and discussing how much I'm going to miss this place before eviction ]

Who knows what I’ll make a video about next? Feel free to leave me suggestions!

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The Death of Memetics

By Rachel Haywire | Published: December 3, 2010
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Meme: a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.

Or so it used to be. I remember a time when memes were exciting. Units of cultural information. The viral (r)evolution. I recently declared that “memes died in 2005″ which created a lot of controversy among my readers. How can memes be dead?

I think that memes are dead because we no longer live in a culture where the strongest memes survive. We live in a culture that I have dubbed the great mashup of nothing. A perfect example would be the website Tumblr in which 90% of its users are rebloggers. They repost the images and videos of other users (Tumblr makes this very easy and even promotes itself based on this) without creating any original content. Are these people posting powerful memes that are generating into something greater? I think not.

It seems like everyone on the Internet acts like a 14 year old troll. Can I haz my culture back? I don’t think that lolcats are funny. They might as well symbolize the death of memetics. The fittest memes are parody macros. Can we say cyber-idiocracy?

From my readers:

“I hate how the term has been misused recently to describe internet cliches, macros, and just about anything else online.” -Dire Deparra

“This is something I’ve never been comfortable with. How does this word ‘meme’ come to mutate from being a concept Dawkins used to track cultural changes to being internet slang for ‘running joke’?” -Robert Bisno

If you would like to understand memetics I recommend reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (also author of The God Delusion) or The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. I met Susan at a convention once (isn’t her dyed hair adorable?) and we talked for a bit about what memes had turned into. Was this evolution? I wish I had recorded our conversation. Dawkins and Blackmore did not envision graphics of slapstick violence as the future of memetics.

You can also check out their websites (Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore) to find out what memetics are really about. Let’s not let the evolution of ideas be killed by this new stampede of maggots.

Susan Blackmore

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Things I Hate Tuesday

By Rachel Haywire | Published: November 30, 2010
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Do you hate? I know that I do. For some people hate has gone out of style. For others it has become so commercialized that it is no different from wearing jeans from The Gap. Peronsally I think it’s time to bring fun and passion back into hate. In the tradition of the Things I Love Thursday column by International Playgirl Gala Darling I would like to bring you Things I Hate Tuesday. Every Tuesday I will be making a list of things that I hate. My mission as a web two point oh blogger is to prove that content can be king without containing feel good self help messages or manuals on how to increase your social media presence. The hate will now begin.

✖ Elder goths keeping the punk out of steampunk. Just stop it. You have your 80′s nights. Steampunk is the big new subculture (whether you like it or not) and we are not going to sit around as it gets invaded by more-elegant-than-thou types. We have to deal with enough condescending bullshit in the real world. In this alternative history of the future we have the right to act however we want. If you don’t like it start a protest in the name of good manners.

✖ Women who attack other women to gain social points. I don’t like these annoying groupies. They are pretty much the middle class version of gangbangers. A female DJ went after me by making an extreme effort to become friends with every guy I had drama with in the music industry. She made up all these stories about me to advance her position in a niche genre. Her excuse was that she had cancer.

✖ People who cause drama by doing everything they can to avoid it. These people are also known as fakes and liars. If you publicly have an issue with them you are seen as a monster because they are oh-so-nice. I’ll take the position of monster here. I don’t like people who tell everybody what they want to hear. It is far too easy to see through them.

✖ Anyone who got into Thelema through listening to Current 93. Are you fucking serious? You got into Thelema through a band? I love Current 93 but damn. Crowley would stomp you in the face.

✖ Internet humor. It died a long time ago. I just don’t find it funny anymore. If you speak in Internet please speak to someone else.

✖ The cult of the anti-celebrity. Just as mindless as the cult of the celebrity only less successful.

This wraps it up for my first Things I Hate Tuesday. Do let me know what you think. Do you hate the same things as I do? Do you feel that my hate comes from a position of privilege? Tell me how you really feel. Tell me how you really hate.

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It Gets Better

By Rachel Haywire | Published: November 5, 2010
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Here is the video I made for the “It Gets Better” campaign to fight against gay teen suicide and cyberbullying. I encourage all of you to make your own.

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Pitchfork Media: The portal to the underground or the portal to pretentious hipsters?

By Rachel Haywire | Published: November 2, 2010
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I was wondering what everybody here thought of Pitchfork Media. They are pretty much considered the gods of the underground/indie music world and their opinion is held in extremely high regard among music listeners between the ages of 15 and 35. They are able to cover bands like Brokencyde but unwilling to cover any bands in the goth/industrial/ebm/whathefuckever genre. The only band they even considered covering was Nine Inch Nails and the review they were given was abysmal. While I see Reznor as a bit of a joke I can’t deny that he is a good producer who has been highly influential to me. Yet Pitchfork Media declared that he was basically just a whiny teenager who needed to shut the fuck up. Maybe this is true but my problem was that they did not actually review his music. They reviewed him for being a gothtard.

Pitchfork Media has no idea who Combichrist is. They see Combichrist as no different from Suicide Commando, Front 242, or even Experiment Haywire. Juvenile crap that is placed in a box of irrelevant teenage angst. Yet have they ever considered reviewing the actual music? According to Pitchfork Media our music isn’t even worth reviewing because we dress in black.

I was wondering if you guys thought that Pitchfork Media was being reasonable in their assessment that all g/i music is a complete joke. I don’t think Front 242 is a complete joke. I don’t even feel that way about Aesthetic Perfection or Android Lust. In fact I think this music is fantastic. Yet if Pitchfork isn’t willing to look beyond the “gothtard image” or give any of us a review based on our actual music what exactly are they doing?

Breeding a new superace of Crystal Castles? What exactly is going on here?

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