Extra Evil - Heavier Metal
Today's Fortune: It's not too late to start that cult.
Newsreel
The fire’s literal too.
Mike Johnson’s General Lee landed again.
We have history’s newest, youngest, and last darts champion.
Bezos lost his newsroom with your package.
US Steel almost escaped before the inauguration.
AI news feeds work as well as expected.
A Photo
War Journal
Happy Public Domain Week. Century-long copyrights seem odd, until you consider ghosts. It’d be sad to see Walt’s phantom homeless. Well, not really, considering his hobbies. But it’d look bad.
Odd that we still get terrorists without manifestos. Why let your last act be misinterpreted, debated, or rebranded? If I blew up a building, there’d be a six-book fantasy cycle with Ayn Rand’s subtlety and grace. While Ser Awesome, Slayer of Private Prisons wouldn’t be appointment reading, it’d clarify some points.
Sure, Stirner’s kids like typing “the propaganda of the deed.” That idea, like most of the anarchist canon, is wobbly in theory and doomed in the field. Though the doodles were nice.
It’s probably just my inner editor. Clarity’s important.
I’ve left EST behind. Again.
Time’s gotten wacky on this end of the keyboard. It’s all me. I’m adamant about squeezing in one more thing, or just making sure this newsletter has less typos than usual. Then bam, I’m back on vampire hours. My Vitamin D levels are somewhere around cartoon goth.
But there’s hope! Maybe. There’s a plan.
I’m three weeks off from a trip to the other side of the planet. Now, I’d accept a short stint of being on local time. But the elite move is inverting my sleep schedule again there, and returning home normal. Weaponized jet lag. It’s a health essential that I live in the nightclub.
Or I’ve lost my mind. Whatever.
This time, I’m inching towards something. I’ve got a project percolating that I think fans of the “Not Sponsored By” section will love. I just have to keep everything else from melting.
I might tiptoe back to a gym. One outside, with other people. I’ve done the bunker home gym thing since the plague, and I want to see what everyone’s arguing about. I hear aspiring influencers outnumber the living.
The Present
Preordering “How to Dodge a Cannonball” saves the coral reefs. [My Next Book]
Everything Abridged makes too much sense these days. [My Previous Book]
The Past
Last year’s most popular prank played on a somewhat loud concern.
The Future
Get ready for game show heaven. Sorry, the other place. Hell. Game show hell.
Not Brought to You By
Ten thousand news cycles ago, I promised to hit retro fitness ads. Let’s jump into Physical Culture 09, from April 1909. The cover’s memorable:
The game never changes—this can’t be about being pretty. They’re saving your life. On to the interior. Maybe we’ll find the first seated calf machine.
Computer, enhance.
The game really never changes. Page one, from the top, is a magic muscle machine. We’ll still chase this dragon after transcending physical bodies. Then again, I would like to double or “treble” my strength.
I’d mock this, but it’s nice to include a quote from a real person that definitely existed. Since constipation still haunts mankind, it might be time to ditch the fiber and reclaim the Automatic Exerciser.
Naturally, they keep going. You have to when you’re wielding secrets this powerful.
Two thousand pounds! Google’s remains say the Guinness Record for a modern, steroid-powered hip thrust is 984. Because we’ve lost our way. Only the Automatic Exerciser can return our balsa wood hips to glory. I’ll spend my life finding this miracle machine.
No penalty today for wordiness, because the words are golden insanity. I read all of them. A victory at the cost of everything else.
Creativity: A+ | Persuasion: F | Sanity: F+
One Sentence Reviews
Castle - Evil Remains: Peaks high, like the target audience. (Rock/On)
Perfume - Nebula Romance, Part One: A cosmic treat. (Blast/Off)
Yakuza Zero (First Impression): A crime drama about Lu Bu. (Hell/Yeah)
Easy Question
Harder Question
Signing off
Thanks for reading Extra Evil, the newsletter with a new Automatic Exerciser. Share it to cure constipation.
RE: Yakuza Zero - Hell yeah.
Favorite non-compute machine: Trains. Partly because caboose is a fun word, but mostly because they are the most whimsical type of mass travel. When someone dies on an airplane or a bus, it's an indictment of society. When someone dies on a train, it's a novel.
Gotta give props to the concept of modern refrigeration. Sure an oven or a coffee machine is a sexier answer, but I can learn to cook food over an open fire if I must. I'd be lost without being able to keep leftovers and dairy on hand.
Edit: I'm in a hotel room where I had to toss some perfectly good pork fried rice because the room didn't have a fridge and I probably could have just kept it in my car overnight to freeze solid but didn't think of that.