You are receiving this email because you have bought a ticket to my minions show! Good job! Tell your friends! There are only 9 of you right now which is fine it will just be intimate.

 

Maybe (more likely) you are receiving this message because you just bought a ticket to a previous show, or expressed interest and asked to be included in the mailing list. That's also okay. Please buy a ticket if you can.

 

Images and more the day before but

Location - 15 Thompson Street, Kensington 

Time - 7:30

 

So, with this show I chose the minions for a variety of reasons. 

 

1. They seem to fall into that perfect realm of being universally hated when you talk to people in the real world, and yet somehow also a huge financial success. When I find things like this I get excited because it means either my circle needs to get wider, or my circle is lying. Both exciting options.

2. I want to do my take on the Adelaide Writers Festival collapse (particularly because I am about to perform in the much cooler West Footscray Writers Festival) and I think it will add the correct amount of humour if an arts board was not overseeing well-established literary authors but rather little yellow capsules.

3. Years and years and years ago, I was in this facebook group called "don't be creul to mignons!" where we would post bad minion memes. 

 

In those days, Facebook groups became quite famous for having humourous and quippy names, even if the group itself had very little content. They were called "tag groups". I was a part of 643 according to this ancient Facebook year in review:

 

After "Jim" a million other groups started to pop up and people started using them as a quick and funny gotcha, not dissimilar to a rickroll. Someone would post in the Jim group and say "this group isn't funny anymore, I'm leaving because it's not worth my time" and someone would tag the group "this isn't an airport, there's no need to announce your departure" and someone could comment under that and tag the group "oh dear, another tag group I need to join" and on and on and on you can imagine. So when someone posted some kind of minion meme or would rag on minions you would tag "don't be creul to mignons!" and you'd get a few likes and then Mr. Colcuccio would take your phone off you for using it in maths class. 

 

These groups were thrilling to be a part of because they were full of drama. Some people would take their admin role far too seriously and act obnoxiously. Little characters would appear in multiple groups. I remember one guy who kept gently posting centrist views whenever the topic of the US government would come up, and people made up a whole conspiracy theory that he was a CIA agent sent to oversee this collection of loosely organised tag groups and to squash communist sympathies. People from groups would meet up in the real world, and often people would post saying "met this guy in 'The group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony' 4 years ago and now we are married ants" and everyone would comment underneath and say "For the Queen!" and "L I F T !".

 

Back to minions:

So at some point someone tagged us in another group that was about tough admins, something like "People who couldn't pass cop school so had to become Facebook admins" or akin. It was about the group called "Midnite Minions Madness" and it was run by this wild person called Kim.

 

The group mostly normal minion memes with the occasional over-reaction from Kim. People started noticing and all of us joined the group to see if we could rile Kim up a little.

 

It started pretty tame:

And got worse as it was clear Kim wasn't easily perturbed:

Eventually, other people started to call us out and Kim started noticing:

 

Kim was everything you wanted as an internet troll.

 

Firstly, she wasn't, and likely would never, be in on the joke. It was all deadly serious to her:

Second, she didn't hold the same values as us which made her easy to demonise:

Third, she reacted to everything. The dopamine potential was endless because she would keep responding:

A personal favourite of mine:

Looking back this was pretty mean. Kim just wanted to run her group and share minion memes and we all went over there and upset her. 

But as a 21 year old, I thought it was hilarious. 

 

To begin with.

 

As with all things on the internet there is no lever or mechanism for control. So when things start to go to far, there isn't a lot you can do to stop it. You just have to sit and watch as something you participated in becomes something very, very horrible.

 

Tw: rslur, suicide threat

It got pretty bad. People started doing everything they could to upset Kim. 

They'd post pretty serious images of gore. 

They'd dig up her past failed marriages and jobs they'd learned she'd been fired from.

Eventually, someone hacked her account and started messaging her friends pretending to be her and saying some genuinely disgusting things.

 

This was probably my first experience of this kind, and while small and entirely about the minions, it highlighted for me how things can get away from you. It's easy to look at the Adelaide Festival Board or politicians with their slimey non-answers and wonder "Why can't they just talk like real people? Why are they so terrified of these imagined public fallouts? Why are they SO worried about optics?".

 

While my minions group is not the same as the federal government, it does give me some understanding. It's hard to pull the brakes on a train that's going full speed. If I could go back, I think I would have preferred that we shut that shit down before I had to see what Kevin the Mignon looked like in a spike pit.

 

There's a funny ending to this story which is that while looking for these images that have been kept in onedrive for the past 9 years I stumbled upon this image I screenshotted all those years ago:

So it's possible that Kim, her group of old people and the lesson I learned all those years ago weren't real.

 

If that's the case, then what is the moral of this story?

 

Anyway, see you all on Friday.

 

Sent from my me-phone.