The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

# 2007-10-09 22:39:21 -0400 | General | 1 Comment

My parent is PZ Myers.

1) The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams.

2) The best romantic movie in historical fiction is…

Erik the Viking.

3) The best nerd song in rock is…

Code Monkey, by Jonathan Coulton.


The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

There are a set of questions above that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

  • You can leave them exactly as is.

  • You can delete any one question.

  • You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

  • You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

One Response to this entry:

  1. Sarah Maddox Says:

    Hi Matt
    Awesome blog. Cool movies. The meme is an interesting idea. Non-trivial. It took me a while to get the rules straight and to persuade myself that they actually do work. Only, I’m wondering how we would be able to measure the ‘propagation’ of our own specific variants? I don’t think PZ Myers has figured that out yet. Oh, and I liked the horse too… ;)
    Seeya Sarah

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