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  • “I still trust comics, but the jokes, memes and comments of internet trolls are different. Trolls don’t seek to demonstrate and celebrate trust; they strive to destroy it. The troll does not want to use offense as a tool to get to shared humanity. There is no bravery.“

    Penn Jillette

    → 9:09 AM, Jan 21
  • Earnest Creativity

    “One of the biggest sins on the modern internet is trying too hard to be funny. It has caused the internet’s sense of humor to turn cruel in the last decade and our knee-jerk response to earnest humor to be negative. Putting oneself out there creates a risk of ending up in a cringe compilation or as the subject of a devastating quote tweet. Strong Bad is representative of a time in the internet’s past when there was something new every day, and there was room for simple jokes. The world of Homestar Runner sprung from a place of passion and caring. It’s possible that nostalgia for the character is rooted in a desire to go back to a time when we embraced that type of enthusiasm. And who wouldn’t want to? At the end of the day, like Strong Bad himself, none of us are truly as cool (or as mean) as we pretend to be online.” - Dan Sheehan

    Dan Sheehan’s article is a wonderful summation of the Homestar Runner phenomenon during the early Internet. A site that my friends and I still quote from regularly. Much like the original Muppet Show, those toons and sketches the Brothers Chaps created had an outsized influence on a generation of people.

    I’m sharing this article because I’ve grown nostalgic for this kind of creativity. Dan articulates an Internet era where earnest creativity stood a chance of surviving and programatic attention hacks hadn’t infected everything. A little naiveté wasn’t just allowed, it was expected, and creativity wasn’t the baited hook at the end of somebody’s hustle. I’m thankful to have experienced that time and to know the difference between the small town Internet and the mega-city we wade through today.

    I wish there was a way for others to experience the open frontier of the early Internet but no effort can remake it any more than Tokyo can remake itself into an agrarian village. The changes we’ve made are permanent. Still, I’m hopeful because I know the human creativity that made the early Internet so special in the first place is just as permanent. Machines didn’t make this place, people did, and much like we do in our physical cities, we’re learning to create pockets of relative safety where earnest creativity can thrive.

    → 2:22 PM, Apr 15
  • “We exist in a state of continuous and conscious attention triage, which can be exhausting, disorienting, and demoralizing.”

    L.M. Sacasas

    → 8:49 PM, Nov 5
  • “If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that it probably isn’t going to teach me anything that I didn’t already know before the pandemic began.”

    Austin Kleon

    → 5:35 PM, Oct 29
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