An Apology to the Hipsters Whose Lives I've Ruined
That, daydreamers, is an invitation from Forts and the InBetween, a group of 20/30-somethings that I can most accurately describe as a fort-building charity(?) campaign(?). Made up of 21st-century hippies (or "hipsters"), the group wants donations so they can drive across the country in a van and build forts with people. Their goal is to help others "listen, interact, engage, give, explore, teach, create, share, grow, ask, act and empower," which is just a verbose hipster's way of saying "spread peace, love and understanding." They explain all $25,000 of it in their video, which can be viewed here.
Depending on how far you got into the video, you may have heard a guy say "kweshun" a lot, and you may have seen a bunch of people jumping off a hill with glee(?). Some of them roll down, some step off and one fucking leaps -- his name is Wes. It looks painful and quite frankly, he shouldn't have jumped so damn far because he easily could have died. The whole video/concept is pretty ridiculous, but my reaction to it was not to make fun of their lensless glasses or hilarious moostaches, or even the basic silliness of their fort idea, but to make the following Alternate Ending:
A hopeful leap off a short hill for poor Wes. May he rest in peace.
Shortly after the Alternate Ending was uploaded, the original 5-minute video was posted on The Daily What, along with a link to Wes' untimely splatter. Several hours later, the original video was taken down from Vimeo and the FIB's Kickstarter fundraiser page had been canceled. The Kickstarter video can be viewed, but not downloaded.
Side Note: If you're looking for something else to donate to in FIB's absence, feel free to give what you can to my new daydream project, "The Bullshit Factory," thanks to which we will run a lemonade stand and watch David The Gnome all day. For the sake of peace, love and understanding, of course.
I couldn't help but think that I was somewhat to blame for the cancellation of the daydreamers' daydreams. The founder's "roommate" sent me an email the next day, I assume in mid-dream. The email confirmed that, yes, I was partly to blame. It was very polite and had a lot of good vibes, but it also pointed out that my "digitized murder" of his friend had in fact caused some ...
Despite the fact that "cook you a real nice meal" sounds like they planned to poison me with good intentions or poison, the last paragraph speaks volumes to their general view on life.
My immediate reaction was about halfway between "Aw, hell no" and "Oh no you di-in't." They were the misunderstood ones? Building forts was still a good idea? I was confused, and aggravated. These aren't the stereotypical, hyper-ironic hipsters who listen to Neon Neon and grow dumpster vegetables because they think it makes them seem interesting. No, they are not your Internet's hipsters.
Hipster Hipster: You've probably never heard of it.
Wes and Company are hipsters in the truest sense of the word: they're hippies. They are the heir to the hippie throne, only instead of songin' and bongin', they're building forts and bonging. The product of a different generation, but still basically all the same type of person. In the hippie-est of ways, they very seriously think that they would have done some good by using people's money to drive cross country and build temporary miniature circus tents of imagination. A waste of money and time and people and forts, probably, but an act of positivity nonetheless. It's more than can be said for half of people, let alone the Internet, which oftentimes seems hellbent on tearing other people down in order to feel better about its collective self. Since the posting of the alternate ending, I have received many emails from people asking me if I have a copy of the full five-minute video, so they can make their own parodies. I do still have a copy. It would be simple to just upload it to YouTube for download, but I don't want to throw these people to the internet, for more than one reason.
No one wants to be a meme, it just happens. Sometimes it's for the better (still waiting for that second Rebecca Black hit "These Are All The Things In My Backpack"), and sometimes it's absolutely horrible (still waiting for the Star Wars Kid prequels). Wes and his crew, their daydreams and forts crushed, are definitely on the horrible end of the spectrum. Misguided? Maybe. But they do mean well. Conan O'Brien once said "Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen." Forts and the InBetween may only have the "be kind" part down, but I think they at least deserve to have no things happen. Maybe it's a good idea to start just being mean to mean people.
And to Forts and the InBetween, if you're reading this: I have a formal apology for you ...
Dear Forts and the InBetween,
As your invitation states, you started Forts and the InBetween "with hopes of growing and sharing in a bigger story". It may not be the story you wanted, or how big you wanted it, but you have accomplished at least half of your goal already. You now share a story with the Internet, and the Internet is, excuse the metaphor, a fort in some way or another, probably. So if you want to try to build forts for a living, go ahead. You know what I do for a living? Tell this story. That's just as ridiculous as your ridiculous fort idea, if not more so. If I ever happen to be in San Diego, I'll hit you up and accept your real nice meal, on the condition that one of you takes a bite of it first. If you're ever in my neck of the woods, I'll let you make me a real nice meal or I'll buy all of you McDonald's, or a McDonald's equivalent.
