RSS readers make me want to jump into a vat of acid!

What RSS reader are you reading these words in right now? Please don't email me the answer. Instead, whisper it into a cup, cover it with some cling wrap, and use its lingering reverberance as a sweetener for tomorrow morning’s cold brew. This is a gift you've given yourself.

You can thank me later. I accept words of affirmation and Apple Pay.

But hold! You say you’re not reading this via RSS? You—gasp—are reading this on my actual website? O rapture! Welcome! Please, stay awhile. Get comfy. Enjoy this typeface. I chose it just for you.¹

Before we continue, I do feel compelled to clarify that I am not here to yuck anyone's yum. I understand that this topic might be a bit touchy for some (maybe you), and I suspect that touchiness is directly proportional to the amount they just whispered into a cup (a gift!). Just remember: these are my thoughts on my very good blog and I am, for all intents and purposes, a dumbass to whom you should pay no mind.

That being said... I have tried for a long, long, long, long, long, very long, long time to get behind RSS and I... Look, I just can't. I can't. I won't. I will not. I will not.

What triggered this? I dunno, man, I guess I saw some new app being kickstarted by The Iconfactory and I'm sure some people will love it, but I see something built around the concept of "a single chronological timeline of your most important social media services, RSS feeds, and other sources," and I just want to put my head in the toilet and scream and scream and scream until I have displaced all of the oxygen in my body with toilet water and I drown in the toilet because my shit gills have yet to evolve.

I think Groupon may be to blame for this reaction.

Okay, that's dramatic. It was my mom.

In the early 2010s, my mom was obsessed with Groupon. She bought loads of them. She showered her friends and family members in a flurry of great deals. My email inbox overfloweth with discounted massages and manicures and meals.

And I didn't redeem a single goddamned one.

Why? I hadn't yet been radicalized against the incessant creep of bullshit tech grifts feeding off the engorged pustule of venture capital with no real monetization strategy. I wasn't philosophically opposed to gifts—giving or receiving—even though I wouldn't necessarily say that I like to receive gifts.

Perhaps I was just an ungrateful piece of shit? I mean, yeah, maybe. I dunno. I've got plenty to unpack. I'm working on it.

But I think the thing that drove me nuts was that I was just existing in the world, being a person, and someone decided to give me an errand that I did not ask for. A task I didn't know needed to be completed was suddenly thrust upon me. I had expressed no desire to participate in any of these activities, and yet I felt obligated to do so. She already paid for the discount. The deal sat glimmering excitedly in my inbox. The text messages from her telling me to redeem the Groupon tapped at me over and over and over, slowly burrowing a hole into my fucking head like some archaic form of torture.

At a certain point I had to tell her directly: "I appreciate that you're thinking of me, but these are not things I'm asking for. You're not giving me a gift. You're giving me a task."

Eventually, the Groupons stopped.

But the obligations remained. Typically self-inflicted, because of how my brain does.

It starts with a backlog. A movie I gotta watch. A game I gotta play. An album I gotta listen to. They get added to a list, and because the march of time is incessant, it is impossible to do everything the second you think to. So another gets added. And then another. And then another. And then eventually you're looking at your Steam library at the hundreds of games you purchased that you were sure at one point or another were totally your shit and definitely something you were going to play, but you can't help but notice that most of the titles are gray. Never installed. 0 hours playtime.

Well that's fine, you think, Just pick one. Play it.

But now there are other ones—newer ones!—the old ones look so booooring. How can you possibly choose?

And there it lingers. The obligation. A little imp flitting about just out of sight, whispering into your earcup—not a gift! A reminder, a quiet shame, a bzz bzz of your text message telling you, "You haven't done the one that the other people done and now you feel left out."

RSS readers are just another place for the imps to play.

I will admit that there is something inherently alluring about organizing all of the information you intend to absorb into one place, but I find, in practice, the incessant drip, drip, drip to overwhelm, rather than delight. For years, I would try the latest, coolest, most hyped RSS experience (and also Feedly, lol). And while many were pleasant to look at, and, yes, thoughtful in their design, none could solve the core problem for me: if I see a list of things to do, I do not find it invigorating. I find it paralyzing. I'm just trying to exist, and I open the app and suddenly there are the tasks, the obligations, pouring in. Perhaps there is a piece in there—hell, maybe even two or three—that I really want to gnaw on, but the numbers always go up. Here are all the things you missed. Here are all the things you need to do. It's a never-ending feast. You can chain your face to the trough and never feel nourished, only full. Opening an RSS reader is about the quickest way I know how to trigger a panic attack in myself next to Googling "colon cancer symptoms reddit." Even when I do my best to only subscribe to sources I truly care about, having the app populate an endless feed triggers violent convulsions deep within me. It's like opening a door in your house only to discover your parents fucking. You gotta get out of there as quickly as possible, even if it's through a window.

"Is this even about RSS reader—"

Okay, and also—real quick—it has to be said that I love websites.² I believe personal websites are a part of the larger whole of someone's creative identity. It is an object I want to cherish, to immerse myself in, just like I long to clutch a book I adore in my hands. I want to see a whole person spilling onto the page. Not the tidied, uniformly-formatted collection of just words on a pleasant gray background, rendered in San Francisco Rounded, visually indistinguishable from the piece that came before and the piece that follows.

Yes, I could use an RSS app solely to perform triage (a job) and find the things I want to read, and then go to the website directly, but that just adds another layer of maintenance (a job). An obligation to prune (a job). A dip of the toe into the swirling miasma that with every gurgle threatens to suck me in and smother me in more (a metaphor). More, more, more.

More more more moremoremoremore moremoremore MORE

So I reject them! No more! RSS readers, YOU ARE NICE TO LOOK AT BUT YOU MAKE ME SO SAD.

"Ohhhhhh-kay, but aren't you worried you might miss something you'd truly love? Something that deeply affects you? Something that makes your rethink your entire world view and change your whole life?"

I mean. Eh. Ask me ten years ago? Yeah, fucking devastating. Of course. Sign me up.

Ask me now? There is no shortage of wonderful in the world, and I trust I will remain sated. That life-changing stuff? That good, good shit? It has a way of finding its way to you.

I'll be fine.

But I know I gotta stop listening to these imps or I'm gonna lose it.³

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¹ It's called IvyPresto Headline, by the way, set at 300 weight and a size of 1.4em. The line height is 1.6em and the letter spacing is 0.03em. I definitely know what these mean. Please do not ask me to explain it to you as I am very busy and also, as I am about to establish (or have already established, depending on how you approach footnotes) in the piece above, I am trying to find more inner-peace, devoid of feelings of obligation. Anyway, IvyPresto Headline looks very good on most displays, especially high-DPI displays such as a 4K monitor, or a "Retina Display" like you might find on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. I won't lie, I would describe its appearance on my current monitor as "serviceable," but, in fairness, that is more of a byproduct of working at a 2560 x 1440 resolution than anything the font itself is doing. This is the life I lead: one of a person who has a PC attached to a 1440p display because I play a lot of video games and this is the best bang for what little bucks I have—and because this machine is so well-positioned on my desk, the convenience of its existence means I default to working from it most days. I do have a perfectly lovely MacBook Pro with a very fine, very beautiful display. It would render IvyPresto headline exquisitely, as I just said, but sometimes we make sacrifices. Perfect is the enemy of good, and my perfect setup is not currently attainable. I would rather not go through the rigmarole of plugging in my USB-C hub and switching video inputs on this monitor, only to have the macOS interface rendered at a mediocre 2560 x 1440 resolution. Could I take my quite portable MacBook into another room? Perhaps, but I recently threw my back out and it sounds extremely uncomfortable to sit at my dining table or on my couch. Frankly—and this may have to be a different piece, but!—have you ever actually tried writing on a "laptop" computer in your lap? It's bad. It's bad and no fun and it's definitely not comfortable. I'm, like, glad we can, I guess? Versatility is nice. But it mostly sucks shit, and my scoliosis/spina bifida wombo-combo ensures that finding the optimal orientation for lap-computing is nigh impossible. Anyway, IvyPresto Headline. It's very nice.⬏

² Except the shitty ones, natch.⬏

³ I'M ALREADY WRITING THIS WHILE HYPED UP ON STEROIDS FOR MY FUCKING BACK AND RUNNING ON TWO HOURS OF SLEEP. I'VE HAD ENOUGH.⬏

Please please please please please please share your big dumb beautiful self with the world

I want to see your art.

I want more of you in the world.

I want your creativity on full display in a way that portrays even a sliver of your wild, dynamic, incredible being.

Okay, it's not all about me, though, is it? I get that. Vulnerability and motivation and self-esteem and validation and cost and fear and anxiety and dread and blocks and the question of: "Is it enough? Am I enough? Will people like this? Will people like me? Will this mean anything? Who cares? Who cares? Who cares?"

I care.

What does it look like to put yourself on a page, or in a photo, or a brushstroke, or a string plucked and reverberating harmoniously out into the room? When does the screaming inside become loud enough, so all-encompassing that you open up the door to let it pour out of you?

Creativity is how we make sense of the world around us. We only have one you and one chance to know the world you know.

Is this getting a little too "live, laugh, love"? Fuck it. Embrace the cringe. Stop blowing out your own candle. You know whose opinion about your art is more important than just making it?

Fucking no one's.

I’m turning off my website analytics because I’m very brave and I promise I truly do not care about the numbers

I find myself idly thumbing at my phone, swiping down, watching the little spinner do its thing, hoping a number goes up once the screen refreshes.

Why do I do this to myself?

In a previous life, I was a tech blogger, and the analytics killed me. The more time I spent obsessing, the less I wrote. The steeper the cliff in the line graph, the worse I felt. I wrote crap to fill an imaginary quota. I posted links to things I didn't actually care about. I antagonized obnoxious tech people whose personas I felt were rooted in being annoying for the sake of being annoying (read: my version of John Gruber's Jackass of the Week. Turns out the real jackass was the me I made along the way). I defended the richest company in the world because I used to work for them and thought that my unique perspective mattered, but in the end I was defending the richest company in the world and holy shit, that was unnecessary. It sucked. It sucked so hard and also it was stupid. Eventually I stopped writing altogether because everything felt so pointless. Data burnout. Passion turned pittance.

When I started writing again recently, my wife noticed that I was digging into my site's analytics. There I was, secreted away on one side of the couch, looking at the Squarespace app. Again.

"I know you've said that it's been a problem for you in the past," she said. "Do you think you're obsessing again?"

"No," I said. And believed. I still believe it. I do. Promise. "I mostly just like to see where people are coming from." What little information I get about where in the world people are or, more interestingly, what website brought you here. What was the thought process? What was enticing? Why my site? Who sent you? I want to see their site.

Little mysteries to solve. Little sources of inspiration. Little compliments in the form of links.

But, let's be honest: it's mostly noise. The data sucks and also the data sucks. It sucks because it's basic and trivial and mostly just "a person went to this page and they stayed for a moment," and it sucks because it's a distraction. As much as I want to create a story and develop a better understanding and make a connection, I'm not going to find that in an IP address no matter how hard I try. Cosplaying internet detective doesn't do much to sate my curiosity, it just lets me spin my wheels and trick me into thinking I'm being productive.

So I'm just gonna turn them off. For my peace of mind, and hopefully for yours. When it comes down to it, I don't care about the data, and I don't do anything with it aside from wonder. I'm not going to change my writing to try and drive traffic, and I'm not going to start optimizing my site's layout to minimize bounce rate. Wanna bounce? Bounce. Fuck it. Life's too short to not bounce.

Of course, there will always be the curiosity. The longing for connection. The desire to know more about who is here and what they're all about. But honestly, it'd probably mean more to receive an email or a Toot if you feel so compelled.

I made an audio blog so you can read in your car without driving into a ditch

Hi. You know, I’ve had literally twos of people ask me, “Hey, Keenan! I want to subscribe to your audio blog in my podcast player of choice!” Cool! A few things…

First: not a question.

Second: thank you. Feedback received.

Third: I did it. You’re welcome.

A Very Good (Audio) Blog is now a thing. It’s on Apple Podcasts, which means it should be in the process of percolating outward into your Overcasts and your Pocket Casts and your Castro—wait, nope, lol—your… what other podcast apps are out there now? I’m not on the up and up.

Pick one, it’s probably there.

Except Spotify.

Anyway, I’ll still publish the audio on the corresponding blog posts themselves, in case people want to listen along in their browser as they read. Otherwise, think of these episodes as companions to the written piece. They’ll be missing things like footnotes, but should otherwise remain intact, with the added benefit of hearing my voice read them. Wow! What a day. Truly glorious. Happy 2024, everyone. I hope I don’t get bored and abandon this project in a week hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha¹

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¹ hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.²

² It’s funny because of how I am.

I learned to love cooking, and all I had to do was destroy my entire life

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Listen along with the audioblog:

Disclaimer: This piece contains brief descriptions of child abuse.

The audio version also contains some brief, but unpleasant mouth noises. Sorry!

