‘Meming’ on a Sunday

The picture is of a fake album cover I made, which is the result of a meme a friend posted to Facebook. Called “Create Your Debut Album”, it has several steps:

1) Go to Wikipedia and click “Random" (or on the desktop web version, click “Random article" on the left sidebar). The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2) Go to "Random quotations" @ http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php. The last 4 or 5 words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3) Go to https://www.flickr.com/commons. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4) Use Photoshop or whatever to put it all together, then post your Album cover with this text in the caption.

Tag friends if you want. All are welcome to play.

Links were in the original

Naturally, I never tag anyone in these things; I figure anyone who wants to do them will do them, and the rest will ignore it. My friend also doesn’t tag people, so I chose to do it, but really for one reason: Step one.

When I did Step one, what I actually got was an article entitled, “Infectious disease (athletes)”, and I realised that “Infectious Disease Athletes” was a pretty awesome band name.

I could very well have stopped there, were it not for Step Two: The last four words of the last quote were “keep your mouth shut”, which I thought went particularly well with the name of the “band”. It's the end of a quote from Robert Newton Peck, "Never miss a chance to keep your mouth shut." Then at this point, I almost stopped again.

The problem here was Step 3: The meme originally directed people to Flicr’s “Explore/Interestingness/7 days”, but the problem with that is that most, or even all, of the images used were marked “All rights reserved”, which means that any derivitive work, even for this meme, is a violation of copyright. I do not like that.

Flickr has a section called “The Commons”, which has photos with no known copyright restrictions, making them arguably better. Also, every time the page is accessed, there are different photos displayed. However, not all of them are suitable for this, especially some of modern photos which have identifiable living people. That might be not the best thing to use for this purpose. And, while it can’t be guaranteed that the photos are in the public domain, they’re probably okay to re-use for derivative works like this, because they have no known copyright restrictions. So, on balance, it’s a better choice (and I’ve changed the instructions above to use The Commons instead).

As it turns out, I was lucky: The third photo was “thought to have been taken 1935 between Kent and High Streets, Sydney” in Australia, according to the photo description. That was luck, though.

And that’s it: I saw a meme with very detailed instructions, the first two steps produced results I thought were funny, the third threw up a roadblock which I got around, and then I made the “album” cover. Meh. I’m not a great designer—and yet, I want to know what the album sounds like, so I guess the “album” cover works?

Anyway, it was just a bit of Sunday evening fun.