Extra Evil - Our 1000th Customer

Today’s Fortune: You have 999 codefendants.

Jun 26, 2024

Newsreel

Mankind previewed future winters.

Two men you already have opinions on are debating.

Louisiana skipped ahead to 2026’s theocracy.

Russia stole our proxy-agitator trick.

There is no aid in Ba-Sing-Se.

Injured chimps like numbing plants. No word on Domino’s or bad movies.

Today's Mood

War Journal

1000 subscribers? Nice. No one should be alone on a watchlist.

The timing’s awkward: I, the Okay and Strong-ish Oz, have had trouble writing lately. I won’t say writer’s block—that term blends a range of problems from losing track of plots to losing track of rent. And I’ve kept my output alive. That said, each word’s taken far more MP to summon than usual. For the moment, there’s even a little tension opening a Word doc.

I’d scapegoat the dying planet, but I’m great in the heat. It’s my one superpower, even by Jamaican standards. Watching neighbors melt makes me feel like a war profiteer. Which, I suppose, is how an American should always feel. I digress. It’s not the weather. I’m losing more brain cells to calorie counting than the sun’s rebellion.

Oddly, there’s some backwards satisfaction to it. What I do put together feels like a grown-up, against-the-grain achievement. Like actually lying down for eight hours. In another era, I’d treat lagging output with Bacardi 151. Though that did make eight hours easy.

Anyway, I’ll do something for the milestone soon. Hopefully before I hit 2000, or plummet to zero.

If your program adds itself to startup, we are enemies.

Any decent parent or therapist (we seem to conflate them a bit of late) tells you to take yourself seriously, and separate games and reality. And it’s true! However hard I try, I can’t pull a decent Hadouken off on mass transit. Trust me, there’d be headlines.

But there’s a little point of nuance. When your vision’s obscured by fear/rage/regular news consumption, games are a great decision making filter. More simply: what would you do if this was a game? If you were controlling you, and playing to win? It’s my favorite way of abstracting problems.

Granted, this much more useful for lunatic powergaming types. But if you don’t burn time and energy optimizing your character, your life’s probably in decent shape anyway.

The Present

Clone bodies and you. [Exclusive Evil]

Twenty-six letters of impotent vengeance? Count me in. [1900HOTDOG]

The Espers make beautiful trash together. [1900HOTDOG]

Would Medabots be like Beyond Meat in the Pokemon universe? [1900HOTDOG]

Everything Abridged is undefeatable. [My Book]

The Past

I considered milking this joke for many more installments.

The Future

Get ready for a riff on human cloning. Unless I sent that out Monday. I sent it Monday, didn’t I? What exactly is time?

Either way, I’ll be on a podcast or two. Keep an eye open. Ear? You get it.

Not Brought to You By

Perhaps I seem harsh. Unpleasable, even. Like an antisocial, anticonsumer snob reviewing an industry he ditched in bad faith. Good point! Guilty.

This one made me smile.

Election riffs sink like lead now, but that has more to do with national arthritis, abuse of the idea over time, and skill issues. Ford’s here seventy years earlier, during the Imperium’s WW2 victory lap, with some lightness to it’s step. It’s hard to imagine the brand having this much fun today.

More technical note: the banners let this ad spam car data in an unobtrusive, easily ignored, and amusing manner. That’s nice.

Creativity: B+
Persuasion: A-
Sanity: B

Note: As a soft rule, Getting above a B+ in sanity requires an actively constructive point/agenda.