from Hacker News

The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”

by SaberTail on 11/21/24, 3:05 AM with 288 comments

  • by numpad0 on 11/21/24, 4:54 PM

    Oh they still haven't figured this one out at knowyourmeme?

    Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba, and permeated to nicovideo.jp as well as to Twitter. That's why it is predominantly image based with few GIFs inbetween, why it is Demon Core and Demon Core only, and why there are few comical non-girl versions created years after inception.

    I'd guess overlap between outspoken (ex-)Futaba users AND HN readers(hops_max=3) OR knowyourmeme users is exactly 1.0f, and this won't ever go on record anywhere unless someone say it somewhere, so here you go.

  • by Semaphor on 11/21/24, 1:53 PM

    > Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor.

    I don’t agree. To me, it’s derived from many things, like juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.

    I’d go further and say the suffering that happened is only important in that it made the demon core popular and well-known, but the memes would still work if it somehow became well-known without the death and suffering because no accident happened.

  • by cr3ative on 11/21/24, 2:06 PM

    I feel like some conclusions of the intent here are born from being very well versed in the actual outcomes, including what I can only assume was a very painful end to someone's life.

    But on the surface level of it, it's a scientist doing something knowingly incredibly dangerous and dumb for no particularly justifiable reason.

    We've all felt a bit like that at some point. We just probably didn't have a core and a screwdriver.

  • by dale_glass on 11/21/24, 2:38 PM

    Despite it being so famous, and the memes, I still don't understand what Slotin was doing.

    So I get it, it was a demonstration of how to perform an experiment. But I can't understand how the screwdriver makes any sense at all. What's being measured? What does success and failure look like? What does the experiment produce, what data in what format?

    Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements. Somebody's working on a data table that says "At position X, we measured value Y". But randomly wiggling stuff around with a screwdriver, I can't see how one can do anything of the sort. And I figure at this level, "more coverage = more radiation" is kind of a trivial point that doesn't really need to be demonstrated.

  • by PaulHoule on 11/21/24, 2:16 PM

    Oddly the art is largely Japanese in style, not just the musume (e.g. "girl") images but that first one.

    Between that accident and the year 2000 there were about 60 criticality accidents causing about 20 fatalities

    https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0037/ML003731912.pdf

    After a software project failure that overturned my life I got interested in the quality movement, Deming, Toyota Production System and all that. I was also interested in nuclear energy, actually opposed to it at that time, an opinion I have changed.

    Before the Fukushima accident I became aware that Japan was leading the world in nuclear accidents, especially this criticality incident

    https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...

    as well as the comedy of errors at

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant

    which I could summarize as "makes Superphenix look like a huge success"

    Causes floated for that were that (1) Japan was more aggressive at developing nuclear technology post-1990 more than any country other than Russia (who is making the FBR look easy today) and (2) the attitudes and methods that served Japan well in cars and semiconductors served them terribly in the nuclear business. Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production but takes detailed modelling and strict following of rules to avoid criticality accidents.

  • by 00N8 on 11/21/24, 7:56 PM

    IMO the demon core incident resonates with people as kind of the ultimate case of "playing with fire". Humans have always played with fire, so we see the attraction, but also the dangers of it. It's a primitive behavior that's put us at risk, but also been the origin of most of our technology. The juxtaposition of a top nuclear weapons scientist taking such a "caveman" approach, playing with a new kind of "fire" that's millions of times more powerful, is poignant in the way it's absurd, but also relatable, sad & darkly funny.

  • by vanderZwan on 11/21/24, 2:53 PM

    The author mentions 2019. That was the year that the "Demon Core Kun" videos were put on YouTube[0]. There's no mention of them in the article, which is a bit odd. I don't know if that was the first to "memeify" the demon core, but it certainly is one of the most popular memeifications, with each of the eight videos having somewhere between three to six million views.

    This also would explain the relatively large presence of anime memes in particular, since the "main" meme is a series of Japanese animations.

    EDIT: knowyourmeme.com actually has an article about the Demon Core and its popularity in Japan as a meme[1]. Apparently the latter predates the Demon Core Kun series by about a year at least. Still, the latter being on YT made it a lot more accessible to non-Japanese people which might explain the spike in meme popularity in 2019.

