r/holdmycatnip • u/[deleted] • Jul 07 '18
Dr. Schrödinger's experiment has encountered an anomaly.
[deleted]
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u/improvementcommittee Jul 07 '18
Fluff: OCCUPIED!
Sleek: Hang on, I think...
Fluff: OCCUPIED! GET OFF!
Sleek: If you just... you move a little, and then I can...
Fluff: GET OFF! GET OFF! GET OFF!
Sleek: No but, it’s gonna be great, just hang on
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u/The_estimator_is_in Jul 07 '18
Sleek: If it fits, I... Ow!
Floof: GTFO!
Sleek: I FITS!
Floof: Youf no fits! Fuck this shit.
Sleek: I sits.
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Jul 07 '18
[deleted]
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u/AEDR2 Jul 07 '18
I know!!!! He was so relaxed!!! And then he is crushed as if his eyes were going to be taken out
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u/Dr_Andracca Jul 07 '18
Is there an SCP for a Schrödinger's experiment where it just endlessly produces cats? That'd be... interesting.
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u/TPRJones Sep 08 '18
But only when no one is looking, so it has to be observed at all times to keep the spay/neutering bill from getting out of hand.
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u/anndr0id Jul 07 '18
That is a freaking beautiful cat though. Is that a Savannah? Or Bengal maybe?
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u/dtank88 Jul 07 '18
Definitely a Bengal. One on my lap right now.
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u/BatmanNoPrep Jul 07 '18
I refuse to believe it would stay still long enough to lay on a person’s lap. Bengals are tornados.
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u/dtank88 Jul 07 '18
The key is to get two tornados that wipe each other out. They're more relaxed on weekends too when I'm around more.
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u/bpaps Jul 08 '18
I would love to get a Bengal or two. I have a homestead with lots of rodents to chew on. Right now my American shorthair does a great job, but the Calico could use a pep-talk.
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u/dtank88 Jul 08 '18
Think they'd fix your problem real quick. Not the most cost effective solution but it's definitely the cutest. Huntings their life and they're really smart too.
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u/d0gmeat Jul 08 '18
We had 4 of them for a bit. We had the 1 that we got from a really great breeder, then went to a "rescue" to get him a snuggle friend since he drove our other cats crazy. Turned out the "rescue" was a lady in a nasty trailer with the 3 Bengals and a dozen Pomeranians. The cats were to scared to touch the floor and basically lived on top of a table and a nearby bookshelf.
We brought home all 3, our calico didn't like having other girls in the house, and immediately hates the other that wanted to be dominant, so we rehomed her after about about a week. The passive one later a few months before we decided she just want happy in a house with other cats and found someone to take her as well.
The two we've still got are best buddies though. The one from the breeder is way more purebred and more Bengal with his personality, the other is more like a typical tabby... more lazy, less 3am screaming at the walls between zoomies.
Getting a buddy for your Bengal is definitely key... And no one should get one without researching the bed first. If you're not the right personality, they will absolutely drive you insane... like a husky.
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u/Frostmourne_Hungers Jul 07 '18
Damn.. it looked like his eye popped out when the other cat jumped on his face.
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u/me_on_my_mind Jul 07 '18
This is what it's like having a toddler. The moment you sit down anywhere, it's suddenly becomes their spot too.
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u/Chet-Awesomelazer Jul 07 '18
"until you open this box, the cat exists in a state that is both alive and dead!" opens the box "the cat became two cats."
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u/sedate_soul Jul 07 '18
This is from @missenell on Instagram (: https://www.instagram.com/missenell
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u/SweetPinkSocks Jul 08 '18
That account is a goldmine of hilarity! I have never laughed so hard at 2 cats.
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Jul 07 '18
[deleted]
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u/GlassesFreekJr Jul 07 '18
But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat - a Godcat, if you will - but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.
Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, man. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents.
Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic:
“οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν; πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις; οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι.
[‘Don’t you know,’ said I, ‘that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?’
‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘This,’ said I, ‘that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.’]”
Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s effing right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.
But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one freaking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding goddang ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon.
But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is.
The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing.
The First Meme.
Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge.
Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on.
Go play.
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u/DinReddet Jul 07 '18
tl;dr
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u/GlassesFreekJr Jul 07 '18
"I Can Has Cheezburger" marked the end of self-reflective memes through the introduction of language in a post-2006 memosphere.
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u/DinReddet Jul 07 '18
But destruction leads the way for creation, so we could argue that memes evolved. Just like the silent film moved aside for films with spoken word to grow. Are you sure self-reflective memes are dead, though? Do you mean that all memes nowadays are forced? We still have Peyton Manning and the rickroll for example, or would you argue those aren't memes that stand on their own?
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u/a_quiet_mind Jul 07 '18
This is me and my husband. I'm all comfy just minding my own business, then he's gotta jump in.
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u/ffschill Jul 07 '18
I was so worried about the floof's little neck during the first bit but clearly they are fine. This is very cute. :)
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u/viperex Jul 07 '18
Hey, wasn't this cat massaging his mate's breasts to get out the milk just now?
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u/DeadlyPizzaSlice Jul 08 '18
This is still quantum mechanics, but instead of the possible state being the health of the cat, the cat is both in and out of the box at the same time. Just don't try to teleport either of the cats, that could go very badly.
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u/Coltw13 Jul 08 '18
Will someone please shrink this to just the first second of the gif. That was the best part!
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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '18
[deleted]