The Mezunian

Die Positivität ist das Opium des Volkes, aber der Spott ist das Opium der Verrückten

A Year o’ Yuppie Inanity with Mozilla’s Pocket ( An Unpublished Classic )

Accompanying music

A couple years ago, Firefox, my browser o’ choice for purely traditional reasons ( when I started using it, Chrome didn’t exist yet, & all its then competitors sucked ass — still do, actually ), decided to bless me by showing me recommended articles by Pocket. ¿What is Pocket? I don’t know & I don’t care. All I know is that whene’er I opened a new tab or opened my browser, I got to see 3 new articles with zany images that looked like they belonged on Clickhole, from such venerable sources o’ wisdom as Offspring Lifehacker ( ’cause I definitely want to get responsible advice for raising living human beings from nerds who compare raising kids to hacking a computer ) or Nosepickings, — er, I mean Brainpickings — or e’en such refined repositories as the New York Buzzfeed Times or the Bezos Post, where democracy dies in dimness.

Reframe your relationship with the internet. Pocket helps you put down the clickbait and pick up the content that matters to you.
Blatant bullshit alert.

’Cept the New York Times then turns round & says I have to pay, which isn’t going to happen, since they’ll just waste it on Thomas Friedman’s moustache wax. Shit, I can’t e’en be bothered to hack their sad JavaScript code from ScriptKiddies.com used to try keeping me from reading their work for free. I guess you can’t expect a newspaper that can’t figure out how to hire competent writers to hire competent web programmers.

The New York Times. Booking.com. What you pay is what you see see. No booking fees, cleaning fees, or any other fees. You have reached your limit of free articles. Already a subscriber? Log in. Help us hold power to account. Subscribe to The New York TImes. 50% off one year. Limited time. You may cancel anytime. Are you a student? Special rates here.

Holding power to account, sponsored by Booking.com.

This article is dedicated to the best hits o’ those recommendations o’er the year, carefully kept in my pantry for years like eggs, to their perfect ripeness o’ stank.

For example, as I started writing this post, Mozilla helped me by giving me a perfect example:

Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot. By Nautil.us. How the null hypothesis keeps the hairy hominid alive. I recently got an email from an anthropologist commenting on a new report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Big tech has your kid’s data — and you probably gave it to them, by Vox. Many parents today enjoy posting about their family on social media. But along with those adorable photos, they are sharing crucial data about their children.

When I think o’ hard-hitting news articles that fight “fake news”, as Mozilla proclaims in 1 o’ their messages, I think o’ an article named “Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot”… ¡As the mastermind ’hind the Democrats’ Pizzagate conspiracy! ¡It all ties together now! As for “Big tech has your kid’s data — and you probably gave it to them”, that’s definitely fake news, ’cause I don’t e’en have kids.

I love this example ’cause it demonstrates yet ’gain how “new fads” are just the ol’ with new names. Much as how “SJWs” are just last century’s politically correct & today’s “fake news” is last century’s “yellow journalism”, “clickbait” is just a new name for “Weekly World News” tabloids. ’Cept now newspapers that call themselves serious are jumping on the self-driving car right off the cliff.

¿Think I’m joking ’bout that New York Buzzfeed jab? ¿Have you tried reading such hard-hitting pieces as, “Where to Find Bangkok’s Best Street Food While You Can” or “7 Ways to Keep Your Bedroom Comfortably Cool This Summer”? ¿How ’bout “The Last Great Clothing Store” or “Bananas vs. Sports Drinks? Bananas Win Study”? That latter 1 sounds like some wacky gorillamilk pseudorandom humor. ¿How ’bout “36 Hours in Budapest”? ¿Or “The Highs and Lows of Testosterone”? Then there’s “The Univesity Is Fake. The Laughs Are Real.” showing me a sexy caption o’ some guys big crotch-emphasizing belt. Mmm… You got my buttersworth, New York Times. After that we have some sexy gossip like, “Conana O’Brien’s Unequited Fanboy Love for Robert Caro”. ¿Who’s Robert Caro? ¿Who fucking cares?

Too many fucking articles to write alt tags for. They’re not worth reading, anyway.
Pictured: The New York Times landfill.

Then you have the New York Times turning into the New York Lifehacker with such hard-hitting advice as “How to Avoid a Renovation Nightmare” & “How to Enjoy Fine Dining on a Fast Food Budget”. They e’en follow QZ in spreading fake news ’bout me having a child with their article, “How I Know You Wrote Your Kid’s College Essay”.

But the New York Times isn’t the only venerated New York newspaper to give us tips. ¿Have you read the New Yorker’s high-class article, “Yes, I Use a Hair Dryer to Make Roast Chicken—Here’s the Recipe”. I was still ’live when this newspaper still insisted on spelling “cooperate” with a diaeresis. How papers rot quickly.

By the New Yorker. “Yes, I Use a Hair Dryer to Make Roast Chicken—Here’s the Recipe. Roast chicken is probably my—”

The Washington Post, meanwhile, fights for oligarchy “democracy” with such bold news as “Ten fruits and vegetables you’re storing wrong” & “NBA players know they’re addicted to their phones. Good luck getting them to”. ¿To what? O, god, I haven’t had to endure this much tension till I had to wait a whole day to see whether Heather Fairchild would truly get run o’er by that train.

A lot o’ these articles are virtually advertisements, oft for some celebrity the writer’s wanking off to. For instance, we have “Can Jack White Change His Stripes?”. See, it’s clever ’cause The White Stripes have been broken up since 2011 & Jack White’s been doing other things for years before this article came out. Then we have “The Instagrammer Teaching People How to Live Like Pioneers”. “Instagrammer” is up there with “Guy who sits on his couch all afternoon in his boxers rubbing his crotch as he watches court shows” in prestigiousness.

Also, Pocket for some reason kept giving me basketball articles, woefully ignorant o’ my utter lack o’ interest in that pastime. You would think this service would a’least, I don’t know, pay attention to what kinds o’ articles I actually click on & maybe use that as an indication o’ the kind o’ articles I might want to read.

Anyway, like the wisdom o’ Allah ( who’s totally different from God, guys — look, he’s wearing a moustache ), the # o’ these idiotic articles is so numerous you could fill the earth with a sea o’ its ink, & thousands will still be puking out a thousand mo’ articles the very next day. I literally have o’er a thousand snapshots — & I only e’er use “literally” literally. Thus, I shall only treat you with the greatest o’ hits:

For instance, here’s a gem from my favorite woo factory, The Guardian, embarrassing the left with their mystic crank economics yet ’gain:

Empty half the Earth of its humans, It’s the only way to save the planet

By the Guardian

Nothing like clickbait that makes you sound worse than Hitler. As it turns out, the wacky writer — who isn’t a scientist & doesn’t provide anything resembling science in his long religious ramble, but is a science fiction writer, which is ’bout on par with studying medieval history under the tutelage o’ a random Renaissance Faire dork — isn’t saying we should kill off half the world’s population, but have them scrunch together in cities. Which he says we’re already doing — ¿so apparently we don’t have to do anything? ’Cept apparently it needs to be managed, anyway, or else… ¿it’s still happen, but not some vague way it should be happening? Robinson has a Ph.D in English, ¿& yet he can’t write an article for a prominent newspaper with a consistent, straightforward thesis?

After that, he says we should leave half the planet to, I dunno… Just grow back into Eden ’gain, ’cause it’s natural. Robinson clearly ne’er took a Logic 101 class, or else he would know that that’s a logical fallacy… which is something he should’ve had to take when getting his Ph.D in English, since being able to competently write persuasively is kind o’ a requirement in most English programs. Then ’gain, I used to be great @ math in school & I forgot all that shit, so maybe Robinson forgot all o’ his English learning & just scribbled out this nonsense for a quick buck for The Guardian. Can’t blame him: they probably didn’t pay him much.

