Maybe your favorite artist hasn’t changed — you have

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3 min readAug 9, 2024

💫 On Sunday night beginning at around 11:30 p.m. ET, over 100 meteors per hour will be visible in the sky as the Earth crosses comet Swift-Tuttle’s debris stream
Issue #138: childless teachers and and pragmatism vs. perfectionism
By Harris Sockel

Here’s a test to gauge what type of internet user you are. How does this Tweet make you feel?

Nostalgic? Confused? Joyful? Deranged?

I was online in 2013 and remember it vividly: the absurdity, the “what did I just read”-ness of the artist known as dril. Honestly, it makes me a little nostalgic.

@dril’s humor covers, let’s see… cops, diapers, jeans, Family Guy, Hondas, computers, microplastics, Nickelodeon, Reddit, and Kate Middleton. If you’re familiar with this posting style — nonsensical, a little satirical, vaguely trollish — you’re probably aware of Weird Twitter, a subculture that’s the writing equivalent of early-20th century Dadaism. “Weird Twitter” rejects logic and embraces stupidity. It’s a deliberately irrational style of comedy.

(Related: Someone started a Weird Medium pub but there are no stories in it. Maybe there should be?)

On Medium, @pidgezero_one investigates a recent conspiracy theory that @dril — actually just a guy named Paul — sold the account and his Tweets got less funny. After reading every single Tweet (nearly all 7,519 of them!) @pidgezero_one concludes that @dril has been remarkably tonally consistent over his career. There’s no evidence of a dip in quality, but his longtime followers keep imagining one — which @pidgezero_one attributes to recency bias. Fans of any artist compare their latest work to their greatest hits from the old days (like that candle Tweet). Any creator’s ratio of memorable-to-forgettable work is pretty consistent, but we tend to compare all of our present-day posts to our evergreen bangers.

There’s another lesson here about how our relationships with the music, movies, books, and internet personalities of our youth evolve as we get older. If you’ve been following someone for a decade, it’s easy to believe they’ve changed and ignore all the ways you’ve changed alongside them.

Two more weekend reads

Kim Stillwell, an elementary school principal who’s worked with ~3,000 children over her 33-year career — and who happens to be childless — pushes back against JD Vance’s comments about child-free folks not having a “direct stake” in America’s future. “A woman’s value to her community goes far beyond her ability to reproduce and raise her own children.”
In April 2020, I read Julio Vincent Gambuto’s “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting” along with 21 million other people. It’s an essay about how businesses capitalized on our urge to return to “normal” post-pandemic without giving us a chance to reassess what “normal” should even mean. Now, Gambuto has released a book based on that viral essay. He published the first chapter on Medium. In it, he describes going viral as “spiritual.”

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: pragmatism vs. perfectionism

Advice from former ops lead at Meta and Uber, Torsten Walbaum: In a fast-growing company, getting something done quickly is better than getting it done perfectly. If you have perfectionist tendencies (like me), push yourself to share your work just a little bit before you think it’s ready.

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.