Daily Archives: December 6, 2022

T-Shirt: Inspiring Threat

Hey, you know those ‘live laugh love’ and ‘in this house we do hugs’ kind of inspirational posts? Those things have this weird threatening energy to them. I’m often struck by how the aesthetic of them deforms the message, where how they become unsettling just by the way they are composed and all it takes is the right mix of unimpressively hacky fonts to take a message with some meaning and make it demand scrutiny.

Anyway, a long time ago I heard at a draft table, you can’t make it go faster but you can make it go slower, you know, as a way to scold players who were trying to rush other players making decisions. Somewhat recently, I rewrote it, a permutation of it:

I’ve been thinking about this phrase a lot in the context of, uh… well

You look at twitter over there?

It’s a phrase I like the more I turn it over, because it’s both an impetus to be kind (think about the ways your impetus to act may cause harm) and also direction to recognise that some things are damaged beyond salvaging (and maybe you should be spending your energy tearing down bad things).

Anyway, uhhh, you can probably get masks, shirts, and stickers before Christmas, if that’s a thing you want?

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