Apparently there was a show on SBS last night about vaccination, which I refused to watch, or let Justin watch, because no-one needs that kind of rage on a Tuesday night. But I did get into a bit of a general sharing on Twitter about the monumental and dangerous stupidity of people who refuse to vaccinate their children. The lovely @BronwynHinz posted a link on Twitter and Facebook to this article which completely debunks the vaccination-causes-autism idiocy. It was shared and retweeted countless times, as it has been before.

There are still a few dickheads out there who enjoy their stupidity too much to stop endangering their own and other people’s children, but humanity is not, generally speaking, as moronic as it seems, and far more people are convinced by common sense than you would believe if you read the Herald Sun.

The internet is a fabulous thing, all those busty MILFs and LOLcats still haven’t filled it up, and there’s room left for actual information as well as all the misinformation. Despite the fact that I know far more about the Tea Party than I ever wanted to, the internet, and particularly Twitter, has shown me more about the kindness of strangers than my cynical veneer can stand.

We’ve taken our little local vanity project out into the wider world this year. You may have heard about it. If you have, you probably heard about it on Twitter. You may also have noticed that we have some pretty impressive writers in the February edition. One thing you may not know about them is that every single one of them donated their time and their awesomeness to the Tribune for free. Not because they are friends of ours (although many of them have become friends) and not because they think they are going to get anything for it (although we’re hoping they will soon). Just because we asked them to.

It was @gibbot5000 who suggested that we could just ask people to write for free. I didn’t believe him; I thought it would be a bit weird and wrong to pop up in front of people I’d never met and ask them to help me without being able to offer them something in return. He scoffed, sent me a few of his weirdly brilliant insults and started DMing people. And it worked.

I’m putting in a fair bit of work to make the Tribune pay for itself, and I firmly believe, despite all available evidence, that we will succeed. But only because I already have a fabulous product to sell, and that I owe to @gibbot5000, @benpobjie, @clubwah, @mikestuchbery, @drag0nista, @tobiasziegler, @dgf77, @theNDM, @morgwn, @articcircle, @the_wino and @skoeman74.

Thanks guys, not only do you do fabulous work, you are all also fabulous people.

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