Years ago I signed up for Mastodon. I tell you that so you know I’m not some Johnny-come-lately to the technology. But I never used it. So take all this with a grain of salt. If you find this helpful, won’t you forward this email to someone else that might find it useful and encourage them to subscribe?

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GUIDE BEGINS!

Mastodon is Twitter, but…

• Way fewer people use it

• It is “decentralized” (more on that later)

• It is initially confusing to use

Wow, sell me on it more, Chris!!!!!

Mastodon is trying to be emulate Twitter. That means you post little updates1 and your followers see them. When you look at your homepage, you see your timeline of people you are following. One nice thing immediately: when you view your home timeline, as far as I can tell it is your followers’ content and the content they are boosting in reverse chronological order and no other algorithmic BS. Already that’s a great improvement over Twitter!

So it’s easy, you go to mastodon.social and sign up, right? Yeah you can! Do it! I’m there @chrisgrace.

That’s it, have fun!

Wait, what was that stuff about “decentralized”?

Haha, it’s fine, it all works out, just get an account and start enjoying yourself.

[taps foot….]

Siiiiiiigh. Okay.

So Mastodon is “decentralized” and “federated” or “federalized” or something. Essentially, it means there is no one big company running a big server that everyone is on. The biggest server is mastodon.social, as of this writing, it has about 850,000 users on it. But anyone can start a Mastodon server (called an “instance”). You can host a Mastodon instance for your family, or even just for yourself to make a little microblog.

Why? Why is this a thing?

Think of it like this. Remember bulletin board systems? Or message boards? Or forums? They were all the hot thing. You’d go to your “Bruce Springsteen forum” and talk to other Bruce Springsteenheads about “Born to Run” or about what a jerk Max is and you would meet a bunch of like minded people and go on road trips to see the Boss at the Stone Pony or whatever. An individual Mastodon instance is like that. You can create, or join, an instance themed to certain interests, or regional areas, or anything. Each instance can set their own content rules. There might be a Christian instance that bans users if they use profanity, and another instance called OnlySlurs.

Cool, silos are back?

Sort of. The big difference here is that the instances can all talk to each other. That’s why they call the Fediverse. So you can follow me @chrisgrace@mastodon.social even if you aren’t a member of mastodon.social. (George Takei just joined universeodon.com, a different Mastodon instance, and I followed him. Now his posts show up on my home timeline even though we are on different instances.)

So you separated all the groups but now they are joined again?

Yes.

Um, what.

Well, now each instance has their own little boss, which can turn into a huge pain in the ass, but it also means there are some ways to control who is in your audience and whose content you see at the server level. So if the admin for your server that’s all LGBTQ folks realized “Hey maybe we don’t need to have any link to the TrumpBoyz instance” they can disconnect and you have to have or allow any access to those red-hat-wearing rapscallions.

I guess this sounds okay?

Yeah, I think it sounds okay too. I’m not totally sold on it. But since five years ago, Mastodon has gotten a little easier to use, so it’s relatively seamless. Just go to an instance, sign up, and start following people. Apparently you can move your account and all your content to another instance relatively easily.

That’s good because what if the instance goes away?

Well, yeah, that’s a thing. They say you’re supposed to get a lot of notice ahead of time if this happens. But yeah this could be a problem.

So… how is it?

It’s nice. It’s a little slow (or at least, mastodon.social is). The people are nice so far! Most of the users are fleeing Twitter so there isn’t a strong urge yet to cause a ruckus. And I think because the algorithm isn’t really there to exploit your attention, maybe systemically it won’t lean towards trying to get you angry to keep you engaged.

But!

The things that are nice about it so far might also be because it’s very very very small (relative to Twitter).

But!

Maybe its obtuseness… your grandparents are probably not going to grok being on Mastodon … means that the audience will always stay a little sharper than your average social media user. (That’s probably a little wishful and it’s definitely elitist.)

But I know recently after leaving Twitter I’ve been wanting someplace to put little thoughts, and I even appreciated while deleting my tweets the way Twitter served as a microblog slice of life over the years2, and I think Mastodon might be a nice place to do that.

If you want to try it, come check out my profile and follow me and I’ll follow you back!

A bit of a life update: My life is kind of revolving around four things right now: stand-up comedy, re-learning to be a coder, a new podcast I’ll be launching soon, and physical therapy. If I can keep these four plates spinning I think I’ll have a good year. I’ll definitely chat more about these pursuits in future newsletters. And there will be significantly more newsletter activity, because:

I’ve deleted all of my tweets, leaving my Twitter account up just for DMs with a handful of people. Some sharp writer friends of mine have taken to their Substack newsletters with their tweet-like thoughts and I thought, oh, that’s not a bad idea! So I’m going to collect a bunch of things that would have been on Twitter and send them to you as a nice little batch. I guess Christmas came early this year!

• Eric and I are watching The Patient which is just okay. I find it a little distracting that Steve Carell, not Jewish, is playing a man that is Jewish, and being Jewish is very important to the storyline. And in episode 6 there was a sequence where I said out loud, “See, this is where I would have said maybe someone else should play this part.”

• Checked out a new pop culture podcast and I thought this was a funny (and hopefully not reflective) comment: “I’m not really into NBC multi-cam shows, I haven’t watched one since The New Girl.” (The New Girl was a single-camera show that aired on Fox.)

• Highly recommend Netflix’s The Mole. While watching it, I kept saying to Eric, “That’s not how it was in the original,” and then I would Google the original and that’s exactly how it was.

• If you’re interested in nightmares, definitely ask an AI art generator to create an image of two people kissing!

• All I can think during the recent troubles is how human beings keep falling for Ponzi schemes, then we forget, and then we tell ourselves why the new Ponzi scheme isn’t a Ponzi scheme, and it happens again.

• I’m going to try to consume more “cool” media… and yes I just looked up what that mean. Media that requires you to bring yourself to it, it doesn’t just goose-feed its way into your maw with no effort. Kind of the opposite of conflicty-engagement-y stuff… books, theater, live poetry… newsletters.

• I really admire Taylor Swift’s career execution but I wish the new album were better… it’s kinda bland to my ears.