---

One of my clearest childhood memories is the bacon my dad made. Despite my aphantasia affliction, I can clearly see it: curled and brown and crispy (but not too crispy), nestled in a pile on a plate. Underneath, layers of paper towel yellowed and wilted by grease. No matter how many times he made bacon, it looked, tasted, and felt the same.

Now, please don't mistake this for the misguided yearnings of yesteryear. As a person perpetually wary of nostalgia, I don't trust my brain to handle memories with anything resembling objectivity. You won't find me waxing poetic on the simplistic beauty of my adolescence.

But Dad's bacon was perfect, and I simply don't care if it wasn't.

My dad was the person who cooked in our home. Didn’t really matter the meal, the kitchen was his domain. Sunny-side-up eggs, pancakes, and that wonderful, perfect bacon for breakfast. Ham sandwiches and salad for lunch. Spaghetti and a side of garlic bread for dinner. It wasn’t the most complex fare in the world (we were white Midwestern suburbanites in the ‘90s after all¹), but my dad loved food,² loved experimenting and perfecting, loved elevating meals beyond the basics. Making a burger for him wasn’t just slapping some ground beef together on a skillet. It was diced onion, and garlic powder, and Worcestershire sauce mixed in with the patty. It was a slice of nice cheddar on top. It was a toasted brioche bun.

Again, not groundbreaking stuff, but there was thought and effort in his cooking that was absent elsewhere during my upbringing. For him, the act of making food wasn’t merely a pursuit of sustenance, but something to enjoy in its entirety. He loved cooking, and that was apparent to anyone who ate what he made. There were dishes of his that transcended the confines of our household, becoming staples of every cookout, every holiday. Sometimes it seemed like gatherings happened as an excuse for my dad to make someone's favorite something. These recipes ascended into familial mythology. Legends were passed from generation to generation about his pasta salad. His corned beef and cabbage was the subject of sonnets. And if there was anything that could come close to proving the existence of a deity, it was his mashed potatoes. Dad's food was the topic of conversation. Dad's food was something everyone looked forward to.

This was pivotal for me. Seeing my dad cook—and being recognized for his aptitude—made the act of cooking itself something aspirational. The way I saw it, if you could cook, you were impressive. You were important. You were adult. As a child, I often felt invisible. There was nothing more important to me than to be taken seriously, to be seen as mature. While I struggle to grasp any concrete memory from my childhood, I do know that one of my defining characteristics was a desperation to be older. To be perceived as something more than just a kid. To be a full person. I wanted people to notice me. I wanted to be seen.

I think the most memorable thing about my dad’s cooking was his eagerness to share it—the way his eyes lit up when he tweaked a recipe or ventured out to try something new. I can still feel the palpable joy radiating off of him when he finished making something he was excited about.

Here's an example that feels inexplicably significant. I mentioned above that he would make spaghetti. Most of my childhood pasta experiences facilitated by not my dad were either noodles topped with butter and some Kraft grated Parmesan on top, or noodles drenched in Ragu and some Kraft grated Parmesan on top. But Dad wanted more. Dad wanted to make pasta sauce exciting. This meant that instead of just reheating store-bought pasta sauce on the stove, he would first brown Italian sausage in a pot, and then dump in the store-bought pasta sauce. But rather than blindly trust the Ragu company to season it properly, he took it upon himself to layer in complexity by adding a variety of spices and herbs. Some dried oregano, a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes, I'm pretty sure there were some bay leaves—it felt like bay leaves were the cornerstone of my dad's cooking, even though I couldn't tell you what the fuck a bay leaf ever added to anything. Regardless, the point is that my dad saw a jar of pasta sauce and (rightly) thought: This could be better.

I can still remember him ushering me over to try it from the pot. I can still hear him asking, “What do you think? Do you like it?”

Back then, I didn’t realize how deeply insecure and anxious my dad was. I had no idea that his propensity for explosive anger was a byproduct of his emotions seeking any outlet from underneath the strata of bullying and manipulation and neglect that solidified during his own upbringing. It is easier to see now that I’m in my late 30s. Though, admittedly, I still find it difficult to look past the incalculable amount of time I spent trying to hide from him when he came home from work, arguing with someone who only existed in his head, a bubbling grumble murmuring deep within him until eventually—inevitably—he whipped himself up into a frenzy that burst out in violence at the wall, or the steering wheel of his car, or just that one time when he wrenched me into the air by my wrist and hauled me upstairs to my room, my feet kicking in circles trying to find the ground until he set me down and slammed the door behind him. I don’t remember how old I was. Young and small enough to lift by the wrist, obviously. Old enough to have that seared into my brain for the rest of my life. Old enough to have the abstract, instinctual fear of my father's simmering rage validated. That moment emulsified hypothetical pain into fact. Dad's anger wasn't just scary. Dad's anger could hurt me.

I wonder if my dad ever thinks about that, if he even remembers it, if he feels shame. I’ve never brought it up to him. For as much of my own anger I feel all of these years later, I feel an (almost) equal amount of sadness that the demons haunting him go unaddressed—but that's not for me to uncover. I've got my own therapy to worry about.

“What do you think? Do you like it?”

“Yeah, it’s good!” I said. It was nice to see him happy, for however long it lasted.

Mom didn’t cook much. Sometimes she’d bake cookies. Sometimes she’d make nachos, and by "nachos" I mean Tostitos chips piled on a plate, pre-shredded taco cheese scattered on top, microwaved until melted and bubbly. White Midwestern suburbanites. Sometimes she’d make what she called “cheese ho-hos,” which were white flour tortillas with pre-shredded cheese scattered in the middle, rolled up and—you guessed it—microwaved until melted and bubbly. Mom’s cooking was functional, the byproduct of both a self-deprecating insistence that she was terrible at it, combined with an immensely picky daughter, my younger sibling, who, for the most part, would settle only for carbs and cheese. Mom’s food satisfied cravings. Mom’s food got the job done.

In addition to the aforementioned nachos and cheese ho-hos, Mom made box mac and cheese,³ or Campbell’s Hearty Ham & Bean soup,⁴ or Styrofoam cups of ramen.

But there was one other dish. One that followed her from her own childhood that her family, the Nelsons, affectionately referred to as “Slumguck.”

Yeah, I'll repeat it: Slumguck. S-L-U-M-G-U-C-K. All one word. Slumguck.

I'm almost embarrassed to write it, in large part because I cannot for the life of me think of a word that conjures up a more vile image in relation to something that is ostensibly edible. But in doing so, there's a modicum of hope that I can offload at least a portion of the psychological horror I've lived with for decades. Perhaps disseminating it to the masses will dilute its potency.

Slumguck.

Seeing it provokes a visceral response deep within me. Like nausea, but the kind where you wanna die.

Slumguck.

To this day, I remain blissfully ignorant of its etymological history. A cursory search reveals zero results, so there's a sick part of me that can even appreciate that this may be a Nelson family original. The more I think about this word, though, the more I hope that its existence is the result of synaptic misfire. Perhaps during my formative years, my brain folded in such a way that garbled the original name into the bizarre and heinous concoction that I'm in possession of now. I've never interrogated my mother about it, and, honestly, I'm worried that she'd confirm my recollection is accurate.

For the masochists among us who are curious about what Slumguck even is, here's the recipe:

• 1 Ground beef
• 1 Cream of mushroom soup
• 1 Pasta (typically flat noodles)

Cook the ground beef. Boil and drain the pasta, dump it in with the beef. Dump in the soup. Stir to combine over low heat. That's it. Salt? No, thank you. Pepper? Fuck right off. Not in our house. This is white people food.

Now, perhaps you're thinking, Keenan, that sounds a lot like a boring-ass, bland, and basic beef stroganoff recipe. Why, yes, you're correct. But for us? It was "Slumguck."⁵ And for my mother, who was already juggling so much, it was a hearty, simple meal—nearly effortless to assemble. Damn near impossible to screw up.

Almost.

When I was old enough to be trusted to commandeer the stove, my mom began delegating cooking tasks to me. It started with the box mac and cheese, and the Campbell's Hearty Ham and Bean soup. It wasn't long before I graduated to grilled cheese duty, because my mom told me she liked my grilled cheese more than my dad's.⁶ That validation was all that was needed to stoke the fires of excitement for the beginning of my culinary journey.

As a child raised in a family whose one shared personality trait was emotional volatility, a child who got grounded when they brought home a report card with anything lower than a B on it, I was desperate for the approval of authority. As a result, my early tenure as a chef was defined by a close adherence to instruction. Scrutinize the directions on the box. Follow them to a T. If an ingredient didn't exist in the recipe, it didn't exist in the final dish. There were right answers, there wrong answers, and there was punishment for the wrong answers. (In hindsight, I understand that the reality wasn't so dictatorial, but my perception at the time was that there was one way to cook: follow the recipe. Perception is often stronger than reality.)

Being the smart and capable and self-sufficient kid that I was told to be, I quickly mastered the art of boiling water and dumping ingredients in a pot. So the time came for my mother to pass the Slumguck baton. I eagerly approached this new responsibility with an unquestioning reverence for the recipe as originally shown. I would make it a number of times on my own over the years, never straying from those instructions. But boredom did set in. After all, I am, and always have been a person who craves variety. While I will happily throw myself into a new endeavor, it doesn't take long for my patience to wane. I need to spice things up, lest my interest wither to dust and flit away into the ether.⁷

I suppose this is where I tell you about The Incident.

The Incident occurred one evening in my late teens. It's hard to remember exactly how old I was, only that it was during a period where I oozed angst. An era defined by such an excessive amount of defiant eye-rolling, it's not difficult to understand why I have very little recollection of it. Most of my memories are of the inside of my skull.

Anyway, Mom told me to make Slumguck for dinner, and on that particular evening, I was not feeling it. Defiant, I rolled my eyes. See? That's just how things were then.

"I don't wanna make Slumguck," I muttered to myself. "I don't even fuckin' like Slumguck. More like Slumyuck."

Ha ha, got 'em.

But Authority loomed—I dare not defy it so brazenly. I relented. "Fine, I'll make the Slumguck, but I'm gonna make it my way."

Brimming with teenage hubris, I decided that I wanted to experiment. I wanted to be creative. I wanted to be seen.

I cooked the shit outta that beef, poking at it occasionally with my spatula until it became that cool gray color that lets you know, "Yeah, I'm done." I boiled that pasta. Dumped it in. Dumped in the soup. Listened to it all come together as I stirred. Shlorp. Shlorp. Shlorrrp.

And then that's where things took a turn. My mind wandered to Dad's spaghetti sauce. How could I take something mundane and transform it into something more?

I opened up the cabinet where we kept our spices and stuff—the spices and stuff cabinet. My hands reached out for some of the things I had seen my dad use in other dishes. The Lawry's Seasoned Salt. The garlic powder. The bottle filled with some orange liquid. Yeah, give it that little kick. Really zhuzh things up.

I started making it my own. Not once did I stop to taste a single thing, I was running on pure intuition. That real chef shit. I was in the zone.

A few dashes, pinches, and shakes later, my masterpiece was complete: a heaping mass of noodles and beef swimming in a beige sauce. I filled two bowls, brought them to my sister and my mom in the living room, and then went upstairs to my room. I wasn't even hungry. I was sated by satisfaction. And it was time to play Morrowind.

Not even two minutes later, I heard my sister calling me from the stairway. "Mom wants to ask you something," she said.

The resulting eye roll reverberated throughout the house. I went downstairs to face my mother in the living room, where she sat with a nearly-full bowl of the dinner I had made.

"Did you do something to this?" she asked.

Uh oh.

"Um, yeah," I said. "I, like, wanted to try something different. Make it better."

"What did you put in it?"

"I dunno, like, some of the stuff from the spice cabinet. I think the seasoned salt and garlic powder and some of the sauce from that one bottle."

She paused for a length of time that can only be described as: I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

She said, "You know your sister and I don't like spicy food."

"Sorry," I said, my gaze averted. If I concentrated hard enough, I could probably ignite the wood floors with my stare and escape this moment via immolation.

"It's so spicy," my sister said.

My mom said, "I just don't understand why you would mess with it like this."

I didn't have an answer.

She sighed. "Well. I'll just have to try and stomach it."

The conversation was over. I sulked out of the room.

It's remarkable how quickly hubris dissolves into shame.

Later that night, Mom told me that she was able to finish it. That it wasn't that bad.

Eventually, we would laugh about it, though not quite hard enough to shake the feeling deep within me that I had inexorably fucked up. A feeling that followed me for years, lingering in the background, a relentless voice chiding me, "You idiot. What were you thinking? Give up."

Maybe I wasn't meant to be taken seriously.

In late 2004, I moved to Chicago for college, where I initially shared a school-sponsored studio apartment with a Culinary Arts major who cooked a comically large amount of Rice-A-Roni. I, on the other hand, cooked very little. After all, The Incident was still fresh in my mind. I didn't want to look like a moron in front of my chef roommate, so instead I deferred ownership of the kitchen to him and resigned myself to a life of indulgence in The San Francisco Treat®.⁸

A year later, for reasons unrelated to my roommate or his cooking, I found myself longing for my own space, eventually settling on a 327 square foot apartment in the heart of the city. For the low, low price of $967 per month,⁹ I had my own bathroom, my own living room, and my own kitchen. 15 stories below, the 'L' track intersected with itself, battering me and my apartment with a cacophony of grinding metal every 7 to 10 minutes as the trains rolled by. It was a loud apartment, it was a hot apartment, but it was mine. I couldn't wait to move in. To feel independent. To feel like an adult.

