D&F 4/23/23

This weekend was a many-spirited thing. Friday meant rum & cokes during Beau is Afraid, and Saturday brought an alleycute bike race with pals. It was warm this weekend, but ice on the neck, and beer in my belly helped. My team (A)CAB didn’t win, but we went fast and had a great time. No flats, no crashes, and it felt like 100% good vibes.

Beau is Afraid is almost completely the opposite of that ride. I did love it though, but I can’t say much more for fear of influencing the sentiment of anyone who sees it. Which, you should.

Here’s a soundtrack for your newsletter perusal today:

Links

• Do you think you’re a picky eater? Easily disgusted? Find out how you rate with this test. I got an 18%, and I’ve seen as low as 8%, and as high as 80%. I think this is way more telling of a person’s vibe than any Meyer’s Briggs.
• Sometimes you grow up online, logging-into every social site, talking to your friends, and strongly connecting to the World Wide Web. Maybe you’ve developed internet brain! Former Today in Tabs intern, and current cool guy Bijan talks about the internet here.
• For lit kids of a certain age, Gravity’s Rainbow was a rite of passage up there with Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and Dhalgren, but I’ve never made it all the way through. Honestly the only Pynchon I’ve finished was Crying of Lot 49, despite trying to read a few others he’s just never stuck. However, I bought another copy recently of GR, and at some point this year I’ll dive back in. As the essay above discusses, it’s almost intentionally confusing and challenging, with the added difficulty of all the pop-culture references being 50-60 years out of date. I love finding out that complicated literature is meant to be funny though, since I think humor gives so much inertia to any reading. Infinite Jest is also hilarious.
• You may have heard of the demise of Twitter, as one very stupid man has a tantrum about his inability to be funny or cool, while punishing anyone who is either of those things by making it even more intolerable to share a planet with him. He’s especially punished companies who built their business alongside Twitter and its API, like Tapbots. Fortunately, Mastodon keeps getting better at a decent clip, and Ivory is really good.

Closing

I’ve got a beer in one hand, and Infernal Affairs on the TV, so I’ll bid you adieu for now. Keep reading, and to quote a loved-one’s mom, “make sure to get lots of [vitamin] D”. Summertime thrive, space cowgirls~