• Elon Musk asking his employees to click an online form to commit to

• Clear out a small divot of mental space for the return of The Chris Grace Show. Shooting for Christmas at a podcast provider near you.

PLUGS:

I'm doing 30 minutes of comedy this Friday in LA at The Hollywood Comedy with my friend Greg Berman. This will be the longest set I've done maybe... ever? Come watch me flounder! $15 tickets here.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

The Rehearsal, Ibibio Sound Machine, candles from the Wal-Mart Black Friday sale, brain.fm, brilliant.org, A Mind for Numbers, physical therapy, going to physical therapy, not canceling physical therapy.

Look, I’m sure this is going to be terrible, but I’m enjoying it so much. OpenAI has a text playground where you can write text, leave it hanging, and have the AI complete it for you. So I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (which starts today) and I just need to write 1667 words a day and I’ll have a 50K book by the end of it. And the computer is writing about 50% of it for me. So here’s the first 1800 words or so. I would write a chunk, then have the AI complete it for me, and it’s surprising adamant about certain plot elements, so I ended up mostly doing a duo improv scene with an AI as it kept guiding the story back to certain moments and I would take those, try to build on them, and then throw in additional elements (or face the computer into a dead-end which regularly backflipped out of with ease).

Enjoy!

PLAYGROUND (Day One) by Chris Grace (and OpenAI’s DaVinci Text Completion intelligence)

An elderly man in a tuxedo, holding a vodka martini, approached Frank at the gala. "Where have you been?" the man said. Frank suppressed a grimace.

"I've been around, Peter," Frank said. "You know that."

"You've been avoiding me," Peter said. "I know you have. I've called you dozens of times."

"I'm sorry, Peter," Frank said. "I've just been busy."

"Too busy for your old friend?" Peter said. He sounded hurt.

Frank sighed. "Of course not, Peter," he said. "It's just been tough, you know, since Mary passed away."

"I know, I know," Peter said. He patted Frank's arm. "I miss her, too, you know."

"I know you do," Frank said. He took a sip of his own drink.

"Anyway," Peter said, "I should let you get back to your night. It was good to see you, Frank."

"You, too, Peter," Frank said. He watched as his old friend walked away.

---

"Bastard," Peter muttered as he rounded the corner, drink in hand. Frank was the same as he always ways: a self-pitying pretentious fart. Peter had always sought a deeper intimacy with Frank (just as a friend! he would protest to his confidants). Mary's passing, he thought, was an opportunity to, at long last, deepen that relationship. And in one 30-second conversation, Frank had batted that possibility away with a few curt sentences.

"Fuck him," Peter thought, as he sat in an armchair at the gallery that was only half as comfortable as it looked. He wasn't even sure what charity this fundraiser was for, he had only come because Mary was one of the gallery's major donors and he thought he would run into Frank.

"After all these years..." Peter thought. But he didn't know how to finish the sentence. Maybe he had deluded himself into thinking that Frank could ever care for him the way he wanted him to. Maybe this was just the way things were meant to be. Fuck Frank, and fuck this stupid fundraiser. He took another sip of his drink and tried not to think about anything at all.

A few minutes later, he was unconscious.

The other people at the gala filed out, as the night progressed. They barely noticed the old man in the chair, snoring. The personal assistants and caterers, the event planners with their headsets, none of them thought twice about the sleeping old man. They had their own problems to deal with.

And so, overnight, Peter slept in the chair.

---

When he woke up, he was stiff, and his head was pounding. The room was still, and dark; the only light came from the Exit signs.

"What the fuck," he muttered, as he tried to stand up. His legs were wobbly, and his head was swimming. He felt like he was going to vomit. He made it to the restroom, barely, and vomited spectacularly into one of the stalls.

When he was done, he leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath. He couldn't remember the last time he felt this bad. He staggered out of the restroom, and into the main room.

The main room was empty, except for him. All the chairs were pushed up against the walls, and all the tables were overturned. Peter tried to remember what had happened last night, but his head was fuzzy. The last thing he remembered was sitting in the chair, drinking his martini.

He looked at his watch. It was 8:00 am. The gala was supposed to have ended at 1:00 am. He knew where to go.

---

Frank opened the front door of his apartment and retrieved the brown paper bag placed there. Saturday. Bagel delivery. In the bag were four bagels, three plain, and one onion, and a tub of light cream cheese. He emptied the contents onto the kitchen counter, then turned on the radio.

The onion bagel. That was for Mary. He hadn't changed his order. He hadn't thought about it in months, but there it was. He put the onion bagel on a plate, then put the plate in the oven. It was a ritual he had performed hundreds, maybe thousands, of times.

He toasted the bagels, then buttered and spread them with cream cheese. When the onion bagel was done, he put it on a separate plate, and brought all the plates to the table.

He sat down and bowed his head, then began to say grace. "For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful."

"Amen," said a voice behind him.

Frank froze.

"Amen," the voice said again. It sounded like Peter.

Frank slowly turned around.

Peter was standing in the doorway, leaning on a cane. He looked like he had aged 10 years since Frank had last seen him.

"Peter?" Frank said. "What are you doing here?"

"You know why I'm here," Peter said.

"No," Frank said. "No, I don't."

"You've been avoiding me," Peter said. "You've been avoiding me for years."

Frank grabbed two plain bagel halves, still hot from the oven, and threw them at Peter. They plonked off of the senior citizen's head.

"Worf," Peter grunted, stunned, stung by the heat, cream cheese in his eyes.

"Get the fuck out of here Peter!" Frank shouted. "You're insane! I never wanted you, Mary never liked you, the last twenty years without you were the happiest of our lives!"

Peter was still stumbling, off balance. An older body doesn't recover the way a young body does. Here's the thing about a young body: the joints are supple, the muscles are strong. The balance is good, the reflexes are good. You don't think about these things when you're young, but when you're old, these things become painfully clear.

Peter had been an athlete in his youth. He was still in good shape for an old man, but his best years were far behind him.

