Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

In this week’s episode, the Lounatics are treated to a healthy dose of what many artists might call lunacy: Pablo Picasso’s potentially apocryphal quote “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal.”   Then, hotlou shares one story of using this principle to create a post that’s probably been shared millions of times and maybe been seen hundreds of millions of times.  A feat that would, of course, effectively demand that the cycle perpetuate. And of course, it would be stolen over and over again.

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

Or, put another way, good fairies copy, great fairies steal.  The post discussed throughout the episode is seen here.

And the author here would be remiss here if he didn’t mention what happened throughout the episode.  A certain host kept referring to “PabLOU” Picasso’s expression as “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”  Let’s just pretend that never happened.  Thanks in advance.

The original quote was something along the lines of “someone once told me I was delusional, and I almost fell off my minotaur.”

North Korean Unicorn

Modifying it to “Someone told me I was delusional. I almost fell off my unicorn” has spawned hundreds, if not thousands of derivative memes and products all throughout the internet.  In fact, just googling the incomplete quote “someone told me I was delusional” yields 15.7 million results, none of which point back to any sites owned/operated by Twig on the first few results pages.

And, possibly even crazier, is that if you do a reverse image search (yep, that’s possible!) with the image, out of all the results on the first several pages, all but one point to somewhere other than a Twig-operated site.

Thanks to new celebrity listener Kim Jong-un for his contributions, however dictatorial they may be.

Inspired by Current Events

Of course, employing this principle became pretty commonplace.

Perhaps you’ve heard the following one-line:

If vegetable oil is made out of vegetables.  And if olive oil is made out of olives.  What is baby oil made out of?

Well, if you haven’t, now you have.  Look forward to it on a future Dad Jokes Daily post.  And, as you might imagine, fairy dust was a recurring feature on the Twig the Fairy Facebook Page, so using the joke above as inspiration, the garlic powder example was born.

Oreo was famous for doing similar things a long time ago on the Oreo Twitter.  And, more so, they are/were famous for using enormously popular current events as inspiration for their posts.  Famously, the had one of the most popular tweets (and/or Super Bowl posts) of all time.

And if you look over the Oreo Facebook Page Photos, you can see they’ve done a few similar things with Game of Thrones.  Oddly, their page was created on March 26, 2019 (according to Facebook).  Yet, only a handful of images appear on it and there are 42M+ likes.  And the admins only publish every few days.  And the posts get only a few hundred to a couple thousand likes per post.  0.002% engagement.  Hmph.  A mystery for another time.

SOPA and PEEPEE

Twig SOPA and PIPA

Normally, Twig stayed far, far, FAR away from politics, but the protests against SOPA and PIPA were pretty easy to pick a side without alienating the audience.

And in case you aren’t familiar, check the wikipedia link for in-depth details.  But in oversimplified terms, the two proposed laws would have made a ton of the images in these show notes (and by extension, the website itself) illegal for including a few of the images.

And a possible application of the laws, would be for systems to black out areas of websites, including text, that others could claim copyright over, leading to potential massive blacked out areas of websites.

In turn, many people started posting parodied censured images and blocks of texts on their blogs, twitter, Facebook, etc.  Embedded is Twig’s version.

Another instance of Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal, SOPA and PEEPEE edition.

Successful Content Categories

Inspirational, Educational, Entertaining

You’ve heard this on the show several times already.  But try to put your content into one or more of these categories:

1. Inspirational
2. Educational
3. Entertaining

And of course, these categories are not mutually exclusive. So ask yourself where these posts might fit into the diagram seen here.

With that, thanks again to all of our amazing sponsors, but most of all Every Day is Humpday! (our crack team of researchers have yet to find the offensive hybrid camel Mike talked about during the show, but here’s a Cama baby (camel-llama hybrid) for your viewing pleasure.

Cama Baby (camel llama hybrid)