the salmon and the trout
If you send me a video, odds are extremely high that I won't watch it. Sorry — it's just how I am. Ninety percent of the time, I see these things on my phone, and I am equally opposed to finding my headphones (the first step in losing my headphones) and turning up the volume on my phone ever (I absolutely refuse to do anything that makes it easier for my notifications to find me). Dylan has come up with a clever solution thanks to living with me: When he has a video he really wants me to watch, he holds his phone in front of my face until it's over, kind of like A Clockwork Orange but with memes. Credit where it's due; this works and has brought me a number of enjoyable videos there is absolutely zero chance I would ever have seen otherwise. For example, this depiction of almost every work email I've ever received or sent, or this, which you just have to watch:
Or this, which I think is genuinely one of his favorite videos of all time. Which brings me to the real point of this letter, which is about entropy and the eventual slow decay of all things — yay! — but, more specifically, various online platforms that have come and gone. To begin with, I'd like to direct you to this thread about Tumblr:
look I know a lot of people make fun of tumblr for supposedly being badly coded but I just tried to make a post and it turns out the E and W keys just stopped working. the ones on my keyboard. I can’t type them, but only in tumblr.
Tumblr was one of the worst, as in least structurally sound, social media platforms of all time. I believe its userbase actually bullied the staff account into deletion. It brought the phrase "female-presenting nipples" into wide usage. Allegedly you still can't send asks about a certain brand of sunglasses On There without getting instantly logged out. Every time it broke, it did so in a new and worse and never-before-seen way. I think about this post every day.
Do I miss Tumblr? Fuck no. One time an anonymous user came into my askbox and demanded that I explain why I was too selfish to give my life to end capitalism.
Do I nevertheless find myself thinking of it wistfully, now and again? Well, if I didn't, then I wouldn't be writing this letter, would I?
These things come and go, right? That's the whole point of the internet, that things rarely stay the same. People change and software gets updated and hardware all comes with planned obsolescence (ha ha!) and the ground is constantly shifting. Some people cite this as proof of innovation; I would argue that it's actually proof that humans are terminally incapable of leaving well enough alone, and as soon as we invent something good, all we can think about is finding new and exciting ways to break it (sometimes by trying to make it better, though more often by trying to make it... well... more full of cash). Not to say that there aren't some genuinely altruistic souls out there whose only motive is keeping the whole house of cards upright, if teetering, though even they have their limits. (H/t Joe Rosenthal for that link.)
the most consequential figures in the tech world are half guys like steve jobs and bill gates and half some guy named ronald who maintains a unix tool called ‘runk’ which stands for Ronald’s Universal Number Kounter and handles all math for every machine on earth
But it's hard — for me, at least — to accept that, for example, threaded comments are going the way of the dinosaurs. I don't like Twitter's inane little lines. I really don't like Discord; if I wanted to be embroiled in an endless scroll of conversations between other people about things I'm not really interested in and am not really paying attention to, I would unmute my in-laws' all-family group chat. (Just kidding ha ha of course it isn't muted!!!!! Who would ever do such a thing! Yes I'm bringing the fucking pies this year! Again!) I used to like and then not like Tumblr, first in an ironic but then in a sincere way, but as the thread cited above notes, it's become so broken that it's practically usable again (as long as you're down to party with a userbase composed largely of "cool extremophiles adapted to that environment who can't be killed"). It's kind of like any online community that has been unmoderated for so long that it's taken on a kind of character of its own. An internet ghost town. A virtual haunted house.
But, as the video says, we CAN'T go back to CONSTANTINOPLE been a LONG time gone, Constantinople. Which means that I too am, in a way, going down with the ship, succumbing to planned obsolescence. Have you ever heard of zombie salmon? I hadn't, until recently. I don't remember why I started reading about them, only that one moment I was googling "zombie salmon organs shut down?" and then, an hour later, found myself 167 pages deep into The Behavior and Ecology of Pacific Salmon and Trout by Thomas P. Quinn which, credit where it's due, is quite informative but not what I'd call recommended reading for anyone who hasn't developed a sudden interest in programmed senescence. Then I watched Annihilation, I know, one million years late — which I would argue is a great movie but an adaptation in quite a literal sense: it takes the book's central conceit and discards much of the original's execution in favor of exploring how such a story might be told visually, to both its advantage and its detriment — and noted the biologist's reference to the Hayflick limit, which essentially describes the phenomenon of cellular aging: that there are a limited number of times a cell population will, or rather can, divide. (There's a correlation to telomere length, which is tempting to analogize as a lossy data format, but that's not really accurate. Anyway, I have to assume you don't read this newsletter for a look into my deep past as an aspiring microbiologist. Don't correct me if I'm wrong.)
The point is, anyway, that the other night I found myself thinking about the Kids These Days or whatever and the things they don't like that I find normal, and the things I don't like that they find normal, and suddenly a memory of being, myself, one of the Kids Those Days landed on me like a cartoon anvil and squashed me flat. Which is something that I've been thinking about as I watch older people I generally think of as fairly sensible wading deep into the trenches of (for example) what queer people are allowed to call ourselves and how we're allowed to behave and what kinds of spaces we should promote and what sort of sex is most ethical for us to have (lol!) and, to be clear, it's not that I don't think it's important to have these conversations — to build friendships and relationships across generations; to learn and teach in turn — but I also remember being 15 and knowing that no argument I ever made, no matter how passionately argued, would change anything, and that nobody was fucking listening to me. And I so badly wanted someone to listen to me, to take me seriously, to have a real conversation with me and to hear me out and engage with my points (many of which were bad but many of which I still stand by!) on the basis of actual merit rather than perceived membership in and alignment with the alleged values of my age group. Anyway, I think that's a really important part of not getting worse as you get older: understanding that being an asshole still doesn't make you cool, especially now that you should know better.
Time for the list of stuff! Get your list of stuff here!!
What Sam, one of the best tweeters I follow, accurately refers to as “one of the like four good things left” arrived this week: the last of Demi Adejuyigbe’s annual Sept. 21 videos is here! Plus a way to donate to not one but three great causes. (I mean, the situations that lead these causes to seek donations aren’t great, but — you know what I mean.) It’s been six great years of these and now, as per Rave Sashayed: “it’s time! let the man rest!!! he’s given us more than enough!!!!!“
Does anyone in Cleveland want a normal-sized Crockpot that kind of works, a small Crockpot that works but doesn’t have removable stoneware, or a blender with no lid? The blender is probably from the ’80s, if that sweetens the pot. Maybe even earlier. When were blenders invented? Maybe not quite that early.
I read all of Rax King’s Patreon last week and had a great time. I showed the post about The Godfather, The Godfather II, and Goodfellas to Dylan and he agreed that it was a great time. You too can agree with us by subscribing. (She also has a book coming out in a few months!)
Did you know that Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, who did the soundtracks for Annihilation and Ex Machina, created a soundtrack for the 2012 Dredd adaptation (yes the one with Karl Urban) that was then dropped from the film but which you can find on Bandcamp? I did not but now I am happier.
I am trying to get up the nerve to play Anatomy by Kitty Horrorshow. Unfortunately, I’m told it has a thing with a basement, and our washing machine is in the basement. Stay tuned to find out which I choose: playing this or ever doing laundry again.
Also, apparently I’ve managed to write 50 of these (now 51). As they say:
