HAHAHAHA.

I think it's a bit peculiar that the New York Times Magazine gave their cover this week to a former Gawker employee who wanted to write "I was a blogger and that's kind of weird and I'm sorry if I hurt anyone's feelings," but this graf is truer than I'd like to admit:

Though Gawker’s bloggers often worked from home, I went to the office every day at first. I was used to communicating with most people I knew via instant messenger, but it seemed important to see Alex, my co-editor, in person. I figured that we’d be able to express ourselves more easily by actually turning to each other and speaking words and making facial expressions rather than typing instant messages. But because we were so busy, we continued to I.M. most of the time, even when we were sitting right next to each other. Soon it stopped seeming weird to me when one of us would type a joke and the other one would type “Hahahahaha” in lieu of actually laughing.

Eep. Though, to be fair, typed out laughter is not the same as actual laughter. The artificial nature of electronic writing -- where tone can't soften and facial expressions can't contextualize -- actually requires a lot of validating communication. Typing out laughter, weird as it seems, doesn't suggest a joke is funny so much as it acknowledges that the other person just made a joke, and you recognized it for what it was. But, frankly, reading those sentences back to myself makes me feel like I'm made out of computer, and am, in the parlance of the Gawker article, "oversharing." So! Back to politics! I sure don't support most of the policies of our president!