Frank charged straight for him, like a bull. Peter tried to brace himself for the impact, but he was too slow, and Frank was too strong. The two men toppled to the floor in a heap.

Frank was on top of him, his hands around Peter's throat.

"Die, you son of a bitch!" Frank shouted.

Peter was struggling to breathe. He couldn't get his hands up to Frank's wrists. He wasn't strong enough.

"You killed her!" Frank shouted. "You killed her, you fucking killed her!"

"No!" Peter gasped. "No, no..."

"You killed her!" Frank screamed. He was sobbing now. "You killed her, you killed her, you killed her..."

Peter's vision was getting fuzzy. He couldn't breathe. He was going to die.

And he did.

---

As Frank stared at the blue-tinted corpse on his apartment floor, Peter stared at Frank. He was standing next to his own body, calm, aware of what happened, still not believing, but also accepting. Two, or three, or an infinite number of things at once. "Look at Frank," he thought. "What an old man. But he did it," Peter thought. "He killed me."

Then:

And:

After a bit: "What now?"

A year had passed for Peter. Five seconds for Frank. He tried to revive Peter. He shook him by the shoulders, but Peter's skull dumbly thudded on the rug, the sound sickening Frank, so he stopped. He stared in Peter's eyes. "Wake up!" he shouted.

Nothing.

Frank, scrambling, got up and grabbed his phone. He dialed 911. "Help!" he shouted into the phone. "I think my friend is dead! I think I killed him! What do I do? What do I do?"

The dispatcher on the other end of the line walked Frank through CPR. He tried, but he couldn't do it. The dispatcher told him to keep trying, but he couldn't. He started to cry. It was too much. All the blood. Mary's blood. Peter's blood. It was all too much.

The dispatcher told him to stay on the line, but Frank couldn't. He dropped the phone, still sobbing, and staggered into the bathroom. He vomited explosively into the toilet, then dry heaved for a few minutes.

Finally, he staggered out of the bathroom, and looked at Peter's corpse.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry."

He grabbed the phone and dialed 911 again.

"I think my friend is dead," he said. "Please send help."

---

"Friend?" Peter thought. Some friend. There went Frank again, putting on a show for other people, but in the dark, in the corner of a room where no one was watching, he was capable of the worst possible actions. A petty dismissal that the receiver would obsess over for decades. Overlooking a creative partner in favor of financial gain. Ruining the esteem of so many potential partners, in so many ways, in so many fields, in so many cities, innocent, instructed, the insidious narcissism that overwhelmed the crevices of what could have been a giving, complex, capable, joyous person, until that ego became everything smoothed over.

Peter was floating. He looked down, where his body was, and saw Frank, still in his own world of shock and denial and pain.

A few minutes later, the paramedics arrived. Frank let them in and led them to Peter. They checked for a pulse, then started CPR.

"Is he going to be alright?" Frank asked, his voice trembling.

"We're doing everything we can," one of the paramedics said.

They worked on Peter for a few minutes, then one of them said, "I'm sorry. He's gone."

Frank collapsed to the floor, sobbing.

"Aware that he's sobbing, no doubt," thought Peter. He was up near the ceiling, seeing the dust on top of the bookshelves. He had a lady he could recommend for that. Well, could have recommended.

Frank excused himself to the bedroom as the paramedics took Peter's body away. Peter followed him there, and watched Frank's crying subside. Frank wiped his face, and the speed of its return to a normal, placid expression stunned Peter.

"Well, he grieved me for all of five minutes," Peter thought. "He'll move on quickly."

And he did.

A year later, Frank was dating a younger woman. They were talking about getting married. Frank had told her about Mary, of course, and how he had killed her. The woman was sympathetic, of course, but also understandingly cautious. They took things slow.

Five years later, they were married. They had a child.

Ten years later, they had two children.

Fifteen years later, they had three children.

And so on.

Peter, meanwhile, was watching from the sidelines. He tried to communicate with Frank, but it was no use. Frank couldn't hear him, or see him. He was a ghost.

But he was also still alive, in a way. He was aware of everything that was happening. He knew every thought that Frank was thinking, every memory that Frank was reliving. He was, in a way, living Frank's life for him.

And it was driving him insane.

Okay I’m back. Thanks for reading this. I highly recommend you check out the OpenAI Playground and make an account!

https://beta.openai.com/playground

I touched briefly on the “women” vs “people who give birth” issue in my email last week and yesterday on America’s birthday Bette Midler chimed in as well.

I think this a complicated issue because essentially people are reacting to misogyny and transphobia from 360 degrees of attack, and it’s causing a lot of dissonance in the crossfire. To be honest, this tweet almost reads as if Bette has mistaken the more biologically-inclusive language as an angle of approach from the right, as opposed to be it mostly being verbiage created by people on the left.

In that last email, I mentioned how it’s kind of clunky to keep having to say “people with uteruses” or “menstruators” when talking about these things, but there’s also an accuracy to it: frankly, trans men that give birth are going to have a harder time getting abortions.

I think where some of the dissonance comes from can be highlighted by a few questions. I’ll try to answer them as best I perceive our current state, but your answers may be different and I think no matter what they make the issue more complex and less cut and dried:

• Do conservatives that want to ban abortion seek to do so to control the bodies of women, or the bodies of everyone that gives birth? I think that as these laws descend from archaic patriarchy, their spirit comes from controlling women-as-potential-sexual-targets. Through that lens, I think conservatives don’t give a rat’s ass about trans men. So I don’t think they are seeking to control trans men even if their actions are doing saw as fallout. This is not a reflection that they are progressive at all about trans issues; put it this way, as acceptance grows for trans women, I won’t be surprised if conservatives attempt to regulate their lives as well.

• Does the overturning of Roe versus Wade affect women of any age and reproductive function, or only women that can give birth (or only people of any gender that can do so)? I can’t answer this from my own experience so I would gladly defer to someone else’s perspective, but from observation it seems like a whole lot of women past child-bearing age do indeed care about SCOTUS’s actions. Probably because it says they are second-class citizens… their bodies are under attack. I don’t personally ever have any intent to adopt a child, but if there was a law enacted that gay people couldn’t adopt, I do feel that would affect me in a more holistic way than just “what is it practically doing to my life”.

