Originally published at: Twitter legend Dril profiled | Boing Boing
…
7 Likes
Twitter “legend”
"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . .
Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains."
19 Likes
Who??
1 Like
He has come up with some choice epigrams. I hope he got a house down payment out of it.
10 Likes
50 years ago, he would have become a famous stand-up comedian
40 years ago, he would have become a television star
30 years ago, he would have become a hotshot writer
20 years ago, he would have gotten a book deal with serious marketing and publishing behind it
But now it’s just tweets, helping Elon not lose quite so much money.
9 Likes
Everyone is Elon’s mark lately. Especially Elon.
6 Likes
Sadly, from the profile it very much sounds like he did not.
Also, I will always remember him for coining the phrase “face god and walk backwards into hell,” which I use regularly.
4 Likes
To be fair to dril, he was doing this long before it was doing anything for Musk’s bottom line.
2 Likes
What’s interesting about Dochney is how much the form is very online and highly resistant to being monetized. His non-internet stuff, from which he actually makes his fairly modest income, i.e. his books and tv/stage shows, etc. are weird and don’t really fit the conventions of those forms, and his success is pretty marginal. His form and humor are very much a product of internet forums, Something Awful in particular - the internet is his native context.
The idea that X years ago, he would have been doing Y is like saying “if Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge were alive today, he’d be writing sitcom scripts.” I mean, maybe, if a person grew up in a different era and had different influences, they’d be doing something completely different. Leaving aside that they didn’t, what made/makes them successful in one form doesn’t necessarily apply to others. (Being a stand-up comedian or tv star required a certain stage presence, a particular temperament, a voice - and even appearance - that fits expectations of the era.) Those are forms in which he could have found critical and financial success - in the same way that critical/financial success is to still be found in being a famous stand-up comedian, tv star, hotshot writer or famous author now. He wouldn’t necessarily have been any better positioned to achieve success in those forms then as he is now.
In fact, one might make the argument that in a previous era, he would have been a guy who just made really funny jokes to his friends, and that’s where his creative efforts would have ended, as he’d have no platform to allow him to move to any of those other forms.
6 Likes
It’s fascinating to me how, every time humanity invents a new medium, activity, or discipline, there’s always someone who seems born to do it. There’s a Mozart who was just waiting for this obscure thing to come along so they could excel at it.
4 Likes
In Dochney’s case, it’s an idiom he grew up in - he was like… 12 [gods, I feel old] when “Something Awful” started, and that’s where he developed his sense of humor during his formative years. So, he was rather literally born into it. Of course, it’s an idiom that doesn’t make sense outside the context - I can imagine someone doing “internet humor” before the internet, but it would have been extremely… eccentric and not meaningful to many people.
So on the one hand, he’s got a set of knowledge/skills/temperament that works well in this format, that might not in other formats, but he’s also working in the kind of humor that he grew up in, because he grew up in it.
1 Like
The heyday of alternative anti-comedy was a while ago, like when Andy Kaufman and David Letterman became major stars by being weird and confusing
Since then, defying expectations has become just another cliche 
and not a very competitive one
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