Porcelain that looks like pastry

By Eater.

Mo’ than 100 o’ these articles are just “Here’s some niche thing you ne’er cared ’bout ’cause it’s irrelevant & stupid”.

By the way, ¿can I rant ’bout the annoyingly trite pattern o’ writing editorials like a story, with some description opening. “Joe Nobody wore a white T-shirt & talked with his mouth”. They act as if they’re the next Tolkien to hide from themselves the reality that they’re precious 200,000-word manuscript ’bout the depth o’ being a white middle-class, mildly liberal academic is languishing in some agent’s slush pile. Ironically, Robinson, who actually is a published writer, didn’t indulge in this nonsense, to his credit.

J. Cole Does Not Want to be Famous: Exclusive Interview

By Billboard. A photo o’ some schmuck who may or may not be J. Cole.

¿Then why are you writing a public news article ’bout him, assholes?

On Social Media and Its Discontents

By CalNewPort. As someone who has publicly criticized the major social media

I love that li’l snipped under the headline that seems like it’s trying to turn me off as much as possible. “As someone who has publicly criticized the major social media…” should be translated as “As someone who thinks he’s mo’ important than anyone else does…”. As someone who writes English using Latin letters, I can definitely authoritize that those are, indeed, words that have been written.

Nobody Knows Anything About China

Photo o’ a bunch o’ Chinese people staring & pointing @ a laptop. Fuck if I know.

Foreign Policy takes “No news is good news” straight to the heart.

24 Cognitive Biases You Need to Stop Making [Infographic]

Photo o’ a game o’ Chess with just a white queen in the front-center & a bunch o’ black pieces in the background.

#1: Thinking that yelling @ readers through your headlines will encourage them to listen to what you say.

I mean, look @ how shitty Lifehacker is @ Chess: they haven’t captured a single black & they’ve got only a queen left. That’s not e’en possible.

Wild Wild Country: The Jaw-Dropping Story of the Cult Next Door

Photo o’ a bunch o’ hippies in saffron robes straight off the set o’ “The Apple”.

There was a cult that murdered many people by forcing them to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Shit, there are authentic religious groups that have thrown gay people off buildings & made Creed albums. The only jaw-dropping I’ll be doing to these hippies in saffron robes is yawning.

How to Make a Whole Mess of Fancy Mussels

By Skillet.LifeHacker. Mussels are one of those sexy, evocative dishes that seems best

How ’bout I don’t ’cause that’s a stupid thing to do.

“Mussels are one of those sexy, evocative dishes…”.

Apparently the answer is “Furiously masturbate into it”. Remind me ne’er to go to any dinner party held by… ¿Skillet Lifehacker? God damn it, ¿how many subjects can you guys give bad advice in? I can’t wait till the 1st Health Lifehacker article: “22 Orifices You Need to Stick a Fork in Right Now”.

How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes or Less

A grayscale poster o’ some 50s-style guy leaning back in chair with his feet in ’nother chair.

Read clickbait headlines.

Why is Wes Anderson’s ‘Isle of Dogs’ set in Japan? We’re not sure either

A chef & a bunch o’ Japanese kids stare toward the viewer @ a TV screen with its back to the viewer.

¿Then why are you fucking writing ’bout it?

¿& who the fuck is Wes Anderson, anyway?

How to Enjoy Fine Dining on a Fast Food Budget

Steal.

How Bill Hader Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Show Business

Horrifying photo o’ what I presume is Bill Hader staring boggle-eyed @ something offscreen with an off-center Dreamworks smirk.

If the picture is any indication, it’s by becoming Jack Torrence from The Shining.

¿& who the fuck is Bill Hader, anyway?

Is it time to give up on fish oil?

Illustration o’ an ol’ man with a coffee mug sitting ’cross the table from a bug-eyed fish with a half-smirk, half-frown.

’Nother hard-hitting piece from The New York Times. Yet ’nother “I’m a random nobody, & I’m going to drivel on ’bout my particular ( but also not rare ’nough to be interesting ) life problems as if The New York Times were Livejournal”. ’Cept Livejournal is free. & it has crazier people, so it’s actually better.

Grampa to fish friend: “Hey, ol’ pal: ¿you think I should stop funding the butchery o’ your kind to feed my gluttonous maw?” No wonder that fish looks horrified.

Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use It

Photo o’ Nietzsche’s sexy moustache.

Nietzsche: “Um, ¿camera man? My face is up here”.

This “news” is essentially: “Hey, ¿do you remember that Nietzsche existed mo’ than a century ago?”.

“Nietzsche on Meaningless Buzzword, Meaningless Buzzword, & Some Jumble o’ Poetic-Sounding Words that Together Don’t Mean Anything”.

Globalization’s Backlash is Here, at Just the Wrong Time

Mo’ zany economists. This economist can’t e’en pretend that “globalization”, or “trade laws preferential to the rich people who wrote & lobbied for them” ( let’s remember that “strong-arming other countries into accepting US draconian copyright law & patent law based mo’ on how much money you have than what role you had in creating the idea” is defined as “free trade” in the Orwellian world o’ economics ), as somebody actually honest might call it, isn’t harming working class people, so he just says, “Well, it’s too late, anyway” & claims that, anyway, all those Chinese people would’ve become well off & would’ve bought all the stuff Americans are making to balance things out… which is the same bullshit “the market always balances itself out” claim that economists had claimed in the 90s when Paul Baby-Sitters Club Krugman made his brilliant hot dog & bun factory metaphor. It’s almost as if the “market” isn’t run by some magical invisible hand in the sky that ensures karmic justice but is a complex social system full o’ inconsistencies that doesn’t balance out to anything @ all.

Nowhere is there any semblance o’ the scientific method or empirical evidence used in this article — like a striking lot o’ economics works. But I’m sure the book he’s advertised @ the end, The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, is a cool-minded, rigorous work o’ science & not sensationalist fawning o’er some corrupt politicos. ( I do like the use o’ the word “alchemists” for economists, since both are pseudosciences ).

How Kacey Misgraves Found Her Golden Hour

Photo o’ a woman in god-damn clown-striped pants holding a guitar. By Spin. On a dreary afternoon in late March, Kacey Musgraves pulls us

Since I don’t know who the fuck that is, I’m going to wager I don’t care.

There are good reasons for ignoring the news

Illustration o’ a man sitting on a couch chair wearing a paper bag on his head. By the Guardian. Wealthy American Erik Hagerman has entirely cut himself off from

“We have no self-awareness”. It’s almost as if The Guardian is taunting me with their shittiness now. Fun fact: that’s the same paper bag all The Guardian staff must wear on their face in public to hide the shame that is their buffoonery.

It’s easy when nobody in the news industry produces any actual news.

Teachers and Parent Share Stories From Inside the 'Fortnite' Phenomenon

By Waypoint.Vice

Maybe if they spent less time sharing stories ’bout their kids that nobody cares ’bout they’d have mo’ time to learn proper style & learn that video game titles aren’t put in quotation marks but italicized. Typing it like that makes you look like an obnoxious idiot who makes quotation fingers when talking ’bout this thing all the hip kiddie-Os are into.

For fuck’s sake, they’re not e’en real quotation marks, but the half-assed flat marks people had to suffice with in ASCII.

‘Grandma’s food’: How changing tastes are killing German restaurants

By Washington Post.

This is the worst thing to e’er happen in Germany.

