In Record Time

Generally I ignore the various pyramid schemes for swarm communication on Facebook that are often called, somewhat imprecisely, "memes." Usually they involve lists of some kind and personal disclosure and tend to be more like Truth or Dare than games in with chance and skill play a role. But I made an exception for the recent "album cover meme" that has become popular on the site.

To create your own album cover:

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Often this kind of digital ephemera that apes an artifact of material culture is created with a web generator, but in this case the different randomized components are assembled by the participant, so the final product is a kind of quip that uses both happenstance and clever styling.