About a year ago I was really enamored with This Is My Jam, the small fun service where you pick a favorite song, find it on Soundcloud or YouTube and tweet it out to friends. You can also get a feed of everyone’s favorite jams and it was a fun light music discovery web app that appealed to me as both someone that enjoys music as well as someone that likes to build little web apps.

I got an idea to do something similar (basically a clone of it), but let people pick whatever silly thing they think is their current “spirit animal” so I bought the domain. I imagined each week you could say kale salad is your new thing and tweet out kale.salad.is.my.spiritanim.al and that page would have a picture lifted from the Creative Commons Flickr pool and the name and date of when you set it up, and I suppose when other people could mark that off too at later dates. Same concept, same goals really.

As I was looking around at simple Twitter auth libraries while thinking about how to set it all up, I searched on the “spirit animal” term and got some really well-written criticism of the entire concept, on Tumblr posts like this one that lay out all the ways in which it’s offensive and appropriating native culture. I instantly soured on the idea of poking fun at this concept online and wondered how I didn’t think to look this up sooner but I freely admit I have a lot of big blind spots about my own privilege that I was so clueless about it previously. I don’t want to build anything that perpetuates this.

So I still own spiritanim.al, and I pointed http://tilde.club.is.my.spiritanim.al/ here as a quick goof, but I don’t really want to own it anymore or build a thing that appropriates culture in a shitty way, so I will let it expire in a year or so when it is up.