In the last few weeks, I started watching "Dark" because I'd heard enough people say it was cool, or something. I just wanted something interesting to watch. I suspected it might be bullshit, but I gave it a try. And the first season, like so many first seasons of television, was pretty interesting! The entire time I was thinking, "Okay, this has some neat stuff in it, but they'd better be going somewhere interesting! Don't jerk me around for no reason, TV people!"

Well, the second season started to drag out, repeat itself, and then indulged in big-time prequelitis — when a story thinks it needs to show you the things it's been suggesting, but it really doesn't. And this one super didn't need to do it!

I don't know whether it was badly-written in the beginning, and just felt interesting because it was unfamiliar, or if the writing got bad during the second season, because... why? I know it must be terribly difficult to write and produce an entire season of television in a year. I don't want that particular job! But it's a horrible thing to watch someone run out of ideas right before your eyes. The camerawork grew less interesting, the plot lost its spark, the dialogue... the fucking DIALOGUE. WHAT the FUCK happeNEDDD??????

What is wrong with TV people? Why is manufactured drama, which fails to resemble real human conversation in any regard, the standard for television? What the fuck is wrong with us? And why do people SAY that it is GOOD???

At the end of the second season, I was shouting at the television every five minutes that it was too stupid to exist. Against my better judgment, I watched s3 e1 just to see. And even then, I was ready to say, "Okay, maybe this is interesting! Maybe the insipid philosophy, the nihilistic fatalism, the corrupt ideology of predestination that's being wrung out of every moment of this cursed entertainment product is at least going to do something interesting."

So I looked up some reviews. I didn't learn what happens. But I did learn that the 3rd season is the last, and there were a number of reviews where people said, "It's a mess, but it somehow works out to land somewhere really good."

Well, I just watched episodes 2, 3, and 4 of the 8. And I tell you what!!! I already hate it so much that there's no way it can be redeemed. But I'm going to watch it anyway, because fuck me, I guess! I am compelled to endure media I despise so that I can think about it, fruitlessly, to no one's benefit. Perhaps I am fated to do so. What the heart wants, etc. But holy shit, the lifeless, dour, ennnnndlessssss draaaaaagiiiiiing onnnnn and onnnnnnn, repeating the same vapid, faux meaningful bullshit lines over and over again. Every time someone says, "The end is the beginning," I groan SO loudly, to drown out the 60th time I have to hear someone say, "... and the beginning is the end." Jeezus fuck.

If you watched this, and said it was good, and wrote a review that was anything other than a beam of hot fire intended to destroy its memory and re-write time itself so that the show never existed in the first place (and I know no one reading this is the target of this question, so forgive me for wasting your time, too) —

Fuck, I don't know. How? Why? What the fuck? It's so frustrating to hear people talking about how interesting and compelling something is, and then have every minute of it be excruciating in its inhumanity and plot-bulldozer mechanical horseshit. At one point, I said out loud, "I hate this stupid planet and the people who inhabit it, myself included, because of how stupid this is and how stupid so many of us are so much of the time, and it's bad for a television program to make me feel this way!!!"

IN summary, any argument for predetermination is a philosophical excuse for oppression of all kinds, written by fascists and consumed by idiots. And if the show tries to end on some fucking note of the possibility of change, after spending its entire length reiterating the ineluctable nature of time, if it tries to do some weak-kneed late-script fight club "but really what I said the whole time is wrong" bullshit, I will remain, as I am now, furious and powerless to change anything about it, and it will simply join the ranks of "things other people like that I'm the asshole for thinking was empty and poorly-made but somehow people were paid to make."

the rubik's cube of, "but how can we prove there's free will" is a baby toy for baby thinkers. get fucked

oso oso — shoes (the sneaker song)

just some important research from earlier today

and, since we’re both here for some reason, here’s a picture of Cricket, also earlier today, taking up all of my desk that isn’t Products!

I didn’t expect to discover the future of music videos by a fun young artist last night, but…!

Brace yourself:

Remi Wolf is hilarious and brilliant!!!

Great interview with Gunpei Yokoi about the Game & Watch.

From Daniel Steinberg:

The man who killed Kim was on the phone while he was driving.

It feels so avoidable.

There are things you are supposed to do when you are driving for your safety and the safety of those around you.

Fasten your seatbelts.

At one point that was a major issue and seen as an infringement of your freedom.

... I remember my mom telling me how stupid they thought seatbelts were when she was a kid. “We never wore seatbelts when I was a kid, and we were fine.” She said this to me in her 50s, and there was still a trace of sneer in her voice; not at her own past ignorance, but at being forced to do something she had never fully believed was right? Fucking wild.

It takes little effort on your part to do the many things it takes to drive safely.

It requires that you understand the risks to yourself and that you care about the risks to others.

The man who killed Kim was on the phone while he was driving.

He ignored the risks to himself and cared little about the risks to others.

In this time of the Corona pandemic don’t be that person.

Don’t be the person who could do the least they could do but didn’t. And for what?

The driver didn’t want to wait to talk to his friend in Romania.

