Annals of Duplo 10 Year Anniversary - The Meme and the Antimeme

This month marks the 10 year anniversary of the Annals of Duplo blog.  The blog began in December 2007 with the purpose of chronicling the evolution of Nod Gods and Duplo - respectively viewable as a meme vs. an antimeme.  But is this a cause for celebration... or cerebration?

To summarise, Nod Gods - originally just Nods - were primitive, almost malformed, doodles with inscrutable expressions.  It's fair to say that these Nods lacked the confident expressive potency of other general doodleforms prevalent across primary schools in the early 1990s (e.g. the rave smileyface).  To afford them greater esteem in such a gung-ho visual culture, the Nods were flippantly bestowed with the 'God' appellation.  But by merely contemplating their status in this way, the "self-esteem" and sentience of the Nod Gods roared into the foreground; these now became entities with potentially injurable - and inflatable - egos.  In addition, emergent computer graphics technologies allowed them to be considered as virtual beings.  Foolishly in hindsight, they acquired higher dimensionality in the light of all this.  Further doodling sought to provide Nod Gods with vehicular support, weaponry and mechanical means of expression.

Duplo, meanwhile, was an initiative set up years later at secondary school - also in the realm of doodles - to stymy the ubiquity of the Nod Gods that were beginning to infiltrate (via impulsive inkmanship) into school exercise books and even further: to school textbooks and furniture (detentionable offences).  Several school friends were implicated in all this, but are now too embarrassed to talk coherently about it.  It also did not help matters that when Nod Gods were irresistibly introduced into schoolwork (as with the topical 'title page' assignments given at each new semester, as shown below), teachers often lavished praise upon the results.

Duplo was led by the cod-fascist Duplo Officer and his several clones, and imaginations were given free rein to develop the most outlandish mechanisms to regain control of the errant Nod Gods and minimise their mischiefs.

One of the necessary qualities of an antimeme is overwrought complexity, ensuring ideas cannot easily spread.  Duplo, then, attempted to overcomplicate the memeish Nod Gods into non-transmissible nonsense.  Despite the fact that the inter-doodle warfare between Duplo and Nods itself provided regular feasts of mind-drama, this overcomplicating essence of Duplo - replete with fictitious bureaucracies - did indeed dilute the fixation upon Nod Gods over time.  Whether the Duplo-implicated school friends also felt this, or simply drifted towards the 'done thing' of adolescence and its distraction from abstraction, I cannot say for certain.  All I can say is that as a result I am now solitary custodian to a vast, elaborate, sprawling antimeme-engulfed-meme that exists only in my mind, quarantined from all outside scrutiny.  I do, however, still possess the Duplo archive, some of which was accessioned at the time from those schoolmates, relinquishing their ink-conjurations with laboured affectations of cool "maturity".  Such documents provide proof of doodleform power, and possibly - if viewed in a certain frame of mind - could reactivate at some point, in some person.... requiring antimeme counterdoodle measures.