A diet guru explains why you should eat dinner at 2pm

[Missing picture, Richard]

& I ’splain why this “guru” can go fuck himself.

“First, there was the change is what we were[ … ] [ emphasis mine ]”. Still in the blurb, & we already find a typo. Keep those standards strong, QZ.

How to Craft A Life You Don’t Need to Escape From

[Image missing]

I feel like the answer to most o’ these clickbait headlines could be, “Go seek help: you have mental problems”.

Also, the Grammar Gestapo in me is amused by the way “a” & “from” are capitalized, but “to” aren’t. It’s almost as if someone tried to emulate the strange pattern o’ headline capitalization without knowing the rules ’hind it.

A Naturalist With a Checkered Past Rediscovered a Long-lost Parrot… Then Things Got

[Image missing]

This isn’t news: this is the beginning o’ an elevator-speech blurb for some wacky airport novel.

&, god damn it, ¿why would you e’er capitalize “with”, but not “lost” there? ¿Why would you e’er think “with” would be mo’ prominent than “lost”? ¿Don’t you guys know why we capitalize certain words & not others? This is why I’m glad so many newspapers are shifting toward the Spanish style o’ only capitalizing the 1st word: that’s harder to fuck up & make look hideous. ¡I mean, look @ what what a hangnail that “With” is!

J.K. Rowling Needs To Stop Messing With Harry Potter

By Kotaku. Some pencil drawing o’ Harry Potter fighting a snake.

This isn’t news: this is just the Comic Book Guy whining, “They Changed It Now It Sucks”, ’cept rather than keeping it in the bowels o’ usernets, where they belong, like in the 90s, Kotaku is giving them a prominent podium.

The Best Board Games for Kids, According to a Board Game Blogger

A cheap photo with a plain white background o’ some generic board game.

This gold-standard advice by Offspring Lifehacker is right up there with “The Best Movie, According to Guy who Never Shuts Up About It @ Work”. Becoming a board game blogger is so prestigious you need to study for almost a decade to get your Ph.D in tabulaludemology.

How the Finnish lifestyle of getting drunk while wearing pants became the new hygeine

A beer bottle with legs & a face wearing red underpants sitting on a couch chair with a TV remote in their hand.

It’s better than getting drunk & not wearing pants, as they do in the States…

9 Genius Ways to Fold Clothes to Save Space

By Prevention. A photo o’ a blurry woman holding a stack o’ folded blue clothes.

& after that you can read, “22 Hobbies You Can Get to Fill the Black Hole that Is Your Meaningless Existence & Stop Worrying ’bout Such Frivilous Shit as whether Your Clothes Don’t Take Up a Li’l Too Much Space — ¿What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?”.

Want to live for ever? Flush out your zombie cells

By The Guardian. Image is a strange 3D graphic o’ a corner o’ a blobby liquidlike teal sphere with what look like a few orange grape bunches sprouting out from it. Look, it’s The Guardian — you know their graphic artist was stoned when he made this.

When I picture The Guardian’s staff, I can only imagine screw-eyed trollish people sitting around, gazing off @ the office tiles, high on peyote till 1 o’ them remembers they have some serious meeting with some business vital to funding their operation, hastily stands up, & tries to smooth o’er their wrinkled business suit & rub their hair into something resembling tidiness as they rush out the building.

He Got Schizophrenia. He Got Cancer. And Then He Got Cured.

Some eldritch monstrosity gainst with blood round its eyes & mouth & some orange skin below that & a cranium made o’ black eggs.

These choppy sentences in the headline make me think the writer’s got something, too.

I want to give a shout-out to his 5th-grade nephew for this wicked MS-Paint picture, though. That’s exactly how I picture people recently cured o’ schizophrenia & cancer.

Cat Power Is Doing Just Fine, Thanks

Grayscale photo o’ the face o’ some random woman. By The Cut. Let’s just get out of the way that Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, the indie-rock icon who has been known to cancel a tour to take care of herself, is okay. Not.

I didn’t give a shit ’bout this rando I’ve ne’er heard o’, so thanks to you, too, passive-aggressive headline.

An enemy of envy

By Austin K. Leon. Photo o’ a white card with “You’ve got to make an enemy of envy. – Jerry Saltz” written on it in marker tacked o’er photos.

I was mo’ interested in the starting snippet o’ the article below the title, “When I heard [ certified rando ] Jerry Saltz say this during his [ thing o’ his I’m plugging ], I immediately got up, write it down on an index card, and pinned it above my desk”. Mr. Saltz then informed him that his anus was bleeding from this writer jamming his head into it so hard. If this was worthy o’ the decisive index card, I think he’s going to need to buy many mo’ packs if he were to accidentally stumble ’pon & read a work o’ actual credible philosophy.

In Praise of Mediocrity

By NYTimes. Photo shows man’s bristly chin chiseling wood figures. “The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure. I’m a little surprised by how many people tell me they have no hobbies. It may seem a small thing, but — at the risk of”

A’least we know that the New York Times lives by this credo.

The Cat Who Could Predict Death

By Tonic Vice. Indescribably regal photo o’ a tabby’s face in side view taking up the left half o’ the photo, most o’ its back in dark blue shadow while its serious staring face is brightly lit. The right half o’ the photo is just blue shadowy abyss.

(Laughs). That impressive photo o’ the cat seals the bathos. We need to make a statue o’ that face.

There are too many video games. What now?

By Polygon. Picture is illustration o’ a pastel-colored hero that looks like they belong in Steven Universe standing before a cloudy city o’ giant sword towers jutting up from the cloudy floor. ’Hind them is a black starry sky, half covered by curling aquamarine fog.

Stop buying them. Now let’s move on to the real problems…

Da Story of Da Bears: How an ‘SNL’ Sketch Defined Sports Fandom

By the Ringer. Image is a still frame o’ Da Bears sketch.

Ah, yes, I almost forgot ’bout the vital news article that ’splains a meme to all us squares — in this case, an outdated meme that will switch the roles round, but still make the young shake their head in shame.

Pokémon: The 20-year fad

By Polygon. Photo o’ 2 Game Boy Colors side-by-side in the center, 1 playing Pokémon Yellow, the other playing Pokémon Gold. On either side o’ them are cartridges for Pokémon Blue & Red.

The article is actually ’bout the opposite: arguing that it’s ridiculous to think Pokémon is just a fad. Good thing nobody I’ve e’er met thinks that, since it is, indeed, ridiculous. I’m glad Polygon used their limited resources to fight gainst such an important strawman they made up in their mind.

A radical idea for reducing inequality deserves more attention

By The Economist. Image is an illustration o’ a Pachinko machine. “RECENT decades have not been particularly good ones for those who toil on, rather than own, the means of”

If Karl Marx had named his book this ’stead o’ dusty ol’ “Das Kapital”, he would’ve won the world o’ ideas. Sadly for Marxists, who spend the rest o’ their lives hiding in the shelter o’ their dimly-lit college campuses, that role has been seized by the philosophy o’ waking up @ 7 am every morn & only eating food whose calorie count and carbohydrate % are prime #s.

If this image is any indication, The Economist’s radical idea is for everyone to gamble on pachinko. I can say from experience that that is, indeed, a popular philosophy for bettering the livelihood o’ the working class ’mong the working class. But like communism, it’s just a fantasy — albeit a much mo’ expensive 1. This is why I support communism: it’s a cheaper distraction for the working classes than gambling & alcoholism. Plus, e’en if it wouldn’t make any lasting societal change, I think ’twould be fair ( &, mo’ importantly, entertaining ) to see a working class person take a whack @ a rich guy just a few times. I’d make a joke ’bout a dystopian novel ’bout a corrupt capitalist society that keeps itself sturdy by sacrificing a few rich people a year to let the poor murder them however they want in return for letting the rich stay in control; but I think that’s the role pretensious left-wing intellectuals play in the real world. “I’ll let you exploit me; but let me fantasize ’bout shooting that Soros Jew”.

