North Carolina's online discourse is a many-splendored thing

Three (somehow safe for work) stories about a cursed image, innovative funding sources for hurricane relief, and nostalgia for places where people threw up in college.

OnlyDonations

I have seen a lot of videos showing the relief efforts after Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina. The ending of this one is … unique.

@alanachoofficialWe helped hurrican survivors @vvptoria @jenfoxxuwu

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The summary: Three young women show up in Asheville with a truck full of supplies, and then chip in $20,000 directly to the relief effort. At the end, one of the women, Alana Cho, asks the guy in charge if he knows how she paid for it all. He doesn’t.

“With OnlyFans money,” she says.

“Even better!” the guy replies.

And … scene.

(If you don’t know what OnlyFans is, here’s a Wikipedia article which hopefully won’t send up alarm bells if you happen to be reading this at work.)

This was sent to me by a Rabbit Hole reader who stated: “here's an WNC relief aid story with a ~unique~ angle if you're looking for something to report out.” Boy, is it ever! I generally subscribe to the fact that toxic masculinity is to blame for a whole host of societal ills. But in this very specific case, I gotta hand it to the guys being dudes who accidentally subsidized this particular recovery effort in Asheville. Way to go, patriarchy?

Newsweek tracked down some of the people involved. The guy who’s receiving all of the food, generators, computers, and other donations here is Darian Bodenhorst, who started a volunteer organization called AVL FAST (which stands for Friends Assisting Survivors Together). No, he says, he really didn’t know know where the money came from before the women told him. “I didn't think it was odd at all that three young women had that amount of money to spend," he told Newsweek. Also, neither Bodenhorst nor the people behind the video want to turn this into a whole political thing. “Ultimately, we're not policy makers, we're [OnlyFans] creators,” the videographer, Ethan Fox, told Newsweek.

I did not know who Alana Cho was before I saw this. I swear! Turns out she’s the “MrBeast of OnlyFans” according to Ryan Broderick, who writes the always excellent Garbage Day newsletter. Broderick notes that this video is a good example of Cho’s online existence, which seems to sit right at the intersection of pornography and viral philanthropy. She and many others are trying to find a formula to make money off of a modern internet that’s dominated by algorithms and platforms, one that increasingly downplays links to interesting stuff. Says Broderick:

On an internet without hyperlinks, where every post must be completely digestible in someone’s feed within microseconds of a user seeing it, your face, your physical body, is the last thing left that can connect across platforms. And creators like Cho have figured out that that’s one of the last reliable ways to keep their personas consistent across every platform they have to post on. It just so happens to turn out that the only impulse strong enough to still reliably motivate someone to figure out how to find your website is horniness.

All of this is to say: The people of Western North Carolina still need your help, and some of them are getting it from, well, let’s just call them innovative funding models.

The memories we made, the places we peed

One thing I’ve noticed: The further away from college I get, the more I remember the really schmaltzy nostalgic parts. And not, so much, the parts like this:

alexandramadisonn

A post shared by @alexandramadisonn

In the video above, a woman named Alexandra Madison Bouffard walks around at her alma mater of North Carolina State University and shows her husband all of the places where she peed and threw up. It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course. Or maybe not.

It’s a pretty slick production, which I think is meant to be an example of the sorts of videos that Alexandra and her husband Jon can make for you, dear brand. Both are from Raleigh, but according to an interview, they moved to New York a few years ago. During the pandemic, their video business was hurting, so they just started making fun husband-and-wife TikToks, and they blew up. Alexandra’s Instagram channel now has 2.5 million followers, and she has ANOTHER 2.5 million followers on TikTok. They also have their own production company. The implicit sell here: If we can make videos that millions of people love, then just imagine what we can do for you.

All of this feels very much like another husband-and-wife team from Raleigh, the Holderness family. I wrote about them in a very grumpy blog for Charlotte magazine way back in 2013 after they first went viral for their Christmas Jammies video. I did not like that video! Well, joke’s on me. The Holderness family now has their own Wikipedia page and podcast and IMBD listings because they were in “Iron Man 3.” Me? I still have a blog!

In any event, I’m glad to see people online chattering about NC State about things that have nothing to do with losing critical sporting events in heartbreaking fashion.

A Cursed Image

I’ve been saying for years that I need to use Twitter less. I’ve seen the discourse there degrade, and the number of people hanging out there has dramatically fallen off. The experience there lately is akin to hanging around at a party too long, and noticing that the interesting people have gradually left. Post-election, people are fleeing the site in droves. My follower count there has dropped by the hundreds, and I can’t have conversations there like I used to.

So yeah, I’ve been kicking the tires on other social networks. LinkedIn? Still weird! I have no B2B consulting services to talk about, unfortunately. I’ve tried Threads, but basically my feed there has consisted of pithy statements from people I don’t know. But! Bluesky has recently popped up as a pretty viable social network for me. How do I know? Because people are now sending me stuff like this:

Ten years from now? Why wait? I would like to talk about this cursed image right this very minute.

I didn’t talk much about Mark Robinson much during the election, because there’s really no way to add to stuff like, well, this. But now that Robinson has gone down in defeat and will once again become my neighbor (his home in Colfax is a few miles away from mine), yes, absolutely, let’s talk about this.

The image above is a painted representation of a picture taken by

Bryan Anderson

, back on August 24, 2021. At the time, Anderson was working for the Associated Press, thanks to a grant-funded Report for America position, and was covering a debate about removing lessons about racism and sexuality from the classroom. While he was there, Anderson snapped a picture of Robinson jutting his chin out dramatically at a press conference. It’s since become the file photo of choice for stories in which Robinson is referred to as “embattled.”

Somebody took that photo and painted it and gave it to Robinson, who seemed happy to be standing next to it. If you know more about who created this and why, please tell me. I will say: At least an artist took a tiny bit of license to create something sort of new as opposed to Robinson himself, who just ripped off all sorts of pictures from other people for his campaign website. As for Anderson, he has his own politics newsletter! You should read it! It’s not cursed.

I say all of this to say: If you want to hit me up on social media, try Bluesky. I think you’ll like it. Although I am going through a phase where people are waxing nostalgic about dead regional banks in my replies. Look, no social media network is perfect.