Playing "Name That Fark!" and Metacommentology

I'm not sure how many years I've been reading Fark. I've had an account since 2003. (Still haven't made it to a meet.)

Over time, you get to know the flavor of a place. In my experience with Fark, it's all about the snarks, puns and pop-culture references that'll pop up in a comments thread.

Fark's a fairly diverse group when it comes to experience, interests and knowledge, though it's probably overrepresented slightly by folks of my generation (which would be defined by that still-hateful term, Gen-X). So we're drawing pretty closely from the same pop culture collective intelligence.

Sometimes, when a story is posted, it will immediately call to my mind a specific, and usually pop, cultural reference. (This, of course, excludes headlines that are written to specifically evoke a particular pop culture reference.)

In these cases, I'll play a game when I go into that comments thread. I call it Name That Fark!

Obviously, it's based on Name That Tune -- I try to guess how many comments it'll be before someone posts a reference to what's inhabiting my mind.

For example, one of the main page headlines right now is "When I think of 'two-handed weapon combinations,' the first things that pop to my mind are not 'golf club and a sword.'"

(The article it references is in the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot, though for our purposes, this is immaterial.)

Naturally (well, it's natural if you're me), the first thing that came to my mind was Casey Jones, from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic.

It's a fairly obvious connection (again, if you're me), so I give it a 10: we'll see a Casey reference within ten comments.

Lo and behold -- 7 comments in:

2006-11-23 08:41:24 PM

Thenixon

this guy thinks it sounds ok.

7 is within 10. Therefore, I win.

So what to do with this little bit of applied metacommentology? Well, nothing: It'd be too easy to game, and, anyway, I wouldn't know where to begin building an app around it.

But it keeps me amused.

Tags: fark, fark comments, metacommentology, name that fark, gen-x, pop culture