Extra Evil - Federal Deficit Disorder

Today’s Fortune: Artificial flavor solves real stress.

Newsreel

The police are your friends. You need new friends.

It's time to play global economic chicken again.

Erik Prince remains the Tom Brady of war criminals.

We got biopunk weight-loss drugs without the cool mutants.

Iran launched a gritty Footloose reboot.

TikTok's CEO is set to reuse and watermark Zuckerberg's testimony.

Today's Mood

War Journal

In the market for a hobby? Try history. Any history. Civil War, medieval, financial, alternative, any niche works.

All of it makes me feel better about life today. We break fewer people on the wheel.

I couldn't watch anything for a while.

That's not a statement on the media. Plenty of good material came out, and I had half of it on a list. But something was fried in my head for months.

Reading and gaming were fine. I could still grade papers and play X-Com (two activities I definitely did separately and not at the same time). But getting through Steamboat Willie in one sitting was out.

I suspect film's more annoying purists share this problem. "It can't be my fault my attention span is vapor. Every director alive must be a failure."

Dirty secret: I didn't finish off Cyberpunk: Edgerunners  until Sunday. The last two episodes were good. Action-stuffed, coherently plotted, and full of fun Trigger animation notes. But something undiagnosed had hacked my head. If it wasn't interactive, it didn't exist.

It must have been ego. A phase where I had to be involved in my entertainment. I think that's the purest form of divadom.

Are you familiar with the whole Open Game License mess? If not, here’s a little inside baseball about people that don’t play baseball. Let's talk Dungeons & Dragons.

Wizards of the Coast, the generous overlords of my childhood, enjoyed a good half-decade. Podcasts, fan content, two years of isolation, and the coattails of the board game explosion brought D&D to people that didn’t memorize The Silmarillion. A nice turn for the game, and even nicer for the company. All they had to do was rip off a different fantasy setting every other year.

We're in the golden age of avarice, so you can guess where that went.

If you're doing well, shareholders are a curse. You can't come back to them with the same pile of diamonds. You have to explain your plan for a second pile. And may Adam Smith preserve you if you can't find it.

Wizards planned to tweak the rules for advertising their game for free. They wanted you to send them a finger or two for the privilege. The marks valued fandom caught on, unleashing a backlash that probably would’ve been more useful somewhere else, but remains welcome.

That said, I honestly get the scheme. It'd be the heist of the century, finding a way to rob people twice. But it requires a subtle hand, something the publisher of Oriental Adventures doesn't have.

This isn’t a new story. It happens with everything from music to eggs. Yet it still hits me every time.

Writing flamewars tend to go in circles because decent creative advice is rarely universal.

For example, I pal around with a writer we'll call Tanya. We went to the same debt factory, and now stand in the corner of the same events. She's better at all this, but for today's argument let's pretend we're even.

I tend to rush through everything, and Tanya tends to drag it out. The best writing advice I ever got was simply to slow down, and Tanya got the opposite. Both tips were miracles. Without the personal touch, this newsletter would be three words long. And a Gundam ripoff, but that’s a whole other issue.

The Present

My monthly 1-900-HOTDOG column is about the finest cosmic horror: British reality television.

In case you missed it and/or wisely filtered the word "supplement" in your email, I wrote a little fitness community parody.

Me? And Brendan McGinley? OnSecretly Incredibly Fascinating?  You should already be halfway through.

Imagine a rap video by Chinese state media. You know I couldn’t stay away.

It's time to try Everything Abridged .  Do it for America.

The Past

This is still my favorite satire piece here.

The Future

I hear Gutfeld! is hiring writers. Time to move up to the big leagues.

Still patting myself on the back for solving that plot problem.

Submitted a proposal for something amusing. But it's a long shot.

One Sentence Reviews

Puss in Boots - The Sequel to a Shrek Spinoff: This being great goes against nature. (4/5)

Mia Jackson - I Got Electrocuted Trying to Eat Some Hot Dogs: The first great Civil Rights Movement joke I heard this week. (3.5/5)

Roy Wood Jr. - Father Figure: The second great Civil Rights Movement joke I heard this week. (4/5)

Dulcé Sloan - I Was Forced to Move to New York Because of Success: Peaks at the title. (2/5)

Yamaneika Saunders - Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents: An EKG machine of interest. (2.5/5)

Wanda Sykes - Sick & Tired: Fun fact: Wanda Sykes was the Dayle household go-to comedian. (4.5/5)

This Book is Full of Spiders: I read at my own pace, okay? (5/5)

Open Question

(Explanations next week, if desired.)

Signing off

Thanks for reading Extra Evil, the newsletter digging to Pandemonium. Share it to drill faster.

-DD