Day 1 Post-Animal Crossing
But that game wrecked my already tenuous sleep schedule. After starting it up and midnight and running through the intro period, I was very close to ending my day inside the game when I found out offhandedly through a video I was watching that the game day resets at 5am. The time it actually was is irrelevant, but know that it was a trivial amount of time to wait for that reset, and I wound up accomplishing most of my day 2 tasks by 830am, at which point I slept for a little bit and decided that maybe I can just run on multivitamins through this quarantine so we’ll see what happens there.
The biggest, dumbest news from yesterday was multiple Senators who were privy to advance briefings on the coronavirus went and dumped a comical amount of stock in relevant industries while at the same time downplaying the threat of the virus and leading us all into this current hell. The original ProPublica article focuses on North Carolina’s Richard Burr, but subsequent prodding has yielded at least 3-4 other members on the same committee with the same pattern of transactions. It says something about our current state that whatever new information comes out isn’t truly shocking, but at the same time I keep coming back to the idea that these are already people who will never want for anything for the rest of their lives (Georgia’s Kelly Loeffler is worth $500 million, and her suspicious transactions total maybe $1-2 million, which, at that strata I don’t even know if I’d notice it missing), and yet they continue to scratch and claw for every additional cent, and somehow it’s uncivilized for me to say it’d be nice to use their [REDACTED] as skipping stones down the steps of the Capitol and give their wealth to actual good people.
All of that is to say that while I was blessed with Animal Crossing and the gentle island life promised therein, I was also reminded by my neighbor’s blaring stereo of the existence of The Chainsmokers, so today wasn’t all roses.
Listen to this: Reply All - The Case of the Missing Hit - Hey it’s a podcast! One of the better episodes of the form in recent memory, it centers around a guy who can’t quite get a 20-year old earworm out of his head, and, armed with only a faint memory of the lyrics, he tries to uncover who wrote the song and how it came to be. It’s full of small twists and turns, and is a relatively low-stakes affair, but it also gets surprisingly insightful about the state of the record and radio industry circa the turn of the century and is a very fun listen.
The other day I mentioned that Shudder, a horror film streaming service, was giving away some free time to help people avoid going stir-crazy and, along that same vein, horror/genre magazine Fangoria is giving away two months of digital subscriptions, for great writing about horror movies.
In other horror movie news, this is a reprisal of a scene from SHAUN OF THE DEAD with some good old Nick Frost/Simon Pegg banter that brought a smile to my face.
In more free stuff news, two different publishing companies are giving away a selected assortment of eBooks to also help keep you occupied in these times. Haymarket Books and Verso Books are offering a combined 18 books between them, with Angela Davis’ Freedom is a Constant Struggle and Branko Marcetic’s Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden striking me as immediate standouts, but I’ll be going through those in the coming weeks and you should hopefully be able to find something in there.
On a Joe Biden note, he’s been conspicuously absent this week as a voice to counter the wildness coming from the Republican side, which is troubling considering that’s supposed to be the thing he does well. In case you’re not very familiar with me, I’ve been a strident Bernard Sanders supporter this cycle and, up until this past week, was kind of performatively a Bernie or Bust asshole but I’ve really got to say that encouraging people to vote in these conditions and then completely no-showing as opposition might cause me to break kayfabe. Biden’s already a dumpster man to begin with, and my one point of solace was going to be the battle of deteriorating brains at the presidential debates, but if I don’t even get that then what was even the point of all this. Anyways, here’s an article whose thrust I agree with about the dynamic between the mainstream Democratic party and the left faction, and how/if we move forward.
So that was a bit of a back and forth with darkness, so as a palate cleanser here’s a video that resurfaced in my travels of John Tesh explaining how he came up with Roundball Rock, or as you may know it, the NBA on NBC theme.