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Flyers, leaflets and other assorted tomfoolery

Started by Cain, January 26, 2007, 01:47:48 PM

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Dimocritus

Snagged a few quickies from the one sentence meme bombs thread and incorporated them into the "Chao Revisited" series (corny name? whatever...). The look of the flyer has been improved. Credit is given to whomever posted the 'bomb. If it came from somewhere else, please correct me!

Sheep
A common one around here, not exactly sure who first coined it.

Conclusion
I first saw this in Fomentors sig, I beleive it's attributed to RWHN

Equality
Saint Aini

These next few are my own. Well, not mine, per-se. Kopyleft and all that. You know what I mean...

Breaking the law (updated)

Hope

Reason/Purpose
HOUSE OF GABCab ~ "caecus plumbum caecus"

Dimocritus

HOUSE OF GABCab ~ "caecus plumbum caecus"

Cramulus

These are pretty good. I like the layout & font selection. They're definitely eye grabbing.

Here's another misc. tip - partially for you, partially for anybody that's making posters-----

One thing to be careful of with one-line-meme-bombs is that sometimes the closer your phrase is to sounding like a commercial slogan or catchphrase, the less memorable it is. The brain filters out most of the stuff it sees over the course of the day. You may be making a good point (ie, the last one in your set suggests that common sense is actually fairly uncommon), but remember that your posters are adrift in a sea of memes. As you walk down the street, you're seeing ads for concerts, billboards, bumper stickers, guys with sandwich boards handing out coupons, etc etc etc.

There is a war going on, a war for your attention. The trick isn't just to grab attention, but to maintain it. A cute catch phrase momentarily rises into awareness and then will be replaced by the next flashy thing to come along.

That is why I think Discordian posters should be absurd, surreal, mysterious, or otherwise itch your brain in some way. You can get by on being funny. The main thing is that the experience of the poster should be something unique which the target will remember later in the day, will relate to others.

Think about how many times you've seen the phrase "Buckle your seatbelt", or some other public safety notice. This is sort of what we're going for, except we're not concerned with physical health. Does it stick our in your memory? (probably not) When you saw it, did it change your behavior? (it might have, if you were unbuckled, and there was a hefty fine listed) What factors can make your posters more effective than that? A meme's goal is to get inside someone's head and change their behavior from within. In the "buckle your seatbelt" example, they do that by leveraging internal factors against one another. Namely, the fear of harm, and the reminder of financial penalty for failing to internalize the meme.

The Situationists thought that the best way to protest the dominant order is to protest from outside of it. They tried to be surreal, confusing, misunderstood. They thought this gave them a certain outsider power. The phrase "My shadow is my graffiti" was a popular May 1968 slogan. I like it because it doesn't make a clear point that you can argue with. It seems to express some dissent, but not in a way which can be circumvented through discussion. You have a hard time explaining it to people. It sticks in the brain a little bit just because you can't chew it up and swallow it like the phrase "Shop at Sears" or "Drink Guiness for Health" or whatever.

A powerful meme creates a mental shift in the reader. Sometimes all it takes is a phrase like "Is this a dream?" to make people spiral into a cascade of self reflection and awareness of one's own thoughts. But it's hard, because you have to pierce through the veil first, you have to win the attention economy. The battle for attention is fought nearly every time you move your eyeballs. How are your posters going to win that battle? How are they going to throw a wrench in the MachineTM?

We have a bit of an advantage in that we are not a commercial venture. We are not trying to sell you anything. But we are marketing ideas, hoping to snare your brain into a train of thought which leads you our way. Perhaps you are intrigued. We leave you with little to follow up on, other than "the Discordian Society", a mysterious and nebulous entity if ever there was one.

Or maybe it's just about rearranging the MachineTM. If you make everybody that reads your poster smile a little bit, you'll have introduced a little warmth into a cold cold world. I think a lot of people are surprised when they see a poster which isn't trying to sell them something. We have no commercial interests. We just want to make the world better (for ourselves), and we can do that by making you relax and laugh a little. People aren't used to the idea that you'd waste your calories doing something that isn't tied to a bank account. They don't know that there are forms of protest which don't involve carrying a sign and shouting at (essentially) a brick wall. They don't understand that there are hobbies which you can make up yourself, you don't have to pick your activities from a predefined list of culturally accepted pasttimes. If putting up posters has mindfucked anybody, it's myself. And I wish I could show everybody what I've seen.

Hail Eris

LMNO

"How am I not myself?"