Look, guys, these Pocket ads have truly worn me down. I had to suffer for them for your entertainment; now you must suffer through my bleak humor for my entertainment.

On brighter topics: we need to demand Konami make a Karl Marx pachinko game. It’s a historical necessity, in honesty.

The Only Story in the World: John Steinbeck on Kindness, Good and Evil, the Wellspring of Good

By Brainpickings. Graphic is a grayscale photo o’ presumably John Steinbeck leaning back in a chair, staring @ something offscreen.

This is fake news: there are, in fact, a’least quite a few mo’ stories than just 1 in all eternity.

How to write the perfect sentence

By The Guardian. Photo zoomed in on paper with cursive writing full o’ editing scribbles. “Every writer, of school age and older, is in the sentences game. The sentence is our writing commons, the shared ground where all writers walk. A poet”

These crackas @ The Guardian mix up “for ever” & “forever”, & now they try to tell me what a perfect sentence is.

If the snippet is any indication, they drivel on ’bout nothing — so typical The Guardian content.

How to Help Teenagers Embrace Stress

By NYTimes. Photo o’ a student with their back to the camera & their hood-covered face down in their arms on the desk next to a plastic red bin full o’ binders & composition books.

Certified Word Creator Mezun Mezzanine says that whipping them is always best.

American Weirdness: Observations From an Expat

By The Atlantic. Image is a photo collage o’ an SUV with a Coke bottle for a body & a toothbrush for a hood driving o’er iPods littering the ground, seemingly driving ’way from avocado toast peeping out from the yellow sun in the background.

¡Ha, ha, ha! ¡Americans are disgusting, backward slobs! This may be true, sir; but not only is it not news, I don’t take that shit from someone who thinks “from” deserves to be capitalized in a headline.

How to Live Better, According to Nietzsche

By the Atlantic. Illustration o’ a yellow head split in half with a staircase ’tween them, cut off by some kneeling naked man. ’Hind this all is a starry purple void.

Anyone who has read Nietzsche’s biography knows that Nietzsche is not a good role model for living well.

Need to Find Me? Ask My Ham Man

This is a 100% real headline from the New York Times, the same organization that published the Pentagon Papers. This is 100% scientific proof that God is dead.

Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore

[Image missing]

Americans have ne’er “practiced democracy” ’cause real democracies don’t have silly electoral college systems, but are actually elected by popular vote. It’s only people ignorant o’ how the US’s electoral system works or idiotic Americans who think “democracy” is “whatever the US electoral system says” who think the US is democratic.

Ignoring that, though, if whoe’er wrote this trite article actually looked @ the data, they would know that voter turnout is ’bout the same level it’s always been this century & that the President’s election better reflects popular will mo’ nowadays than in the past. Americans have ne’er been big voters & have ne’er not looked @ the election in a cynical way. If anything, now people have a reason to care mo’, since now there are actual real ideological differences ’tween the Republicans & Democrats: back as early as the mid 90s, & definitely during the late 1800s, who you preferred was generally based on clan mentality. ( That’s OK, ’cause elections were generally decided by Boss Machines, anyway ).

But we can’t let that get in the way o’ our ol’ bloated pundit full o’ hot air bemoaning the loss o’ the ol’ days when things were idyllic & the average upstanding citizen said “golly” & “swell” as they watched the local negro get lynched.

Li’l Wayne Is Ready For His Comeback

By Billboard. Photo o’ Li’l Wayne walking through a beach forest in beach clothes.

He’s the only 1.

The Startup Whiz Trying to Make Big Business out of Social Philanthropy

By New Yorker. Photo o’ some young shit walking down a cracked street with his hands on his belt like he’s a god damn cowboy. He ain’t.

We call those “con men”.

On the Sidelines Of Democracy: Exploring Why So Many Americans Don’t Vote

’Cause unlike the people who write these articles, they have real jobs.

Also: the US is not & has ne’er been a democracy, you idiots. Take a history or civics class for once, please — this is high-school shit. You just need to read 1 o’ our wonderful slaveholding founders ranting ’bout how democracy is anarchy, man, or know how electoral colleges work to know this.

This year’s Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to a Python convert

By QZ. Photo o’ an ol’ man in front o’ a microphone. “Economist Paul Romer, a co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, is many things. He is one of most”

Considering the # o’ war criminals who have won Nobel Prizes, the fact that the Nobel Prize Committee’s just an arbitrary group o’ rich people with loud opinions, & the fact that Alfred Nobel himself was gainst the existence o’ an economics Nobel Prize ’cause he ( rightfully ) viewed them all as corporate shills, I think some heathen who prefers a programming language used quite oft for mathematics & data can get a pass. I mean, it’s not like he chose PHP. Honkeys would shoot his ass if he touched that gunk.

The appealing myth of the frugal billionaire

By Vox. Photo o’ Fuckerberg standing before a microphone podium with his mouth wide open, his teeth jutting out like he’s a shark.

See, now the genius who took this hilariously embarrassing photo o’ Fuckerberg deserves a Nobel Prize for Best Photography. “Huh huh huh. Duh… I made the social mediaz”.

Worries about the rise of the gig economy are mostly overblown

By the Economist. Photo o’ 3 millennial fuckwits walking down a sandy path toward an occupied beach. “IT IS a warm morning on Bondi Beach. Simon and Sophia are drinking coffee on a terrace while athleisure-clad millennials stroll by. The young”

People make fun o’ country bumpkins who claim climate change can’t be real ’cause it snowed once, but self-claimed “intellectuals” don’t blink when “classical liberals” ( too bad it’s “classical” like ham in the back o’ your fridge, not wine ) claim that they saw 3 rich young shitheads go surfboarding, clearly such silly things as economic stability are useless. ¡Surfs up, bro! ¡Let’s catch this wicked boom!

Smartphones Aren’t Ruining Your Eyes

We need a section for “antinews”: bringing up that something isn’t happening. Breaking News: Pigs Still Don’t Fly.

A Saudi Prince’s Quest to Remake the Middle East

By New Yorker. Photo collage o’ Saudi Prince with his hand held up merged with 2 other randos — I think the whitey @ the top is Jared Kushner. All is in black & white & deep green.

The true news is meta: “Journalists who Fashion Themselves as Noble Opponents to Evil ( while, Conveniently, also Claiming to Be Unbiased, which Utterly Contradicts this Goal ) Suck the Dick o’ Murderous Dictators”.

But a’least we got this swanky Photoshop art o’ the Prince raising his hand to ask the teacher to let him go to the bathroom.

In Defense of Elon Musk

By Popular Mechanics. Photo o’ Musk next to some beaker thing. “He is under attack. For tweeting the wrong thing, for not making enough cars, for appearing unstable. Some of the criticisms have merit. Much of it is myopic and small-brained, from sideline”

“Rich White Person Not Loved by Everyone ’Nough”

Yes, but there’s no defense for this juvenile writing o’ choppy sentences. ¿Do these newspapers outsource their writing to the local Kindergarten?

