Memes are also not inherently digital. Going back to the definition set by Richard Dawkins (trans-hating bigot he is), a meme is anything that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” Perhaps that’s a bit broad of a definition compared to what we conventionally think of as memes, but it’s how we got to where we are.

People in ancient Egypt building pyramids and obelisks because someone before them built pyramids and obelisks is a meme. Cathedrals being built in much the same way throughout Renaissance Europe is a meme.

But those examples aside, there are still a few pre-internet examples that would still resonate more with the idea of memes as we know them today. Kilroy was Here is considered a meme and goes back to World War II. Or a bit before that, this “How you think you look” cartoon which I am not entirely sure was overly meme-like in its day but certainly feels relatable today.

But even slogans or popular sayings could be considered memes; if we consider internet terms/phrases like “pog” or “Are ya winning, son?” or (dating myself) “I can haz cheezburger?” to be memes, what about pre-internet sayings like “Luke, I am your father,” “It’s just a flesh wound,” or “Where’s the beef?” Or going way, way back, what about saying “Break a leg” before a performance, or “All the world’s a stage,” or even “Carpe diem”? I think one could make a case for just about any repeated and widely understood concept, really.

You get to save $10 so Nintendo can later take it off their marketplace, and remove your access to the game.

The shitty part is that I don’t think physical games are even exempt from that problem. Excluding whichever Switch 2 games are use the “key card” option versus “memory card” (key card basically just being a transferrable download code), we see games like Tears of the Kingdom being nearly unplayable without the day 1 patch. Or other games like Splatoon 3 that simply don’t include the full game on the cart and prompt you to download launch-day content after booting it up.

Neither of these games will be very playable even with physical cards once the Switch eShop servers go down for good.

We can only hope the current standard of backwards compatibility lasts indefinitely so all digital stores can basically be like Steam going forward and keep their content available across all future generations. But even that is a stretch when who even knows what the state of CPU architecture will look like in 15-20 years.

We don’t know tariff cost yet

Billionaires successfully dissolved the left into factions of people who all in-fight

I think this goes all the way back. Leftist groups have been competing basically as long as there’s been a right and left. Going back to the OG “Left,” the French Revolutionaries, you see the Jacobins seize power from the monarchists, after which they start to eliminate competing revolutionary groups who have some ideological differences. In Russia, you’ve got the Mensheviks being eliminated by the Bolsheviks, and then the Trotskyists being eliminated by the Stalinists.

Wherever there is a small difference in ideology and people willing to die for it, the left will always be at each other’s throats.

On the other hand, I think the right keeps succeeding precisely because of identity politics: they unify under an identity instead of an ideology, or I guess maybe more specifically they succeed at turning identity into ideology. Identity politics are pushed by the right as a way of forming out-groups so that the majority can remain unified and always have a “them” to distract from what the ruling “us” is doing.

If only we knew at the time how prophetic that damn commercial would be…

Anyway, the replicants as depicted in all incarnations are clearly biological constructs and not mechanical, so while they’re certainly artificial the notion of whether or not they’re “robots” to begin with is highly debatable.

I would say it’s not even debatable, the issue at the heart of the conflict in the original Blade Runner and continued in 2049 is that the Nexus-7 was made so close to humans that they basically are humans, at least in a biological sense. Maybe the earlier models were more android-like, but later they’re basically just manufactured people.

This is why in 2049 we see >!Deckard, a human, and Rachael, a replicant, were able to conceive a child, who was otherwise born perfectly normal other than not being able to inherit an immune system from her mother.!<