Loving the aliebn: @jonnysun

December 3, 2015 2:40 PM

Loving the aliebn. A long interview with and article about @jonnysun, one of my absolute favorite Twitterers, who now also has an Instagram with tidbits in the captions.

Some of my favorites:

me: goodnight moon :)
moon: night<3
me: goodnight stars :)
moon: wtf
me: sry wrongnumber
moon: whos stars
moon: who is stars
moon: answer me

look. life is bad. evryones sad. we're all gona die. but i alredy bought this inflatable boumcy castle so r u gona take ur shoes off or wat

falling in love is like having spent your entire life reading a thesaurus and someone hands you a dictionary

posted by kmz (11 comments total)

It is very hip these days among cool weird twitter types to denigrate j.sun because his style has become very self-serious and sentimental since blowing up. Which of course just makes me like him as a person and writer even more.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:51 PM on December 3, 2015

But on the other hand, he is no longer laugh out loud funny very often. I only follow accounts with <5000 followers tho so don't listen to anything I have to say on this or any other matter.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:52 PM on December 3, 2015

Or, occasionally, Jomny tweets are pointed political criticism:

‘this is your captain speaking. i bet you’re reading this in a man’s voice. well guess what! i’m a woman captain. women are captains too.’

Oyes such points, how political. Got em good, the captain-assumers.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:58 PM on December 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

> this is your captain speaking. i bet you’re reading this in a man’s voice. ...

I'm actually hearing it in Laurie Anderson's voice, but whatevs.
posted by benito.strauss at 3:28 PM on December 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

and that captain - was albert einstien!
posted by Sebmojo at 3:31 PM on December 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

From his Instagram:

if u dont believe that constraints
create beauty, please realize that
the infinite poetry of the english
language comes from only 26
letters

I don't think "constraint" means what he thinks it means.
posted by univac at 3:49 PM on December 3, 2015

Pfui you guys are harsh.

I especially appreciated being reminded of the one about the boumcy castle, and how the matter of fact acknowledgment that everybody is sad feels to me like a kind of gentleness in this generation (millenials I suppose? I can't keep track) that is really refreshing and needed and a significant change compared to older generations that will hide their sadness, and do silent battle with it which most often doesn't work very well or makes things worse.

Whew long sentence, possible derail, haven't been on the Twitter web site in a long while, jomny was one of my favourites, thanks for reminding me, that was a cool interview.
posted by disso at 4:21 PM on December 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

good twitter thread
good video of a guy peeing on the jonny sun avatar and flushing it down the toilet
posted by Alterity at 5:21 PM on December 3, 2015 [5 favorites]

good twitter thread
good video of a guy peeing on the jonny sun avatar and flushing it down the toilet

Uggh I really deeply dislike weird twitter as it exists right now.
posted by naju at 6:08 PM on December 3, 2015

As Jon Sender (“The Jonald”) explains via email, “The voice he has chosen to use (that of an alien who misspells words) caught on to such an extent that he is not boxed in by the usual expectations of a ‘Twitter comedian.’ By consistently using his alien voice, Jonny can basically write poetry on Twitter. Maybe that’s why he’s still around when so many have come and gone by now.”
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:50 AM on December 4, 2015

I don't think "constraint" means what he thinks it means.

No, I think he's exactly correct. Language itself is a form of constraint: think of how many ideas / emotions / sensory experiences there are for which we do not have a specific word, but which we nonetheless try--and sometimes even succeed at--describing precisely.

That said, this, from the article

When Jonathan Sun was a student at the Yale School of Architecture, he had an exclusive agreement with his studio professor: he, and no one else in the class, was allowed to use his phone during class time.

would have pissed me the fuck off if I were one of his classmates. In fact, it irrationally pisses me the fuck off right now just thinking about it. If one of my students demanded special treatment because s/he was famous (internet- or otherwise), I'm pretty sure I'd suggest they would be happier taking a different class.
posted by dersins at 9:29 AM on December 4, 2015