How the Finnish survive without small talk

By BBC. Photo o’ a blonde woman standing clinging to a bar on a red subway as its doors are closing. “I met my now best friend Hanna a few years ago during my first visit to Helsinki, on a coffee date set up out of desperation. Without any acquaintances”

¿These fuckers are statistically the happiest people in the world, with some o’ the best health care, educations, & welfare systems in the world, & they don’t have to deal with drunken dipshits rambling ’bout some conspiracy theory they heard ’bout aliens? I don’t think it’s news that they’re surviving.

Small talk is legit just shitty talk. Wasting your time having small talk with people is the equivalent o’ sitting round reading the marketing copy on candy wrappers ’stead o’ reading Shakespeare.

Momo Is as Real as We’ve Made Her

By NYTimes. An illustration o’ the Momo meme. The real “Momo Challenge” is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here’s the truth of what we know. Released in 2002, “The Ring” furnished

Yes, you saw that right: The New York Times. ¿Have I mentioned that these are the same organization that released the Pentagon Papers? Remember that next time your douchie elitist moderate friend brags ’bout how smart they are for reading it & not filthy blogs.

Three Writing Rules to Disregard

By The Paris Review. Illustration o’ Moses that looks like it came from an airport novel. “I have nothing against rules. They’re indispensable when playing Monopoly or gin rummy, and their observance can go a long way toward improving a ride on the subway. The rule of law? Big fan.”

“#1. Don’t show irrelevant painting o’ Moses on your trite rules for writing advice written by someone who writes like a middle schooler”.

They waste the entire blurb blabbing ’bout how they do, indeed, still support the existence o’ some rules in life. Truly brevity is the soul o’ wit.

Why Americans are suddenly paying $550 per month for new cars

By USA Today. Photo is o’ a stereotypical fat lower-class person getting out o’ a big white SUV.

’Cause half o’ them are idiots & the other half are con men — & the whole sum are wastes o’ carbon.

Also, not to be that guy ( fuck it: I love being that guy ), but did they truly need to make their representative o’ the slobbish lowerclass American who chose to impoverish themselves with their fancy transportation without lobbying for themselves a large ’nough negative tax to pay for it like the frugal rich a fat black woman.

The Raisin Situation

By NYTimes. Grayscale photo o’ Sun-Maid sign. “FRESNO, Calif. — Millennials just weren’t eating raisins. So Sun-Maid, the century-old company with the iconic little red raisin boxes, hired someone to convince them that they should.”

The Greatest Generation bemoaned Baby Boomers & Gen X’ers as useless potheads & whiny brats; these generations twist a once-respected newspaper into bemoaning Millenials for not eating ’nough raisins. The Greatest Generation were so right ’bout Boomers & Gen X’ers that they can’t e’en bemoan their kids half-intelligently. “Back in my day we didn’t bitch ’bout you shits not buying ’nough raisins. ¿What the fuck is wrong with you, son?”

How this one font took over the world

By The Outline. Illustration white text o’ the word “GOTHAM” in Gotham font 4 times, gradually becoming thinner, o’er black background. “When I close my eyes and think of a word, I picture that word in Gotham.”

It didn’t. Hardly anyone uses Gotham or e’en knows ’bout it. ( Laugh ). That’s like someone writing, “How Ill Niño became the biggest band in the world” or “How Clannad Spelunker took over the world”. ¿What world does this writer live in?

All My JavaScript Is Broken and I Don’t Know Why

Sponsored by Sentry.io. Illustration o’ a faceless cell drawing with their head on fire in spotlight in a dark purple-gray void. “There are few things in life more enjoyable than good, healthy, broken code.”

You’re a shitty programmer & JavaScript’s a shitty language. There, I solved your issue. ¿Can you start giving me real news ’stead o’ some rando idiot’s whiny problems?

A Brand New Interview with David Foster Wallace

By Electric Literature. Photo o’ David Foster Wallace standing in front o’ a microphone podium with his head turned ’way toward something offscreen put through a threshold black-&-white Photoshop filter. “Eighteen years ago, writer and translator Eduardo Lago sat down with David Foster Wallace for a discussion that ranged from pedagogy to teniis to”

’Less it’s a séance, I don’t fucking think so.

Why suicide is falling around the world, and how to bring it down more

By The Economist. Illustration o’ a guy walking back down a long cliff. “YOU KNOW, says a trader in ‘Margin Call’, a film about the crash of 2008, as he stands high on a building above Wall”

I can say from personal experience that disabling Pocket in their Firefox browser would make a vast improvement.

Also, if The Economist wants me to be happy ’bout fewer people committing suicide, ¿do they truly want to pick a stock market trader as their example o’ someone saved from the noble duty o’ committing sepuku after fucking up & losing their family’s mortgage so they could fund the next “disruptive” start-up by some pothead 20-year-ol’ tragic waste o’ human life? Ha, ha, I’m kidding, capitalists — I love you guys. ( I’m kidding — no, I don’t ).

Two Harvard guys based their million-dollar business on a whole lot of nothing

By Washington Post. Photo o’ a tiny gray safe in the middle o’ a field o’ trees. “When I think about entrepreneurs and Harvard, I think about Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook mob, who started their”

That’s not news; that’s, like, 90% o’ businesses nowadays — including the Washington Post, which makes millions posting articles ’bout insignificant memes. Clearly stories ’bout some hicks scamming a bunch o’ idiots into giving them millions for a trailer is how they will fight the darkness that is clutching our “democracy” that was ne’er democracy — seriously, read a history book, guys, you’re just embarrassing yourselves.

Why are more Americans than ever dying from drug overdoeses?

By The Guardian. Illustration o’ US map with a bunch o’ red splatters all o’er it.

I would joke that this is obviously preferring to die with dignity than live in pathetic luxury as an American… but I have an inkling that dignity is a foreign concept to The Guardian.

“The growing drugs crisis sweeping across the US is deadlier than gun violence, car crashes or Aids [ sic: Christ, The Guardian can’t e’en spell AIDS correctly — ’less they’re referring to the assistants who helped Jared Fogle child-fuck his way out o’ obesity ], none of which have killed as many Americans…”. This thing that kills mo’ Americans is deadlier. Thank you for your acknowledgement that the laws o’ basic mathematics still continue, The Guardian — this is quite an accomplishment for you.

Toward a More Radical Selfie

By The Paris Review. Picture o’ some rando’s nose & mouth with the impressionist Photoshop filter applied to it. “We are at the end of an era characterized by the self-portrait. This claim is not provocative—we’ve lived as characters for some time and have all felt it coming.”

This is why communism failed — ’cause, ironically, the most bougie fucks e’er, the French, got their mitts on it & made it frivolous & lame so that now painting with your nose & making up academic terms is “radical” — radically boring. France needs to stop fucking round & go back to slaughtering some monarchs. I’m serious.

Showering Has a Dark, Violent History

By The Atlantic. Yellowing black & white illustration o’ an old-fashioned showering contraption. “The 19th century was a time of great innovation in plumbing. Cities got the first modern sewers, with tunnels that snaked for miles underground. Houses”

“¡Extra! ¡Extra! ¡Smelly Journalist Prepares Article on Evils o’ Showering, with Research & Everything, Just to ’Scuse Their Refusal to Shower!”

I love it when the “news” is fucking ol’s. If I wanted to read the history o’ showering, I have these things called search engines ( but not Google — that shit will just give me mo’ clickbait articles on what time o’ day Certified Groin-Cleaning Experts have empirically proven to make you mo’ likely to be a millionaire ).

Double Feature: “The world has just over a decade to get climate change under control, U.N. scientists say” & “How to Get More Done in Less Time”

By The Washington Post. Photo o’ Eiffel Tower recolored so that it’s green & the sky is rusty brown. “The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and”. Sponsored by Monday.com. Flat illustration o’ an eyeless frog sitting on a blue spoon in a cyan void. “Overwhelmed by your to-do list? Try this popular time management hack.”

