I’ve spent most of this week falling through the bottomless mood hole. One of those weeks when my cynical impulses took the wheel and drained the meaning out of everything. Someone says “Good morning” and I shoot back “prove it.” Or I don’t say anything at all, because who cares? Why bother? I should’ve stayed in bed. Depression is such a blast that way.
Music really helped me this week so I’m just gonna link to a lot of it, including my hotly-anticipated followups to Synth Season.
Synth Season #2: Party in the United Synths of America
Synth Season #3: Running Up That Synth
I became a Kate Bush fan (like Big Boi) and there’s no going back. She was an early and enthusiastic adopter of the Fairlight CMI, which I mention so I can show you this video of jazz legend Herbie Hancock playing one on Sesame Street.
John and I collaborated on the bottomless mood hole. Then we made the equally-important antidote ok you need to cheer the fuck up. Put that on shuffle, invite some friends over, and you got a stew going.
Finally, John put together a solid week of bangers. 169+ hours of good music. It’s so beautiful. What a magnificent soon-to-be-published-author lad.
‘There’s Virtually No Conversation In Chicago … About the Aftershocks of the Violence.’ (Longreads)
“In An American Summer, journalist Alex Kotlowitz tries to report on gun deaths on Chicago’s South Side with the same attention to survivors, anniversaries, and aftershocks that is paid to mass shootings.”“For Trump, language is ONLY a tool to gain advantage & establish dominance. He can say ‘family separation is bad, Obama started it’ and ‘family separation is good, I want to expand it’ at the SAME EVENT & not be troubled in the least.” (twitter/@drvox)
Some people have been hunting for Trump’s “true beliefs” and I think this gets much much closer at explaining his behavior. He has no true belief structure, aside from his need to impress, impose, and dominate. (In later tweets, this guy “diagnoses” Trump with narcissistic personality disorder, which is a dumb and bad thing to do. Long-distance amateur applications of the DSM are Not Good and Should Not Be Done.)The Tax Middleman Is Your Enemy (Hmm Daily)
“Electronic tax filing is a service that has evolved into a full-on scam, in which for-profit companies insert themselves between taxpayers and tax collectors for no good reason. And a bipartisan Congressional effort wants to keep it that way forever. It is the ideal case study in how and why nothing will ever get better.”We Tried To Find 10 BuzzFeed Employees Just Like Cops Did For The Golden State Killer (BuzzFeed News)
Peter Aldhous tried using DNA databases and public genealogy information (along with Facebook sleuthing) to identify 10 BuzzFeed employees out of 1200. He got 6.Scientists discover Cthulhu sea cucumber that terrorized oceans 430 million years ago (CNET)
Latin name Sollasina cthulhu.The Golden Age of YouTube Is Over (The Verge)
Unless all you want to watch is clips of late night TV shows and music videos.Hear Sylvia Plath read 18 of her poems (Open Culture)
Millionaire wants to stage real-life battle royale on private island, which should go fine (A.V. Club)
XOXO