-Used in I Heart Huckabees with enough repetition to bring the antagonist to the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Dimocritus

Quote from: Cramulus on November 10, 2009, 03:35:48 PM
Hail Eris
Indeed.
For example, though, what would you have done differently if you had made some of these flyers? I've come to realize that posterGASM, in and of itself, is an art-form, that requires a certain degree of skill, and it's an art-form that I find very appealing.
Now, I have friends that will look at them and say either "I like it" or "I don't like it," which, in the end isn't all that helpful because they don't really know what I'm shooting for (I don't fully know either) and, while your advice is always helpful, specific examples and suggestions about specific things would, for me, be the most helpful. It's tough, because I normally learn best hands-on, by example, from an actual person, and as I'm sure you could have guessed, I don't really know that many people IRL that are into this kind of thing. I have a small crew that hangs the posters, but they don't make them, or even make suggestions. (Robots. Kinda sad, actually). Anyhow, I'm totally going to keep working on this. It's the best thing since Pizza-Pie.
HOUSE OF GABCab ~ "caecus plumbum caecus"

Cramulus

my advice is to keep stoking and stroking the meme bombs until you have something really potent.

Just clicking on a random poster... the meme is "HOPE ALONE CANNOT BRING ABOUT CHANGE"

which is a strong thought, a call to action of some sort, but does it actually motivate you? If you saw this on the street, would it make you change your behavior in some way? What is the function of the phrase, who is its audience, and how are you hoping they'll respond? Not all posters need a huge philosophical underpinning, but these ones don't strike me as terribly powerful.


But the trick is to just keep making them. Make a hundred of them. I have made a TON of shitty posters. These days I just print out the strong ones and put them in my messenger bag. Doing this over and over again gave me an eye for what works vs what doesn't, but it took practice. So keep at it! You're making great progress - keep challenging yourself.


as for your cabal, don't worry about them too hard. Whether they know it or not, they ARE a Discordian cabal. They may not be coming up with anything, but they're participants, they're actually getting out of their comfort zone and helping you do something cool, and that is fucking awesome. I have found that the hardest thing in the world is to motivate people to do something in 3D Meatspace. You just keep leading by example, keep discussing how this stuff works, and eventually, they will have internalized some of that energy.  :wink:


Dimocritus

HOUSE OF GABCab ~ "caecus plumbum caecus"

Dimocritus

HOUSE OF GABCab ~ "caecus plumbum caecus"

Dimocritus

Yeah, swine-flu has been done, but I put a little spin on it and directed it more towards the profiteering of companies that produce things like Purell hand sanitizer. There are hand sanitizer dispensers everywhere at my school, and this is going to end up right next to each one. If anyone else has hand sanitizer dispensers of another brand at their school/work, let me know and I can change it around to reflect whatever brand you need.

Swine-Flu
HOUSE OF GABCab ~ "caecus plumbum caecus"


Sir Squid Diddimus

I like the swine flu one.

I'd like to share that with "bubble boy" at work. I swear he snorts that crap.

Dimocritus

Quote from: Cramulus on November 20, 2009, 04:04:54 AM
Quote from: dimo on November 19, 2009, 04:18:36 AM
Ask

Destiny

Distracted

to be honest, I think these three lack the punch / depth of your previous work


Thanks for the feedback. I agree, though I think the "ask questions" one is kinda' catchy and could get some momentum.

I've been putting a sort of dualistic, antipodal spin on how I place posters. For instance, I've been taking my more oppressive "illuminati" style posters (Do the Right Thing, Swine-Flu, etc.) and juxtaposing them with the more positive "Discordian" posters (Ask Questions, Have You Been Lied to Yet Today [ToA]) so if someone happens to read and buy into the negative posters, there's a contradictory poster right next to it to try to swing the reader over to the "good" team. I'm basically being subversive to my own stuff. I dunno if that's really beneficial, I just thought I'd try it out as a sort of experiment.

On a side note: I'm starting to fuck with myself. I get paranoid every time I see anyone wearing a Swiss-gear backpack or anything else that has a Swiss flag on it because of my own friggin' Swiss-Terror poster.
HOUSE OF GABCab ~ "caecus plumbum caecus"

Captain Utopia

Thought I'd give it a go. These are meant to be more along the lines of "WTF?" than propaganda.

It is now time

This is your answer

Captain Utopia


Cramulus

I love the logos on these. Especially the gynecological one with the ....crab logo? hahahahah
Good compositions, too - quite eye catching.