I am very sorry for whatever negative attention the Alternate Ending brought to your project and your life. I will never post the full version anywhere, and we can all avoid a Lonely Island "I'm In a Fort" parody. I've decided to not take the Alternate Ending down, though, if it's all the same to you. I hope you don't take much or any offense to that, because it was not at all made to mock or offend you or your project. It was made to make a much more important point that I think can actually help you fulfill your hopes of growing.
You see, at some point, someone or something really dropped the ball and forgot to tell you that when you're an adult, you can't change the world by acting like a kid. This playtime feelgoodery is your passion, though, and I admire that. It's kind of wonderful, in fact. I wish I still had that childlike whimsy and disconnect from the burdens of adulthood, because I wish I was a less cynical person. You, on the other hand, don't have to make the effort, because cynicism was never even introduced to you. So shine on, you post-modern hippies. Shine wherever you'd like, because I think you can fulfill your invitation's destiny, and grow in this shared story. Just watch the Alternate Ending a few more times until you realize that at some point, someone or something really dropped the ball and forgot to tell you to not jump off hills like that, because you easily could have died, man.
Dr. Mister Apology,
Cody
Cody is on Tumblr, Twitter, and TheFacebook, and he uses all of them sparingly.
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Is it wrong that every time I'm down nd just need a good laugh I'll just get on here nd see that video nd then i can't stop laughing?
ReplyThe A key, my boy! The A key! It's essential!
Funny, after reading a couple of Cody's unfunny ironic blogs, I thought he was a hipster. Oh wait, a hipster talking bad about hipsters is a hipster thing to do, isn't it? I got it now.
ReplyShave your hipster beard you unfunny freak.
A hipster talking bad about hipsters........does anyone else see the irony in this post??
They had good intentions, but a rather upper middle class, sheltered way of going about it.
Replybut at the very least have some commitment. One internet joke and they flee from (to?) their forts? If they got 1500 then some people must have thought they were on to something (they weren't).
Petrol money, online advertising, food, hotels (forts dont stay warm overnight), where in that would four people need 25k?
Ah, wait... i forgot ironicly outdated clothing and obscure music, and the outdated technology to play said music. yep 25k sounds about right.
f*****g hipsters
This article is incomprehensible. Oh, and hippies aren't hipsters in the truest sense. Hippies and hipsters are completely different. Hippies love everything, whereas hipsters hate everything.
Replyno not technically but when you think about it, doesnt it make sense for hipsters to emulate hippies and pretend that they arent. Hippies dont care about society, hippies are outdated and irrelevant, they are everything hipsters want to be. and more and more hipsters are deciding that its hip to forgoe personal grooming.
but also they are sufficiently in the past tense that hipsters can pretend that they aren't copying them, and that they are doing something new that you and i havent discovered and ruined yet
Here's my thing (and I'm sure someone must have said this at some point, but I scrolled through quite a few comments and didn't see it): How incredibly un-dedicated to their cause must they have been to let THAT end their little quest? It wasn't even offensive. The video didn't impugn their plan in any way, didn't threaten or wish any harm upon the guy... it was just as simple and stupid as "That seemed like a dangerous thing to do. Here's what it would have looked like if it had gone wrong."
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesWhat in it could have possibly caused Wes' girlfriend to experience "serious turmoil"? It wasn't a realistic depiction of a possible brutal death or anything, it was a couple splashes of half-assed CG blood and some text. I can see why the most effective campaign they could think of to change the world was to drive around building pillow-forts. What a bunch of whiny, ineffectual pussies.
They're a group of people that can exist in societies like ours because our culture allows that kind of frivolous crap. We coddle the hell out of people instead of telling them they're being dumb asses and making them get with the program. I'm so glad these people are essentially useless instead of being productive members of society. Oh wait, I'm not. I think they're idiots who need to get jobs and not beg for other peoples' money so they can build damned forts.
@DocLobster, Whoa, society coddles people? And here I thought society was a machine made of apathy, misanthropy, and angry internet commentators. Despite society's enormous rates of homelessness, suicides, and drug users, I suppose you believe that just because a few oddballs decided to build pillow forts, society is really just coddling everybody. I mean, if we didn't coddle people so much, perhaps they would toughen up and finally fulfill this utilitarian vision of ours, instead of having human flaws, personal problems, and fragile self confidences that they remedy by joining some sort of group (like religion) or doing drugs (like Cracked) or both (like hippies). OBVIOUSLY life is not a turbulent or difficult process at all, and telling hipsters that they should be productive members of society will fix EVERYTHING.