• Is overturning Roe versus Wade an attack on women, people who give birth, ciswomen, ciswomen and transmen, ciswomen and transmen and non-binary people with uteruses, or something else? Anyone’s personal answer here probably reflects what language they prefer to use when expressing their outrage.

Unfortunately, the answer to the last question is most likely “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and probably yes, and all of the above and more”.

I do agree that Bette Midler could do better and hope she learns from the moment and posts a tweet clarifying her position (because in the meantime a whole bunch of “gender critical” buffoons have taken her tweet as validation).

I also agree that a person shouldn’t be demonized for one misguided statement. But you can’t go back and undo it. If I could go back in time and undo things I would go back to when I spent $300 to see Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! but that cash is out of my wallet and that tweet is out of Bette’s phone.

As usual, my pitch is for nuanced, moderate, more considered looks at these issues which is why I’m never going to buy a McMansion with my Substack money.

Happy July 5th!

If you think this newsletter is worth reading, please forward it to someone you think would appreciate it. If you don’t forward it to 10 people with 24 hours you will have bad luck. But let’s be honest you’ll probably have bad luck anyway. So live your life.

I don’t really know many people that positively interact with Twitter these days. Simple metric: you log on to Twitter, you spend some time, you log off. When you leave the website, do you feel better?

Most of us would say “no”.

So the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk is a perfect time to let go of the site. It’s had its run. I used to defend it by saying “Hey sure it has a lot of toxicity but it also birthed the Arab Spring” but it turned out that those claims were a little overblown. And I think for me, the negatives now outweigh the positives:

• PRO: Twitter provides fun jokes sometimes

• PRO: Twitter is a good place to check on instant reactions to things like the Will Smith slap1

• CON: It’s an engine for generating outrage that you can’t do anything about

• CON: It saps empathy and compassion digitally but doesn’t spur you to actual action

• CON: It radicalizes people’s opinions and generally removes nuance, or at least makes it out of fashion to express nuance in the public space

• CON: The signal-to-noise ratio has gotten worse in the last 5 years, requiring you to attentively garden your feed which becomes almost a job in and of itself

• And hot off the presses…. CON: Adding to Twitter’s value now adds to Elon Musk’s net worth

So yeah this seems like a good time to let the straw break the camel’s back. I think a lot of us were already feeling some ambivalence to being on Twitter so this is as good a time as any to finally let it go. It hasn’t been that fun for a while.

Let it go.

Recommended Book: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The subtitle of this book is “Time Management for Mortals” but it’s really not about time management, it’s about our relationship to time. This is more like a philosophy book (with a lot of stoicism mixed in) disguised as a productivity book. I was on board with his perspectives on time from the very beginning so the middle of the book dragged a bit for me (I was like, “okay I agree I agree but now what”) but I think if you are less pre-aligned to Burkeman’s way of thinking the first half of the book could persuade you. Even if you don’t agree with everything it’s worth a read.

https://freelancepretend.transistor.fm

This is a story about worms. It starts with a simple suggestion.

Last week I did musical improv with my friends Ross, Shannon, and Rashawn at the Clubhouse here in Los Angeles1. This particular configuration of people had never done a show before, so we had no preconceived notion of how we should improvise a comedy show together, even down to what kind of suggestion to get. So we did the standard thing, we asked for “anything at all”.

ROSS: Can I get a suggestion of anything at all?

AUDIENCE: A walk in the forest.

ROSS: A walk in the forest, thank you!

Ross and I started the first scene. I have a brilliant, complicated, baroque, rococo comedy mind, so I began the scene, jumping off of the suggestion of “a walk in the forest” by walking in a forest. I would explain to you how I made this connective leap but I don’t have the space. Just trust that I’m the Mozart of taking a suggestion and then doing exactly what that suggestion… suggests.

I played a bit of a nerdy character, and at one point Ross made reference to the large trees surrounding us, and I made mention of them.

CHRIS: Ah, the Parliament of Trees.

ROSS: I hope that’s a thing you just made up.

CHRIS: No, it’s actually from the comic book Swamp Thing, during the Alan Moore era. It was one of the most revolutionary and influential storylines in modern comic book history.

ROSS: <something much more funny>

Sometimes, when I don’t know what to do in an improv scene, I just talking about something on my mind, and it turns out to be so dull and prosaic that almost by oppositional reflex, sometimes the show has to get more interesting and dynamic. Other times the show descends into dullery. (This was not one of those times, it was a very fun show and a good time was had by all.)

But it got me reminiscing about 1980s era Swamp Thing, which was truly an influence on my storytelling mind and some of the most trippy, mindblowing comic book narrative I’ve ever experienced. It all started in Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, just at the start when Alan Moore2 began his run. In that issue, called “The Anatomy Lesson”, Moore completely upended the Swamp Thing mythology and set the series in a completely new direction.

Before that issue, the idea of Swamp Thing was this: a guy named Alec Holland died in a swamp, and then something in the muck turned him into this plant-man hybrid called Swamp Thing. But in “The Anatomy Lesson”, Moore had a character discover that that wasn’t what happened at all. What actually happened was that a guy named Alec Holland died in a swamp, then plants ate the body, and ingested Holland’s memories, and then formed into a man-shaped plant that was not Alec Holland at all, but only thought that it was. A plant dreaming that it was a man.

This changed everything about the series, because it detached the main character from human identity and morality, and kicked off a decade of insane stories that took Swamp Thing around the world, out into space, through time, and into the nature of consciousness itself.

Crazy, but it was based on science! You see, in “The Anatomy Lesson”, Moore had a brilliant character named The Floronic Man3 investigate Swamp Thing’s body, and randomly, The Floronic Man read about a study of planarian worms (pictured above). This was a reference to an actual study in the 1960s by a biologist named James McConnell, in which he taught planarian worms to navigate a maze for food. Then he chopped up the worms and fed them to other planarian worms that had not been taught to travel through the maze. After eating the educated worms, the new worms were able to find the correct path through the maze. This was the basis for Moore’s idea that the plants in the swamp ate Alec Holland and formed with his memories into a new creature.

