College students do not get too many chances in their hectic schedules to stop and deconstruct some of life’s simpler things. Take Daylight Savings Time (DST), for example. How many people take time to ponder how it came to be? Self-proclaimed visionary Joe Piccininni takes whatever chance he can get to recognize these lost thoughts. On his website, twovisionaries.com, he breaks down DST as, “It’s kind of like that picture of your Aunt Myrna that’s been in the same place in your house your entire life. You don’t know why it’s there. You don’t know who put it there. It kind of pisses you off when you think about it, but then you sneeze or the dog walks in and you forget about it.”
Piccininni, a junior majoring in cinema and cultural studies at Stony Brook University, hopes to use his blog to enlighten people on some of life’s simplicities by using humor. The blog, titled “Two Visionaries Visualizing,” is run by not just Piccininni alone, but also his best friend of 11 years, Justin Milliner, a student at Five Towns College majoring in mass communications.
If this website sounds familiar, it could be because there are numerous stickers advertising the blog cleverly hidden around campus, such as on the ceiling of one of the elevators in the library.
Milliner and Piccininni were inspired by some of their comedic idols, Woody Allen and Larry David, to make a variety-show-like blog, which includes mainly comedic posts involving observational humor, music and some non-humorous news-related content.
“The main goal was for [the blog] to be a comedy experience,” Milliner said. “We want to make people laugh.”
When the two advertise the website, they bring in about 50 page views a day. Most of their followers are either college students or Tumblr users since most of the humor is geared towards young adults.
“We wrote this one piece on door -knocking etiquette,” Piccininni said. “No one really thinks about how they knock on a door. They just knock. So we wrote a guide on how to knock on a door, such as what is and isn’t acceptable and what knocks mean different things. We later learned from Google analytics that that piece brought the most viewers to our website.”
Even though the two are separated by distance, they still manage to regulate the blog with a couple of posts each week.
“As long as the two of us are together, we’re bound to keep this up and running,” Piccininni said. “We’ll continue this until one of us gets Alzheimer’s.”
