Giving Thanks
Feeling grateful for you. And a special thanks to DamianLuck925, aka Fulcrum, #yodieland
Twitter feels a bit wobbly right now. Elon Musk is a teenager trapped in a 51-year-old’s body (with all due respect to teenagers). He’s the guy at the top, and what he does sets the tone for the website. What used to feel like a salon for exciting discourse has turned into an obnoxious sports bar. The kind of bar whose four walls are made of TVs looping Elon Musk’s face and hair-plugs and rocketship explosions. The idea of tweeting anything remotely serious feels doomed. The message is dead on arrival, met with incessant crying laughing emojis: 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣.
Hence the semi-exodus off the platform and a flurry of new newsletters. Tons of popular writers, podcasters, and tweeters have begun to put out their own newsletters and Substacks. My inferiority complex slightly kicked in. A lot of you probably found us through Twitter. Would you, switch us out of the subscription rotation for smarter, more popular writers?
If you’re reading this then you’re still here. On this week of Thanksgiving, I (and Tana) just wanted to say, thanks. We started this project together almost a year ago, and the whole thing has blown away our expectations. We rolled the dice and it feels like we rolled fabulous numbers (whatever the good dice number are). You’ve indulged us. And that’s way more than we could have ever asked for.
We are not exactly mainstream staff reporter types. Maybe that’s part of our charm and that’s why you like us. We’ve long lost the patience and tolerance it takes to constantly slow-pedal, to always hedge, to sand down edges, to pretend for the sake of today’s perverted journalistic norms that lies, corruption, racism, cruelty, and incompetence are anything but exactly what they are. If a jailer murders someone, we don’t need to debase ourselves or insult your intelligence by requesting a comment from the jailer’s PR spox. We won’t willfully submit ourselves to being spun around. We won’t muddy the waters to appease some hypothetical person—who already hates us anyway—who will accuse us of bias. This newsletter is often steeped in vast institutional injustices and corruption, highlighting oppressive structures that grind honest people to dust. I think we all need a little break from that from time to time.
In the year of our Lord 2022, I also wanted to share a positive vibe. Something light. Something fun. Something to remind us that we live in a goofy society, that we are in this together, that the TV sports bar is pretty much everywhere we go. There is a guy out there who embodies all of this. Courtesy of Felix from Chapo, he goes by the name “fulcrum,” aka DamianLuck925. He is a YouTuber. And he makes clips in which he gets massively “faded,” taking lengthy rips off his various weed vaporizing contraptions in public places": a Lowes, a Target, a Burger King, on his first day of school.
Mr. Fulcrum has adoring fans. “I love the fact that he does not care what others around him think about him, gives me motivation to stop worrying,” one of them says. “Bro this is fucking inspiring,” says another. “The positive talk you were talking about literally helped me when I was feeling down good shit bro keep going!”
The internet isn’t all bad. There’s small pockets of earnestness. Not everybody is corrupted. Mr. Fulcrum’s vibe has certainly cheered me up and reminded me that there’s a time and place to be silly, like when you goto Lowe’s.
Happy Thanksgiving
Giving Thanks
I'm not a big Twitter user, but speaking as an outsider I wonder how much of the change you describe is actual change and how much is just more widespread recognition of the garbage fire it's always been.
It's always been rife with tribalism and doxxing and harassment. It's always been a tool for the powerful to congratulate themselves on being right, and for their supporters to support that idea. People have been decrying it as toxic and by-design incompatible with civil conversation for years now, long before Musk even looked at it.