Analog Rebellion's Daniel Hunter Asks Baseball Question, Shares Life Story, Becomes Reddit Hero
Daniel Hunter's an interesting guy. Always has been. Life events like signing a record deal with Island/Def Jam at the age of 17 under his PlayRadioPlay! moniker and then being dropped from the label after selling “only” 50,000 copies in 2008 tend to build character. And Hunter, who is now studying pre-law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington and still performs around town as Analog Rebellion, has plenty of character.
His character was on full display early on yesterday morning, too, when Hunter started waxing poetically in Reddit's baseball forum about whether Major League Baseball would benefit from adopting a one-game-a-week format a la the National Football League. He then followed that up with a second rant on the subject — one he admits he penned while under the influence of marijuana — wherein his 2,667-word, not-even-remotely-linear ramble also tackles such heady topics as the music industry, Disney's purchase of Star Wars, his enjoyment of mathematics and the fact that he watched his father die before his very eyes while on a hike as a young adolescent before coming back to the subject of baseball.
It was an inspired, if largely out-of-nowhere bit of stream-of-consciousness, but Redditors have sure taken to it. Hunter's own two posts on the matter, plus a third one pointing them out, have amassed nearly 5,000 combined upvotes on the site in less than two hours, with that third post even making it as high as the No. 18 position (far as we saw) on Reddit's front page of hottest topics. The post has even inspired the spinoff of a new subreddit called Analog Thoughts.
Hunter himself says he's been largely overwhelmed by the positive responses his posts have received.
Then again, this is a guy whose own rant described his own music as “shitty” when, clearly, that's not at all the case.
So allow us to gloat for him: This attention's deserved. His lengthy, revealing post, is a touching, funny, irreverent read.
But that's not entirely surprising. Like I said earlier, the dude's an interesting guy. Always has been. It's just nice to see other people realize it.