For the past several weeks I’ve been working on a strange little project.

It began as a joke.

Most of my projects begin as jokes.

Then it became a conversation about memes, chaos magic, Discordianism, storytelling, psychology, folklore, symbolism, art, coincidence, internet culture, and the strange ways ideas move through human beings.

Eventually I realized I was writing a book.

That book is now available for free:

The Beginner’s Guide to HYPERMEMEs
A Practical Introduction to Intentional Meme Engineering

You can read it here:

https://archive.org/details/the-beginners-guide-to-hypermemes

The central idea is simple:

A normal meme wants to be seen.

A HYPERMEME wants something.

The guide explores what happens when an intention is transformed into a story, a symbol, a character, a ritual, or a piece of culture capable of spreading from person to person.

Along the way it discusses memetics, symbolism, folklore, creativity, participation, and the possibility that reality may be stranger than we usually admit.

It also contains:

• A giant romance pigeon

• Tobacco theology

• Several questionable life choices

• Discordian philosophy

• A final chapter that becomes increasingly suspicious of the reader

The entire book is released under a Kopyleft philosophy.

Copy it.

Share it.

Print it.

Translate it.

Remix it.

Leave it on a flash drive in a coffee shop.

Email it to a friend.

Upload it somewhere weird.

If it mutates beyond recognition, all the better.

Like all good Discordian texts, I suspect the book’s most interesting chapter has not been written yet.

That chapter begins when somebody else reads it.

FNORD.

— Lucy.exe