About a week ago I posed this question to my Twitter followers:
No one had a good answer to this. In fact, there were zero serious answers. Then again, I was asking Twitter, where you would presumably not be if you had a good answer to this question. But I did get a few "likes" which suggests to me that some people at least agree with the premise that it might not be worth it to be addicted to a website in exchange for the few times a year you hear about something cool.
So today I pose this question to you - is it possible to hear about good new things without having to engage with mind-numbing and addictive internet feeds? If anyone has any ideas, I'd really like to hear them. Here's one idea I came up with:
What if there was something like a Discord server where people recommend art/media, but the requirement is that you're only allowed to post stuff that totally blew your mind? You know, the kind of art that makes you think about it for weeks after, or even changes who you are as a person. To post a recommendation, you'd have to write a few sentences about why you think the work is important, kind of like the write-ups I did on absurdly ambitious art earlier this year, or my favorite Canadian animation before that.
Well, you probably know where this is going by now, so here's the invite link:
So if you liked either of those blog posts, come join the fun. Who knows, you could be getting in on a budding cult of personality! Maybe you'll even get the rare opportunity to take some screenshots that get someone cancelled one day! Or you can go around to the three or four people on the internet who remember Peck and say, "yeah, I talk to that guy all the time on Discord."
I'm gonna keep it short because I really just wanted to promote the Discord link. This was originally going to be a whole long-winded essay like I usually do on here, but I changed my mind partway through writing, since the welcome page on the Discord is like six more paragraphs you gotta read anyway. (I mean it! Reading the welcome post is mandatory.) Anyway, here's what the opening paragraph of this blog post used to be. it's kind of cheeky, and I liked it too much to throw away:
Every time I go on Twitter I want to die. This was true even back when Twitter was called Twitter - actually this has been the case for about six years. I've watched the website downgrade year after year, and yet no one seemed to care about this until just recently. Why is it that people are suddenly so sensitive to every little degradation of this one website? What changed? I guess we will never know.