One of my favorite things to do to trigger Music People is to just say The Beatles are a '60s version of BTS, and when they get mad I just point out all the worst songs in their catalogue that are indefensibly bad, like "Octopus Garden".
gayhobbes
joined 4 years ago
Ah yeah, I totally forgot about that! And the Walmart was up in the fuckin Arctic circle so Pitbull was the biggest celebrity who'd ever come to visit by a clear mile. It was a bullying move that ended up being an unintended good thing.
I will destroy you.
I think it’s less that he was irony-poisoned and more that internet comedy writers tend to be awkward dorks in-person
I think these are the same thing. Hedren is clearly an awkward dork, so it's how he copes. He looked like a racist nephew at a family reunion while everyone's laughing and eating eggs and smiling and clapping. The key to this, to me, is the Vice article. I'd be willing to see him as simply a goober, but look how he paints himself a hero here:
I'm not bragging. On the contrary, this is a confession. I, along with several thousand Internet people, forced his hand and made the otherwise nice-enough lead singer from Smash Mouth eat eggs until he either cried or was sweating so hard it looked like crying. I'd almost go as far as to call it extreme cyberbullying. Yeah, now that I think about it, I guess we cyberbullied the "All Star" guy.
This whole humblebrag shit doesn't fly with me. He's trying to make it sound like all of this was an accident. I'm sure he didn't intend for it to blow up like this, but you can still see from the video that everyone is having fun. His spin on events is very dark and depressing. I am guessing he doesn't go to many parties since he just hangs out and takes video the whole time. I remember that the Something Awful forums actually made fun of him and gave the W to Harwell at the time.
Right? Meanwhile he seemed to be miserable the whole fucking day.
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[effort post] Irony poisoning is death by detachment: the tale of @fart, Smash Mouth, and two dozen eggs
(hexbear.net)
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.
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.
They made fun of otherkin just to butter you up to mock trans people
It only sucks 99%.
If you're a cis dude then no, I deny and rebuke you
Google isn’t gonna do shit, those nerds fear me
I’ll guarantee it’s not the length of what I shared that’s preventing people from reading.
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This is the kinda guy you watch at the park attempt an ollie for three hours, snap his board in half, and never come back.