Crazy, but also: debunked. McConnell’s results were unreplicable by other scientists, and soon he was discredited. And that’s what I remember from all of it… that it was a cool idea, but not really true.

Cut to 2022, after I did the show at the Clubhouse, and I thought about revisiting those old Swamp Thing issues, which I did (“The Anatomy Lesson” is still an incredible piece of writing), which led me to Google all sorts of … swamp things, including if the planarian worm study was still discredited. Answer: it is, but a new variation of the study was considered serious and real as of 2015 or so.

In the new study, a biologist at Tufts named Michael Levin taught planarian worms how to navigate a path for food, then cut off the worms’ heads. Planarians can regenerate almost completely, even if you decapitate them, and even after decapitation, the worms created new heads and brains for themselves, and they retained the ability to find the food they had been taught. So there is something there that seems true in a way similar to McConnell’s study… the worms are carrying some kind of information or memory somewhere that’s not their brains. They still don’t know where, or why, or what it means. But it’s a trippy idea… you could have actual memories locked up in some physical part of yourself that isn’t your head.

I’m not sure what this means for our own biology, and I couldn’t find much recent information about Levin’s study (because I’m partly expecting this one to be discredited as well), but I also enjoy when I learn something, and then learn that what I learned was wrong, because that’s what’s great about science. And the fact that it may have happened twice on the same subject is even more fun.

So now when people ask me about Swamp Thing and I explain that planarian worms affected his origin story, because they showed that memory and learning might reside somewhere other than the brain, I’ll have a bit of science to back me up. And when their eyes glaze over or they mumble some response and look to walk away, I’ll do what I always do when I bore someone with the most recent thing on my mind… try to find my friend Ross so that he can something much more funny.

Just a couple of quick things, I’m doing stand-up comedy again, so occasionally I’ll put a little bit of a blurb up top to let you know where you can see me, like this

Hey, I’m performing at the Angel Comedy Club in London, the Bill Murray Theatre on May 14, 2022!

Like that. And that’s a real gig. But I don’t have a ticket link yet. But I will.

So in the meantime, here’s some quick little tids:

• I’m telling everyone: Go see Everything Everywhere All At Once. Don’t watch the trailer, don’t read anything about it, just go.

• You like Wordle but want more? I’m enjoying Yeardle, Framed, and WeighOff.

• My opinion about the Will Smith thing is the whole thing was gross, I thought the acceptance speech was cringier than the actual slap, and I can’t wait to hear what Chris Rock has to say. While I’m not really onboard with the “God told me to defend women” angle of Smith’s speech (which I thought was very gaslight-y), I also am persuaded by Black perspectives that have noted that we have grown up on “Handsome Prince saves damsel” narratives with white faces for our entire lives but there was a layer of racial coding that caused us to see this as a violation. At any rate, I’m sure you have plenty of opinions to choose from on this topic.

• I think I have space to add 1-2 more podcasts to my listening routine, please comment or message if you have recommendations. One that I’m really enjoying is Imagined Life… the premise is it’s told in the second-person from the perspective of a celebrity before they got famous, so it’s a bit of a puzzle/mystery trying to figure out who the subject is. Although a few times you get to the end and you’re like… ewwwwww.

• I’m very excited to be traveling to London in a month to see Punchdrunk’s new show The Burnt City. I’m just hoping COVID has declined there before the trip.

• Finally, this will only be useful to a few of you, but if you need a utility for creating subtitles for a social media video pretty quickly, I’ve had good luck so far with veed.io.

Have a wonderful day!

OK let's talk about this dude. So recently I started playing a lot more tennis and as is my wont, I got back into it full bore, meaning I bought a racket, I've been watching YouTube videos, I will randomly stop the car next to the tennis court and practice my serve… not that I’m any good but I'm really enjoying playing a sport again and if you know me at all you know that I love to learn, so that process of just trying to improve physical skills has been a really nice thing to have in my life.

At the same time I've been watching a lot of professional tennis, particularly the Australian Open, which I'm enjoying a lot especially after Novak Djokovic was awkwardly (and inevitably) deported for not being vaccinated and lying on his visa (I think what I liked was that Australia stood up to say “just because you’re a rich famous superstar doesn’t mean you don’t follow our rules”). I've been getting to know a lot of new faces like Maxime Cressy, an exciting serve-and-volley specialist, underdogs like Taro Daniel (qualified into the tournament and hasn’t dropped a set yet!), and the next generation of stars like Jannik Sinner, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Daniil Medvedev, and of course I’m rooting for Naomi Osaka to make a good run.

But the guy in the picture above might be my favorite of all, because, frankly, he is hilarious. His name is Benoit Paire, and he's a French professional tennis player who is supremely talented, super weird and awkward, extremely moody, and emotionally fragile. Do you remember The Royal Tenenbaums where Luke Wilson played a volatile tennis player that just gave up at one point? Benoit Paire is that guy in real life.

He throws temper tantrums, he breaks rackets, he's been cited for not putting forth enough effort at the end of matches that he has given up on, and yet he is capable of making some of the most incredible tennis shots you've ever seen in your life. Oh and by the way, take a look at that photo above and note his outfit. That is not a still image from a practice session. That's what he wore to multiple tournaments after losing his sponsorships. His ups and downs I think have become slightly unpalatable to most activewear brands and so he went for a few months in 2021 without any sponsorships at all, and at Wimbledon last year he just went to the Wimbledon apparel shop on site and purchase clothes to wear in the tournament (he has since gotten signed by French fashion brand Cielo and now amusingly wears a shirt that says “Be Normal”).

I know this kind of makes him sound like an asshole, and he definitely is, but I think what I love about him is that he's so much an open wound emotionally on the court; and I appreciate that he often pulls back the lie that is professional sports during late-stage capitalism. For example he will get into arguments with umpires about unsportsmanlike conduct or racket abuse and at one such juncture last year he told the tournament officials, “It doesn't matter I can say whatever I want I pay the fine.”