At that time, I was dating a person I would eventually marry. I'll refer to them/her as "G." We had been together for less than a year at that point, having met on Myspace the previous Fall. G was a senior in high school, who lived in the dorms of their boarding school about an hour north of the city. The bulk of our relationship was therefore confined to nightly phone calls and sprawling AIM conversations. It was a special occasion when we would get a chance to see each other in person. Me having my own apartment made that prospect even more enticing, because now we wouldn't have to worry about my roommate getting in the way of adult hugs.

In a masterful display of social engineering, we were able to convince G's parents to let G come over and "help me unpack" the day after I moved in. This was the first time we'd get to be alone, with no fear of interruption, for hours. I wanted it to be special. So I thought, "What better way to christen my newly-acquired IKEA cookware than to make my first adult dinner in my first adult apartment for my boo?" It'd be so romantic.

Smoldering coals stoked deep within: an excitement for cooking I hadn't felt in years. Suddenly, I was eager to have G over not just so we could "unpack," but so I could also make a special dinner for both of us. A chance to share my love and appreciation. To feel mature.

I decided to make tacos.

I got taco shells from the grocery store. And ground beef from the grocery store. And shredded cheese from the grocery store.¹⁰ Everything you could possibly want in a taco. It was going to be perfect.

When G finally arrived to my new apartment, we did, in fact, spend the day mostly unpacking. I got my computer set up so I could put on one of the many playlists I had made for us. We cranked that shit until I got to experience my new neighbor banging on the wall for the first time. We set up my shitty metal bookshelf. We put away all of my clothes. And, yeah, we made out a little.

The day melted away. By the time the sun crept in through the window, tummies grumbled. This was my moment. I went to the kitchen, got out my new nonstick skillet and my new spatula. I started to brown the beef, poking at it apprehensively, at which point I was interrupted by G's laughter. They asked, "What are you doing? Why are you poking the beef like that?"

It hadn't dawned on me that poking the beef was weird,¹¹ but G found it to be not only weird, but also hilarious.

It should be noted that G grew up in an Italian household on the South Side of Chicago. And when I say Italian, I mean Italian. Like, first generation off-the-boat Italian grandparents on her dad's side. Like, ties-to-Capone Italian on her mom's. These are people who had a proud, deeply intertwined culture, a heritage for which a mutt like me had absolutely zero frame of reference. One of our family meals, I might remind you, was Slumguck. G's family meals consisted of homemade pasta, homemade wine, homemade wine chicken, homemade pizza, homemade soppressata, homemade fish salad. These were people who did not tolerate store-bought pasta sauce.¹² These were people who called pasta sauce "gravy," and you better fucking believe that that gravy was made from scratch. There was a rich history of intergenerational food sharing at every family gathering. These were people who knew how to cook.

And people who knew how to cook did not poke beef.

G's phone rang. Her mother. For the third or fourth time that day. G picked up and immediately said, "Ma, you won't believe what Keenan's doing." Me cooking was hilarious enough to lead the conversation. There was plenty of laughter about my ineptitude. That was the day I learned what the word "chotch" meant.

It's remarkable how quickly excitement dissolves into shame.

Anyway, I don't recall how the tacos turned out. I do recall how deflated I felt.

G and I were together for 12 years, and me cooking remained, let's say, a challenge. My presence in the kitchen was a source of tension (for both of us) throughout the entirety of our relationship. As a result, I largely relegated myself to handling the most mundane cooking tasks. Reheating frozen pizzas. Microwaving Lean Cuisines. Boiling water for pasta. If it was pre-cooked and required little more than concentrated warmth, I could handle it. Turns out I'm really fucking good at opening and closing oven doors.

It was when I longed for variety, when I wanted to challenge myself, that things fell apart.

I've been forever plagued by a proclivity for perfectionism, and a notable byproduct of that has historically been an unwillingness to ask for help when I need it. Surely, I should be able to handle anything on my own. I should be able to control everything. I was very smart—after all, I wasn't allowed to bring home anything lower than a B on my report card—the last thing I needed was assistance, like some chotch. I was convinced that I needed to be able to do it all, to be self-sufficient, to figure it out. And when things didn't go as planned, I would spiral.

For over three decades I was unaware of the concept of mise en place. So when I did attempt to make something more complex than Velveeta Shells and Cheese, my philosophical approach to the kitchen was what I like to call "winging it." Winging it is very simple—all you have to do is start! Start reading the ingredient list on the recipe. Start reading step one. Complete the tasks in the step as you read them. Don't look ahead. Don't look at the bigger picture. You'll get to step two eventually. Just follow the instructions. Preheat the skillet. Chop the onions. Measure your spices. Unpackage the chorizo. Start browning the chorizo in the skillet. Don't forget to prep the bouillon. Where the fuck is the rice? Peel the sweet potatoes. Measure out the salsa. Realize the chorizo has been sizzling for a long time—oh fuck, it's starting to burn. Look at the next step in the recipe. Shit you forgot to finish chopping the sweet potatoes. Get overwhelmed. Feel the world start to close in around you. Give in to frustration. Get irritated at the dog coming into the kitchen, or the cat trying to jump on the counter, or your partner coming in to check how things were going. Any interruption is an intrusion, and the only thing you can possibly focus on is just trying to hold it all together.

And failing.

G's response to me in these situations was to kick me out of the kitchen. "I'll just do it," she'd say, her eye roll rattling me to my core.

This happened enough times that I felt broken. Clearly, I was incapable of handling a simple task like cooking, and the friction of me struggling wasn't something my partner could tolerate. The miasma of frustration obfuscated reason or calm. I would retreat with my shame, sitting with it until it settled into another stratum. What was so wrong with me that I couldn't get this right?

Back then, I didn't realize how much shame informed how I operated in the world. I didn't realize how much of my propensity for rage was tied to the shame I felt. It is easier to see now that I'm in my late 30s. Though, admittedly, it is difficult to look past the incalculable amount of time I've lost while stewing in shame. Shame was a cancer that began spreading early on in my childhood, and when left untreated, festered, a malignancy multiplying until it controlled so much of my mind that I felt like I could never be whole. I wasn't capable of feeling emotion. I was emotion. My actions dictated by emotion. The more I tried to reign it in, the less control I felt. I'd lash out, which resulted in more shame, which resulted in relinquishing more control. I couldn't see anything clearly. It felt like everything was a potential trigger that ultimately resulted in shame. Rage. Loneliness. Irritation. Sadness. Disappointment. Annoyance. Numbness. Depression. Frustration. Anxiety. Panic. Attraction.

Shame.

Every time I got sad.

Every time I lost my patience.

Every time I hurt my partner.

Every time I saw my father in me.

Every time I saw myself as a child, afraid of who I had become.

Shame.

It consumed me. I didn't know who I was without it.

I didn't know who I was.

In December of 2017, I moved into my own apartment on the north side of Chicago. For the low, low price of $1,225 per month, I had my own bathroom, my own living room, my own bedroom, my own in-unit washer and dryer (!).

And my own kitchen.

One of the first things I bought for myself after I moved in was a cast iron skillet. I had decided that I wanted to learn how to make a really good steak.

I watched YouTube videos and read a couple recipes online. I bought a ribeye. I seasoned it with salt and pepper and let it sit out to come up to room temp. I preheated the skillet and seared the ribeye until it got a nice crust on both sides. Tossed in a couple knobs of butter. A couple cloves of garlic. Some rosemary. Basted the steak in the butter, then let it rest on the cutting board for ten minutes. I think I roasted some asparagus for the side.

I sent a picture of the finished product to my partner, Katy, the person I would eventually marry. She lived in another part of the city and wasn't coming over that night.

This one was just for me.

I don't recall how the steak turned out. I do recall how proud I felt.

Shortly thereafter, I decided to try signing up for one of those subscription boxes you used to hear ads for a lot on podcasts.¹³ One of the ones where you pick the recipe and actually have to prep and cook the ingredients they deliver to you. I liked that it gave me the opportunity to try cooking out of my comfort zone, explore a wide array of flavor profiles, while also teaching me some of the basics of how to be a better chef. The recipes were clear, simple, and made cooking feel more approachable than anything else I had tried at that point. They helped me build a level of competence and confidence in cooking that I've taken with me even though I've long abandoned their services.

As I cooked more, I worried less. I lost control less. I didn't completely alleviate the inherent stress of having to manage the preparation of multiple components. To this day, I do still feel that anxiety sitting with me when I try a new recipe. But it rarely, if ever, overwhelms me like it used to. I've learned to cohabitate.

The Summer after I moved into my own place, I asked my parents to come over so I could make them dinner to celebrate both of their birthdays. I wanted to be a little adventurous. Create my own menu. Make something for them that was a little unusual, a little special. Something they probably wouldn't have chosen for themselves.

Okay, yeah, I was excited and I wanted to show off a little.

So I seared duck breast and made a sour cherry pan sauce. A purée of potatoes and celery root. Roasted carrots. (And, no, I didn't touch the hot sauce.)

My dad said, "Wow, Keen, this is one of the best meals I've ever had." Don't get too excited. He says that a lot. He loves food.¹⁴

My mom said she was impressed.

I was happy with how it turned out.

My previous failures in the kitchen don't haunt me anymore. I've spent the last six years learning and growing and becoming more comfortable when I cook. I realize now that cooking is improvisation. It doesn't always go as planned, isn't always as straightforward as you might anticipate, but it's rarely impossible to recover if you just go with the flow. Finally learning what mise en place is has helped a lot. Finally learning that tasting along the way is essential. Finally learning to enjoy the entirety of the process, learning to let go and trust that I can figure it out, that what I did before doesn't dictate who I am moving forward.

In the summer of 2022, Katy and I bought a house in Southern Indiana, and in the past year and a half of living here, we've done the best cooking of our lives. I'm scrolling through my favorite iOS app, Mela, to look back at all of the new recipes that I've made in that time alone. Some of them I've loved; others I've been okay to abandon. All of which help me appreciate who I've become. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's beef stew; slow-roasted Gochujang chicken; Gochujang-sesame noodles—honestly, basically anything with Gochujang fuckin' rules; peperoncini chicken; kimchi and squash mac and cheese; the best potatoes au gratin I've ever had; Brussels sprouts and sausage stir fry; citrus-braised pork with crispy shallots; a surprisingly tasty broccoli alfredo chickpea skillet; the best bolognese I've ever had; Cajun chicken with a peach slaw; asparagus frittata; roast cod with chorizo crisp; scallops and chorizo in tomato sauce—chorizo also fucking rules; Japanese golden curry with pork katsu; sesame crusted feta with broccolini; slow-cooked lamb in a white wine sauce with potatoes paired with brothy chickpeas and Calabrian chilis.

And, my personal favorite, the one I make more often than any other: Fusilli alla vodka.¹⁵ And you better believe that I make that sauce from scratch.

Last night, I tried to cook something new: seared skirt steak with scallion thecha. Roasted Brussels sprouts as a side. The skirt steak was a little tough and unevenly cooked, the thecha a little too bitter and herb-y for my liking. I did add a squeeze of lime juice, though, which helped brighten it up a bit—improv! The Brussels sprouts were good.

Katy and I agreed it wasn't our favorite recipe. Not my best effort.

I think about how even preparing that meal a decade ago probably would have devastated me, let alone not having it turn out the way I wanted. Now? It's something to learn from. To try differently next time. No big deal.

Something that's easier to see now that I'm in my late 30s is that I spent so much of my life trying to appease other people.¹⁶ To fit into their expectations. To be the person I thought they wanted me to be. And the more I tried to be the right person for them, the less me there was. I suffocated myself in an effort to take up as little space as possible. The pressure constricted me for decades. It got to a point where I felt like the only choice I had was to run. Reset. Give myself space to grow. Figure out who I really am.

I learned to love cooking by learning to see me.

