And I don’t just mean on a t-shirt. Somehow I missed this when it showed up in October..

The way that the idea of the North American House Hippo stole our collective imagination and attention in 1999. Twenty-five whole years ago, we needed a bit of help fostering a collective sense of healthy skepticism about the images we saw on tv and on the fledgling internet – we still had to ‘go online’ then, instead of trying to find time to go offline now.

And that’s exactly why the house hippo has made its return. We are no longer being inundated by manipulative imagery from studio vfx and advertisers. Now we are constantly trying to climb out of the ever-growing pile of fake internet crap, devious deepfakes, and constant clickbait AI slop – and we can no longer rely on anything we see at face value.

We’ve all had to add fact-checker and accuracy-assessor to our pile of hats to wear every day. The return of the house hippo doesn’t make that any less exhausting, but it does make it a little bit more entertaining. AND it might just help folks be a little bit more scrutinizing about sharing some BS article, which makes this little house hippo a hero.