Monday, October 15, 2007

The Pharyngula mutating genre meme


Bryan has tagged me for The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

There are a set of questions below 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.

My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My grandparent is archy.
My parent is Why Now?


The best comic fantasy *novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Complete Compleat Enchanter by L Sprague deCamp and Fletcher Pratt.

The best “bad” movie in scientific dystopias is: **A Clockwork Orange.

The best sexy song in pop is: “I'm No Angel” as performed by Greg Allman.

The best Gulf and western album in country music is: A1A by Jimmy Buffett


In order to keep mutation alive, I’m passing the meme on to:

Keifus, because Keifus Writes
Dogscratcher, of Tainted Ideals
Claude, the Self-Absorbed Boomer
Achaeopteryx, because Notes from a Transitional Fossil must absolutely be included in anything that mutates


* yeahyeahiknow, it's really a collection of shorter works
** loosely interpreting both bad and scientific

6 comments:

Keifus said...

Oh great, now who am I gonna pass it on to?

(nxexhd: my next ex-husband...what?!)

hipparchia said...

[evil grin]

anybody you like [or don't like]. also, you don't have to play if you don't want to. i love memes, but only when i don't really have to do them.

Anonymous said...

You only need one "child" to pass it on.

I used a series, so it's a valid mutation to use a collection.

hipparchia said...

i expect most of my children to rebel and not participate.

dogscratcher said...

How do you let the people you "tag" know they're supposed to do this? I of course know because I'm a faithful reader, but if I tag someone else, do they have to actually read my blog to know (unlikely).

hipparchia said...

it's fairly customary to leave a comment on their blogs, or you could always email them. i was going to go around and comment on everybody's blog if y'all didn't show up within a couple of days. i probably should have anyway, but i got sidetracked.