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Comment by heyrhett | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to be a wet blanket here, but does anyone else find this "tender love making" branding all over Aaron Patterson's technical content a bit... distracting?

Personally I do. That said, Aaron does amazing work and he should be able to brand it however he likes. I'm also very grateful for what he gives to the community.

So, am I just an old fuddy-duddy, or what? I mean, personally, I actually enjoy it, despite the distraction, but I'm surprised that this seems to be such a non-issue to everyone else.

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I think adapting to people with low tolerance for eccentricity/personality is universally destructive. Ever see one of Aaron's presentations? Every time he startles someone by tenderlovemaking all over their expectations, I consider that a good thing. Most people take life too seriously, and people like Aaron are a rare breed.

I'm so scared of distracting anyone with my personality that I write in black, white, and Helvetica.

Do you have an issue with "tender love making" branding or branding in general? I think a healthy dose of personal branding is ok for me.

With that said, the developer community is much much tolerating place than other communities. I mean, think about the rude behavior from some developers and how far we go in tolerating it because of our "They built X, so they can do unrelated Y however they want". Compared to that, some love spreading is actually very nice. :)

Edit: the sentence "They built X, so they can do unrelated Y however they want" is confusing, even to me. What I meant is, we tolerate some otherwise really inconvenient stuff, like Crockford calling all JSHint users "stupid people". You get the point.

lol! Do you have suggestions for improvement? I'm not sure what I'm doing to brand the site. My expertise is in tech, not branding. I'm open to suggestions, but I will not compromise on the color pink (or Ruby-San)! :-)

Don't change a thing, mate.

Agreed, I think it's brilliant and enjoyable to read (unlike many technical writings).

What makes it uncomfortable for you?

I love this kind of quirkiness. I kind of miss having handles we all took seriously that didn't resolve directly into real names, said Phill to Rhett.

I think that why has made us numb to developer quirkiness :)

I didn't even click through to his stuff, initially. The branding resulted in a false positive from my mental spam filter.

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