Many years ago, when the internet was young, there was a brief era that I shall call

the era of offendedness. During this time, people figured out that they could get things

like social cachet, power, even money, by being publicly offended. Now, sometimes the things that

people took offense at were legitimately pretty offensive. Other times, and more and more so as

this era went along, the things people were offended by were contrived and ridiculous. Yet at the height of this brief era of madness,

the expectation was that the impetus is on you, the potential offender, to imagine what I,

the potential offende, might be offended by, and if you don't know and keep up on it, because

it does change very

quickly, then you will have committed a great internet sin. You will have offended someone.

And certain offenses were more allowed than other offenses, but let's be honest, when everything

was done and the age of offendedness was over, pretty much every group, every special interest,

every set of hobbyists, every vocation, everybody had at least tried this on once to see if

they could get anything for the common misconceptions or criticisms that were often they they believed, unfairly, leveled at them

in internet discourse. Thankfully, this era has passed on into other difficult eras, like the era of

here's two middle fingers at everything. I didn't like the era of offendedness very much. So now I'm

going to just do the era of offensiveness on purpose. That's disappointing as well.

I yearn for the era of try to be nice to people and give people the benefit of the doubt and like

each other and build beautiful things together. I'm working on it. It's part of what I'm hoping that

maybe you and I are building together just some tiny bit here. All of that to say, during the

age of offendedness, I once got accused of an offense called Stolen Valor. It was a public

accusation that I got, and it was dumb, and it was wrong, and I did not steal Valor, and the whole story is really quite funny, but it didn't feel funny in the moment because the person who was mad at me knew me in real life. They didn't pull me aside. They didn't give me a quick call or shoot me a text and be like, hey, what were you doing here? That seems offensive. They just nuked me on an internet site. And this is before I did the kind of stuff I do now. So that wasn't

fun at all. But maybe you're like, well, what is stolen valor? I don't remember that offended

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