Internet Shaquille Formative Media

During the period in which I was tracking all my low-effort meals, I was also writing down the names of any media that had a permanent and recognizable influence on my work today. This is that list, in alphabetical order:

• AdamJK
  I barely found out that all the music I used to dance to in college is now retroactively categorized as "bloghouse", so brace yourself to be like "damn this old man really used to read a lot of blogs". Anyway, I came to know about brand slash person AdamJK by seeing this shirt in some menswear blog. Adam was selling physical trinkets like keychains and ribbons, and as a design student trying new ways to make money off my ideas in any way possible, I could finally point to someone who was effectively saying "here is what I make, you big uncaring free market. Take it or leave it". There is no way that the inner workings of his business were actually that simple, but from my perspective as a follower, everything looked straightforward and unbothered. If it turns out that there was actually a million dollar advertising budget behind the whole operation, it wouldn't change the fact that Adam's success proved to a young version of me that you could just say "what if I made an egg cup" and then eventually put a damn egg cup in your web store.
  
• Brick
  My art teacher in high school showed us a movie called Brick in class, which turned out to be the only art lesson I remember from the semester. It's like noir fiction, but the characters are all high school students. The principle is top brass, and everyone needs to hitch rides to get around. The mix of gritty drama and laughable context is nothing remarkable now (combine a mystery flick with Foghorn Leghorn and you get Knives Out), but to my developing baby brain, this was the first remarkable time where two opposing concepts could come together into something really enjoyable. It was also the first time I was able to have fun riding that exhilarating line between "boy howdy listen to this boy speak" and "i have no dadgum idea what these folks are saying", which I try to weave into my YouTube scripts.
  
• Butteryass Mondays
  It's hard to find any evidence of this old internet video series, but there was one in which the protagonist buys a case of Tampico orange drink at the dollar store and sells them all at the skate park for a profit. I was gripped by the get-rich-quick schemes, but stuck around long enough to learn that anyone's lived experience could be useful and fun to watch. A fellow shithead skate kid was able to share all sorts of ultra-niche life advice, like using those 50-cent newspaper dispensers as "street lockers" to hold all your stuff while you skate.
  
• Diggnation
  I used to be an extreme podcast head in high school, which is part of why the recent podcast craze is so wild to me now. Diggnation was the first time I was introduced to the "two friends talking on the couch over beers" format of media. They did a live show here once and I sat in the front row, which was supposed to be reserved for GoDaddy employees. (They were a sponsor of the show.) I got lucky and the person whose seat I was in never showed up. I still have the poster from that show, signed by the hosts. It was long after the podcast ended and Digg became irrelevant, but when one of my Youtube videos made it to the front page of Digg.com, I was proud of myself.
  
• Fuck Yeah Menswear
  This is the most embarrassing entry on the list, but I still have a physical copy of this blog's book. In the same way that Brick could use words that seemed at first blush to be nonsense, FYMW would write about clothes with language and obscure references that rewarded readers who were in on those cultural touchstones. Unlike Brick, everything here was written like a fast-paced poem, so anything that you didn't comprehend could be half-understood with context clues or written off as unimportant. In this example, the reader is rewarded at the end for understanding that the wrinkles that develop in selvedge denim's crotch area are called "whiskers"
  
• ImBoyCrazy
  This is another blog that doesn't exist any more, but the author Alexi Wasser had a series called "The Bling Leading the Blind" in which she posted bulleted lists of advice. Dome Improvement is pretty much a direct ripoff of her work.
  
• Kenny Vs Spenny
  I re-watch this series at least once every couple of years, but it's not something I commonly or publicly recommend. The crude early 2000's humor has naturally aged into hours of cancel-worthy joke crimes. But the reason this show affected me so much is how cleverly each episode employed cheating. This is still my favorite  twist ending of all time for any show, be it real or scripted, comedy or drama. If this all turned out to be completely scripted, it would still be a perfect story.
  
• Videogame Dunkey
  Before I would watch a lot of Youtube, this was the only channel I had seen that focused on good videos and not so much on Youtubery stuff like self-promo and clickbait.
  
• ZeroPunctuation
  A long long time ago before anyone had to worry too much about copyright strikes on their videos, each one of these videos found a way to make music part of the joke. The host showed me how to artfully dunk on the popular things for which you don't understand the hype, and he is solely to blame for my penchant for talking too quickly and employing more similes than a uh idk some kind of simile employer thing.
  
• Honorable mention: a video I tweeted a few years ago
  Most of my work has been an exercise in matching silent B-roll to narration, which is why I enjoy How To with John Wilson so much. Proof of this habit can be found in this now-deleted video I tweeted titled "I still miss Vine". This video eventually got retweeted by Chance the Rapper, which was a nice little treat that I shared with a then-just-barely-dating Bree. She came over to my house that night and brought Sprinkles cupcakes to celebrate the occasion. I was totally surprised by the gesture because a big part of being an extremely online guy is "acting like you've been here before" and trying not to get too excited when something cool happens. After all, if you're trying to go viral all the time, shouldn't you try to play it cool whenever it does happen? This piece of my own self-produced content is still important to me because it reminds me that people close to me are sometimes proud of me for the work I produce, even if I try really hard not to go too easy on myself.