I mean, I don't see the point in getting funding to build forts either, but man, I can't tell if you're trolling, if you keep Stalinist propaganda under your mattress, or if you're really just an internet hipster trying to be ironic... or something. Have you been hanging out in the comments section so long that you've lost touch with reality, or are you a troll who is currently laughing his head off in front of his computer because I took you seriously?
I think DocLobster's point needs to be clarified into what I think he really meant, that the comforts of modern society allow for useless people to exist and thrive off of the work of other, useful, people. Obviously not everyone is in a situation where everything's perfect for them, but there ARE many people who could make something of themselves and instead would rather go around wasting their lives away at the expenses of charitable people.
wtf is a bulldash commission?
ReplyI still laugh at this.
ReplyInception music just killed it, f**king awesome.
ReplyI don't think it matters if they're hippies, hipsters or run of the mill idiots. What's important is the fact that these...people, I guess, were able to con nearly $1,500 out of the internet. I just can't wrap my head around the fact that someone saw the video and thought "Hey, I'll give $160 so these kids can drive around building pillow forts."
Reply1.5g?? that's honestly not worth caring about... let the crazy nerdies make what they can off other... nerdies? but seriously, it's absolutely harmless.
$1500 isn't worth caring about? Jesus, why don't you send some $ my way then...fuck's sake.
Well, they dress like hipsters but act like hippies. What do we call them?
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesI thought they dressed like they came from an "Office Space" themed Halloween party.
"Stupid". We call them "stupid".
Agreed. Stupid is the best term. SOMEONE RIP THAT VIDEO. I KNOW YOU CAN.
Hippisters. Maybe.
I quit reading as soon as I noticed that Cody for some reason thinks that hipsters are hippies. They're totally different. A hippie in a hipster bar feels uncomfortable around all the nicely dress, trendy, wannabe cool douchebag hipsters. In any case, hipsters were around before hippies...idiot.
Reply Hide All See All 6 RepliesSo, you give enough of a s**t about the difference between hipsters and hippies to call a far more talented and "hip" person than yourself an idiot? You're actually a far bigger douchebag than any of the hipsters/hippies/who gives a s**t in the article
Is your user name a refence to a "Watership Down" character?
Good point, sorta ('cept Cody is NOT an idiot - he is a comedy genius!!). Hipsters are not the same thing as hippies - if anything, they are more like old school beatniks. The sort of people who know a lot about a little, usually philosophical literature, that use this obscure knowledge to make everyone else around them feel like a misinformed 'tard (e.g., most common phrase associated with hipsters? 'You've probably never heard of it.') But just as beatniks begat hippies, hippies (in a round about way...) begat hipsters. And they are all sort of one in the same in that they are a group of overtly pretentious people that spend a lot of time, energy, and resources thinking of ways to make the world a better place, but very rarely actually getting there ('Don't you care about thinking about peace??'). Especially nowadays - I'm not saying all new age hipsters/hippies/whatever-the-heck-they-call-themselves-now are like this, but I will say that most of them seem more focused on their clothes and sounding educated and self-actualized than they are on any REAL cause. It can be argued that people of popular subcultures past have made a difference, but a decent chunk of them probably didn't - let's not forget how many of the hippies running around back in the '60s were probably just smelly and too stoned to actually protest anything.
mansquatch, congrats, you just made yourself sound like the biggest tool in the universe. kudos.
The fact that you took time to write out this asinine response is just as much of a waste of time as these people running around building forts. Regardless of what you call them, the money, time and resources spent making this video could have been used to do something worthwhile. You know, something that actually HELPS people that need it.
Hmmm, so, from the looks of it, the internet has agreed that hippies are a counterculture movement that focuses on creative expression, rejecting social norms, doing drugs, and holding music festivals. But the internet has not yet decided what a hipster is. Is it what El-what's-his-face says, a trendy, wannabe cool, well-dressed douchebag? Is it what iammine says, a pretentious person who tries to look smarter than others while not actually doing anything for society? Is it what Lev Yilmaz says, somebody who goes to thrift stores and listens to obscure bands? Or is it what Cracked says, is it some sort of person who incorporates irony into certain fields of their personal life- a middle class person ironically, drinking working class beer, a person who wears ironic T-shirts, etc. A person who tries to contradict your expectations in a witty and humorous way, like through action and appearance? I bet the word has racked up a thousand different definitions on urban dictionary.
are 98% of the people that post on here 80 year old grumpy f**kers?
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesNo, Im pretty sure its just that no one likes hippies, which in this case I beleive, is what they are.
Yes, yes they are.
grumpy fuckers i mean
Atiitya, stop trying to be witty with rhetorical questions on the Internet. It will never, ever work out for you. Also, f**k you, not all old people are grumpy fuckers. And, f**k you for percentages.
