"Truth is now a business growth strategy" is the title of the May 7th 2026 article by Jeff Bullas. He argues that "Verifiable, accountable, earned honesty becomes a premium asset in a world drowning in frictionless content."

Truth is stranger than fiction. In "Artificial Intelligence, Empires, Taste", I mentioned the article "Taste was always the job". The author cites a February 2026 article "Is taste a ‘new core skill’? Techies debate — and quickly get memed". It was from this article that I learned about Paul Graham: "...Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham — who coined “founder mode”...an old essay of his from 2002, titled “Taste for Makers,”..."

When I read Graham's 2002 essay, I was blown away by the many nuggets of wisdom that are still true over two decades later. Truth is stranger than fiction. I will begin with Graham's assertion that: "Good design is often strange. Some of the very best work has an uncanny quality...They're not just beautiful, but strangely beautiful...I don't think it works to cultivate strangeness. The best you can do is not squash it if it starts to appear. Einstein didn't try to make relativity strange. He tried to make it true, and the truth turned out to be strange."

The Afrogoth look is a mixture of the goth aesthetic (mainly Victorian goth) and African fabrics. In "Capturing Contemporary Gothic Through Strangeness in Proportion" Natalie Mercer begins by quoting Edgar Allan Poe: "“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion," then she goes on to write that: "Strangeness in design can be a powerful catalyst for engagement, stirring feelings that range from intrigue and nostalgia to awe and even unease. This concept of “strangeness in proportion” perfectly encapsulates the essence of Contemporary Gothic."

Going back to Jeff Bullas' article, he also notes that "Truth is built in the moments when honesty has a price and you pay it anyway."

One of my favourite books is The Comic Toolbox by John Vorhaus. There is a helpful formula for writing comedy. Comedy = Truth + Pain  (Recently, John Vorhaus added the cruelty factor to the formula.)

Graham also wrote that: Good design is often slightly funny...to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them. And so the mark-- or at least the prerogative-- of strength is not to take oneself too seriously. The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings-- or Shakespeare, for that matter."

In Chapter 1 of The Comic Toolbox, John Vorhaus writes: "We know from the commutative property of addition that if comedy = truth + pain, then truth + pain = comedy as well. (See? I learned something else in seventh grade math beyond the fact that love makes you stupid.) So if you’re dying to be funny even if you’re not, simply pick a situation and seek to sum up its truth and pain."

Afrogoth uses dark humour to candidly confront the "comedy" of colonialism.