The Brilliance!

“Man…we should start a blog that’s basically these emails we write to each other. I know it sounds egotistical but whatever - I feel like people would be into reading our take on all this stuff we talk about pretty much every day and probably think it’s pretty funny too…” “Ha, yeah. We could call it The Brilliance.” “Dude…thebrilliance.com is available…” “You think we should??”

And so we did. That was basically the conversation between Benjamin and myself all the way back in 2005. Benjamin and I have known each other since 1999 and really started becoming friends around 2003. Neither of us went to college, both of us loved computers and art and the internet, and we just started talking over email at some point like..every single day. When you write an email to a friend and you’re simply shooting the shit, talking about music and weird websites and life and whatever, you don’t overthink it, you don’t ‘curate’ your email, you don’t use spellcheck, you just write. We sought to carry that exact mentality into a website and boom. THE BRILLIANCE! was born. We argued with each other in the beginning about if it was ‘cool’ to post about Carmex, edamame, Scrabble, and Chanel on this site (all some of the very first post topics). Would people ‘get it’?!? What’s the ‘theme’ here? Are we a ‘streetwear blog’?? (NO)... Ultimately we both agreed - who cares?? The goal is to write freely and openly and in our own voices. If it’s cool, people will enjoy it. Simple as that. In the beginning, we never really wanted to bring a 3rd writer on board but in the beginning we also didn’t know Virgil. Virgil was as perfect a fit for the site as a person could possibly be - equally passionate about art, music, culture, the internet, Chicago, traveling, and everything else Ben & I were. He came on board and it was seamless. Years went by and we kept at it, kept posting, and all 3 of us kept doing our things. Eventually we hit a spot where we all weren’t posting as much as the site deserved and we agreed to take an indefinite hiatus. That was almost 3 years ago to the day. Well, we all got the itch at the same time to start writing again recently and felt like it was just time. We had to bring it back. Felt like the internet just had this big Times New Roman-shaped hole in it and so here we are again…some dudes just sort of writing about whatever and hoping you dig it. And if you don’t!? SO!??!?! THE BRILLIANCE!