#roflcon

[thedigitalhuman]

At ROFLCon, watching memes go mainstream

Reporting from ROFLCon III at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we find that not everything is LOL-worthy

Unlike a lot of other conventions, however, the atmosphere is laid back and mostly everyone seemed to be having a pretty great time. I'll admit, I wasn't sure what to expect (this was my first ROFLCon) going in, but the fairly joyful environment caught up with me. The discussions at ROFLCon covered a wide assortment of topics ranging from the funny to the very serious — things like intellectual property law, and data management for huge sites such as Reddit and YouTube — but for the most part, there was a prevailing vibe of positivity that I at first found to be endearing and hard to disagree with, but ultimately left feeling unsettled about.

Digital Human: Series 16, Episode 1: Gentrification

[amplifier]

Transcript: "Running The Tubes" Panel at ROFLCon

(NOTE: Amplifier recently moved our blog to Tumblr and lost a few old Wordpress posts. This is a restored transcript from Amplifier CEO/Co-Founder Jef Sewell's Panel at ROFLCON II.)

Cast of Characters: Larry Oji (LO), Tim Hwang (ROFLCon Founder) Jef Sewell (JS),  Aaron Peckham (AP), Christina Xu (ROFLCon Founder), Pete Hottelet (PH), 

Moderator was Xiaochang Li (XL)

XIAOCHANG:  welcome to the running the tubes panel about the infrastructure of the internet. what’s more sexy than infrastructure? discuss your role in internet culture. JEF:  we started despair.com in 1998 as a parody products company. we wanted to sell directly to an internet audience. demotivators® took off really quickly. led [my cofounder & I] to start amplifier.com. We’re the distributor for a lot of internet content sites. fulfillment, screenprinting, print on demand for onion, red vs. blue, penny arcade, other sites. they’re quintessentially roflcon types. I don’t have permission to mention all our clients. PETE:  I’m from omni consumer products corporation. you may remember that from another event. I defictionalize fictional branding and products. if it’s awesome, I can probably make it and it’ll be really good. brawndo, true blood. just signed a deal with sony to do stay-puffed marshmallows from ghostbusters to coincide with gb3 next year. LARRY:  I’m the community manager of ocremix.org. ocremix was started in 1999 by DL (dj pretzel). reimagination of videogame music. dave created the site to stay sharp on his musical skills and do something creative with that. there were a lot of sites out there in terms of rearranging video game music. there was no place on the internet to get videogame music reinterpreted in all kinds of styles (jazz, classical). it used to be an ugly orange website. 2k+ free remixes so far. all content free. around the time of first roflcon, was working with capcom on street fighter. working on album projects. donkey kong 2 country remix. david wise contributed the credits remix. goal is preserve videogame music and demonstrate that it has the same longevity of other kinds of music out there. metroidmetal.com does awesome remixes of metroid soundtrack. AARON:  I run a little website called urbandictionary.com. largest repository of cusswords, slang words, made up sex acts. 5 million submissions, 10 years. pretty fun to work on. XIAOCHANG:  feel free to tweet at me if you have a burning question, otherwise use backchannel. the internet – what do you think it’s about? you are the enablers of the roflworld. you create platforms and tools required for people to create great things. what’s the process behind the curtain?

[joshdamon]

Sprouting from the digital petri dish of social networking, seapunk is a whimsical style that mashes together cartoonish aquatic themes, rave culture and a nostalgia for ’90s Internet imagery. The iconography, which exists almost entirely online, includes clip art of dolphins jumping through pyramids, aquamarine-haired mermaids with SpongeBob T-shirts, and psychedelic orbs flying over computer-generated waves. Like LOLcats and pedobear, it is an inside Web joke that feeds off its own ridiculousness. “Micro-genres dovetail perfectly with online media’s thirst for novelty,” said Mark Richardson, an editor at Pitchfork, a music Web site. “I also think there’s an overriding awareness of the absurdity involved that is part of the appeal.” Started online last year by a tiny sect of social media geeks, seapunk gathered momentum as it echoed on Twitter, Facebook and especially Tumblr.

[watchpopspot-blog]

Behind the Scenes Slow Motion with Scumbag Steve! 

[kenyatta]

Jonathan Zittrain on Memes & Society

There needs to be a class on The Real Internet. This video would be required viewing.

[watchpopspot-blog]

ROFLCon Meme staring the Vegan Black Metal Chef and Hannah Hart

[jerrybrito]

While I think he misses some of the wonder in the emergent order that are Internet memes, and I can't believe he didn't mention 4chan, this dispatch from ROFLcon is definitely worth a read, especially for the Tumblr set.

[sallymustard]

I'm really loving Latoya Peterson's participation in this year's Roflcon panel about political memes, representing her site Racialicious. In this video, starting at 7:42, she discusses the subject of the default internet identity and how the internet reacts when variations therein are identified and what it means for the person articulating themselves outside what is assumed. She mentions fandom circles in this scheme too. 

Her main discussion in the panel is really interesting too. She discusses how the "Shit People Say" meme evolved.