And he’s not wrong! Yes he is frustratingly lazy on the court sometimes, and stormy, and brilliant, and sometimes just astoundingly stupid. But I feel like he knows his place in the world: a supremely gifted athlete that isn’t really sure if he even wants to be on the court, and is definitely not sure if he wants to try hard enough to rise to the top of the game for the approval of a bunch of people that he kind of despises.

And even with that toxic mix, he can still produce moments like this, where he retrieved a drop shot and returned it in front of people that were shocked he was even able to get to the ball.

Anyway, he won yesterday and now he’s in the 3rd round of the Australian and he’ll be facing Stefanos Tsitsipas (who a lot of people hate as well, but for a different reason, because his dad illegally coaches him during matches to the point that Tsitsipas will take long bathroom breaks while he brings his cellphone and then you can clearly see his dad texting him from the stands) and he’ll probably lose, but for now, I’ll enjoy the unique blend of tennis wizardry and French existential malaise that is Benoit Paire.

And with that, enjoy these ten amazing shots from Paire on YouTube.

What a year, y’all, I think it worked out pretty great for everyone involved. We all got what we wanted and there was no strife or drama anywhere for anyone. GREAT JOB.

In celebration of that (okay, now I’m going to stop being sarcastic), here are things that brought me joy this year, in no particular order.

1. Slate’s Pop Cultured podcast, specifically the delightfully cantakerous Stephen Metcalfe. In their latest episode, his co-hosts tried to get him to recant his previously dismissive opinions about Taylor Swift and his response was so simultaneously articulate and convoluted that I could only laugh and admire a perfect modern-day curmudgeon. He also voiced an opinion about TV comedies describing the “joke every 15 seconds” modern single-camera style as being just as much a trope as multicamera shows were where I had that feeling of someone saying what I was thinking. And he mentioned that in support of the show…

2. Reservation Dogs, which is an original, idiosyncratic delight.

3. And so is Stath Lets Flats. Three seasons of pure comedy that just gets better and better.

4. Wait, three seasons one better than next? I think I mean Succession. Matthew Macfadyen in the Nero and Sporus scene is some of the best acting I’ve seen… ever.

5. Dr Pepper Zero Sugar.

6. BananaSlamJamma’s Dota 2 YouTube content is so good it makes me play the game, even though I kind of hate the game, but I also love it and I’m coming up to 5000 hours played since 2013. I was gonna link, but honestly, if you don’t know what Dota 2 is, I don’t recommend it. It’s one of the greatest video games ever created but at this point in its lifespan it’s enraging more than not.

7. Valorant was the other multiplayer game I played a lot of this year and it’s quite fun, even as my physical reflexes atrophy in the struggle against Gen Z assassins.

8. The “card game” Inscryption. If you have a PC, just get this. Don’t read anything about it, just play.

9. Cathedral City near Palm Springs continues to be our soul-refreshing getaway.

10. The Tovala Smart Oven. I got it for a super cheap Black Friday price and it’s been wonderfully simple to use making delicious meals.

11. The movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and

12. C’mon C’mon, and

13. West Side Story, and

14. The Green Knight, and

15. Dune, and

16. Tick, Tick… Boom! It was a good year for the film and it’s been nice to be back in the theater (even if we might need to take a break from that for a bit).

17. Oh, and the book Dune by Frank Herbert, which is surprisingly undated and refreshingly unproblematic (except maybe for the very last line of the book, but still). It’s dynamic and is filled with absorbing palace intrigue that hasn’t really come through in any of the screen adaptations.

18. I don’t know if brought me joy, but exquisite melancholy… Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

19. TENNIS! I haven’t played in decades but my friends Zach, Tim, Bayne, Melanie, Mike, Lucas, and Rob played with me this year and it’s been a blast.

20. The incredible support put forth by my friends in several severe times of crisis this year.

21. And last but not least, my husband Eric, our two cats Corny & Peanut, and our families.

Hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a happy New Year. See you on the other side!

I think if there is one overarching lesson that we can learn from the last 10 years of American culture, it's this: someone who is an industry leading expert in any particular field is no more authoritative in any other domain than any other average person.

We are seeing our culture dominated by people who become rich, or become standard bearers, or leading-edge thinkers in a specific field of study, who are then elevated by their accomplishments as authorities and some other field of study, and we all fall for it.

You can think of a lot of examples of people like this period. Just because someone became rich through manufacturing doesn’t mean they should be listened to about crypto. Just because someone is a neuroscientist doesn’t qualify them to speak on security profiling. Just because someone invented a new technology doesn't qualify them to speak with expertise on, for example, saving the lives of people caught in a cave under water in Thailand.

Specifically I was thinking about this today because I was reading yet another “open letter” complaining about “wokeness”, in this case about MIT. But you don’t need to know the individual details of this letter, and I refuse to link to it, because you've seen this kind of open letter many times before. And it really is saying nothing new. In the end, mostly what these writers ( who are overwhelmingly cis white men) want is to get us all back to the basics of individual merit free of our identities, free of systemic biases, free of labels. (You know, I think really none of us have a problem with this vision as a final utopia that we can all live in. However, most of us only get between 50 and 90 years of life. And I think it's safe to say that we could forecast that this perfect world of meritocracy will not be arriving anytime within our lifetimes. So we all have to wrestle with how to live in an imperfect world with systemic prejudices baked in, and whether to fight against them, or game them, or some other alternative.)

I wish that when people would criticize stuff like wokeness they were more intellectually rigorous about how they approach it. I actually think there are probably some legitimate criticisms against the most enthusiastic activists for woke sensibility. I think it potentially causes a lot of problems, especially if you fold in consequences of how wokeness can be misapplied in real world circumstances. But the screed I was reading today wasn’t even understanding basic terminology like “diversity” and “intersectionality” correctly. If your sense of the base definitions of a subject are more distorted and less accurate than your average high school student, maybe you should put down the pen and read up a bit.