Mercy is for the weak. You've ruined Darwin's work cody, now they will breed.
ReplyCody you are too kind. You did do a good job of giving a subtle reality check to these hipsters, but what they need is a reality enema. I could only imagine if Bucholz, Seanbaby, or Brockway attacked these fools. It would have been brutal. Nonetheless, good job Cody.
Replyyou know that picture of a seal ripping off a penguin's head and all his insides are just suspended in midair? It would be exactly like that.
I don't think hipsters are anything like hippies, despite the similar names. You really should've gotten your sub-cultures right, dude.
ReplyBecause sub-cultures are important.
Watch the actual video for the Fort Building project.
These guys dress like hipsters, but they are full-blown hippies on the inside.
They want money so they can explore "The Inbetween" and expand "The Bigger Story" to the world. "Could bulding a fort be action that expands and betters your community? We think so."
So does anybody know what they did with the funds that their parent (ahem... contributors) donated before the shutdown?
ReplyWith kickstarter you only get the money if you can raise what you asked for, they needed 25k, so they did nothing
Fair point Cody; Someone would have made a parodoy and considering most of the people whom make pardodies are stupid, at least one person would break their back jumping off a f**king hill.
ReplyA nit to pick. Hipsters are not hippies. They really couldn't be more different. Hipsters are all about being hip and in the know. Hippies couldn't care less about being hip. Both groups are terribly good for making fun of, though.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesHippies care about being hip...you f**king hipster stop trying to define something a*****e
As a resident of Portland, I have to agree with wjglenn. A lot of hipsters look down on hippies, though I have yet to figure out why.
And hippies don't care about being hip. They care about their values for solid reasons that don't change often. A veggie hippie will remain a vegetarian because they think that is right. They want more people to be vegetarian because they think it's the moral thing to do. A hipster will start eating meat the minute he finds out his parents are going veggie.
The biggest difference I've found between hippies and hipsters is that hippies want to educate you about their values, while hipsters want to look down on you for them. Hippies welcome new members to the movement, hipsters are defined by the ones they exclude.
well the hippie movement is coined as such because they were, well hip or hipsters. to be hip, a hippie, a hipster is basically the same thing from an etymological viewpoint. What we usually call hipsters today are much easier to just call dickwads and keep the hippies hip. much less confusion.
spot on dizzypdx. no doubt there was plenty of people along for the ride during the height of hippie culture, the concepts and social values were at least admirable for being peaceful and inclusive. hipsters are all about exclusivity, one up manship bulls**tting and postering. check out bedroom philosopher - northcote (so hungover) for a pretty funny send up of the hipster/band scene.
Both are equally irrelevant, and probably have coinciding monthly bathing schedules, so Cody gets a mulligan.
You`re not cynical, Cody. It`s an ethical duty to stop this kind of bulls**t when it is still on the cradle. I already hate when "kind-hearted" people make charity using other people`s money, (the photo in the daily paper is a must) but I hate it more when their idea of charity needs too many words to sumarize - that`s exactly where you can spot that their "social attitude" don`t have any practical result. s**t, you can see by their response to an silly parody how these pussies don`t have any idea what a real problem is. "Boohoo, I`ve put a movie of myself in the internet acting like a dope and people said I`m a dope, this world is a cruel place for the good-willed..."
ReplyHere where I live some hipsters had a similar idea some time ago, they started making "circus officines" (I don`t know how it would be called in English, sorry) for poor kids to participate. They would gather these kids, who usually abandon the school to become beggars in stoplights, and take them to learn various circus related activities, in the hopes that it would help them to boost their self-steem or some crap like that. Because, you know, "run away to join the circus" is a solid career plan these days. The result is that now we have little jugglers who don`t know how to juggle in the traffic lights, running between cars to retrieve their dropped balls before the lights go green. And the best part is that the majority of those "social attitudes" are financed with government funds.
But back to the FIB fools, the only child benefited from their fort-building would be Wes'imaginary friend Danny who were always there to take him to the ponyland when daddy started choking mom in the dinner table for giving birth to an hipster.
My brother is a neo-hippy, living in a commune (which they call an "intentional community" these days).
ReplyBefore today I felt some derision for them... they're sort of goofing off a lot. But they are also practicing survival skills and living off the land, being eco-friendly, in preparation for the coming apocalypse.
In comparison, these a*****es from F&IB are (with straight faces!) telling me that they can change the world by building blanket forts.
Let's make a deal, F&IB. You teach me to empower through building blanket tents, and I'll teach you how to... almost anything else. Butcher a hog? Repair a computer? Write an essay? Get a job and go to work every day? Then in a few years we'll see which skill proved more useful.