(D.L. Anderson)

NDR’s Social Media Director Tim Jones had the opportunity to sit down last week with John Darnielle, the singer-songwriter of The Mountain Goats and author of the novel Wolf In White Van. The interview took place at the Red Cat Café in Birmingham, AL after a packed Mountain Goats show the night before. Presented here are some excerpts from the interview, in which Darnielle geeks out pretty hard regarding his Facebook game habits and least favorite Street Fighter characters, and gives some perspective on how arguing on the internet has evolved from the days of Usenet to the Twitter epoch. The full interview will appear in the Winter issue of NDR, out this December.













Tim Jones: Much of [Wolf in White Van] revolves around by-mail roleplaying games. When I was at Bowling Green State University I learned that the library there actually has a sizeable archive of people mailing back and forth their moves in games to each other.

John Darnielle: No kidding? Oh wow. Is it online? I gotta look into that. I don’t see myself getting out to Bowling Green any time soon, but that would be hip. Gee whiz.

TJ: People played chess by mail, roleplaying games, board games like Risk.

JD: In all the major papers, they used to, or may still have, descriptions of chess games. There’d be a board that would say, “Here’s your board, the last three moves were this.”

TJ: I’ve always been terrible at RPGs. Despite wanting to play them, I have no imagination for doing things unless I have choices presented to me. Given the choice to do anything, I do nothing.

JD: D&D is all about that though. It’s pretty rigid, like, “What do you do? Roll for initiative. There you go.” The last campaign I played was all battle. Warhammer’s another one: you don’t have to be terribly imaginative. You can be, but it’s not required.

TJ: I can’t even play open world video games because of that same problem.

“I have become that which every game playing person fears: I just play Facebook games. Candy Crush Soda, Candy Crush Saga, Monsters Blasters, Monster Blasters Hexablast. Mainly Monster Blasters, I have to say.”

JD: I have become that which every game playing person fears: I just play Facebook games.

TJ: Which ones!?

JD: Candy Crush Soda, Candy Crush Saga, Monsters Blasters, Monster Blasters Hexablast. Mainly Monster Blasters, I have to say.

TJ: I read a great article on The Verge that talked about how Facebook game companies are borrowing from slot machine manufactures to keep you playing.

JD: It’s a time killer. My son likes Monster Blasters too.

TJ: My brother is a competitive Street Fighter player.

JD: Oh no kidding. Who’s his character?

TJ: In Street Fighter 4 he plays a character called Poison.

JD: Oh Street Fighter 4, I don’t know any of those guys. I’m just glad it’s not Ken or Ryu. I hate those guys. Guile too. I don’t like Guile. That was the least of the silver flashball evils.

TJ: He was a Balrog for a little while.

JD: Oh, that’s my guy!

TJ: There was a particular moment in time on Twitter when guys like @regisl were around—you remember him, the pyramid guy?

JD: Oh, from San Diego right? Yeah that guy was cool. I met him. He was a sweet guy.

TJ: I felt like that was a cool moment when “weird twitter” had run into this positive spiritualism. It was when Night Vale started up. Just a great time to be online. Why do you think you use Twitter so much?

JD: I don’t know. Everybody likes to talk about social media, but I don’t. I think overthinking what you’re doing is a mistake. I mean, you should be aware of your choices and stuff but… One thing I like about Twitter is I’m not using it to live blog my life. If I want to do that, Livejournal is still out there. I can go get a Livejournal, or Diaryland, or whatever. Diaryland: old, old platform. They’re still around! It’s still free. I had one years ago, and I looked at it, none of the people I followed had updated since over a year ago. But talking about Twitter, it’s golden goose stuff, you know? It’s there, and my computer’s open all the time anyway.

TJ: It’s fun to tell jokes!

“But you see these guys who really want to do this war of attrition style of argument, and say, ‘Who will give up?’ and want to see some guy beat into submission, but who has been persuaded of any position on Twitter?”

JD: Yeah, that’s what it’s useful for. If you’re into being positive on it, it’s like a therapeutic exercise. If someone wants to pick a fight with you, come on. I’m not gonna fight with people in public, only politicians!



TJ: Doesn’t happen to me often, but I’m sure it does for you.

JD: Yeah, I tweet a lot of pro-choice stuff. People want to argue. They say, “Let me ask you this,” and, dude, if your tweet starts with “Let me ask you this,” and it’s not a joke, you are not understanding Twitter! But you see these guys who really want to do this war of attrition style of argument, and say, “Who will give up?” and want to see some guy beat into submission, but who has been persuaded of any position on Twitter?

The thing is, what is interesting about it is that in the Ur-days of the internet there was Usenet. There was this hierarchy of newsgroups and people didn’t have character limits. Well, people now use TwitLonger anyway and write you this big giant essay. But back then you would see these nested responses. If you went to the archives of alt, the one where they talk about evolution, people who have doctorates in anthropology but are creationists would show up to argue. Alt.vegetarian had a troll from Montana who I remember to this day would show up to argue that it was catastrophic to the human body to not eat meat. Smart guy with too much time on his hands. But it’s an expression of something that’s been around as long as we’ve been online.

John Darnielle is a writer, composer, guitarist, and vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats; he is widely considered one of the best lyricists of his generation. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his family and is the author of the novel Wolf in White Van. You can follow him at johndarnielle.tumblr.com and at @mountain_goats.

Tim Jones is Ph.D student in the English department at LSU. He holds a Master’s in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University and is from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Follow him at @cutebuttsaga.