In all today, through reading yet another cranky blatherstorm, I was smacked with a triple banger of three white men who individually were experts in computer science, robotics, and molecular biology speaking about socialology, racism, and misogyny, and how the discourse around these subjects are pernicious antithoughts that will eventually devour the flesh of our great academic institutions. Just absolute drivel.1

Which brings me back to my first and main point: just because someone is an expert at one thing does not make them an authority in a different thing2. Kanye West is a genius at making music and a genius at pretty much nothing else. Aaron Rodgers is a genius at throwing the football and nothing else.

Sam Harris.

Dave Chapelle.

Elon Musk.

You can be Albert Einstein and still wake up on a Sunday morning, go out on your porch and yell at clouds and maybe a few more people will listen to you, because you published the theory of special relativity.

But you’re still just an old man.

And they’re still just clouds.

Postscript: Of course the exceptions are brilliant generalists who make the very idea of synthesizing concepts and reaching greater understanding their domain of expertise, like me, which is why you should take my comments above as authoritative, and also I’m good at improv.

I don’t know where this newsletter fits in.

I have a lot going on right now.

I want to tell people about it, and I also want to stuff it in an old Folgers can and bury it in a swamp.

People ask me “How are you?” with cheerful voices, and I say “I’m doing okay.” It’s too much to catch you up on, and it feels so heavy to speak any of it out loud anyway.

(And it’s not all heavy anyway. There’s joy, and being present, and thinking everything is sad feels like a performance in itself.)

I think I may write in detail about what’s going on, but it doesn’t feel like the time and it doesn’t feel like fully my story to tell.

In the meantime.

I was re-inspired this week by seeing Wilco live at the Orpheum here in Los Angeles. I have Jeff Tweedy’s book How to Write One Song on my shelf and it’s already wonderful.

We started watching Dickinson on Apple TV+ again. It’s absolutely wonderful. I really love it. I tell everyone to watch it. And yet every adult I’ve recommended it to seems to not enjoy it, so take that with a spoonful of salt and maybe you’ll be the first.

I started playing tennis with my friends Zach and Tim. I haven’t played in… twenty-five years? I’m loving it. (It’s also very COVID-compatible. Lots of distance!)

When KIND bars first came out, I didn’t like them. I tried one again this week. Now I like them. We can grow.

Egg whites in a carton are very convenient.

I’m taking a stand-up comedy class, it’s been good to have some structure to force me to write again. The showcase is in a few weeks, I’ll announce it here, I think it’s a Zoom anyone can watch, if you like.

You can ask me “How are you?”

And I’ll say: “I’m doing my best!”

1. Donda Chant: this is dumb

2. Jail: I like this. Also thinking: what exactly is hip hop these days? This is a rock song. It shouldn’t be called hip hop just because the artist is Black. It’s just a rock song. I like the way Kanye does like… choral/church vocal arrangement stuff. It’s very dramatic. Guess who’s going to jail tonight? God gone post my bail tonight. Oh, Jay-Z just started rapping. This is a rap song. (I don’t say this out loud much, but I think Jay-Z is overrated. I’ve never enjoyed his rap music.) Now with him on the track this reminds me more of the “99 Problems” style of hip hop.

3. God Breathed: Sonically, I think Kanye is a very interesting producer. This song has weird little interjectory sounds in it, distorted vocals and cryings out. It also has that thing he’s done for a decade now where he completely changes the vibe of a song that is probably interesting to him but also makes it hard to listen to/enjoy.

4. Off the Grid: Hey it’s a more standard hip hop song. Triplets. Boring. (Neat bass sounds though)

5. Hurricane: You know what this album reminds me of so far? Later Prince albums where he was off of his Warner contract and had no restrictions (and started writing about God a lot more) and the songs become esoteric and less fun and then I stopped buying Prince albums. Made the best tracks, still went off the rails indeed.

6. Praise God: Oh man am I just going to shrug my way through the rest of this? This is whatever. While we’re here, my favorite Kanye album is 808s and Heartbreak.

7. Jonah: This stretch of songs has been more like what you hear on the charts, I guess. But I think what I liked about Kanye before was it didn’t sound like the charts, it sounded like “Here’s a new way to make a song”. Even when the subjects were super serious, the music was innovative and most importantly, fun and cool to listen to. This is not.

8. Ok Ok: Each individual track is quite internally repetitive. Just like the title of this song! Man, if there is one word I can think of to describe this album so far: dreary.

9. Junya: dreary

10. Believe What I Say: The most fun groove so far because it samples “That Thing” by Lauryn Hill. Again, fun bass lines!

11. 24: the … R&B bedroom ballad? When you write a lot of things about God, I, as an agnostic, feel kind of like I do when watching a TV show with a lot of MCU references… I sort of comprehend what you are talking about but I don’t really get it.

12. Remote Control: Maybe the concept of “Donda” is like a meditation thing? Since the album started with a chant? Because there is a drone-like effect to the sonic palette of this album.

My cat Peanut pooped and the Roomba ran over it. So I missed tracks 13-16. They sounded boring from the other room. But that is an unfair judgment. So I have no idea, maybe the greatest songs on the record are tracks 13 through 16.

17. Jesus Lord: I liked the guest verse on this one, so I looked it up… it’s Jay Electronica. Good job! This song is quite long. Produced by Gesaffelstein who apparently produced “No Child Left Behind” which is coming up later.

18. New Again: I got a phone call during this.

19. Lord I Need You: I can relate to this. Three hours to get back from Palm Springs. What a nightmare! Seriously, this is a more chill listenable relaxing song. Probably won’t be a hit. But one of the grooves I would listen to again. Pleasant.

20. Pure Souls: These songs are so samey I have no new responses. I will say, if you want the best version of this type of gospel-y Kanye song I love “Ultralight Beam”. It felt fresh at the time.

21. Come to Life: Starts out feeling like the same song but then turns into “Chromalume No 7” as heard by Kanye’s ears! As George Seurat’s great grandchild would say, “It has to come to life!”

22. No Child Left Behind: I think sometime soon there will be some radical move to vocals sounding extremely raw, including being off-pitch. Maybe it will take a push by the children of today’s Zoomers to have this. Something to get away from the warbly autotune sound, which I have enjoyed in the past, but is just kind of hack at this point. (This song is… not much of a song.)