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¹ “Fancy” in our house meant going out to Bennigan’s. Remember Bennigan’s?⬏

² Probably still does, actually!⬏

³ Velveeta, not Kraft, obviously.⬏

⁴ Which I had again recently after more than a decade, and I am happy to report that it, in fact, still slaps.⬏

⁵ I'm not going to dissect the problematic ramifications of cultural appropriation and subsequent degradation here. Let's just agree that we all see it.⬏

⁶ My secret to a great grilled cheese? Butter two slices of white bread. Put a slice of Kraft American cheese between those. Cook over medium/medium-high heat (depending on your burner) until both sides are golden brown. Voilà. Witness my culinary prowess! Watch out, Julia Child.⬏

⁷ See also: any of my previous blogs, stories, or various other fits of creativity. Oh wait, you can't, because I deleted them.⬏

⁸ If you didn't sing that aloud, congratulations, your brain is not broken.⬏

⁹ A little over $1,500 per month today, adjusting for inflation. Holy shit, lmao.⬏

¹⁰ You're welcome.⬏

¹¹ Although now that I've written "poking the beef" multiple times, it is starting to make me uncomfortable.⬏

¹² One time, I was being facetious and told G's dad that I liked Ragu and he looked at me as thought I shot his dog. We were not close.⬏

¹³ They're not sponsoring this piece, but their name rhymes with "Shmello Shmresh."⬏

¹⁴ See??⬏

¹⁵ Most of the recipes I listed come from Bon Appétit, Alison Roman, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, or New York Times Cooking. Feel free to search them. But if you try only one of these, it has to be this one.⬏

¹⁶ I cannot overstate the importance of therapy, y'all. Spoiler alert: shit's good. Highly recommend!⬏

Happy Monday! Enjoy this dumpamine from the past week

dumpamine

[duhm-puh-meen]

noun

1. an outpouring of ideas, experiences, and/or items that bring joy

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Hi. I saw this post. I’ve seen others like it, but this one hit at the right place. The right time. The moment where I was finishing up my cold brew (I’ve started making my own, and the coffee I got from Sightglass this month fuckin’ ruuuuules) and eating some Brunsviger my wife made. The right Monday late-morning/early-afternoon time where I was like, “Hell yeah, time to make up a stupid word and tell people about some cool shit I did/saw/thought/was subjected to last week.”

Astronaut time

Are you familiar with the concept of Astronaut Time? Neither was I, but my wife brought it up to me after seeing someone talk about it on TikTok. She brought it up mostly because she recognized that she has the habit of strolling into my office throughout the day to say hello. To be clear, I do not mind this. My wife is literally my favorite person, and being in the same room as her is one of life’s great joys.

Anyway, Astronaut Time. It’s a system, I suppose, an agreement between two or more people to easily inform the other(s) of when you anticipate being in the zone (like I am right now, I’m in Astronaut Time) and just need minimal distractions. Particularly helpful if you and the people you live with work from home (but I would have paid a bajillion-hojillion actual money dollars for something similar when I worked in an office). I believe the TikTok couple had some sort of whiteboard that they would update with a smiley-face next to their name when it was Astronaut Time? I dunno, I didn’t watch it.

The solution my wife and I decided to try was setting up automations on our phones. We created a Focus in iOS called “Astronaut Time” that would automatically send an iMessage to the other person when it’s enabled/disabled.

The result of testing our automations.

Will it work? Who knows! It’s fun to try. Today is the first day since we talked about it that I’ve actually turned on the Focus Mode.

The new piece

Last week, I started a new piece that I expected would be a bit bigger than usual, but wasn’t expecting it to be quite as big as it is shaping up to be. That’s super vague! Regardless, it’s been a long time since I worked for days on a single piece of writing. I usually abandon something if I can’t finish it in a day because I am super impatient and what some people might call a “bad writer,” and someone who is “not satisfied with the concept of delayed gratification,” and maybe “that’s why I’ll never find true happiness.”

Anyway, the best thing I can say about the new piece is that it’s not about tech! Instead, it’s an introspective look at traumatic experiences and how it can take a long time and a lot of big changes to start healing. Hilarious stuff!

My goal is to finish it this week. I ran into a snag where Squarespace ate a large portion of the draft, so I had to rewrite a significant chunk of it. Which brings me to my next thing.

iA Writer

Wow, it’s good to be back. I used to be an iA Writer zealot back in the day, when I worked mostly on Mac and iOS, but when I took up blogging once again, I found that I wanted to write at my desk, where my PC is, so I decided I was gonna be a lazy garbage person and just use Squarespace’s editor. FOOL ME ONCE, SQUARESPACE. Fool me once.¹

This is probably not news to many of you, but it turns out that iA Writer is also on Windows, which makes life so much easier.

Past Lives

The second I saw the trailer for Past Lives, I knew that it was going to be Very Much My Shit™, which is why it is weird that it took me so long to finally watch it, but I finally watched it, and hooooo boy, was I right. It’s right up there with Oppenheimer as one of my favorite films released this year. Beautifully shot and directed. Absolutely wonderful performances² that manage to say more with silence than they do with words, which felt particularly pertinent because reasons.

This movie made me laugh. It made me cry. It made me cry more. It made me look at my own life through a new lens. It made me love and appreciate my wife even more than I already did.

Fuck. Wow. What a film.

Three games

Turns out Lethal Company is a great and silly time.

The Finals surprise launched during the Game Awards. It’s chaotic, infuriating, and awesome.

I stumbled upon Songs of Syx, and was intrigued to see that it was a city-builder that seems to combine the approachability (lol) of RimWorld with the scope of Dwarf Fortress. The demo available on Steam is an unlimited, full-version of a previous build of the game, which is just absolutely wild to me. I played the demo for 30 minutes. Felt lost. Turned it off. Read some Steam reviews. Turned it back on. Played the tutorial again. Felt lost. Turned it off. Read some discussions on Steam. Turned it back on. Played for a couple hours. It clicked. Game is dense, but gooood.

TikTok gave me Autism: The Politics of Self Diagnosis

The very funny title of a video essay that was not only humorous, but extremely thoughtful and informative. This helped shift my perspective on a number of things, including MY OWN SENSE OF SELF.

My favorite song that came on shuffle while I wrote this post

“Do Ya Wanna Taste It” by Wig Wam, the song that plays during the opening credits sequence of Peacemaker, which I love.

Very, very, very close last-second runner-up: “Birthday Cake” by Cibo Matto.

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¹ Fun fact: I used Squarespace’s editor to write this post. Shame on me.

² Greta Lee continues to be one of the most captivating performers working today.

Here are a bunch of games I played this year to distract me from the fact that one day the Sun will swallow our planet whole

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Disclaimer: There are a lot of links in the post. None of these links are affiliate links, because I am not enterprising enough to bother. I’m just trying to make your life easier if, by chance, you want to look into any of these things. Click them or don’t, I do not care. I’m not tracking them, nor am I invested in their website’s traffic.

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It’s December. Yeah. Like. Fuuuck. Right? Time just passing us by as we collectively inch ever closer to a distinct and (from my understanding) quite permanent dearth of consciousness.¹

Anyway, here is a selection of games I played this year that helped stave off the existential dread. My criteria for selecting these is as follows:

1. I like them.

They are otherwise unranked. I do not like ranking things. These are just good games that I enjoyed to varying degrees for varying reasons.

Back in January, I started playing a game that I have since put like 900 literal hours into, and I still play it basically every day. This is, to be charitable, highly unusual for me. Some people don’t bat an eye at investing thousands of hours into a game. Me? I like variety. It’s rare that I dump more than a hundred hours into any one experience. Exceedingly rare that I near a thousand. Anyway, that game is called Escape From Tarkov and I don’t even know why I’m recommending it because I think the vast majority of people who read this will probably think I am losing my goddamned mind for enjoying it in the first place. That’s fine, I know this one is niche, but one of you is gonna look into this and be like, “Yeah, this is exactly my shit.” You and me, we are the same.

On the other hand, if you investigated Escape From Tarkov and your immediate reaction was to do a 180 and run through a brick wall, might I suggest Jusant?

Jusant is a wonderful, solemn, heartwarming, heartwrenching, cute, bleak, optimistic, and beautiful meditative journey where you traverse a large rock pillar using very simple-and-forgiving-yet-immersive climbing mechanics. Along the way, you learn about the people who lived here before you as they faced an existential crisis, and how they responded. It’s one of the rare games that got me to care about its narrative, so much so that I played through its 5-ish hour adventure multiple times so I could lap up as much detail as possible. As of this writing, it’s available on Game Pass, though I do truly believe it’s worth every penny if you decide to purchase it on the platform of your choice.

It’s at this point in the writing process that I look at my list and think to myself, “Yo, there’s no fucking way I’m going to write a paragraph for each of these,” so I’m just gonna do a quick little lightning round:

• Baldur’s Gate 3 — An absolutely wild and sprawling RPG adventure that miraculously recreates a large part of the D&D experience, for better and for worse.

• Diablo IV — The opposite of Baldur’s Gate 3, but when you click on stuff it explodes lmfao it’s v fun, fam, pew pew pew.

• Starfield — Yes, I liked Starfield and I don’t care what anyone says about it.²

• Forza Motorsport — Yes, I liked Forza Motorsport, and I think everyone (especially the people on the subreddit) needs to lighten the fuck up.

• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — Just a remarkable little indie gem from a small studio that manages to capture the magic of video games in a way that most other games only dream of.

• Remnant 2 — Some people describe this as “Dark Souls with guns” but I like to think of it as “shooty bang bang gun/sword smacky whackathon that is sometimes challenging.” It’s quite good, and also it just surprise dropped on Game Pass.

• Alan Wake 2 — Fuckin’ weird.

• Cocoon — Fuckin’ cool.

• Star Wars: Jedi Survivor — Fuckin’ Star Wars.

• Spider-Man 2 — Fuckin’ Spider-Man.

• Laya’s Horizon — Ever play Alto’s Adventure/Odyssey on iOS? Well this is the same studio, so imagine those games but in 3D and instead of a snowboard you have a wingsuit. It’s a Netflix game, so that blows, but I think it’s worth a look.

• Meet Your Maker — It’s like Doom had a little video game baby with Lego. Bonus points to this game for getting me to interface with the level builder, something I almost never do in games, but was especially addictive and fun in this.

This is the end of the post. Tell me which games you think I missed in the comments section.³

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¹ Y’all ever think about death? Kinda weird. One second you’re like, “lol gonna write my blog,” and the next you’re like, “…”

² I WILL NEVER BOW TO PEER PRESSURE!!!!!!!1

³ The comments section can be found by clicking the Trash icon on your computer’s desktop.

An inordinate amount of our attention is afforded to absurdly rich children

What the fuck is happening over at OpenAI? Reading the latest development in the saga, I found myself literally sighing out loud. A bunch of emotionally unregulated people with too much money decided to play a little Game of Thrones. It’s all very dramatic. And very stupid. It almost makes you wonder why we give so many shits about these dumbasses in the first place!

The one (and there is only one) benefit of social media is that these attention-starved dorks show their whole asses to us on a daily basis, with Very Important Business Tweets that read like the AIM away messages I posted in high school when I wanted nothing more than my crush to finally notice me.

The one time I wish he cared about capital.

We’re supposed to revere these people? Really? This is the culmination of five days of petty posturing. Tantrum upon tantrum upon tantrum upon tantrum upon tantrum, with Microsoft pretending to be the adults in the room in a desperate attempt to save face with investors because god forbid it appear as though their over-inflated company value could dwindle.

Is it too reductive to say “it’s all Capitalism?” Actually, no, it’s not too reductive to say, “it’s all Capitalism,” because, let’s be honest, it’s all Capitalism.¹ So much time, energy, and money invested over the span of decades to convince us that there is no greater indicator of intellectual and moral superiority than by how many magical dollars one company (or one person!) manages to amass. To be wealthy is to flaunt your big, big wonderful brain.² And as a result of our inherent tribalism, we are beckoned to cheerlead for rich dickheads. Like if we simp hard enough, we, too, will find ourselves infused with the superpower to manipulate stock prices, at which point we… win society? I dunno. If the end game is possessing the ability to impulse-purchase social media companies because my dad didn’t love me and now the only validation I can get is from my army of obsequious right wing shitasses,³ I guess I’d rather just Fargo myself into a wood chipper.

But this is what we get when the foundation of our entire modern society is built on the odious notion that the only thing that matters is money, and everything else, like empathy or providing a benefit to society or having fulfilling relationships, is but a mere distraction from making more and more money. We have a generation of repugnant dullards with zero regard for humanity who mistake their gratuitous wealth as the same thing as having a personality. In their relentless quest for more, they’ll step on anyone, thrust their useless, flaccid products at us, and spout lies, lies, and more lies in an effort to bolster their company’s perception for shareholders. Fuck doing something useful. Fuck creating sustainable companies. Fuck ethics. Fuck the world. Burn it all down for the quick hit, it’s all mine for the taking. More more more faster faster faster. If I don’t get what I want, I’m going to throw a fit!!!!!!!!1

It all feels like asking children to wait to eat marshmallows.

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¹ CAPITALISM ALL THE WAY DOWN.

² Wow! You’re so, so, so smart I’m so proud of you, honey, you did it, you got the big number! Who’s my big rich, beautiful boi? You are! You are!

³ Dude’s will literally drop $44 billion to buy a website instead of going to therapy.

This is not a sub-post about Harrison; I just want to defend Signs, M. Night Shyamalan’s best film

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Disclaimer: I suppose it needs to be said that this piece contains some spoilers for Prometheus (2012) and Signs (2002). Also if you’re really picky, some very minor spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) and Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker (2019). So, uh, yeah, like, self-regulate however you need to.