¡Sounds like these U.N. scientists need Monday.com!

Fuck “Fiddling while Rome burns”; the phrase should be “Clickbaiting while the world drowns in humanity’s own oily fat”.

She Was Told ’No’ 100 Times. Now This 30-Year-Old Female Founder Runs a $1

By Entrepreneur. Woman in bizarre shirt with holes it its sleeves @ the shoulder, making her look like she has arm bands, laughing a bit manically in a generic, blurry office.

¡A whole $! ¡Holy shit! ¡Think o’ the whole gumball she’ll be able to buy! It’s a good thing Entrepreneur made thrifty use o’ their words to include that this entrepreneur was a female &, most shocking, 30-years ol’… which is probably round when most successful entrepreneurs become successful, or a’least way too many to count.

Teens And Teachers Say Fortnite Mobile Is Destroying Some Schools

Fortnite meme dances.

I thought Pokémon cards & rock & roll already destroyed school fore’er.

Look @ those menacing meme dances. Truly this is our world’s greatest trouble.

19 Great Truths My Grandmother Told Me on Her 90th Birthday

Close up o’ ol’ woman’s eye with shitty Photoshop filters splayed all o’er it.

#1: “You’re a shitty photographer. ¡Get that shit out o’ my eye!”.

Theodore Roosevelt on the Cowardice of Cynicism and the Courage to Create

By Brainpickings. Maya Angelou wrote in

¿Offering idealist gibberish from 19th-century equivalent o’ Sarah Palin who actually did stumble his way into presidency from what everyone assumed was a safely useless vice-president spot o’er the corpse o’ his assassinated predecessor? Check. ¿Quoting Maya Angelou, everyone’s favorite living Hallmark card? Check.

’My whole life has been a lie’: Sweden admits meatballs are Turkish

By the Guardian. Turks have reacted with

¿Could there be anything worse than The Guardian melodramatically claiming that their whole life is a lie ’cause some food item doesn’t come from where they think it does?

Swedish Meatballs Are Turkish? ‘My Whole Life Has Been a Lie’

By NYTimes

¿How ’bout if they plagiarized the fucking story from The New York Times, — ¡clearly holding the corrupt powers o’ the Swedish Chef to account! — including the same melodramatic “My whole life is a lie” bullshit.

E’en worse: The New York Times outclassed them by actually using true single quotation marks, — ¡& they’re filthy double-quote Americans, too!­ — while The Guardian made due with those half-assed generic flat single quotes like savages. Clearly true single quotes are too bourgeois for our misnationed-meatball-protesting radicals.

How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era

By The Guardian. This is what happens when you

They didn’t, you fucking loonies. “This is what happens when…”. This is what happens when you have stoners who were dropped on their heads when their own stoned parents were distracted by the 8th solo in a Grateful Dead song writes your articles.

Has Alanis Morissette Made the Most Woke Musical Since ‘Hair’?

By NYTimes. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Everyone seems to have a story about hearing Alanis Morisette’s “Jagged Little Pill” for the first time. The writer Diablo Cody

No, but there’s mo’ important problems we must address here:

  1. Only the kind o’ morons who try to eat their fingers ’cause they think they’re hot dogs calls something “woke” unironically.
  2. Hardly anybody has a story ’bout 1st hearing “Jagged Little Pill” ’cause, last time I checked, some singer who sang bubble-gum-pop that sounds like Sean Connery trying to be a sexy girl suddenly writing bitter songs ’bout her breakup with 1 o’ the guys from Full House ( ¿Which 1? ¿Why aren’t we writing ’bout this deeper quandry, New York Times? ) isn’t the fucking moon landing.
  3. Everyone knows that Rent is the “wokest” play out there — in all its hipster dumbass glory.

13 Lessons to Make Your Really, Truly Happy. Maybe.

By Outside Online. Photo o’ a cross-eyed black dog with a leash, but with its body missing, just an off-white void ’hind it. “Last autumn, I enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley’s massive open online Science of Happiness course to see if I might goose my felicity quotient”

I hope “make horrifying Photoshop edits wherein a leashed dog becomes a floating disembodied head” is near the top o’ the list — ’cause such a task does, indeed, seem like ’twould bring me mighty happiness.

“[…]to see if I might goose my felicity quotient”. I don’t think you’ve quite grasped how English words work.

Is capitalism worth saving?

By Vox. Photo o’ a bronze bull statue.

¿Have you read all o’ these advertisements hard-hitting news articles? As a wise gerbil said, “Push the ‘die’ button, you fucking moron”.

Intermission

Paul Apostle of Christ. Their Faith Challenged an Empire. In Theaters March 23.

Let’s take a break & laugh @ this ad I found months ago for some Christian movie ’bout the Apostle Paul, who in this adaptation seems to be Jesus’s lover based on the way their faces are snuggling. You sure got my butter’s worth, Heyseuss Christopher.

“Their Faith Challenged an Empire”. & now it’s whored out to a newer empire, but with Socrates replaced with fucking Steve Pinker — proof that Christianity is inferior to the Greek gods.

These assholes are so greedy they straight took “paulmovie.com”. So now if someone wants to promote a movie simply called “Paul”, they’re fucked. Thanks a lot, Jesus.

24 hours at my local Dunkin’ Donuts

By The Outline. Grayscale photo o’ a guy in diamond-checkered sweater standing gainst a wall with a donut shop ’hind said wall. “I pass my neighborhood Dunkin’ often on my walks home.”

I thought ’bout making a Twitter account or something called “#notnews”, or however the hip hiphop PHP-to-C++ hashmaptags works in these kiddios’ O(n) efficiencies; but then I discovered such a hashtag was being used by right-wing morons so they could whine ’bout newspapers not sufficiently coddling their self-esteems by pretending they’re not morons. This is proof that rightwingers ruin everything enjoyable.

But, yeah, this rando’s Livejournal post ’bout going down to their “neighborhood Dunkin’”, as the Hammer Bros. hablar in el barrio, is surely riveting news & not a waste o’ precious electricity.

The polarized reactions to Pixar’s ‘Bao’ are rooted in culture

By Polygon. Screencap o’ Bao. “Premiering before the Incredibles 2, ‘Bao’ is the first Pixar short film directed by a woman, Domee Shi, who was inspired by her childhood as the”

This stark cultural difference is whether or not one gives a shit ’bout families & children, evident by a bunch o’ dumb white people leaving posts saying, “Duh… ¿What’s it mean, man?”. This is less evidence o’ some deep cultural difference ’tween Chinese & westerners & mo’ evidence o’ white people being dumb — hardly a new development.

The importance of high standards: Key takeaways from Jeff Bezos’ latest

By Medium. Photo o’ a mountain o’ Amazon boxes on someone’s front step, probably ’bout to be stolen while the homeowner is @ work.

Using Amazon as an example o’ “high standards” is like praising the culinary experise o’ a McDonald’s fry cook. The fact that this is Medium, notorious journalistic whorehouse, just raises the irony to a 2nd dimension.

Evidence: the blurb is just “Follow me on Twitter (@parsa_s)”. This won’t be happening.

‘Why are you still here?’: Inside the last Blockbuster in America

By The Washington Post. Photo o’ storefront o’ Blockbuster. “A man parked his motorcycle on the sidewalk Saturday morning, ruining the aesthetic of the last remaining Blockbuster in the contiguous United”

Speaking o’ the lower standards o’ Amazon, here’s the Amazon Post posting a not-subtle-attack-@-all gainst a cement-&-mortar media seller for their rude continued existence. You’d think they’d have the decency to realize they’re irrelevant & just give their business o’er to Amazon already.