In this time of the Corona pandemic don’t be that person.

Wear a mask.

From Daring Fireball, though I’m omitting the horrifying description of brain inflammation caused by otherwise-mild covid infections:

Germany yesterday reported 298 new cases of COVID-19.

The U.S. reported over 55,000. Just yesterday. It is raging out of control here in the United States. It’s that simple. We’ve lost any handle on it we might have had, infections are now — I repeat myself because there’s no other way to accurately describe it — raging out of control, and a large segment of the population has decided to pretend it isn’t happening and isn’t a big deal if you do get it.

For those of us who’ve been taking this seriously since March, it’s soul-crushing that this is where we’re at after four months of isolation.

And that’s for those of us alive and unafflicted.

I have decided that today I am allowed to be just flat-out angry at how our fucking trash country has handled this, along with so many other things that, with even the tiniest amount of compassionate or logical thought, could be resolved and improved dramatically. I hate it, I hate the people who have held ya hostage to their greed-fed indifference, their fear-stoked campfire boogeyman tales, their idiot priorities and deference to unearned power. Fuck them through hell and out the other side, out into the cold vast accident that our unbelievable planet silently protects us from.

Those who survive this goddamned virus will have had months of our lives stolen by malicious negligence. Those who catch it and survive may have extensive neurological damage, or other prolonged health problems. Things, people, places, and experiences we love are being taken from us, day after day, simply because we have allowed the rich to trick a sufficient portion of our population into believing they live in a world which has never been. And as overall horrible as it’s been to grow into adulthood in this hellhole, what comforts we’ve been afforded are even now being moved farther and farther away. Not by nature. Not by fate. But by fuckers.

“If you don’t like it, you can leave,” doesn’t apply to people who disagree with our national policy. But it can apply to those who hate our planet, and the lifeforms it produces, so much that they would just as soon see it burn. Maybe they’d prefer the view from helmetless space?

jimmy eat world — pass the baby

this song is so fucking weird!!! bizarre first half that feels like it's part of a heist movie standoff; and then the absolute chunkiest, droniest, head-banging-est thing jimmy's ever published, as the abrupt coda. I love it every time it comes around.

man I still feel like this record just came out. but it was... ah, 2016. right. that makes sense. the last year of the gregorian calendar, while we now live in a perpetual year zero of interminable collapse

you know I was thinking about how the carceral state has extended itself to trapping us in our homes by way of preventing policy that would diminish the threat of covid or provide access to treatment, but has done so by inflaming the canker sore of "freedom" in the mewling mouths of the abject masses. freedom to work. freedom to not wear a mask. freedom to inflict yourself upon others without reflection.

and I feel so trapped in my own home that I can't even reach out, because it all draws attention to how absolutely fucked everything is. remembering how cool it was to just have friends over, but now they can't come over because our government would prefer we die and are happy to passive aggressively allow the virus to do it, and when I think about the friends who would come over it makes me so fucking mad to be unable to see them that I just, can't, do anything about it????????????????

BECAUSE I JUST WANT TO SING SONGS WITH MY FRIENDS AND INSTEAD WE'RE TRAPPED INSIDE SCREAMING TO OURSELVES BECAUSE THE FUCKING DEATH CULT OF CAPITALISM REFUSES TO MAKE THE DUMB FUCKS WE'RE DROWNING IN WEAR A GOD DAMNED MASK??????????????? WHAT? THE FUCK??????? ARE WE STILL DOING INSIDE????????????????????????????????????????????????? WHILE THE FUCKING MONSTERS GLOAT UPON THE THRONE

anyway, "it's almost too easy. the pictures frame themselves." what the fuck ever!!!!!!!!

I have been making up songs as long as I can remember. I started writing them down, and formalizing them into product, when I was 15, and some new friends wanted to start a band, and I liked singing, right? And I said sure, and the focused effort of the next 6 years slotted into place. I stopped performing songs long before I stopped writing them down; and I still write songs in my head, so often it’s annoying, and most of them turn into jokes now because it’s easier than confronting what it would mean to take it seriously.

I don’t want to be a middle-aged man, full stop. And I especially don’t want to be one who picks up the guitar periodically, remembers what it felt like to believe that dreams mattered, strums and picks a bit before putting it down again. But lord, that’s the way I’m going; and I feel the slope steepening.

Listening to someone like Phoebe Bridgers is infuriating for me. I’m moved, but I also resent the songbird voice, the simple chord structures, the apparent ease I know she still struggles to produce. Her new album is at least half good; I liked her better before Conor Oberst sank his sonic fangs in. But I can’t listen to it without feeling both moved to write a song of my own, and then to full-blown envious disgust with myself that I have the wrong voice for what I want to sing; that I learned to be pent up and strange and still haven’t unlearned it; that hearts open readily for some voices, but I’ve always felt like mine was more crowbar than key.

we were all of us born after the end of a world.

Circa Survive — "The Difference Between Medicine and Poison Is In The Dose"

"Don't call me by my full name. Don't talk about it; write it down, but don't ask for help. I can't be honest with even myself! Did you ever wish you were somebody else?"