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Someone¹ in Discord was watching Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s 2012 Alien (don’t call it a) prequel. And, as it is wont to do when somebody watches Prometheus, the discussion turned to “the moment.” You know “the moment,” the one that everyone (maybe even you) brings up to point out how “bad” and “lazy” and “illogical” the writing in Prometheus is. “The moment” where the “super smart scientists,” in the midst of exploring an alien craft on an alien planet, find themselves face-to-face with a tiny, slithering alien creature—first contact—and their reaction is not overt fear, but fascination. Curiosity. Playfulness, even. Apprehension, sure. Caution, yeah. It is a slimy little alien reptile after all. But there’s a full range of emotion happening. Multiple reactions in quick succession. Confusion. Excitement! One of the scientists, after taking a hit off of his space bong, is feelin’ a little paranoid. The other is like, “Bro, shh, I got this,”² and reaches out a hand to coax the creature, like one might when faced with a stray dog.

“She’s beautiful,”³ he says, reaching closer.

And we, as viewers of a horror thriller genre film, with all of the broader context and media literacy and safety of sitting in a room passively watching this event transpire, are collectively thinking:

No! What? Why?! Why would you do this? You were just freaking out about being stranded on this ship a moment ago. Aren’t you scientists? You’re supposed to be intelligent! Why are you approaching an alien creature? Don’t! Stop! Stop trying to touch it! No! NO! Yep, duh, of course that was going to happen, yeah, yep, of course it’s wrapped around your arm now, yeah, he’s not gonna be able to cut it—oh fuck it just broke his arm—don’t cut it, it’s gonna have acid—yeah, acid for blood, yep, told you—oh fuck the acid just melted the spacemask onto his face⁴—of course the alien is in his suit now. No way it’s gonna go in his mou—yeah, okay, right in the mouth.

Clearly, had these two dumb-dumbs been written like the “super smart scientists” they were purported to be, that scene would’ve played out way differently.

But—now hear me out—what if sometimes people just, like, act illogically in the moment due to myriad factors in and out of their control? Consider for a second the fact that we’re kinda just little idiot animals and our lizard brains often take over when presented with extraordinary circumstances.

The one scientist says it himself: “She’s beautiful.” As he stares at a literal alien, something never witnessed before by humankind.

Is there a world where a scientist can be smart, but also susceptible—even overwhelmed—by curiosity? That it’s possible that even a very intelligent person, when presented with something completely novel (like, again, a literal alien) could cause them to make what an outside observer might describe as an ill-advised decision?

Sometimes people just do things and it’s not driven by logic or reason.⁵

Have you ever slowed down to stare at a car crash on the other side of the highway? Okay, well, there’s literally nothing you can do about it. Logically, you know this. But now you’re causing traffic and potentially increasing the likelihood of additional collisions occurring because you’re not paying full attention to the road.

(And you can rest assured that the person behind you is likely incensed by the fact that you’re slowing down to gawk in the first place. “This fucking dumbass doesn’t know how to drive. Don’t slow down! Are you fucking stupid?? Honk honk.”)

It’s a weird thing that happens when we watch a movie, or read a book. We start to min-max character decisions. We take our life experiences, our insight into various other stories where we’ve seen similar events play out, our assumptions at how someone should behave in any particular situation. And we often attribute the actions that we disagree with to “the writing.” The writing is bad. Why didn’t the director consider these plot holes? Why would this character do X when doing Y would have circumvented everything?

We forget that a character choosing to do X instead of Y is why the story happens.

So many grievances with the stories we tell each other could be resolved if we just remembered that sometimes, what happens is what happens.

Why would she run upstairs if there’s a killer in the house?

Because she was being chased by a killer and made a bad decision in the moment because being chased by a killer is probably a little stressful.

The entire conflict of the story would’ve been solved if they had just talked to each other from the beginning!

Yeah, and it’s not an uncommon occurrence that people lack the emotional intelligence or self-awareness to have a conversation like adults.

Why didn’t they just fly an Eagle to Mount Doom?

Because they fucking didn’t.⁶

Why would the aliens try to invade Earth if the most abundant substance on the planet was fatal to them?

Okay, yeah, let’s talk about Signs for a second, because I unabashedly love this movie, and I find the little nitpicky nonsense people come up with to be so asinine.

Here are the actual facts that we know about the aliens in Signs:

1. They are here.

2. They do not mix well with water (and also, judging by their actions, they seem to know that).

Here are the facts we do not know about the aliens in Signs:

1. Why are they invading Earth?

2. How intelligent are they?

3. What type of sensors do they have?

4. What is their biological makeup?

5. How many are there?

6. What planet are they from?

7. What are they doing with the people they abduct?

I’m stopping there because that list is, for all intents and purposes, limitless. The point being that the film Signs quite deliberately does not provide answers to questions about the aliens, because the aliens are not what the movie is about. The movie is about what happens when a person who has lost all faith is confronted with a completely surreal challenge that leads him back to the path from which he strayed. “Why are the aliens here?” isn’t important. What’s important is the fact that they are here and now the main characters need to deal with it, and what will they learn about themselves in the process?

There’s a lot going on in Signs that is far more interesting and important than the existence of aliens. Look, I know I just went on a whole diatribe about how when presented with literal aliens, that people should be forgiven for letting their curiosity about said aliens take over, but also shut up and believe me when I say that the aliens in Signs, while creating some very spooky and exciting moments in the story, are not the main attraction. Instead, there’s an entire philosophical meditation on grief, and fate, and identity, and faith, and family, and realizing what is actually important to you and what you’re willing to do to ensure you stay alive long enough to embrace it.

The details about the aliens aren’t necessary to the story. Personally, I think Signs is more exciting and sinister because of all the mystery about them. Like, consider for a second how interesting it is that they’re here, they seem to know that water is bad for them, and yet they are still motivated enough to continue on with their invasion. Is it desperation? Is it hubris? What circumstances drove them to make this decision? We don’t know. We’ll never know.

And that’s where art gets to be a conversation between the artist and viewer. When we bring our own experiences, ideas, assumptions, and interpretations, we get to participate in the larger conversation about the world that’s been created. We get to add on to it in our minds. We get to draw meaning from what’s said and what isn’t.

However, all too often, our assumptions lead the conversation away from curiosity and toward endless nitpicking. It does feel worse now than at any point I can remember, though that may just be my recency bias showing. Perhaps I’m just too online. But it does seem as though we’ve collectively moved more and more toward artistic literalism, where anything not explicitly stated in the text by the author means that there was an oversight, rather than a choice. We’re quick to dismiss a character’s decision that we disagree with as merely “bad writing,” or an unanswered question as a “plot hole.” To me, that’s more often about our own unwillingness to do our part in engaging with the story, than a problem with the story itself.⁷

I want to be clear that I know that bad writing exists. I saw The Rise of Skywalker, and you’ll never convince me that Chewbacca receiving the medal from Maz Kanata makes any sense in the context of the story. It’s just fan service that exists solely to appease the meta conversation, and fan service in place of story is hacky bullshit.

But I know that the broader mindset shift I’ve described has helped me enjoy stories more. I mean, I went from someone who scoffed at the existence of Prometheus when I saw it in the theater, to someone who is writing a blog post defending it. Upon rewatching it years after its release, through this new lens, I was excited to see that it’s actually a pretty excellent movie.

It’s best to remember that sometimes things just happen, and the important thing is what happens next.⁸

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¹ Not naming names, but let’s call him… Uh… Shmarrison.

² Not actual dialogue.

³ Actual dialogue.

⁴ God, this scene is fucking cool. Holy shit, even 11 years later it still looks great.

⁵ Like, Christ, just look at my first marriage.

⁶ There is an actual answer to this question and you can do your own research into it, but it doesn’t change the fact that due to a number of factors not important to the actual story, they fucking didn’t.

⁷ Or, look, maybe you just didn’t like it, and that’s okay, too.

⁸ One of my favorite anecdotes about Tolkien writing The Lord of the Rings was how Faramir emerging from the bushes in The Two Towers surprised him. Tolkien remarked that he didn’t know Faramir was there until he revealed himself. One of our most acclaimed authors writing one of our most acclaimed stories, surprised by the sudden existence of his own character. As a writer, I know that sometimes our characters do things that we don’t expect. We’re not writing what they do. We’re writing about what they do.

Hot take: It’s okay if we don’t consume all of the world’s information before we die

Listen along with the audioblog:

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One of the more distressing qualities of humanity, in my mind, is the emphasis we collectively put on “efficiency.”¹ It saturates our professional existence. It haunts our socioeconomic barometer. And it drives our current approach to both creating and appreciating art. It’s insidious, the inordinate amount of power “efficiency” holds over our daily lives, without even drawing much attention to itself, creeping up in unanticipated ways: the life hacks bombarding us on TikTok; the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague; the Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice.

What?

The Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice.

I don’t foll-

This post is about how much I hate the Trim Silence feature.³

I will admit that this is perhaps a weird hill to die on, but I truly believe that Trim Silence is an abomination that should be fully eradicated from existence, as it not only spits in the face of the people who take the time and effort to produce their shows, but also, more broadly, encourages a way of interfacing with art that can only be described as gluttonous.

For the uninitiated, Trim Silence is a feature in many podcast apps that seeks to eliminate any pause in conversation—however brief, however intentional—so as to expedite the listening process and ensure efficiency is always the priority. Oftentimes, this is accomplished by dynamically adjusting the playback speed of the audio, increasing the speed when there is silence, and then reverting to “normal speed” when speaking is detected. The result being a nearly uninterrupted stream of information, and an average time savings of 5 minutes and 37 seconds added to our lives. Pesky nuances, such as comedic timing or a brief pause after a thoughtful question or an opportunity to process the knowledge of the devastating horrors the average soldier in World War I experienced,⁴ need not pester us. Our time is too valuable, and the information we ingest can’t fill our gullets fast enough. Why process when you can just keep listening?

I think about this a lot.

Full disclosure: I used to be a Trim Silence advocate! When Overcast launched in 2014, one of the marquee features was Smart Speed (Overcast’s name for Trim Silence) and I was initially a Smart Speed enjoyer. It was the only way I listened to all podcasts.

Until the moment I listened to one of my own shows.

I remember thinking, “Did I fuck up the editing?" Something seemed off. The banter was too quick to hop between me and my cohost. There was this uncanny valley effect as one of us would speak and the playback speed normalized—the beginning of sentences were slightly too fast, too clipped. I could tell it was me talking, but it still didn’t. quite. sound. like. me. It was juuust weird enough to ring untrue, like I couldn’t trust it. Smart Speed altered the audio to the point where the creative choices I had made during recording and editing were unrecognizable. The intent of the work had been subverted by an algorithm. That was the moment I swore off Smart Speed and decided I would never use a comparable feature ever again.

Sure, with time, software could improve to better clip the silence and leave the voices properly intact, but that is only useful if you assume that all silence is bad in the first place. So much communication happens in the gaps between the sound we produce. Moments made funnier, more thoughtful, more heartbreaking by recognizing that a well-placed pause says so much more than any word uttered in its stead. Silence gives sound a chance to flourish. Let it.

Or is it more important to just complete the task? Consume the show. Gobble it up. Glean whatever little meaning you can and move on to the next thing. Clear the backlog. The new season of Stranger Things is on. Binge it in a day so you don’t get left behind. Forget it a week later. The new Taylor Swift just dropped. Listen to it until the new Beyoncé. Listen to that until the new Kendrick. Listen to that until the new… Fleet Foxes? I dunno. Listen to this audiobook at 2x. Watch this LinkedIn Learning video. Queue up that thing on YouTube. What’s happening on Twitter? Scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll.⁵ Look at this Reddit post. Read what’s on Apple News. Check your RSS feeds. Watch that new show on Netflix. Watch that new show on Hulu. Watch that new show on Peacock. Watch that new show on Max. Watch that new show on Paramount+. Watch that new show on Disney+. Watch that new show on Apple TV+. Watch that new show on Roku (lol). Wait what’s that actor’s name? Yeah, they were in that thing. No, no, the other thing. We just watched it. Yeah, we did. Yes, I swear you and I watched that. Yes, you have, you said you liked it, I remember. Anyway, can you believe what they said about Israel and Palestine? You need this promotion. You need more money. You need to upskill. You need a better manager. You need to network. You need to market yourself. You need to monetize your hobbies. You need to sell your art. You need to hustle. You need to count calories. You need to check out this story on Insta. You need to hook them in the first five seconds before they scroll past. No one wants to put in the time to listen to someone who can’t capture their attention. Trick them. Make them mad. Get them hooked. Make them crave more. Here’s another fucking Star Wars movie. Here’s why it’s fucking terrible. Here’s why it’s the best fucking thing Disney has ever done since it invented Star Wars. Here’s the first in an anthology series you’ll watch over the course of 20 fucking years. Don’t miss it. Oh, you didn’t watch Ms. Marvel? You’ll never understand why Reed Richards fucked this ox in the post-mid-credits sequence of Quantumania. Get ready for the multiverse. Get ready for the metaverse. Get ready for Spatial Computing! Get ready for the new iPhone. Write a review. Make a video. Smash that bell. Like that subscribe button. Kiss your dad square on the lips. I wish my dad saw me as a person. Get 5% off your first purchase by using code COCKSWADDLE. Thanks to our sponsors. Support us on Patreon. Visit the shop. Rate us on iTunes. Follow us on Threads. Enable notifications so you never miss a thing. Help, please, I am drowning and there’s only so much time left before I am completely forgotten, and I haven’t been able to do anything I thought I was supposed to do, and all I want is for people to see me and appreciate me, and I just want to make things that say something meaningful to someone, anyone. Are you reading this? I want to be done with this blog post, but I am so worried that if I stop, it won’t mean a single goddamned thing, I won’t mean anything. I am no one. I am nothing. I am so excited for the new Call of Duty. I played 2,000 hours of Diablo IV, and here’s why it’s total garbage. The new Zelda is literally the best game ever created. There is nothing more bae than swag, no cap. You will never believe how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

(Breathe.)