People love to bash the media for the biases they have, e’en though not having a bias is impossible; but they don’t oft note how this bias is mo’ & mo’ just aiming for that which serves these newspapers’ business interests, whether it be this or demonizing social media ( totally not ’cause it’s a major competitor ). It’s like watching Coca-Cola release a news article ’bout the moral degeneracy o’ Pepsi & pretending that they’re doing it out o’ some noble cause to save “democracy” from “darkness”.

Marissas Mayer Is Still Here

By NYTimes. Photo o’ who is presumably Marissa Mayer. “Marissa Mayer was celebrated as a savior when she left Google to become chief executive of Yahoo”

Cool. ¿When can she fuck off & get out o’ the way o’ real news items, since I have no idea who she is & surely don’t care?

The creepiest part o’ a lot o’ these articles is how oft they’re just kiss-ass advertisements for people, as if modern capitalism has devolved back into feudalism & newspapers are just patrons for aristocratic nobles, but with corporate logos replacing family crests — the “Duke o’ York” replaced by the “Duke o’ Yahoo”.

Though, I must say, trading your allegiance from the Google clan to the Yahoo clan sounds ’bout as wise as keeping allegiance with Renly Baratheon.

Student Loans Are Too Expensive To Forgive

By Five Thirty Eight. Photo o’ a college student’s backpacked back in front o’ a blurry school campus.

¿Truly? ’Cause the US government seems quite capable o’ affording much mo’ expensive military expenses that have no evidence o’ being particularly effective @ making Americans better off or wasting money on inefficient health care systems or allowing some o’ the richest people in the world ’nough tax cuts & loopholes to have no income taxes. Perhaps if students stopped foolishly wasting their money paying back their debts & ’stead used that money to pay for lobbyists, then maybe the US government would find a way to “afford” forgiving their debt.

But, you know, actually trying to help & reward people for actually becoming smarter isn’t nearly as beneficial to society as buying the military shiny aircraft that ne’er gets used. It’s not as if history is saturated with evidence that human development comes primary from educated people & it’s not as if China’s kicking the US’s ass largely ’cause the US’s workplace is unskilled.

Why Brazilians are always late

By BBC. Photo o’ colorful cacophony o’ busy Brazilian downtown. “Three months after I moved to Rio from Manchester, I was invited to a Saturday night churrasco — an informal barbecue — by a casual acquaintance with whom I’d crossed paths socially enough times that”

I think a better question is why the BBC is suddenly racist. Perchance, ¿do you have any theories to trade ’bout why Poles are so bad @ screwing in lightbulbs?

The City of My Birth in India Is Becoming a Climate Casualty. It Didn’t Have to Be.

By NYTimes. Photo o’ lake ’tween a dirt mound & a town in presumably India. “KOLKATA, India — I wanted to glimpse the future in the city where I was born. So, this summer I returned to India for a”

Considering the only people truly perturbed ’nough by this to want to do anything aren’t powerful ’nough to do anything, I think real life has shown that it did have to be. But I’m sure this will be the article by reasonable moderate liberals that will make the Grinchlike corporate powers’ heart grow 3 sizes & decide that they do actually care how the world turns out decades after their wrinkled bodies are dead.

Question for this writer: acknowledging the empirical evidence that the people in power are usually sociopathic, ¿how effective are appeals to empathy & emotion liable to be? History has shown: ¡not much!

Parents, stop feeling so guilty about TV time

By CNN. Photo o’ a kid watching blurry supernova TV screen.

After all, the continued success o’ CNN proves that you don’t need braincells to be successful, so you may as well let their brains rot. ¡Think o’ all the student debt society can’t afford that they would save!

“I’ve never met a parent at ease with the fact that children watch television”. ¿Truly? I’ve ne’er met a parent who was disturbed @ the idea o’ a child possibly watching TV. ¿Does this writer only know Amish parents?

How Criminals Steal $37 Billion a Year from America’s Elderly

By Bloomberg. Illustration o’ an ol’ person with a weird-shaped head using a weird sci-fi phone, in a purple-&-yellow gradient void, surrounded by stretchy spirits.

It’s like every 1 o’ these articles is a setup for the punchline, “capitalism”.

“Marjorie Jones trusted the man”. You should ne’er trust the man.

Can You Afford to Change Your Career

By HBR.

Obviously I don’t care to waste any time on this article’s trite subject-matter o’ “lifehacks”, but all o’ it on this perturbing photo o’ a thin, flesh-colored dog that looks like a hand puppet wearing a yellow safety hat with a hammer in its mouth.

You Need a Life Strategy Because Extraordinary Lives Don’t Happen by Accident

By Entrepreneur. Photo o’ a guy with his back to the camera, far ’way & tiny in the middle, staring off into the sunset / sunrise.

Strategy #1: save time not reading inane, empty life advice & use that time to actually do things useful.

If I had a $ for every article or book blabbing ’bout how great it is to be “extraordinary”, written by what could pass for a carbon copy o’ a million other generic business advice people, I‘d be rich & I would’ve had this post up mo’ than a year earlier, since I wouldn’t have had to work. That’s probably ’cause people who do what one might call “extraordinary” things are too busy doing them, not talking ’bout potentially doing them.

On the immensely creative illustration: ¿Know what’s extraordinary? Sunsets. That’s something you don’t see every day. Just like how I don’t see a photo o’ a guy staring @ a sunset in every fucking article ’bout living the best life you can masturbating to your shriveled ego. I think these self-help writers have language backward ( for 1, “self-help” is help I don’t need from others, & thus is help I shouldn’t pay anyone else for ): they seem to think “extraordinary” means “thing that everyone else does”.

Epistocracy: a political theorist’s case for letting only the informed vote

By Vox. Photo o’ people looking on awkwardly @ Trump giving the grimacing smile that makes it look like he pooped his pants & is desperately trying to hide it.

I wouldn’t wager much on the advice o’ a so-called “political expert” who is apparently ignorant that there already exists a much better term for this concept — “meritocracy”. & if he truly had political expertise, he’d know that history has consistently shown that “meritocracies” always lead to corrupt aristocracies as being smart doesn’t make you ethical. The public would, ironically, have to be utterly suicidally stupid to give power to people so much smarter than them, as that’s just a guarantee that that leader will be smart ’nough to twist that power into e’en greater power & twist the rules o’ meritocracy toward being biased toward themselves. Brennan might want to look @ such great examples as Soviet Russia & “Communist” China to see where his “epistocracy” will lead, as such people as Lenin, Stalin, & Mao were some o’ the smartest & well-educated people round & had the same great idea that only those with the proper political training should be allowed to make decisions. ( ¡But their scientists were “wrong”, unlike Brennan’s preferred scientists, who are “right”, so decreed by Brennan, so they’re completely different! ). Meanwhile, the happiest, healthiest, stablest, &, ironically, best educated ( smart ’nough to see the ignorance o’ Brennan, yet ’nother casualty o’ the US’s high-quality education systems ) countries are the most democratic countries. I’m sure a work o’ such subtlety & depth as “Against Democracy” have much to say to counteract these empirical facts & is not just a long pundit rant.

Also, I’m not sure if this is Brennan’s fault or Vox’s, but anyone who truly has political expertise would know that constipated-smiling Trump ( ¡There’s that liberal-biased media attacking our Great Leader with their unflattering photography! ) look there didn’t win democratically — he received fewer votes than Clinton.

Facebook Is Testing Its Dating Service. Here’s How It’s Different From Tinder

By Wired.