    [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjjzx95hXRLvbVeHuE8fT...

    [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/demon-core

  • by ndsipa_pomu on 11/21/24, 2:24 PM

    Fun fact - if you eat the demon-core, at 124 trillion calories, it will provide enough energy for the rest of your life.

  • by mensetmanusman on 11/21/24, 2:39 PM

    I still can’t believe that there exists rocks on this world that will make a room glow blue and kill everyone in the room if the rocks are brought close together.

  • by Topfi on 11/21/24, 1:19 PM

    I'd argue Kyle Hill [0] should have been mentioned since his coverage appears instrumental in this trend.

    Also, if you are so inclined, there are also Chernobyl memes [1].

    [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z497lu4t5XI

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQeC06SdicI

  • by jchw on 11/21/24, 1:58 PM

    The first time I saw the Demon Core as a "meme" is from the Japanese creator からめる, a person most known for short absurdist humor animations.

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIjbX1gj88

    I'm not sure if this is the genesis of the demon core meme (probably not), but it definitely came fairly early on.

  • by vibrolax on 11/21/24, 8:23 PM

    Twice bitten, three times shy. After the Slotin incident, prompt critical assemblies by hand were prohibited. Los Alamos then built a series of remotely operated critical assembly machines. There is a fair amount of open source literature on them, especially the "Godiva" series. Some of these machines have experienced criticality excursions that damaged the machine, but spared the biological organisms operating them by remote control.

  • by caseyy on 11/21/24, 2:32 PM

    For comedy one needs to subvert expectations, and this is why making light of grave events (Black Comedy) is a big phenomenon.

    There are many examples from WW2 comedy to 9/11 memes. Sometimes the examples are more indirect, like in film: American Psycho, American Beauty, Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, Fargo, Don't Look Up, Fight Club, Quentin Tarantino's stuff, etc. All of them deal with dark themes in a light way.

    Given the prevalence of this in our culture, the author seems a bit surprised. Maybe they didn't connect it to dark comedy.

  • by jayrot on 11/21/24, 3:28 PM

    As Shaw said, “Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

    Things can be, and often are, both at the same time.

  • by danielodievich on 11/23/24, 1:20 AM

    It just so happens that I am reading Andrei Sakharov's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov) memoirs, he was heavily heavily involved in USSR's thermonuclear weapons design and development, and then became a peace activist, dissident and eventually a Nobel Peace prize winner. His memoirs are a mix of highly technical details and lovely descriptions of people. He mentions "demon core" in passing in an early part of the book, and I am paraphrasing/translating here, their "object" (barbed-wire walled off city, similar to Los Alamos, except USSR had way more of them) had technician who was measuring things just like the guy doing it with demon core - neutron flux, neutron absorption, etc; the measurements were using gaskets of standard width, with multiple layers in between the half-spheres; the technician was a) very capable, b) getting there in age and crucially c) prone to hitting the bottle at work. He eventually got caught and was immediately sacked and replaced with someone a) less capable and b) younger but c) not drinking, who eventually did something similar and I quote "although no lives were lost like in american incident, lots of equipment was ruined". He proceeds to add that they added lots of procedures and fail checks and safety equipment, and it slowed things a lot. He also quips then that after he learned about USA mishaps, he wasn't surprised that stuff like that went on "over there" too.

  • by jkestner on 11/21/24, 8:26 PM

    I really liked this telling of the story with illustrations: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230719-the-blue-flash-l...

  • by shdh on 11/21/24, 2:22 PM

    > So perhaps if anybody has a “right” to make jokes in poor taste about the “Demon Core”… it might be the Japanese?

    > I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.

  • by Vaslo on 11/21/24, 7:06 PM

    Im on the internet a ton. Very familiar with the two horrible nuclear research accidents that occurred around this time. Never once seen these meme.

    Also, I love how the author tries to argue for who should be allowed to make the joke, like there is some arbiter who can tell you “oh you don’t fall into that group so you are not allowed to make that joke.”