There is no point in time where we have had more access to information than we do now. You could cut out every single possible nanosecond of silence and never make it through. You will never be efficient enough to see it all before you’re gone.

(Breathe.)

And that’s okay. Maybe it’s better if you just sit and listen and enjoy the art. Someone worked hard to create it. It deserves your full attention.

(Breathe.)

When was the last time you truly, deeply, unabashedly connected with something and you didn’t say a single word about it?

(Breathe.)

What is the most important thing to you?

(Breathe.)

Why?

(Breathe.)

Why?

(Breathe.)

Why?

(Breathe.)

(Breathe.)

(Breathe.)

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¹ “Um, Keenan, are you ignoring genocide?” I hear you asking, to which my answer is, “What about you shut the fuck up and assume that we both understand that the existence of a truly terrible thing doesn’t negate the existence of other, less-terrible things, and it’s actually alright for people to remark on the less-terrible thing without trying to ‘um, actually’ them into oblivion because they didn’t go out of their way to preempt their perspectives on the less-terrible thing by caveating in perpetuity until all communication loses meaning?”² Anyway, stay tuned for my next blog post: “Hot Take: Genocide is bad.”

² See also: when someone says they’re depressed, it’s maybe not the best approach to say, “You have it way better than a lot of people.” Yeah, like, no fucking shit, but it’s still okay for me to be sad.

³ And by extension: any feature that speeds up the audio or video we consume.

⁴ Imagine the hubris a person must possess to decide they’d rather let a fucking machine optimize the cadence of Dan Carlin’s speech.

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You Should Be Excited for Puzzmo, a Cute as Fuck Daily Puzzle Smorgasbord from Zach Gage

As someone who rarely dabbles in hyperbole, I experience zero hesitancy when I say that I think Zach Gage is a genius who is on track to save humanity using nothing but his unrivaled propensity for whimsy.

After a string of wildly imaginative, beautiful, and fun iOS games, all of which manage to expertly blend familiar mechanics with new, accessible twists, he’s now working on a new project called Puzzmo.¹

Puzzmo.

Puzzmo!

Puzzmo is a daily offering of puzzles that is as adorable as it is addictive. Some of them are old favorites. Some are new. I played my first round of Puzzmos today. The first thing I thought was, “Wow, this so fucking cute and fun I’m gonna write about it on my stupid blog.”

I’ve created a very simple rubric to help you understand if you will like Puzzmo:

1. Do you like puzzles?

2. Do you like the sound of the word Puzzmo when you say it out loud? Try it. Puzzmo. Say it three times. Call up a friend who you believe will answer their phone right now, and when they pick up, just whisper the word “Puzzmo” and hang up.

Did you answer “yes” to either of the above? Okay, you will like Puzzmo. Go sign up.²

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¹ A delicious mix of plosive and fricative that tickles the brain and delights the palate. How much more fun could a word be to say than Puzzmo? Could the puzzles Puzzmo presents possibly provide pleasure parity on par with pronouncing Puzzmo? Perhaps.

² It’s invite-only at the moment, so trying to get in is like a puzzle in and of itself. How meta!

These are the default apps I use as a former tech nerd and current fucking loser

If you’ve read anything on this blog, you’ll see that I’ve referenced Robb Knight a number of times. It’s actually getting out of hand.

In my defense, it’s only because he is not only extremely smart and attractive, but also because he has very good ideas. One of those very good ideas is App Defaults, in which he was inspired by a podcast episode (and this post by Gabz) to list all of the default applications he uses in his computing life.

As previously established, I am a highly impressionable person and also I am desperate for Robb’s validation,¹ so here’s my own list.

Warning: Do not give me negative feedback on this list. I will print out your email and throw it in the garbage and then light it on fire.

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📨 Mail Client: I use Apple's Mail.app on both Mac and iOS. On PC, I just log into iCloud's fucking website

📮 Mail Server: iCloud. I have a few Gmail addresses that are essentially artifacts of a simpler, shittier time where I thought Google was good

📝 Notes: I use Apple's Notes.app for most note-taking. If I have to collaborate, I'll cycle between things like Craft, Notion, or Google Docs

✅ To-Do: Apple's Reminders.app (and previously Things 3)

📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Apple's Camera.app, usually with ProRAW enabled.

🟦 Photo Management: Apple's Photos.app, with editing typically done in Darkroom

📆 Calendar: Google Calendar, which I do not really like, however anyone in my life I have to plan things with uses this fucking thing, so I feel stuck

📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud Drive mostly. A lil' Dropbox for VO work and podcast stuff

📖 RSS: No.²

🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: You cannot convince me that anyone uses anything other than the Contacts app that comes built-in with their phone. Do not email me about this.

🌐 Browser: Safari on iOS and Mac. Firefox on PC.

💬 Chat: iMessage and Discord

💁🏻‍♂️Social: Mastodon and Glass

🔖 Bookmarks: Whatever manager is in my browser.

📑 Read It Later: I use this thing called my brain, which has been historically unreliable, so I rarely read anything later.

📜 Word Processing: Ideally? Dropbox Paper or Craft. Realistically? Google Docs or Pages. [Update—1/3/2024: I recently brought iA Writer back into the fold, and it is what I plan to exclusively use to draft my extremely good and nice blog posts in the future. All is right in the world (aside from all of the shit, obviously, but do we even need that type of clarification anymore? Can we just collectively agree to assume that context matters and we don’t need to endlessly pick apart every innocuous statement anyone ever makes? Yes, there are a lot of shitheels in the world. By all means, make their lives miserable. But let’s just please stop spiraling down into a pedantry abyss every time we feel the slightest bit prickled.).]

📈 Spreadsheets: Numbers or Google Sheets, depending on whether I need to collaborate or not

📊 Presentations: I am a slut for Keynote, but I am also fond of iA Presenter’s whole shtick

🛒 Shopping Lists: Reminders.app has gotten really good for this. I used to use Grocery, but I find it unnecessary now.

🍴 Meal Planning: Mela on iPhone/iPad. It’s maybe my favorite app.

💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: YNAB

📰 News: Apple News

🎵 Music: Apple Music

🎤 Podcasts: Castro, but I’ve been considering moving over to Apple Podcasts [Update—11/30/2023: Due to circumstances no one in the world could have possibly seen coming, I mean, it is truly unbelievable that this happened and I am still absolutely reeling from the news, Castro is shutting down. As a result, I have made the move to Apple Podcasts.]

🔐 Password Management: 1Password, like a sane person

🔉 Audio Editing: Logic Pro on Mac (or GarageBand if it’s a really light edit)

🎞️ Video Editing: Final Cut Pro on Mac, DaVinci Resolve on PC

The moral of the story

Apple’s apps are pretty dang good for everything I want to accomplish. I’m also a bit of a purist, so I tend to default to defaults, even if they aren’t quite as robust as other options. There was a time in my life when I was a bit more adventurous, but I largely cannot be bothered,³ and that has been further exacerbated by the fact that I don’t have a corporate job anymore, so most of the shit I’m doing is just for my personal life, and I don’t require much.

Also computers are boring now, but that’s a post for another day.⁴

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¹ Do you think he’ll see this? Hi, Robb!

² Okay, I guess Reeder, but I hardly use it. I’m just a weirdo who likes to go to people’s websites. Sue me.

³ I am 37 and sad.

⁴ I promise I’ll never write this.

Mountain Dew VooDEW 2023 Zero Sugar: The Dewfinitive Review

Disclaimer: Before venturing further, please note that I truly, absolutely believe that the only good flavor of Mountain Dew is Baja Blast. I don’t think that taints my opinion on this particular product, but it’s worth it to keep in mind.

Never before in my life have I ever tasted something and felt compelled to immediately rush to my lil’ internet blog and write about it.

As they say, it’s never too late to grow as a person.

Not two hours ago, I was wrapping up my weekly grocery run at the local Kroger. Whenever I grocery shop, I always venture into the chilled beverages section to purchase myself some sort of sweet, carbonated treat. A reimbursement for the mental anguish I endure for having to navigate the aisles of a suburban grocery store from behind a cart with at least two janky wheels, dodging my fellow humans, the vast majority of whom seem blissfully unaware of the existence of others. My soda reward is the only thing that keeps me sane.

Today, staring back at me from behind the glass doors, was Mountain Dew VooDEW¹ Zero Sugar. The buzz surrounding this product has flitted about in my social group the past few weeks. Most of the discourse that I heard was about how elusive it was, especially the Zero Sugar variety, so much so that to happen upon a bottle of it in the wild almost felt like I had stumbled into Bigfoot while vacationing in Bielefeld. I admit, I was smitten by the mystery of it all.

As a professional who takes their job extremely seriously, I do think it’s important that I divulge my inherent bias against zero sugar beverages. They are, by and large, awful and far inferior to their non-zero sugar counterparts. There are a couple zero sugar sodas that I can tolerate, namely Coke Zero and end of list. All others, without fail, I generally despise.

But there were only two of these unicorns left, and the curiosity they instilled in me managed to overcome my apprehension about the cursed “Zero Sugar” label plastered at the bottom of the bottle. Like, come on, how bad could it be? Maybe it would surprise me.

It did. It did surprise me.

Surprised me with how fucking bad it is.

I have nothing kind to say about this abysmal drink. From the first sip I took when I sat down in the car, my body recoiled in disdain for what I had inflicted upon it. The first taste I experienced was the familiar, sickly chemical filth that is the calling card of the artificial sweetener. As if to prime your body that what’s about to enter it will be unpleasant, but it’s too late to turn back now. You fucked up. Only sadness awaits.

The second is the distinctively medicinal taste of Cherry Dimetapp, a flavor that traumatized me in childhood, and whose old scars have been reopened once again in my late 30s at the hands of PepsiCo, Inc.²

There are no words to accurately convey how deeply unpleasant the experience of imbibing this swill was. I was so reviled by it that I took two sips and threw away the bottle. I did not even leave the parking lot. I took a sip. Gasped. Took another sip. Gagged. Looked to my left, saw a garbage can, and threw it the fuck out. I didn’t even dump it on the asphalt, because I felt so much empathy for the ground that I dare not assault it with this liquid.

I cannot remember the last time I discarded a drink out of sheer disgust³, but this was an overwhelming and unwelcome assault on my tastebuds. The entire 10 minute drive home, I was trying to rid myself of the taste to no avail. It coated my tongue. Even now, hours later, the memory lives on, and I worry that for the rest of my life I’ll experience flashbacks to the moment I defiled my mouth with VooDEWDEW.

Actually, a shit-flavored soda seems pretty on-brand for them at this point, so I demand royalties when they inevitably produce it and settle on that punny moniker.

In all seriousness, there are people in my real, actual life who have actually said that they actually enjoy this flavor, and the only explanation that makes sense is that the Mountain Dew fanbase is fully Stockholm Syndromed and PepsiCo is exploiting that brainwashing for as long as they can, slowly but surely making worse and worse flavors of their undrinkable demon piss until they can get by on just packaging Zero Sugar Chemical Waste.

No reasonable person would willingly put this into their body repeatedly, and I truly believe we’re at the point where we have a moral imperative to stage interventions and ensure no one drinks this garbage ever again.

Shame on the folks at Mountain Dew. Shame on PepsiCo. Shame on Elon Musk, because this shit is so bad that he must be involved somewhere along the line. If there is any greater indication that we’re speeding head on into full societal collapse, I don’t know what it is.

Sound the alarms.

---

¹ Stylization theirs.

² Mountain Dew claims they collaborated with Cherry Airheads to concoct this flavor, and my response to that is that the people who makes Airheads punk’d you. That or they are war criminals who should be tried in The Hague for the development of chemical weapons.

³ And I used to drink IPAs!

I do not enjoy the saxophone, but it is not impossible to surprise me

Hi, please listen to this:

Quick, I don’t think it’s legit, and it could disappear at any moment because Square Enix for some reason doesn’t want to put it on any streaming service for me to listen to on repeat? ¹

As Jason Schreier perfectly summed up in this Tweet:

This track from Octopath Traveler II goes so hard it should be illegal

It’s true. It should be illegal, but it’s not, and that is good. Honestly, if you make it to the 2:05 mark and aren’t inspired to be a better person, I don’t know what to say to you. It is a song that builds perfectly to an epic climax that leaves you awestruck, breathless, desperate for more.

