Happy Easter!
I didn’t send anything last week because
I didn’t have anything to say. I think these emails work when the news can be
escaped, or at least not fully felt. It can be funny to watch a man rant and
rave about things which don’t have immediate effects on him or the reader, but
the same format is exhausting in the middle of a global crisis. These messages
are cynical by design, but I don’t think that really works any more. People in
power saying something dumb was funny. Now it’s scary. It’s no longer interesting
to be angry. Everyone is angry. And I think I’ve really said my piece on
COVID-19. You know my perspective. So I’m going to dial that back and let this
newsletter find a new identity. At least, I’m going to try before I shoot the
thing in the head. I’d ask what’s new, but if you’re anything like me, the
answer is basically nothing. My parents keep telling Evan and I to journal to
remember this strange time. I think they’re right, and I think that if I can
make it entertaining (which believe it or not I always try to do), this can be
my version of that—though, if you read far enough, there will be links, I
promise. I usually try to avoid telling you too much about what’s happening in
my life in these because I enjoy the tradition of catching up in person and
having a whole lot to say, but in nationwide social isolation, it’s probably a
mistake to delay social interaction, and I hope that I hear from you sometime.
I’ll be happy once I get to see a human being not in my immediate family. It’s
been a while. I’ve been blazing through audiobooks I get from the digital
library when I exercise, and I just checked out Atlas Shrugged for
purely educational reasons—regardless of its moral depravity, it’s got to be
one of the most influential novels in our modern politics—but if I leave
quarantine wearing a fedora, you’ll know why, and I give complete authority to
shoot me on sight.
I don’t know if you knew this, but Evan has gotten very into Harry Potter—a bit late, I know. He read all the
books in a feverish frenzy at the behest of his GF, and now is watching through
all the movies. And since I want to know what he’s thinking about, I, too, am
watching through the movies. As you know, for the most part, my interests have
been esoteric or wacky and often both. I know that I’m not really interested in
every facet of the zeitgeist, and I’m okay with that. But sometimes it really
sucks to be out of the loop, particularly when you don’t instead belong to some
particular subculture and are just a bit pop-culturally alienated, particularly
when you cannot manage to convince yourself that your taste makes you better
than other people. That’s why I try to keep up with the MCU more-or-less for
example. So I don’t resent an opportunity to be culturally edified (if that’s
what this is) after having totally missed the craze. After all, I watched Avatar:
The Last Airbender, a praised piece of children’s media, as an adult, and I
loved it. But so far, all I can really think is how much Harry Potter
really isn’t for me, which isn’t a complaint. I’m a 20-year-old man. I doubt
there was any stage of my life when I would have gotten into this, and that’s
kind of nice in a way. When I watched Avatar, all I could think was that
a theoretical remembered child version of myself was missing out on this shit.
But all this has inspired Evan to write a
novel, and I don’t mean that in the way that I frequently get inspired to write
a novel. No, Evan’s actually writing one and at an absurd rate of speed. I
think he’s bored of being stuck here, and he’s writing something like 5000
finished words a day after classes like it’s no big deal. It’s wild. It’s not
his first attempt to do so either, but he’s taking this project much more
seriously. Despite his odd penchant for reading children’s literature, he’s a
pretty great reader, so I’m very curious to read it. For some reason, I think
Evan could be a competent fiction writer, despite his abysmal AP Lang essays.
Actually, maybe it’ll be good because of his terrible essays. I’ve
always been a strong essayist and a terrible fiction writer. My characters are
uncomplicated walking talking ideas who ramble at one another. Perhaps Evan has
some untapped grasp on actual human behavior. If it’s really good, perhaps I
can read it the way I consume Harry Potter media. “Hmm… I can see how
this could be enjoyed by someone.”
As a side note, when I was a young lad, I
was forbidden from reading those books due to witchcraft, even though I never
really expressed interest, so I think it’s funny that my parents have loosened
up. Eh, Evan can have a little witchcraft, as a treat.
