We had roused a novel demographic with a recent strip - namely, Mormons who also worship Elon Musk. I hadn't been previously aware of this tendency. Spokane, or at least the places I've lived in Spokane, were full of unfailingly nice Mormons who were having the same trouble navigating religion and adolescence I was, except they seemed to be doing better at it. It's possible that I learned too late that the much-referenced "bite" in Barq's - Barq's Rooted Beers - was caffeine. I was already vibrating at a dangerous frequency, just being fifteen. It probably wasn't helping.

But, yes; apparently the guy in the strip is some kinda big wheel in one or both of these communities, or at any rate he was a Known Quantity, and so then people came over to that strip's thread and said various mean things or things they thought were mean. They're barking up the wrong tree.

I have simply been on here too long. The site, and its sacred tenets, were founded in 1998 - just a few years into the thrust of the consumer Internet. I simply can't be harmed in the way they have attempted to harm me. I speak to you now from within a callus of scars and shame; I recite these posts to my page, Sean Stamos, who is dutiful, handsome, and wise.

Something that was especially annoying in the thread was the recitation of various catechisms. Maybe they don't know they're doing it; that's the most noble interpretation I can grant them. But having been raised in a church I can sense on the back of my neck when a sermon is starting, even in an ostensibly secular context. I can't abide it. But they can't help it; they're trying to lecture me about free speech or something. Me. Motherfucker, I'm from there.

They're all subscribers to some political package that involves, somehow all together, adulation of Musk, crypto, free speech, AI and tech accelerationism, and Twitter as a kind of rhetorical Thunderdome. It's the old Cable model, but for your political schema. I want one of those things and I want to throw the rest away. But these packages sort of exist all over, and when people argue online my consciousness launches out of my skull and fires up into the air, where all I can see is the war being waged not by people but by agglomerations of memes and received wisdom via their mortal vessels. There's never gonna be a package I can stomach - I'm too weird, and set. Luckily, I am constructed in a way that eases the pain of exile.

(CW)TB out.