Alex Dobrenko

It is often in the cradle of friendship — a word not to be used carelessly — that our creative energies are strengthened and renewed.

In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs,

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Cheese sweats

I used to think doing stuff like that - hitting myself, slamming things - was cool. Or manly, maybe? I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t think much of it at all besides a vaguely vindicating feeling afterwards like, ‘see, I am fucked up - why else would I do something like that?’ 

Which makes sense given how little physical proof there is of

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Still, taste is closely intertwined with snobbery. And indeed, many snobs (coffee snobs, gear snobs, wine snobs, etc.) often have great taste. But I would say that taste is the sensibility, and snobbery is one way to express the sensibility. It’s not the only way.