For the most part, my college friends
have disappeared from my life as if we never knew one another. I think this is
a preview to what it will be like to graduate. All my friends, even those I have
been with for years now, have been friends for a time, and I think they’ll
vanish in the blink of an eye. It’s depressing to think about maybe, but it’s
okay. It’s certainly not unique. The exception to that is my atheist club. I
can’t type those two words and not laugh at myself. We’ve been meeting weekly
on Zoom. I can’t say no because it’s gotten to the point where that’s really my
only social interaction for the week. But they know my boisterous, irreverent
personality, and I have to try to deliver that while also not being too loud or
saying things which may offend overhearing family members. Because if I piss
off my parents, where am I going to go? We’re all stuck in the house. I’m not
sure how successful I’ve been, but I’m going to talk too loud on a call and out
myself to my whole family. It’s a matter of time lol. When something happens,
I’ll be sure to document the drama for your entertainment.
Okay, I do have one piece of actually
personal news, which I have withheld until this point to avoid seeming
self-aggrandizing—a hopeless pursuit which I can’t quite seem to give up. If
you don’t make it this far, I guess that backfired, but since you’re reading
this, you did make it this far, so I suppose I had nothing to worry about. I
got offered a job, sorta. The summer internship at the company I CO-OPed with
which I’d already lined up has put me on a special project. I’ll be working
remotely—which is convenient since it seems that remote
work would be necessary anyway—on a research project for a top-secret lab on
which I would be the only developer. I can’t say a ton about the nature of the
project, but it involves a lot of programming, math, and physics, so I’m pretty
nervous. But, by agreeing to take on the project, they intend to take me on
full-time once I graduate so long as I don’t fuck up
catastrophically. Well, I looked up their office to figure how much they would
probably offer me. The numbers are no joke.
Okay, here are links. Don’t be upset if I
can’t bring myself to dial up my outrage at this point.
We need to do something about Medium. If
you’ve read my previous emails, you know that it has been an utter
misinformation crisis, and there
have been more, this one posing as an academic study. I like the idea of
people being able to publish their stories for the world to see, but I think
Medium as is might be a mistake. To the untrained eye, medium posts really do
look like news articles, and their writers really do like to pretend to be
journalists. When people watch YouTube videos, it’s impossible to ignore that
you’re just watching some guy say something, and those can still be dangerous.
But I don’t think there exists any user-content platform which assigns more
apparent legitimacy to its unqualified posters than Medium, and I refuse to
give the website empty praise for free speech. A Medium Corp. needs to figure
out a more responsible way to present articles written with no editorial oversight.
Senator Sanders dropped out, though only
after waiting long enough to assemble crowds in Wisconsin after their Supreme
Court decided that it was necessary that people vote in person because they
are unable to adapt and care more about internal politics than human life oh
goddamn it I got mad again my bad back to Senator Sanders. The tears online are
overwhelming. People are not okay. Honestly, I don’t have much new stuff to
say. The Presidential Election has utterly disappeared from the national
consciousness. For kicks and giggles, I’ll hold to my original prediction, but
I really have no idea how things shake out from here. President Trump is currently
trying
to recruit Senator Sanders supporters, and I find it rather amusing. I
don’t think this is the most likely outcome, but if President Trump is
re-elected after this, I think there is a chance that he will try to move
toward socialized healthcare with a nationalist aesthetic. Patriot Care, if you
will. I predict an upcoming Social Nationalist movement in the United States
which will have to perpetually say, “Um, no, we’re not National Socialists.
We’re Zi-nas, not Na-zis.”
In many areas, policing has gotten wildly
overzealous, as totalitarians jump at any opportunity to throw people in jail,
the last place you want to be during a pandemic. These
pro-life sidewalk counselors followed all the rules and got arrested. There
was a father who was arrested for being with his son in an empty baseball
field. There are a lot of examples. Forgive me for not finding all of them.
In a weird turn for brand Twitter,
Steak-Umm posted a long,
insightful thread about propaganda.
President Trump has a new racist ad! Of his ads, this one
is the most racist yet, which is really saying something. He accuses Joe Biden
for being soft on China by being friendly with American Governor Gary Locke,
who is Asian-American, suggesting that he a Chinese national. I’m not joking.
This commercial doesn’t even pretend to be anything other than racist. It’s
actually horrifying. Now is a good time to remember that Joe Biden was publicly
skeptical of China’s response before President Trump. This
is a great breakdown of why the ad is such vile bullshit.
Ken White made a great thread
about how much of a clown Matt Walsh is.
Finally, our President discusses how
Coronavirus brilliantly
outsmarted our antibiotics by being a virus.
I hope you’re hanging in there, and I’d
love to hear what’s going on.
Thanks,
Jacob Morris
Jacob Morris
