My relationship with social media these days is just about exclusive to Elon Musk’s X (although I will call it Twitter until my last breath) and one of the many people I follow goes by the handle of “Deablo Fan Account.” The specific account name is @DeferredWalkOn.
I follow just about anyone who wants to talk about the Hokies, but he caught my eye with his memes and graphics. As one who does a little of that, I can tell you that the simple picture you may enjoy looking at on social media can many times take hours of work to get it just right. Deablo Fan Account (from hereon referred to as DFA) does a lot of these things, and I’ve come to realize when you peel back all the trash talking among fans, he’s a pretty talented and creative person.
But this week he posted something entitled “The Virginia Tech Family Photo” and before even looking at it I thought “this is going to bring him some grief.” It was cutouts of many Hokie people he interacts with, and the reason I thought “uh oh” is that anything promised as a picture of an entire group of something is just never going to include everybody. And as expected, within seconds people started posting “how come I didn’t make it?”
Truth is, the list of people wondering why they’re not in the photo is longer than the list that is. DFA himself isn’t even in it, and I DM’d to ask him if it was OK to use a cartoon drawing of him, which he of course said yes.
It all got me to thinking about our fanbase. Yeah, there’s a cool kid table in Hokie Nation, but there’s also about 10 other personalities across the fan base as well dealing with age and interests. And back during the pandemic when you couldn’t go to live sporting events, I photoshopped a section of Nationals Park and started filling in the seats with pictures of Nats fans I interacted with regularly.
It kind of grew like ivy on a wall in the summer, as every day more people would send me pics of themselves in Nationals attire and I’d update the picture. It ended up being one of the more fun things I was involved with that summer.
So I’m going to start work on a similar series of pictures throughout the football season. First one has a working title of “Hokie fans Deablo Fan Account thought were too ugly to be in his family picture” and we’ll go from there. So you’ve now been warned. If you get a note or DM from me asking for a pic of you in Hokie attire, don’t be surprised.
Just blame DFA 😊