This is one of those songs that causes my body to gyrate uncontrollably. This is a song that would inspire great armies to throw down their arms and enjoy a fine beverage together, like a Squirt or a cream soda. This is a song that would bring Nostradamus to tears. On his knees, he would lament, “How could I have possibly seen such beauty—so elusive, so fleeting—in a world mired in dreariness, this shines through as a beacon. It is proof of the Lord almighty watching over us. Have mercy, O Lord, as I did not recognize my foibles. I misused this gift you bestowed upon me!”

It’s like, lol, Nostradamus, chill, bud. It’s not that deep.

Anyway, it’s a very good song that somehow manages to reach greatness despite its reliance on my all-time least favorite woodwind instrument: the saxophone.²

Yeah, I’m brave enough to admit out loud that the saxophone is, sonically, the equivalent of two balloons rubbing together. It’s abrasive and grating. Many instruments hum, harmonious and pleasant, but that is something of which the saxophone is incapable. It cannot hum, it can only scream. It is an instrument that screams at you out of a dopey gullet.

Also, it’s not even wood. It’s brass. Why is it in the woodwind family? That doesn’t make any sense. But what do you call it? Brasswind? Ew, no. That evokes the vision of some monstrous amalgam of instrument families. Like the creature from Splice.

The one with Adrien Brody.

This one.

The saxophone is the horrifying byproduct of orchestral gene splicing, and, frankly, I don’t want to see Adrien Brody fuck it either.³

Okay, yeah, this one has gone off the rails a little, but I’ve been sitting with these feelings for decades and I needed an outlet. To offset some of that bad karma, I will now recite off the top of my head my three favorite pieces of music that showcase the saxophone.

1. The song at the top of this post.

2. “Number 9” by Moon Hooch

3. … Uh… “Careless Whisper”?

Those are the rare few that are not only good in spite of the presence of saxophone, I would go so far as to say that they are good because of the presence of saxophone.

Alright, post done.

Do not contact me with your opinion about the saxophone. I will have you arrested.

---

¹ JUST LET ME GIVE YOU MONEY, SQUARE ENIX.

² I do not mean any offense to any saxophonists out there, but please for the love of god pick a better instrument. I hear the cello rules. Maybe an oboe?

³ I guess you’ll just have to watch the movie. It’s… fine.

I want whatever drugs Robb Knight is having (except I think the drug is sleep deprivation)

Classy human and builder of a beautiful website that is very much my shit, oh my god, I love it, seriously, just look at his logo, Robb Knight, writing in a brief piece entitled The Biology of the Hey Bear Fruits Makes No Sense that is very much worth your time:

A single orange, in the Hey Bear cinematic universe, is actually two creatures. The face is on the fleshy inside of each half but how did they get like that? Does a bigger fruit, or a human perhaps, have to cut them in half so they can see and talk and do whatever a living orange half does? What happens if said cutter slices off-centre, does one of them die while the other stays alive but has a part of their sibling's face on theirs, forever haunted by the memory.

Anyway, I couldn’t be more elated that someone like Robb has chosen to reproduce—just look at the results his journey into parenthood has yielded thus far! I’m very excited to see what madness might arise from repeated exposure to children’s media over an extended period of time.

(But in all seriousness: Robb. Hey, buddy. You good?)

Oh my god everything is so fucking stupid now

In another episode of my new series You cannot convince me that Capitalism doesn’t absolutely shatter the brains of those that benefit the most from it: two of the world’s richest dumbasses are taunting each other into punching it out in a cage.

This is a thing that is really happening in reality right now.¹

Our premier Elmer’s Glue cosplayer and the human embodiment of the Uncanny Valley, Mark Zuckerberg, and 13 year-old edgelord trapped in the body of a very stupid 51 year-old man, Elon Musk, want to slap at each other’s moist, supple bodies for… what, exactly? Because Meta’s launching a Twitter competitor? Because Musk communicates exclusively by Neuralinking his id to his Twitter account and just letting it go buckwild?

It doesn’t matter the reason. The result is that everything is so fucking stupid right now.

Billionaires building rockets. Billionaires building submarines. Billionaires buying social media companies. Billionaires gettin’ swole. Billionaires having very public and very embarrassing midlife crises. Billionaires who will do absolutely everything instead of going to therapy. Billionaires with an insatiable lust for validation that would make even the angstiest of teens take a step back and go, “Bruh, you good?” Billionaires doing every possible thing (including trying to build a cybernetic implant for your fucking brain, are you serious??) with their time and money except making the world even a slight bit less shitty than when they arrived.

Why does anyone revere these fuckheads? Why in the world would someone, for a second, look at any of them and think, “Yeah. That’s that aspirational shit. Mmm. Inject it into my veins.”

Look, there’s really no one more deserving of a good old fashioned punch to the head than Elon Musk, and so if the end result of this is him getting rekt by a person who looks like a classical painting restoration mishap, I’m all for it.

As long as the cage they fight in is locked, and neither of them can exit until the other is unconscious.

And also the cage is placed on a pool of lava.

---

¹ I really don’t want to be one of those people who is constantly like, “Oh my god, aren’t there more important things to worry about??” But also, like, AREN’T THERE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT? I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind! The world is burning. People are losing their jobs and their livelihoods and their lives. THE WORLD IS ON FIRE. And we’re really, truly going to let any modicum of our attention get taken over by the puerile peacocking of two rich dipshits with too much fucking time on their hands? Really? Are you fucking kidding me? What is wrong with everyone??? Oh my god!

I don’t want a folding phone, but I don’t not want a folding phone

Allison Johnson, writing for The Verge:

The Motorola Razr Plus is the first folding phone that makes me genuinely excited for what’s ahead. In the here and now, it’s a good device, though not quite as ready for the mainstream as Motorola wants you to believe. But for a specific kind of tech-inclined person willing to try out something new, the Razr Plus will be very rewarding.

It needs to be said that I have, by and large, been a real folding phone detractor. I have never seen the point, and the tradeoffs have been far too large to even consider jumping over. I mean… Android? Ew. Samsung??? Literally kill me. Chop me up into little tiny bits and stuff those bits in a box and throw the bits in a box into a volcano.

It also needs to be said, first and foremost, that I am maybe just a little bit, kinda but not really, but also, yes, if I am being completely honest I would have to say that I am falling out of love with phones.

Maybe I’m falling out of love with gadgets on the whole. I dunno, my relationship with technology is fucking weird. Like, I’m still reading The Verge after all, but also am I enjoying reading The Verge? Yes and no. Do I really care about any of this shit?

On the one hand, I am writing about it… so, yes.

… But also no?

My wishy-washy ass is sitting here, looking at my iPhone 13 Pro and thinking, “I’ve been an iPhone user since the iPhone 4 came to Verizon. Apple is embedded into my life in a significant way. I don’t have the reverence for Apple and their devices that I used to, but I sure do trust the overall experience far more than any other company. The cost of switching to anything else at this point seems too damn high, and I’ve really never enjoyed using an Android device…

Hmm. Maybe I should make that citrus-braised pork shoulder for supper club on Saturday…”

Anyway, the point: at this stage in my life, my iPhone serves as a glorified camera (which is important—I’m a photographer and I like what the iPhone camera enables me to do). I spend a lot of time dicking around on this device, don’t get me wrong, but I really don’t want to anymore. I think I would like something that created a bit more of a barrier between picking up the phone and using the phone.

Like, maybe Apple should add a feature to Screen Time that makes it so any time you unlock your device, there’s a chance it explodes. Not a big chance. But, like, 10%. I dunno.

Call it Face IED.¹

Or—or!—hear me out! Folding screen. Shrink down this gleaming monolith into something less enticing to use. Make it just that much more obnoxious to access the big dopamine projector. Save me from myself.²

Look, I’m just gonna say it. I don’t think the RAZR+ makes any fucking sense. If I dig down real deep into the most rational part of my brain, I still don’t see the point in foldable devices period. I really don’t. At least not right now. And I definitely don’t want to jump over to a new operating system. I don’t want to have to learn a new camera. I don’t want to deal with that weird little lip on the middle of screen where the hinge closes, regardless of how noticeable it is while I’m using it. I don’t want to think to myself every time I go to open it, “Is this going to be the time that the display breaks because this tech is still new and underbaked?”

I don’t even know if the tech is underbaked, but that’s the perception that I have, and it would permeate my every waking moment if I was walking around with this thing.

But… this still does look kinda fucking cool?? This is the first time any device outside of the Apple ecosystem has made me stop and think, “Huh! Maybe…” That alone feels pretty triumphant. Now, I might be more inclined, from an I-would-like-to-actually-accomplish-my-goal-of-not-using-my-phone-as-much perspective, to go with the regular RAZR, but the recovering gadget slut in me scoffs at the specs and gets a little indignant about going with the “less powerful” phone. It feels stupid even typing that, like, motherfucker this would help you, but whatever.

Whatever! Phones are dumb and boring.

But I want one.

No, I don’t.

Yes, I do.³

---

¹ Tim, you can have that one for free.

² I actually have real-life anecdata to support this! I was getting my car detailed a few weeks ago, and the owner of the business had a Samsung Galaxy Fold. I had literally never seen one in real life, so I asked him about it, and he laughed and said, “Yeah, it is [a Fold]. I never use the big screen. I just always use it closed.” … What??? Just think if there was an even smaller screen on the front—OR NO SCREEN AT ALL! We could save people from this eternal damnation that is being beholden to these tiny little metal and glass parasites! Also, in all seriousness, it is absolutely fucking hilarious to me that this person had a Galaxy Fold and just kept it closed. Like… Okay, so you just have a really chunky ass normal Android phone. Lmao. He thought it was funny, too.

³ Apropos of nothing, but my dog farted herself awake three times while I wrote this piece, and I thought it was extremely funny. I long for a life as simple as that. Forget folding phones, someone transfer my consciousness into a Basenji.

A website run by morons who are very dumb and also stupid

At this point, we’re all aware of the shenanigans happening at Reddit.

Right?

Like, I don’t even need to post a link to anything?

Fuck, I don’t even think I know where to send you at this point. I could choose any one of hundreds of stories, but it feels like the Reddit news pustule is a fountain of infinite discharge, relentlessly oozing, so much so that by the time you’re caught up, a new layer has seeped out before the old has had a chance to crust over. Might as well bookmark that link, since there seems to be an antiseptic shortage.

It’s disheartening to see the leaders of overvalued tech companies tripping over themselves to out-stupid one another in an endless quest to suckle at the teat of Capitalism (although it is nice to see that every once in awhile they go to fucking prison). Steve Huffman isn’t the last ill-suited idiot to lead a company by over-inflating the importance of short-term gains instead of long-term prosperity, booping his doofy head on every goddamn branch during his slow-motion fall out of the Mighty Oak of Mediocre Leadership, and he won’t be the last.

He is, however, the current public face of a company employing a woefully malformed strategy that has a familiar musk to it: cash in all of the goodwill you have in an effort to scrape your way out of a very bad decision you made, regardless of the cost. In this case, the cost being destroying the trust of the thousands of volunteer moderators who try to keep your site from devolving into a complete and utter toxic hellscape (or Twitter, for short), not to mention showing your whole entire ass to hundreds of thousands of your website’s most devoted and active contributors (read: the reason your website has any value whatsoever in the first place), causing them to not only gleefully join in a protest that effectively kills the usefulness of your website, but who also plan to quit using the site long-term, leaving only a husk in its place that no awful redesign will be ever be able to cover up.

All of this, it seems to me, because he’s worried he’s running out of time to capitalize on an IPO in a volatile and stupid market. What other explanation is there?

I’m not going to pretend like I was the world’s biggest Reddit user. My engagement with it ebbed and flowed over the years, but I had been there since 2011. It was a site I used basically every day, typically multiple times a day, to be entertained, to learn something new, to get a consensus on current events, to participate in communities built around things that I loved.

And also to soothe my health anxiety when Google convinced me that I have cancer.

But I quit without second thought.¹ My main account and throwaways. Poof. Gone. Like a fart in the wind.

Steve Huffman’s relentless campaign to be the most unlikable tech dipshit over the last few weeks (previous infractions notwithstanding) showed me that Reddit is not long for this world, and it’s not worth staying to watch it fall apart around me. It won’t just collapse overnight, obviously. We couldn’t be that lucky. It’ll flail about, desperate to prove it still has purpose. It may even IPO so its investors can try and recoup their costs. And, surely, the dumbest days are still ahead of it. But there’s no future for Reddit while it’s helmed by an immature dingus who decided he wanted to emulate the world’s richest piece of shit.

I think it’s fair to say that Capitalism has broken the brains of business leaders, and it’s no more apparent to me than in instances like this, where inept, petty dullards desperate for their slice of the pie are forced into peacocking for each other, convinced their brilliant display will prove to the world that no, really! They’re humble geniuses! When the reality is that they’re just braindead frat boys running around with their pants at their ankles, high on the scent of their own festering mediocrity.

