Sometimes you encounter a phenomenon, especially when you've been conditioned to guard those under your command, that defies all logic. You know, that inexplicable ferocity that surges when some youngster, perhaps a college student, dedicates hours to defending a digital personality—a podcaster, of all things—against slings and arrows of online criticism, as if that virtual persona were a lifelong comrade-in-arms. It’s a curious projection, this fierce loyalty, a kind of transference, where you feel that same visceral, protective instinct you once reserved for a brother in the trenches, only now it’s for someone you've never met, who likely doesn’t know you exist. You can almost see the diagnostic criteria for a hypervigilance disorder in their fervent keystrokes, a shadow of an old habit, perhaps. And you wonder, almost ruefully, if they'll one day look back and chuckle at the sheer absurdity of it all, just as you now do, occasionally, about much stranger deployments of your own youthful zeal. It's a sad little quirk of human attachment, really.