2023
Ask a Manager: my employee wasn’t respectful enough after the company messed up her paycheck. This letter has a plot twist that takes it in an unexpected direction.
San Diego GOP Lawmakers, Candidates Call for Tightening Border Over Hamas Threat. Building a wall worked great in Israel, so let’s get moving on that here!
Cory Doctorow: A taxonomy of corporate bullshit: “… six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial…. it’s refreshing to see how the right hasn’t had an original idea in 150 years and simply relies on repeating the same nonsense with minor updates.”
We’ve all collectively decided that the 22 years since 9/11 have gone so well that we’re just gonna do it again huh?
‘Scripture is very clear’: New House Speaker tells Congress God has ‘ordained’ them. (AlterNet) A perfectly normal thing that not-crazy people say.
I think maybe video has taken off and text is declining simply because TikTok and YouTube make it easy to share revenue with creators, whereas opportunities for independent writers are harder to find and harder to use. (There’s Substack and … well, Substack. And also Substack.)
If Facebook instituted revenue sharing, I could make a significant revenue stream off this—my random thoughts, memes I find elsewhere, photos I take while walking the dog. It wouldn’t replace other work, but it would be a nice supplement.
Does that sound nuts to you? Ask Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a billionaire now because of the time and effort that I, and hundreds of millions of other people, have put into Facebook.
A little bird tells me that Tumblr is going to put some effort into fixing its RSS feeds. O frabjous day!
Reading about our new Speaker of the House and seeing absolutely nothing good. He’s an insurrectionist who wants to impose Sharia law on the United States.
I had to cold-call a relative stranger for social reasons just now. I knew it was coming and I was nervous about it for days. I have become a millennial.
Until yesterday, I had never seen “Moonlighting.” Now I have.
The first episode at least.
Much comedy. Much fast witty dialogue. Some action-adventure. The clothes are fantastic and very very 80s. Cybill Shepherd is gorgeous. Bruce Willis is handsome, and his suit is sharp. I have always liked double-breasted suits.
I liked “Moonlighting,” but I had trouble getting out of my head to just sit and enjoy it. I kept thinking, “Is Bruce Willis supposed to be charming here? He kind of seems like an asshole. How would the 1985 audience perceive him?”
This morning, I concluded that the 1985 audience would have perceived him exactly as I did, and they too would have wondered whether he was really as big an asshole as he sometimes acted.
This was Willis’s first role of any stature, about two years before “Die Hard.” He was truly an overnight success. Until “Moonlighting” hit he was a bartender and sometime stage actor who had previously done one guest role on (I think) “Miami Vice.” He’s in his 20s here, already starting to lose his hair but still in possession of most of it. And such a babyface. It was a little painful to watch him here, so young, intelligent and fast-talking, knowing that real-life 2023 Bruce Willis is far along in dementia.
The other star, Shepherd, was considered old by 1985 standards. She was 35 then! Heavens! The people of 1985 were idiots; Cybill Shepherd was stunning. Also, she’s great at the witty banter, and—like Lucille Ball—she’s a beautiful actor with no compunction about doing physical comedy that makes her look ridiculous.
On the downside: The show could’ve been better if the villains had any kind of backstory. They are stock 1980s villains. A boss wears a bespoke suit (with a collar pin—nice 80s touch there) and speaks in an educated manner. He has a giant, nonspeaking henchman. Another villain is a punk rocker with bad skin.
The stunts were phony.
The show suffers from having been shot for smaller, lower-resolution TVs of the 1980s. Much of the time I could see Bruce Willis’s makeup slathered on. One of the villains seemed to be a 35-year-old man wearing old-age makeup.
But overall, thumbs up. I’ll keep watching. I think I’ll enjoy it more over time.
I think Julie enjoyed it without reservation. She watched the series when it first aired, but said she’d never seen the first episode.
“Moonlighting” and “Miami Vice” were the two iconic TV series of the 80s. I didn’t watch any primetime TV in that decade; I was a college student in the first part, and then a daily newspaper reporter, and spent my evenings doing other things. 1985, the year “Moonlighting” debuted, was a particularly big year in my life.
I’d never seen “Miami Vice” until relatively recently either. I thought that was fine. Watched one or a couple of episodes, but did not feel compelled to continue.
Finished reading: Pax by Tom Holland 📚A history of Rome’s golden age.
For a long time, I defined myself by my work
That was fine when I was in my 20s, but it became less and less useful. I stayed with it anyway, well past the point of uselessness.
I also defined myself more broadly as a writer. But that doesn’t work for me either. I still write—look, I’m writing right now!—but it’s not who I am.
I’m an American, Californian, Jewish, white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual and Julie’s husband. Those things are characteristics. They’re not who I am.
Maybe we don’t need to define ourselves. Maybe it’s enough to just be and do.
Today I learned about the three types of fun, as categorized by outdoorsy folks:
- Type 1 fun is just regular fun—fun while it’s happening.
- Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect, after you’ve forgotten that you nearly lost fingers to frostbite or gotten mauled by a bear.
- Type 3 fun is just plain not fun, not now and not ever.
From comments on Reddit:
There should really be a type 4 fun. Things that are fun at the time but you regret later, like being mean on the internet
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Type 3 fun is actually enjoyable for others when you share those stories.
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As a Vet I can say that the army is an expert in providing Type 2 and Type 3 fun while advertising Type 1 fun.
