Q: What's the deal then?
A: If you're anything like us, and you don't live in a cave with bad 4G | LTE coverage, then you spend a lot of time on the Internet. We read most anything that seems interesting, like about the best clam shacks in New England and the possibility of the Higgs Boson particle. Trouble is, these pieces usually aren't well-written. They are written simply. The act of reading is fun, the act of absorbing basic information is fun, but a day of reading things off of a screen is tiring. Maybe it's eye strain. Maybe it's because the writing isn't really compelling or the words themselves aren't really worth remembering. And we are spoiled for choice in terms of topics.
Hence the phrase: What's That From? Folks are smart, but we forget where the things we've read or seen or watched or heard came from. That's sad. So it's up to us, Ghost Little and Doberman, to write words worth remembering. Maybe it's about a topic you know nothing about. Maybe it's something you normally avoid reading about. Let's make any topic memorable in any way we can.
Q: That comes off as a little abrasive. What's your background? Can we talk about who you are, and what gives you the right to be a credible voice on these subjects?
A: Well, that's a decent question. Our credibility? Here's our credibility: a person reading what we've written has been visibly rattled by some faceless scribes on a mission to give some memorability back to the written word. If you're here for the critiques and a lithe writing-style applied to things you normally wouldn't care about, then dig in. If you're here to doubt us, we can divert to diplomacy and talk. If you're here to fight, then get fucked, old man. Listen, if we wanted information about how shitty McCarthyism was or what public racism really was like, we'd go to the source on those things. The issue here is that people of this current generation are defining the written word now. We've got the tools and we've got the talent, so when it comes to commentary on the state of critical interpretation, we are the authority, not you, resistant person. That's our challenge to you: "Can you step aside and accept that truth does not necessarily default to the ones that have made an entire career of spitting words?"
We'll be brief. We're classically trained in language and we were educated at places of higher learning around the world. Our Kung-Fu is strong. We aren't waiting in line for our credibility certificate. We'll let the talking do the talking. What, is clout a limited commodity metered out once a year and we can't have any until you're done with it? Nope, sorry.
Q: Okay, so we live in an era of transparency and connectivity -- why do you stand for the golden archetypes of ages past that our fathers and grandfathers once admired like strong individual values and educated critiques. Those are obviously trite, antiquated cliches aren't they? Aren't you just angry bloggers?
A: You're reading too much into it. The idea here is that we all have egos, especially on the Internet. We just have the guts to throw crafted interpretations behind those egos and make them as real as they would be if we were talking at a bar or wherever. Out here in the field, people are quivering masses of Facebook, but in that world, nobody is making any decisions, we're just projecting things other people have written and dropping a few broken sentences in response in our status updates. And that's a great way to communicate ideas and start conversation. What's That From? goes one step further and makes those stories fun to remember. We all have identities to manage online, ones that resembles real life, but it isn't quite there.
We need faceless heroes with honest ideas that operate outside of critical nitpickery and just exist for the sake of their value. Twenty-first century heroes are impotent, sexless demi-gods brewed to the lowest-common denominator. Fuck Taylor Swift. We're more complex than that. We're a trite blogger cliche? We've forgotten better than your best. If we puked in a fountain pen and mailed it to the monkey house, we'd get better work than what you're scribbling down right now. The life we lead is so great that centuries in the future, kids will still want to be us when they grow up.
-- Ghost Little and Doberman (...are going to make the world a better place.)
on Twitter | @GhostLittle_WTF
