Raising Awareness
Hey everybody! It’s time for a new newsletter, even though it feels like I just sent one out. I’m not sure if that’s because the last one was delayed or because life has been hectic lately. Anyway, I’m back again to report on what I’m doing in hopes that you’ll give me money for some of it.
Deal of the Month
I’ve got a lot of friends on the “Left,” and they’re always talking about how important Awareness is. They have Awareness Months, Awareness Weeks, and even Awareness Days. Sometimes they spend so much time Raising Awareness that they don’t have any time left for actual political action. Since Awareness is so important, I’m giving you the opportunity to get yourself a big heaping pile of it in the form of 4 new Awareness T-shirts in my Etsy store. And since you’re a loyal reader of this newsletter, you can get 20% off any order of $20 or more between now and June 24th but using the code AWARENESS at checkout.
Stuff I’m Working On
I haven’t gotten a whole lot done on my regularly-scheduled products aside from posting a couple more Death Cookie articles. That’s partly because of two projects that recently wormed their way into my spare time.
Notion released an email map with all kinds of cool new tools, so I migrated one of my mailboxes over as a test. I did not realize how long that would take and lost a weekend and several evenings playing around to get things exactly how I wanted. The good news is that so far it works great and I’ll probably end up moving all my email accounts over there eventually.
About 9 years ago (according Google Docs), I had an idea for a dictionary of stupid shit. Kind of like Ambrose Bierce’s The Devils Dictionary, but instead of witty, satirical alternate definitions of common words, mine would have stupid definitions of words and phrases nobody needs to know the meaning of. I’ve added to it here and there as things popped into my head over the years, usually expanding the manuscript (working title: “The Dumbass Dictionary”) in spurts. The big problem is that since there are always more words, I was beginning to realize that if I didn’t declare it done, I would never finish it. So I’ve decided that I’m going to release it this year, sometime after My Name Is Hood. That apparently kicked my mind into desperation mode to make sure I don’t miss anything, because I’ve been thinking of new things to add ever since and the manuscript has grown by about 50% in the past month. Here’s a page of them:
Told you it was dumb. Media Roundup
TV Shows
The Righteous Gemstones: This a fun show that you should definitely watch if you get a chance. Great cast, very funny.
American Primeval: Short but decent Western about the fighting between Mormons, Indians, the U.S. Army, and Jim Bridger in Utah Territory. I really like the way they handled the violence—most of the fight scenes didn’t last long, just a brief flurry of violence and then a lot of dead people. The weirdest things about the show for me was watching Lucas Neff (Jimmy from Raising Hope) play and Old West Army commander and narrating in his best Sam Elliot voice.
Bad Thoughts: I’m not super familiar with Tom Segura, but I like everything I see from him and have meant to dig deeper for a while. This show was probably the tipping point. The premise of the show is something like “Black Mirror, but instead of technology it’s fucked-up intrusive thoughts.” The humor is probably not for everyone, but I laughed a lot.
Yellowjackets: Don’t fuck with Melanie Lynskey. She’ll fucking end you.
Daredevil: Reborn: Could we get some kind of standard season length for streaming TV? Episode 9 felt like a season finale, but I had to look it up to confirm. I enjoyed it as much as the Netflix show and am glad that this isn’t one of those cases where IP issues force the writers to pretend that the previous series never happened.
I’m also in the “caught up and waiting for new episodes” stage on The Last of Us and Leverage: Redemption.
Movies
Summer of 69: Not unwatchable, but not something I’ll ever watch again.
Azrael: I was looking for a movie, couldn’t find anything that looked good, and eventually gave up and watched this because it was 86 minutes long. I’m guessing it was made about the same time as A Quiet Place, because most of the people have had their vocal cords cut for some reason. It’s kind of hard to guess what the intended plot is since nobody talks. It’s basically just a bunch of people (and some things that could be people, could be monster) chasing each other through the woods. Even though it was 86 minutes long, it felt much longer.
Morgan: This is a movie about Kate Mara investigating an attack by an artificial being (Anya Taylor-Joy) . It’s pretty much what you’d expect.
Grandma’s Boy: I’d never seen this movie, but a lot of people have recommended it so when I saw it on the feed I decided to check it out. I enjoyed it, but not as much as I’d been led to believe I would. It’s a fun movie to watch, but it’s not really knocking anything off my top 10 comedies list.
Fear Street: Prom Queen: It’s prom night in Shadyside, which of course means there’s going to be a blood bath. If you liked the other Fear Street movies, you’ll like this one.
Tom Segura: Completely Normal: This is the first special of my Segura dive, and if it’s representative I’ll end up watching them all. It looks like he’s got a several, so I’m glad the first one I tried made me want to watch more.
Mickey 17: Bong Joon Ho is probably big enough at this point that this doesn’t quite count as one of the weird indie movies Cedric Diggory does more often than you’d expect, but I didn’t realize he directed it until I started watching, so that was the kind of movie I was hoping for, and that’s more or less what I got. Worth watching for Mark Ruffalo playing Trump in one of Paul F. Tomkins’ suits.
Reading
Still working my way through Dangerous Visions.
Music?
Traditionally, I’ve mostly listened to music while driving, and that’s where I’ve figured out which songs from a new album (I’m old, so I still think in terms of albums) needed to go into the more permanent playlist. Podcasts took a away a lot of my music listening time, and now that I work from home I rarely spend more than an hour a week in the car (none some weeks). As a result, my playlists have gotten increasingly stagnant even though I still occasionally buy new stuff.
To combat this—and to help organize my music collection—I’m going to start spending an hour a week listening to music in my collection, rating it (I’ve removed all the ratings that already existed so I’ll know which songs I’ve already done), and updating the tags, metadata, and such so I know where that song fits and can find it easily. That means you’ll get something about music here in the future. Right now I thinking maybe I’ll do a Top Five list in honor of my favorite music nerd book/movie, High Fidelity (one of the rare cases where the book and movie are both exactly the same and completely different). I haven’t started yet, but here’s a Top Five list to let you know what you’re in for:
Top Five Artists in my Music Collection
Johnny Cash (889 tracks)
Leo Moracchioli/Frog Leap Studios (537 tracks)
Richard Cheese (356 tracks)
Tom Waits (189 tracks)
Steve Earl (159 tracks)
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I didn’t plan this, but I just realized that “Summer of ‘69” (by Canadian Rocker Bryan Adams) is in the Dumbass Dictionary page I included AND that one of the movies I watched recently was called Summer of 69. Since 69 is Bill & Ted’s favorite number, this seems like a good time to remind everyone that members of my Patreon get early access to Death Cookie articles as well as exclusive access to articles like the one full of Dumb Tables I made for the James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Time Machine one-shot I ran at several cons back when I still did cons.
That’s All folks!
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in about 3 weeks.
TYTYVM,
Steve
©2024, Steve Johnson