It’d be hilarious if it also didn’t mean the people they’re exploiting along the way are getting fucked in the process, but I guess that’s just the price of doing business.

---

¹ I think what’s especially ironic here is that I wasn’t even an Apollo user! I was a sucker who used the official iOS app and the “new” website. I put up with obnoxious ads, algorithmic fuckery, the forcefeeding of content Reddit thought I was interested in but wasn’t, and the inevitable, ugh, pivot to video. Every app is TikTok now.

They and Me

Note: this post was originally published on July 14, 2021 on my previous blog, No Octothorpe. As part of an effort to preserve writing I’m particularly fond of, I am republishing it here.

A fun fact I learned: today, July 14, is International Non-Binary People’s Day. This is particularly serendipitous because I have recently come to terms with the fact that I’ve long struggled in my relationship with the gender binary—and through an arduous process of self-discovery, I realize at 35 years of age that I identify as a non-binary person. My pronouns are they/them. 

Hello.

Identity has always been a tricky subject for me. Depending on your familiarity with my writing, you might have an inkling that I am in a constant state of self-assessment, desperately scrutinizing every last emotional whim for some semblance of deeper connection to who I am. What it means to be me. How the world sees me. How I see me.

How I can be proud of me. For my sake.

For an excrutiatingly long time, I quietly interrogated gender norms within myself. I was socialized male growing up, but I never felt fully comfortable hanging out with other boys. I was a “boy,” and later a “man,” because the language we had to help us relate to our mere existence was defined by rigidity driven primarily by our over-simplified understanding of birth sex—humans, by nature, long for simple nomenclature, but it’s remarkable how woefully ill-prepared that predisposition leaves us when navigating the reality of the world and its seven billion people. 

But here I was, a quiet, shy, sensitive boy. Quick to cry. Easy to pick on. Ostracized. My upbringing wasn’t particularly tumultuous in the grand scheme of things, I admit, but it’s the experience I had. It was the world I knew. I didn’t have many friends, and the friends I felt closest to were most often girls. Even when I was young, my longing for vulnerability always sat better with the women in my life. 

Despite some of the close friendships, the thing I remember most about growing up was loneliness. Self-imposed isolation, befriended by a rich imagination, the Internet, and video games—lots of video games.

Some things never change.

But some things do! Leaving home to move to Chicago allowed me to learn a bit more about me. In a city of three million or so people, I was exposed to a much wider array of personalities and perspectives, and my years in college gave me crucial insight into who I am. A serviceable writer. A good listener. A performer! Turns out, I loved public speaking. I loved entertaining people on stage, in the spotlight, turning written word into spectacle. The shy, quiet boy evolved into a shy, quiet man who knew when to flip on the switch and give people a little more of himself. 

And he was also angry. And anxious. And sad. And he didn’t know how to reconcile those feelings in a healthy way, so he let things simmer, boil, until the froth overran, coated the pot in a sickly bubbling foam and dripped into the flame causing it to shoot up and scorch those close enough to witness it.

Anger was always my Achilles heel. It’s how I interacted with the world when I felt helpless, alone, disappointed. I inherited it from my father, and, as a result, it’s the thing that I most closely associate with my relationship to my masculinity. I grow a great beard, and I have a pleasant, deep voice, but the thing I associate most with my manhood is the thing I am most appalled by in myself: rage.

In the last five years or so, I’ve softened. Not by happenstance, but by deliberate action. Leaving a marriage where I was deeply unhappy. Putting time and effort into therapy. Reconciling my relationship to work, creativity, and people. I feel more complete and comfortable with myself at 35 than I ever have. I’m not devoid of anger, but my relationship to it has changed.

My relationship to masculinity has not. While men are increasingly seen and treated as complex beings with a plethora of emotions, many of which are healthy and desirable, my perception of men is defined by toxicity. Anger. Entitlement. Stoicism. Stubbornness. Resentment. Force. Brutality. It’s a reality I’ve never felt comfortable existing in, and it’s a label I’ve never liked associating myself with. So I don’t. I’m more comfortable figuring out who I am in the shades of gray.

There’s a bigger conversation going on in the world right now. We’re empowering each other with new language, tools, and support to help us relate more effectively to our own identities, our own bodies, our own, colorful, wondrous, unique experiences. We’re affording people a level of kindness for themselves that we’ve never seen before. I couldn’t be more elated. How wonderful it is to be present in this moment in time when we’re giving people the words with which to write their own stories. The way in which we’ve seen change sweep across our culture is remarkable. There’s still much to do. There’s still pain. Still injustice. Still a severe lack of dignity given to those who deserve it. But there’s hope. It doesn’t take long to scroll down on this site and read cynical aphorisms about the Internet writ large, but I will be forever grateful to it for accelerating change and allowing people the connection to themselves and others like them.

I struggled for a long time thinking about how I could explain my relationship to gender, whether my voice even belonged in the conversation. Knowing that people have struggled for so long, and who don’t have the same safety or privilege as I do, quelled my own exploration. I turned my attention elsewhere, to more concrete presentations of me: my love of writing, gaming, acting, photography… not to mention the largely meaningless work I produce for the companies that pay me. I assumed as a cis-presenting white male that I didn’t have a story worth telling. I’d have to ignore my discomfort with how society assumed I existed on the gender spectrum, as my concern largely resided in assuring I wasn’t co-opting or trivilializing the stories of those who faced struggles unlike my own, who presented differently than I did, who experienced dysmorphia and a disconnection from their bodies that I just couldn’t comprehend. 

My wife, in her seemingly infinite, relentless wisdom, helped provide context for why I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. “There isn’t a finite bucket,” she said. “Your experience doesn’t trivialize the experience of another. Your experience is valid and how you identify is unique to you. It adds another shade to the spectrum. It doesn’t detract from the stories of others.”

And so… I’m here. I’m me. Sharing a story. Mine. One that eschews any adherence to the black and white label that our ingrained lust for categorical shortcuts demand. Adding to a tapestry we’re collectively creating together by being who we deserve to be. Complicated. Unique. Beautiful.

I feel comfortable now, recognizing that I can fully explore who I am as I want to be. A freedom to be they. To be them.

To be me.

Hey, so, I think I fucking hate the internet

Note: this post was originally published on June 4, 2021 on my previous blog, No Octothorpe. As part of an effort to preserve writing I’m particularly fond of, I am republishing it here.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

— Blaise Pascal, "Pensées"

I’ve got a Safari window open behind this Craft draft (there's no great portmanteau here, though that won't prevent me from desperately searching.) The YouTube video pumping audio into my head via a pair of pink AirPods Max is a clip from Bo Burnham’s latest Netflix special, Inside. Inside is a scathing indictment of our shared connected experience—a meandering, upsetting, hilarious, catchy, delightful, frustrating, poignant, timely, creative exploration about what we inundate ourselves with all day, every day, especially in the midst of a global pandemic when much of the world is not open to us, and we've all shared in this collective misery of endlessly fluctuating undersanding around what, when, where, why, how fucking long are we're going to have to keep doing this, because even though the vaccines are miracles of science and work profoundly well, hesitation due to misinformation, malice, or willful ignorance, the logistical nightmare surrounding distribution of billions of doses around the globe, competing political and social agendas, variants rearing their heads and striking at the heart of even the most insulated communities, general apathy, exhaustion, nice weather, and myriad other reasons ensure this virus will be with us for a long, long time. So we cope in the only ways we know how: Welcome to the Internet. We've created an environment for ourselves where we're bombarded by stimulus, much of it negative, malicious, or otherwise unproductive for the healthy functioning of our brains. It's not all bad, of course, but it's hard to reconcile how to feel when one moment you're laughing at a silly video of a dog feeling guilty about tearing up a couch cushion, and the next you're witness to the agonizing murder of a black man by a police officer, the officer's knee planted firmly in the man's neck, literally squeezing every last breath from him in front of your very eyes. You just watched a murder. You just watched a murder.

Hey, you just watched a person literally get murdered. Retweet. 

But it’s good to be informed! At no other point in human history have we been more connected, more aware, more capable of understanding. I thought for so long that this was a good thing, but the last few years have been especially revealing. Our emotions weaponized, our personalities commoditized, our attention milked by companies lapping up what little droplets we give them. And social media makes it easy for us to give our attention. 

I recently deleted my Twitter account. My long time favorite social network, I joined back in May 2008 and had, I think, over 50,000 tweets by the time I nuked it. Much of my current perspective on the state of the Internet stems from what I saw the network evolve into over the years. While not immediately apparent, Twitter’s key selling point—short, public messages in a seemingly endless list of other short, public messages—is also its single greatest flaw. Shakespeare wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” but I think it’s time we agree that he was a fucking idiot. Wading into the sea of Tweets, nothing is more apparent that there’s a lot of brevity, and very little wit. Social media has convinced us that any thought, regardless of effort taken in developing it, is worthy of publication. In fact, putting too much thought into what you post could result in you missing out entirely on the crucial activity of shared discourse. The rate at which social media’s attention slithers from topic to topic leaves anyone unwilling to knee jerk their perspective into existence likely to be unheard, wallowing in irrelevance.

Twitter wants to be the center of conversation on the Internet, but Twitter’s structure ensures that no meaningful conversation can ever truly happen there. The mere existence of a character limit means the first thing to go is nuance. When anything that requires even a modicum of consideration can be quickly dismissed with a single word and farted out to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers to inhale and regurgitate with the click of a button, is it even worth the effort in the first place? But so much of what people post about on Twitter deserves discussion, so it's particularly distressing that the platform actively discourages it.

Proportional responses do not exist on social media. One of the worst elements of current Internet culture is the insistence that every single person who has a thought must share that thought, and oftentimes they are just the same thoughts that everyone else already had and decided they just had to share. You see this in joke Tweets—dozens of replies follow, most of which are inane and poor attempts at retelling the same joke much worse than the original. 

You also see this when someone messes up. Let's posit a scenario where someone makes an off-color comment (let's not consider the severity of the comment, it's irrelevant to the broader point). The reaction to the poor comment is often met with the same fervor as if that person lit a kitten on fire. Often you'll find dozens, hundreds, if not thousands of Tweets excoriating the person who made the comment. And that's if they get off lucky. It's not uncommon for Twitter to do a deep dive on someone's entire history of ephemera to seek out any evidence of prior malfeasance, completely emancipated from context, time, or commentary from the author, in an effort to reinforce prior assumptions and justify the reaction to the original comment. There's an unhealthy obsession with justice by a group of people who have no businesses distributing it. 

To be clear, this is not some grand criticism on Cancel Culture. I do believe people being held accountable for their shitty actions is a good thing, and I think the Internet has enabled people to direct the spotlight onto the faces of some pretty heinous individuals. But I have to ask myself what being held accountable looks like depending on the action. Does the act of telling a tasteless joke really deserve hundreds of replies telling the author to kill themselves? How is that a proportional response?

This is all exacerbated by the fact that the current state of the Internet and social media essentially renders it an emotional outlet plugged directly into each person’s id. It rewards extreme behavior, and people crave to be a part of something bigger than themselves, so of course they get pulled into taking part in a mob of like-minded individuals who are all saying similar things. It's easy to get swept up in a sea of validation. I found myself there so many times, and only later, once the storm dissipated, did I sit back and consider the consequences of my own actions in that situation. And this doesn't apply to just negative reactions either. We have extreme positive reactions, too, where things (like, say, a meme, or the song of the moment, or a new TV show) are treated as though they've been bestowed upon us by some higher power. Remember the fervor over Tiger King?

Really? Tiger King?

I tried to defend Twitter for so long, mostly to justify my own addiction to the platform. I thought it was a net positive in my life, giving me the connection I sought, the understanding crucial to my existence in this ever-changing world, the little bursts of joy and delight I couldn’t find anywhere else. But I’ve never been in a better place, mentally-speaking, since I deleted it.

Being constantly bludgeoned by variety is destructive. It leaves no room for quiet. No space for contemplation. No opportunity for thought. When we’re constantly craving the next thing, we have no time to digest the previous thing. We have no ability to consider what something truly means to us. The pandemic provided a uniquely horrific opportunity for all of us to collectively share in that misery. We all fed into this in our own ways, mostly by feeding off of others in an effort to stave off the boredom, frustration, and despair a global catastrophe inflicted upon us. The Internet tries to be everything to everyone, and it takes its toll. What hope do we have if we can’t even sit quietly with our own thoughts?

I wasn’t expecting a one and a half hour Bo Burnham comedy special to be the perfect distillation of my feelings around the current state of Internet and social media, but here we are. By scrutinizing everything from the homogeneity of Instagram subcultures, to performative mental health, to our collective inability to shut the fuck up about any tiny little thing that pops into our heads, Inside lambasts our addiction to this miserable cesspool. It's a deliberately imperfect perspective on what goes on inside our heads when we're trapped with the endless stream of other people's id, all of us desperate to be heard and validated, an endless cycle of torment where we're all responsible for each others' happiness.

I fucking hate it.