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.

Nod Gods Towards a Fairer Society (The SNES Cartridges Incident)

Years ago, I was doing community payback (and yes, the 'c' and 'p' should be capitalised, but I won't grant the wretched scheme such dignity) at a landfill site when I saw an upturned cardboard box surrender its cargo of Super Nintendo games onto the conveyor belt.  Towards the control cabin, I wailed and gesticulated for the moustachoied Environmental Operative to "stop!" and without hesitation he immediately hit the big red 'E-Stop' button, bringing the procession of redundancy to an abrupt halt.  "What's happened?" he asked.  I screamed, "there's SNES games in there!" to which he gave an inscrutable look (he was a strong-but-silent type), and in a moment of confusion he sought the advice of the dreaded operations manager (and yes, the 'o' and the 'm' should be capitalised, but I won't grant the obese kunt such dignity).  The operations manager waddled onto the scene just as I was getting ensconced within the angular stream of wreckage (that I always insisted on referring to as "quondamware") [btw, Duplo thrives on quondamware].  He shouted, "get off the transporter, you f*cking idiot!" and I shook my head in discord, clearly enunciating "there's SNES games here", holding aloft a boxed Mega Man 7 to show him.  The manager craned his blubber towards the cabin and ordered the Environmental Operative to "get that tosser off there".  The friendlier operative then helped me alight from the conveyor belt as if I was a princess with a box of SNES cartridges in tow - to this day I'm uncertain whether his delicacy was informed by knowledge of the value of the SNES games, or whether he felt a gentlemanly respect for me.
When I'd finished brushing myself down and getting myself presentable, the manager grabbed my Hi-Viz jacket (which I'd just finished aesthetically repositioning) and seethed "this is going in your report, matey".  The sense of triumph was too overwhelming for me to be aggrieved at his aggression - with warm-heartedness I urged him to praise the Environmental Operative who acted so heroically quick-off-the-mark to shut off the conveyor belt.  Without such quick-thinking, I would've climbed onto it anyway, and would probably have been squashed to death - life is cheap around here...  What wasn't cheap was the total value of the SNES artefacts.  Now, I'm no expert, but those games appeared to be ex-shop stock - some still sealed - and would be worth at least £4000 today.  However, the story does not end on a note of reward.  Strangely, the box was taken away: somebody had purloined the valuable haul... possibly the Environmental Operative (who, most tellingly, went home that evening never to return).  I regretted being so selfless in my praise of his lightning-fast actions upon the 'E-Stop' button.  I kept asking, "where's my box?" but the manager kept shouting "it's not your property".  The cartridges would've been reduced to the status of future pollutant if I hadn't rescued them, but argument was futile - he was impossible to reason with.  Nobody understood anything.  This story exposes lack of fairness in a supposedly rehabilitory scheme, but can also be illustrative of the shittiness of humanity in general.  At this rate nobody will want to marry me.

You may wonder, what led to this community payback hullaballoo?  Well, it was another example of nobody understanding anything.  I was bin-diving on someone's property one evening, when the householder came out.  So as to not cause any alarm, I lightheartedly mimicked Nosferatu: a night-vampire character so ingrained in popular lore as to be rendered harmless as a classic cliche.  I hissed and pretended to be ridiculously vampiry, but he attacked me, and I fought back in character (to maintain the intended cliche, all the while hoping he would twig it at some point).  Eventually I got bored of the violence and briskly walked away.  If only he wasn't in the habit of binning useful and valuable items I wouldn't have been on his property in the first place!  As usual, the local press piled fiction upon fiction to make it seem more sensational than it was.  But ultimately, none of this should've happened: I should've been employed upon graduation, not forced into bin-diving.  Judging from my circle of intellectually first-rate friends such as Rog the Flowerseller, 'Simple' Kev [sic] and Chewing Gum Man, it seems their giftedness marks them out to be damned, slighted, imprisoned or held captive in penury, whilst meanwhile, the most vacuous bastards ascend to comfortable posts of prestige.  In the realm of doodles, Duplo was instated to redress such imbalances, and now more than ever it needs to be hauled into reality somehow.  As a parting shot to gall any governmental gits, the community payback has done nothing.  I still look through that household's waste.  I still assume the cliched aspect of Nosferatu whenever I need to demonstrate to strangers the absurd culturally-instilled habit of fearing people in the dark.  The experience only instilled an additional dimension of exigency, that is, the aforementioned need for Duplo (hence this blog's existence), and I will keep doodling and bringing doodles to life until we have a fairer society....  preferably one where contributions of people such as Rog the Flowerseller (who doesn't actually sell flowers), 'Simple' Kev [sic], Chewing Gum Man, and of course, myself, are valued.