Smash Mouth performing at Sturgis (and their callous disregard for a deadly pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands in the US and globally) aside, I will have a soft spot in my heart for them. Their borderline trutherism over the virus has cooled my admiration for them considerably, of course. But what they did at the outset of this decade was destroy cool, cynical detachment with aggressive earnestness.
I'm an internet old timer who was on Something Awful before the diaspora triggered by effective moderation scattered the neo-dadaist posters to the four corner of the web. As such, I have always maintained a familiarity and sometime friendship with various former members. This is all to say that I know of many of the members of the awkwardly anointed Weird Twitter. They're a strange hodgepodge who invented shitposting before shitposting was shitposting, who tried to one up each other with gross out and bizarre imagery and copypastas and trolling.
I can tell you with no uncertain degree of confidence that many of them were dealing with some sort of pain. A lot of them dealt with mental illness, physical disabilities, intense loneliness, abuse, neglect, alcoholism, you name it. But it was very hard to grab a sincere moment from any of them because this was how they coped with the world. They indulged in the ego defense mechanism of simply not thinking about it to unhealthy extremes. It helped to soothe the self-loathing and self-pity.
It was out of this crucible of Schadenfreude that Weird Twitter and Something Awful contributor Jon Hedren (going by @fart on Twitter) came up with a joke. That joke was that he would pay the lead singer of Smash Mouth to eat 24 eggs. It was a comically small amount of money, $20.
But it's not that simple, is it? Hedren didn't pick someone he admired--in fact, I am loath to believe that Hedren really admires anyone. Smash Mouth, especially at the start of the 2010s, was a punchline. Even then, something of a lazy one. So in the public sphere of Twitter, Hedren thought it would be funny to target what he saw to be low-hanging fruit for a dumb, cheap joke. This joke was clearly meant to be ameliorative. After all, Hedren hadn't written the hacky Shrek anthem "All Star"! People could laugh at this and he could make a quick article, and that's that.
And this is why I admire Steve Harwell, even despite his recent idiocy.
Despite his best attempts to ignore it, a vocal contingent of Twitter folks kept reminding him about Hedren's challenge until he ended up parlaying it into a charity event hosted by his friend, Guy Fieri, at the opening of his new restaurant.
Gamely, he attempted to eat 24 eggs and failed, but others helped. Money was raised for charity. Hedren, who showed up looking very uncomfortable hiding behind his iPhone, attempted to recast the event heroically on Vice. The video speaks for itself: Harwell is surrounded by friends and fans and admirers, raises money for charity, makes people laugh, and has a good day. Hedren skulks about nervously like he's holding in hot panic diarrhea while a shark mascot dances around him.
Sincerity won the day.
Listen, I enjoy a good joke, I love a good rip on people, and cynicism is my fucking anthem. I don't trust anything that anyone says is good and popular. I'm a bone-drenched iconoclast to the core. But I need to remember to pull my head out of my ass and not be like Hedren was that day. I gotta have fun and stop mainlining irony to dull my pain. Harwell had a really good day just being a real person engaging with people genuinely, even in the face of blistering contempt masquerading as offbeat humor.
I don't wanna be like that. I wanted to be a real and genuine person too. That's why I took off the slow deadly drip of irony. I realized I was just finding a way to isolate myself from the world so I didn't get hurt by it. And it didn't do a damn bit of good anyway.
Dose makes the poison. Be careful.
The last time I talked to a venomous hive of TERFs they thought I was a trans man because they couldn't imagine a cis man defending trans people, so they tried to hurt my feelings by saying I'd never be a real man and I couldn't stop crying with laughter while I asked them if any of them knew what their genotype was
Oh agreed, I just hated that they made fun of all that shit. Like I didn't care and still don't care what someone has as an identity. I'll respect whatever. It doesn't impact my life at all.
Wait so, holy shit, no wonder it didn't make any fucking sense to me. None of it was defined beforehand and it was revealed like all of her other sudden twists that explained everything but actually were held together with glue and spit in other plots of the other books too. The entire series is just fucking M. Night Shyamalan all the way the fuck down.
Alan Moore said that Rowling used ill-defined magical principles but you laid out precisely why he said that. He was written off as a crank for saying it, but he's absolutely correct.
Nite Owl and Silk Spectre were intended to be the protagonists of the series, not Rorschach. Moore intended them to be a more neutral, non philosophical point of view while the other characters embodied utilitarianism, pragmatism, and so on.
Yes, they love him because he's lumpenprole and not because he's a savage vigilante butcher or anything
That doesn't change my answer
People who like Rorschach fucking terrify me
It only sucks 99%.
If you're a cis dude then no, I deny and rebuke you
I’ll guarantee it’s not the length of what I shared that’s preventing people from reading.
I wouldn’t consider him a nazbol
Did you see who he's hanging out with here?
This is a bad take, chief, and here's a few thoughts on why.
TheDonald was a cesspit of hatred, bile, and classism that went unchecked for years. It wasn't only tolerated, it flourished on reddit and turned the rest of it sour. If not for Chapo providing a counterweight to their incessant raids and subtle gaslighting of local community subreddits, it would have been even worse. You want echo chambers? TheDonald already was one. They could exist unchallenged in their space despite sorely needing it.
The left has rarely been afforded the same luxury to gather together, to speculate, to debate, to exist, without being broken up violently by the right and their cronies. This is nothing like what TheDonald is doing because they're creating an escapist echo chamber to jerk each other off and clap each other on the back for being well-off white dipshits.
We are creating a space to safely interact with each other, a rarity that has not been afforded, especially in such volume, for the left.
Just read any thread about China, about electoralism, about anything. You're having higher level discussions because you don't have to drag down the discourse to 101 level horseshit just to make your point. This is hardly an echo chamber. Your thoughts here do not go unchallenged. Our ideology is not that of fear.
So stop worrying and post already, Jesus.
Oh please, women haven't been able to get an abortion in most states in the US to begin with.