  • by nothacking_ on 11/21/24, 9:29 PM

    Just about all humor derives from some degree of suffering. Compared what the core could have done, the three deaths from the accident are nothing. Even things that are joked about often have much higher death tolls like wars and natural disasters.

  • by philipkglass on 11/21/24, 5:15 PM

  • by HelloUsername on 11/22/24, 1:18 PM

    Though not really a meme, I always found Anatoli Bugorski in the same, amazingly interesting area as the Demon Core accident. (A real life Gordon Freeman?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski

  • by itishappy on 11/21/24, 2:32 PM

    No mention of the earlier XKCD mentioning the demon core? It's what set in motion my particular interest in nuclear accidents.

    I don't agree with the author's analysis here. I think the demon core is simply memorable. It has a scary name and the beryllium sphere is iconic in a way the Kelley and SL-1 accidents simply aren't.

    https://xkcd.com/1242/

  • by frozenlettuce on 11/21/24, 5:33 PM

    As per Aquinas, every joke is a disguised form of sadness. You can only laugh at something that is sad.

  • by Lammy on 11/21/24, 6:31 PM

    Azumanga Daioh mentioned :)

    I like the pun on “hot girl stuff” https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/hot.html

  • by kapp_in_life on 11/21/24, 9:16 PM

    Remember learning about this from the crossover with fake "bowling alley animations" like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q6MQwsJCA4

  • by Razengan on 11/21/24, 7:26 PM

    The "Demon Core kun" short anime series on YouTube is the most hilarious:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIjbX1gj88

  • by bigstrat2003 on 11/21/24, 6:28 PM

    I had never heard of this story. What an absolutely horrible way to die. Not only do you have ample time to suffer with the knowledge of your impending death, but you get to do so in agony the whole time. I wouldn't wish that upon anyone.

  • by GauntletWizard on 11/21/24, 9:15 PM

    The front page of hacker news is not where I expected to see Gura fanart today.

  • by willis936 on 11/21/24, 5:51 PM

    They didn't include my favorite example.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymbal-banging_monkey_toy

  • by anilakar on 11/21/24, 3:01 PM

    Memes are fun. Crossover memes doubly so. There's no need to overanalyze.

  • by pawelduda on 11/21/24, 6:42 PM

    My favourite one is the flail with the demon core attached to it. Memes aside, I find it fascinating how absurd was thinking that experiment was a good idea

  • by cocodill on 11/21/24, 9:36 PM

    It's pretty funny to see so many anime memes when you consider that demoncore was originally planned as the third bomb for japan.

  • by treflop on 11/21/24, 7:37 PM

    Let me tell you about 9/11 memes…

  • by the_af on 11/22/24, 2:08 AM

    I can honestly say I don't understand this meme. I don't understand what it's trying to say.

    I know what the Demon Core is (there was a similar, lesser known accident in my country, but it only killed the operator) and I'm all for bleak humor, but...

    ... I don't understand this one. What's with the animé girls and the cutesy style? What is this mocking exactly?

    I'm not offended by it or anything, I just don't get it. Seems completely random as well as obscure.

  • by wruza on 11/21/24, 2:04 PM

    What is going on here? I am not exceptionally well-versed in anime or manga tropes, but I think the “obvious” reading of this is a classic case of “unexpected juxtaposition creates humor.” That is, moving something from one context (“Demon Core,” radiation experiment, horrible death) into another (cute, anime, girls) creates something that feels novel and unusual

    Ah, sir, I guess you’re completely unfamiliar with anime tropes. From absurd brutality to dark drama (much worse than your Titanic Ending and Futurama Dog), everything can be found in anime. Thinking that these are cute animations for teens and children is a big mistake. I, a grown up adult, usually dread when an anime plot is too nice to its actors and think if I want to watch it further. This juxtaposition is well-expected.

  • by louthy on 11/21/24, 5:22 PM

    Didn’t read it, just went for the memes. The kinder surprise one is absolute genius!

  • by niemandhier on 11/21/24, 3:04 PM

    Part of the reason why we slowed down in our progress in science is that we do not take risks like that anymore.

    Now the risk takers are at private companies.