Tracks 24-27 are “pt 2” versions of “Jail”, “Ok Ok”, “Junya”, and “Jesus Lord”. They’re fine? They’re like the mid-credits scene. Lagniappe and extra bits. Again, echoes of Prince! He had so many little snippets of his music that he loved, more than we could ever hear. Now Kanye gets to throw them at the end of the album. WAIT: I’m listening to Jesus Lord pt 2 and it’s the same guest verse from the main version? What is happening here?

If you aren’t a Kanye fan I would not recommend this album. Check out 808s and Heartbreak or Yeezus, and particularly listen to the latter and read Lou Reed’s glowing review of it. If you are a Kanye fan, I guess give it a stream. I didn’t enjoy this album. I’d maybe listen to three songs again.

Have a great day.

The only thing that matters is where the camera is looking.

This is the conclusion I have come to after ruminating about The White Lotus some more.

I don’t actually care what the storyline is for a character. I don’t care if they are a “good” person or a “good example” or if they represent any particular values.

When it comes to diversity and increasing representation, all that matters is physically, tangibly increasing representation, and that means who is actually on screen.

This made me rethink Zola… we saw it a few months ago. I blanched a bit because there are significant parts of the movie where Zola has no agency… things just happen to her. But on further reflection… it is her story. The camera is on her. It is processing how she is processing the things happening to her. And that, these days, is all I really care about.

Attaching some kind of “well, is this narrative a good representation of this marginalized group” is actually kind of deadly; it’s both limiting and boring. And it’s a restriction that white characters in movies and television haven’t had to fulfill in decades (if ever). White people can be anything on screen. Everyone else should be able to, as well. Just show them. Show them to me. Show them thinking, looking, reacting, wondering, drifting off, anything. Show them to me.

And here are some good examples, recently seen, where you can see just that:

The Chair (Netflix): This really pushed the limit of how much white male buffoonery I can take, but it stopped just short of my breaking point (it might go past yours), and they did themselves the favor of casting Jay Duplass who is immensely likable. Sandra Oh is the radiant star, with brilliant presence from Holland Taylor and Nana Mensah as well. And always nice to see one of my favorite character actors Bob Stephenson show up.

The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Netflix): This has been on my list for a long time, it came out in 2016. It’s directed by Taika Waititi, what else do you need to know?

Reservation Dogs (FX/Hulu): Watched the first two episodes of this and enjoyed it a lot… sort of a Bottle Rocket-ish slice-of-life look at indigenous American teenage life in Oklahoma. Goofy and fresh-feeling (and co-created by Taika Waititi… WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?).

Have a great weekend!

And now here is a photo, so you don’t accidentally see something you don’t want to see in the text.

Overall: ambivalence.

I am a huge fan of Mike White. I love pretty much everything he has ever done, from Chuck and Buck to Enlightened to School of Rock.

But.

In essence, The White Lotus is a television show that wants to steep itself in white privilege, to tell a story about white people. I couldn’t get over the fact that at one point a character of color accuses a white person of associating with them “for cred”, and that’s how the actors of color in this show feel to me. In the end, they are mostly in service to the self-actualization of the white storylines.

Oh and by the way, this show is impeccably crafted, beautifully shot, Jennifer Coolidge is a national treasure, the dialogue is sharp and compelling, it’s all wonderful. But it’s like the marriage that Rachel finds herself in… it’s perfectly appealing and hollow at its core.

This show isn’t really interested in telling Lani’s story, or Kai’s story, or Belinda’s story, or even Paula’s story really.

Which is fine, on some level I respect Mike White for saying, “look, I’m a white guy, I don’t want to pretend I can tell the story of colonialism and theft in a historical or present-day context”. But then… maybe don’t use those themes as set dressing.

Maybe just give us a fun juicy show about rich people in a hotel.

Don’t use stories of manifest destiny and oppression and class struggle for cred.

I feel like I could either write thirty pages more or just stop here.

Let’s stop here.

Have a great weekend.

I feel like the world is telling me to stop complaining about the way Asian people are treated. Not in any direct way, but just through complacency and indifference.

I just finished reading a comic called Birthright. It’s a fun engaging story, and it’s from Image Comics/Skybound, so in the back there are previews for other series from the same company to give you a taste of what they are like.

In the last issue I read, the preview was for a comic book called Fire Power. It’s about an Asian-American (adopted by white parents) who seeks his destiny as a martial arts warrior. Here’s the cover.

The creators are Robert Kirkman and Chris Samnee. Here is a picture of Robert Kirkman and Chris Samnee.

How in 2021 do we not only have a series about an Asian-American traveling to the east (and meeting mystic gurus) and it’s two white dudes making it, and literally no one cares?

I mean, I’m not even sure if I care. I’ve liked Kirkman’s stuff before, so maybe the series is fun.

I guess I’m just tired that Asian culture is used so often without actually involving Asian people. And I don’t even have the energy to raise a stink about this one, because I intuit that the output of effort to have the conversation is out of proportion to the actual change that will happen, or even the interest that anyone white will have in the discussion.

Anyway, cut to six months from now when I’m like “Fire Power is so good and I would love to play Joe Lo Mein the lovable sidekick in it!!!”

Fun stuff:

• Take it with a grain of salt, but this is a test to see who verbally creative you are.

• The high jump provided my favorite moment of the Olympics so far.

• Bella Poarch’s “Build a Bitch” is my favorite song of 2021.

• I made a delicious condiment in my pressure cooker/slow cooker: tomatoes, olive oil, salt, garlic, rosemary, whatever else you want to season it with, slow cook/pressure cook for 3-6 hours, and mash it up (I blended it). I’m thinking of taking this approach with any vegetables we aren’t getting around to using.

• And for that, get some squeeze bottles so you have the tasty sauce at the ready (no affiliate link, I’m too lazy to make one).

• Finally, this is my favorite recent purchase, a USB-powered stick to treat insect bites. If you get a mosquito bite, you hold this on it, and it heats it up and kind of kills the itch. I don’t really know how it works. And you panic for a second because it is really hot. But then it’s not and you don’t itch anymore.