Extraneous Etcetera

So, it appears I've joined the tumblring cult. I'm Matt. I read, cook, drink, talk, smoke, write, eat, and frequently gallivant and carouse. I have very little influence, am a big fan of acronym-related humor, am often sleep deprived, and think Family Guy is an Emmy-nominated piece of shit (though I'm willing to give it another chance at some point). Guilty, drunken, wee-hour-of-the-morning pleasure? Chicken McNuggets with Sweet and Sour sauce. Reading? Swamplandia! (Karen Russell). Re-reading? Savages (Don Winslow). If you've reached this point by accident, I suggest panic. In memory of DFW, rest in peace. Thanks for everything. I am not evil.

[theidiotking]

“Lifetime Orders Amish Crime Drama Film/Backdoor Pilot Starring Neve Campbell”

[christinefriar]

Amish is so hot right now. Amish is the new going green. Are these veggies Amish? Were they grown without the use of electricity and harvested by a man who doesn’t believe in clothes with buttons?

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

Weird Al Yankovic did it before it was cool.

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

Am I the only one who logs onto Facebook and thinks, "Why did I just do that?"

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday… And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what — a hundred years? two hundred? — and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1863, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

I've been reading The Pale King for a while. There's been much of the above. It's a Debbie Downer of a book. And, as a fan of Wallace, I feel like it's a slap in the face. Reading it is like hanging out with the guy who is sharp as a whip, but wastes his talents at being brilliant at nothing but making himself and others miserable. Here's where Wallace gets to me. And here's where he disappoints me, as well. I've been a huge fan of him and his writing for years. One thing I love about Wallace's fiction  is the primary need for kindness in this miserable tedium we call our life. That's what fiction is for, he insisted. Fiction reveals to us that, though this life may be meaningless, what we do have is our story. And we are the main characters of our story. And since this story is all we have, it's up to us to make it a great one. It's up to us to be the hero, the one who is conscious of others and considerate and, above all else, kind. That to be petty and unkind was to make yourself the antagonist of your own story. It was to commit the writer's worst sin, to be self-consciously commonplace and uninteresting. That to, say, take every ordinary inconvenience and turn it into a personal insult (the lady taking too long in the shopping line, for instance) was to remain on an unenlightened, default setting. It was to deny your own humanness.

So, of course, I agree with Wallace in the above passage. Our lives are meaningless and insignificant and hopeless. But where I feel betrayed by Wallace is that he's come to decide to end the story there. To end with insignificance and emptiness. I feel betrayed because it was Wallace who taught me so well that even though it may be the darkest it's ever been, there must be an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Gratitude that we have what we have, meaningless and pointless and minuscule as what we have may be. That the point of reading and, most important, the point of a life well lived was to snap ourselves out of this default setting of pettiness and self-importance and see the jest of it all.

David Foster Wallace, for all he's taught me, finally betrayed himself. And it upsets me that he wasted his talent and remained in this brilliantly dismal mindset until his suicide. It upsets me to read someone whose writing I had so much respect for give up on what it was about his words that so inspired me: though it's all for naught there's always that question, to quote Infinite Jest, that has the potential change everything: "Yo, man. What's your story?" 

[ianbrooks]

[geekleetist]

ianbrooks:

Firefly Art Nouveau Posters

Prints available for preorder at Quantum Mechanix, the latest in their gorgeous Art Nouveau series which also features the starlets of Serenity:

And they even do the lovely Mrs. Reynolds Safron complete with vintage Lassiter pistol:

(via: io9)

•Geekleetist: By Megan Lara…the cutest swearingest girl on the nets! When I find One Eyed Willy’s treasure…I’m buying all these f•ckin shits. Beautiful•

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

I really like Wilco.

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

You know what?

The Avett Brothers suck. They also sound awful.

[christinefriar]

Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some people deserve to be marginalized and excluded.

Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare? | Stephen Marche for NYTimes Magazine (via drinkyourjuice)

[beautemillesimee]

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.

Stephen King (via aeloquence)

[christinefriar]

Dear Herman, If being gay is a choice, show us the proof. Choose it. Choose to be gay yourself. Show America how that’s done, Herman, show us how a man can choose to be gay. Suck my dick, Herman. Name the time and the place and I’ll bring my dick and a camera crew and you can suck me off and win the argument. Very sincerely yours, Dan Savage

I love everything about this.

Dan Savage Challenges Herman Cain To Prove Being Gay Is A Choice By Performing Oral Sex On Him

(via drinkyourjuice)

[thinkstank]

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

thinkstank:

The Big Markovski

Randomly generated scenes from the Coen Brothers classic, using a markov process to synthesize dialogue from the original script.

Here it is, go abide.

Way out west there was this fella... fella I wanna tell ya about. 

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

I should have gone to bed a while ago but this weather is so holy-fuck awesome there's no way I'm going inside.

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

Sometimes I think, when I get home from work at the end

of the day (ha if by "day" I mean "late/early ass-bitch whore taint of the morning" then, yeah.), the fact that I made it through a ten-and-a-half hour shift without firebombing the cockeyed fuck out of my place of employ is a testament to my super-human patience and goodwill.

'Tis all.

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

You pretty much can't, is the answer. At least, I'm not going to. Either way, this will be helpful for planning your next bank heist.

Also interesting is the former patrol officer's response:

Your chosen city of flight may have the rattiest squad cars in the country, but they have the distinct benefit of redundancy. Your escape vehicle is precious, because there is only one. Nuke a tire from hitting spikes or a pothole, and you're roasted. If a patrol car has a blowout, that unit will fall out and be replaced by another. If you think your car can outrun and outlast what will effectively be an infinite number of responding unit vehicles (when you account for interagency involvement), have at it; otherwise, you may need to rethink your day.

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

n a 2008 paper called The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations, a group from Yale University demonstrated that including neuroscientific information in explanations of psychological phenomena makes the explanations more appealing, even if the neuroscientific info is irrelevant.

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation.

A fascinating article even if I'm not sure I buy all of it.

[christinefriar]

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

drinkyourjuice:

Does anyone else feel really put-upon and annoyed reading these things?

Like, cool trauma. Thanks for making me feel guilty for things I have no control over. Run for office, go to therapy, or stfu. I’m here for the gifs, not to congratulate you on having survived your first world childhood.

That last one on your list? Yeah. You are.

[scullandoars]

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

arnndffr:

The Catcher in the Rye was not meant to be a part of this emo hipster shit. Holden was just cynical and saw through people, not a little emo bitch.

Is it just me or does it seem that the entirety of the previous page is also highlighted?

[zoobunny-deactivated20210203]

That awkward moment when someone I follow posts a porn/sex/"sensual" picture

[extraneousetcetera-blog]

zoobunny:

And I look at it and think:

1) That looks uncomfortable.

2) Why would anyone be sexually aroused by that move? I would just fold my arms and say, “What are you doing?”

3) Apparently other people only have sex in black and white. Do I need to get my eyes checked?

4) At least I’m not in a library or at my parents’ house.

As for being at the library, it seems your remark is relevant.