From the looks o’ this love-strung Fuckerberg with his hand on his heart like he’s acting in a low-budget Shakespearean play, the difference is that while Tinder is ’bout finding a date ’tween 2 various people ( I’m guessing — fuck if I know what “Tinder” is ), the Facebook Dating App will be all ’bout hooking up various people with Fuckerberg himself, a brilliant idea Fuckerberg came up with after his tragic breakup with his last girlfriend, Zelda Pastrami. This is 100% true fact & not libel — it can’t be libel since I’ve been saying this all ’bout somebody named “Fuckerberg”, which isn’t e’en a true person.

How to Motivate Yourself to Exercise Every Morning

By Vitals.Lifehacker.com. Photo o’ a woman jumping off a cliff in front o’ a sunset.

¡See? ¡I was right! ¡I was not only right ’bout these fuckers creating a branch site for medical advice, I was right that it’s suicidally terrible! ¡Just look @ that image o’ some woman “exercising” by jumping off a cliff! I would complain, but, honestly, this is just natural selection doing its duty.

“Long before I noticed any benefits of doing burpees every morning[ … ]”. ¿Do I want to know what “burpees” are? Obviously not — which is why nature was nice ’nough to make me too lazy to Google it ( or “DuckDuckGo it”, to be precise, since Mozilla doesn’t want me to use Google ’cause they’re a competitor they’ll sell all my juicy data & I have no reason to bother changing the settings ).

Why Water Is Weird

By Nautil.

¿Water is weird? ¿How ’bout the crazy bastards who made a photo o’ someone punching their fist into water? I think humans are the last organism to judge other material as “weird”.

I mean, just look @ this blurb: “One day, frustrated after many hours of meditation and practice, Bruce Lee, still a teenager, went[ … ]”. You don’t see water writing articles ’bout water & then starting it by talking ’bout Bruce Lee & meditation.

Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance

By New Yorker. Grayscale photo o’ Greenwald in front o’ microphone podium with heavy shadows, making him out to look like Charles Foster Kane — a potent hypocrisy from a large corporate newspaper.

I feel gross just coming near this. I can feel the jism splashing on me from the dick-waving contest ’tween edgelord Greenwald, friend o’ bigots just to shock the mainstream, man, with the same intelligence & taste as one who moons people in public, & the wastes o’ oxygen known as the average newspaper pundits. I particularly love the way this article tries to make me feel bad for their friends who call Greenwald a “bully” ’cause he doesn’t suck their dicks, as their coddled upper-middle-class upbringing has accustomed them. Watch these same hypocrites later “bully” the poor for not voting ’cause they have real jobs & don’t have time. Upper-class people need to realize that God’s only purpose for putting them on this world is for people to throw rocks @ them & laugh. They’re certainly not useful for anything else.

This isn’t a news article: it’s ’nother self-promotion piece. It’s a hatchet job on someone who makes fun o’ them done purely so people will not listen to these mean voices & keep loving good ol’ New Yorker. If these newspapers think I’m going to pay a subscription so they can keep giving me the literary equivalent o’ them furiously masturbating while they cry to themselves in front o’ my ( & the wide public’s ) face like some has-been celebrity desperate for attention, think ’gain. I don’t give a fuck ’bout Greenwald, & I certainly don’t give a fuck ’bout the New Yorker’s inability to accept that somebody doesn’t like them. Get o’er your fucking selves. Maybe if you spent the effort writing this drivel on actual significant news, people would actually take you seriously.

Donuts Are Better For You Than Muffins

By Vitals.Lifehacker

Lifehacker does more o’ the Lord’s Darwinian work by leading their braindead readers toward early deaths.

What’s driving Elon Musk?

By Wired. Photo o’ Elon Musk in profile, putting on his best lifeless robot impression in front o’ a white void.

Not those crazy space cars he keeps yammering ’bout, yuck yuck gross.

Rick Owens Is Still Out There

Presumably Rick Owens twisting his face alien-like in front o’ what looks like a spiraling black centipede.

GQ turns into America’s Most Wanted.

The Big Business of Being Gwyneth Paltrow

Yet ’nother white face. New York fucking Times ’gain.

I think I once quipped that ol’-school communists were quaint in how they complained ’bout the horrors o’ selling one’s craftwork as lifeless commodities when nowadays capitalism steers people toward selling themselves as commodities, as living logos. I could find a way to tolerate this if it went the other way, too, & scientists found a way to make the Monopoly man or Chester Cheeto come to life — ¡then capitalism would be awesome!

&, no, I have no idea who Gwyneth Paltrow is &, shocking as it may seem, I also don’t care. I’m sure she has done some truly vital work that will lead to the next big economic revolution & isn’t just some “social media influencer” or “con artist” — whatever they call them nowadays.

Bo Burnham’s Age of Anxiety

The New Yorker. Photo o’ some dwebby motherfucker staring off @ a wall whose other half is painted pink.

Bo Burnham is the only milennial to have anxiety. It’s his age.

I made the mistake o’ looking up who this rando is so I could be sure that previous joke was accurate & found out he started out as a YouTube celebrity. So he legit is a useless “social media influencer” & I can safely forget his existence within minutes o’ writing this sentence.

This Story Has Already Stressed Ryan Reynolds Out

By the New York Times. Photo o’ guy who looks like every other white guy sits back on couch with sitcom eye roll.

“¡Ryan Reynolds is a useless white person! ¡Isn’t it great that the New York Times is wasting a whole news article on him & not people who actually put effort into doing useful work!”. It’s no surprise: the mediocre are drawn to the mediocre like flies to shit.

¿Wasn’t the obsession o’ useless celebrities 1 o’ the main reasons people said TV rotted people’s brains? ¿So how are newspapers like the New York Times or the New Yorker any different?

Inside Nintendo’s secretive creative process

By the Guardian.

“Regurgitate the same shit we’ve been doing for the last 20 years, but worse, so we can constantly remind people that we were great in the 80s & early 90s & are fucking has-beens now”.

I’m surprised The Guardian’s praising Nintendo, considering their terrible green policies. The revolution is stifled not by violence, but by the irresistible cuteness o’ corporate mascot, Pikachu.

Is promoting vegetarianism a form of colonialism?

By the New York Times. Photo o’ cows.

No, & just in case you ask, it also isn’t a brand o’ T-shirt or 8th century philosophy. I can’t wait till QZ’s next hard-hitting debate: “¿Is health care reform a color o’ drapery?”.

The Benefits of ‘Tummy Time’

By the New York Times. Photo o’ baby who has clearly been dropped on its head a few times smiling with its wide-ope’d maw.

I can just imagine America’s evil o’erlord, Hairpiece, raising his fist up as he reads the audacious “The Benefits of ‘Tummy Time’”. If the New York Times didn’t receive a Pulitzer for this hard-hitting piece, then there is no justice.

Actually, there’s no justice regardless, so ne’ermind.

Why you might want to wrap your car key fob in foil

By USA Today. Photo o’, well, a car key fob wrapped in foil.

’Cause you’re an inbred moron. I’m glad USA Today has a clear vantage o’ whom their main audience is.

How to Rinse Your Recyclables Without Wasting Water

By Lifehacker. A grayscale photo o’ a faucet slowly leaking water. Orson Wells be jealous.

“We told you to rinse your recyclables. ‘But what about the wasted water?’ you asked. So we asked some scientists”. & they told you to fuck off & quit distracting them from real problems. If their cheeto-fingered fanbase stopped buying so many anime figurines & filled their whole fucking room with the Amazon boxes maybe they wouldn’t have this problem.

About time: why western philosophy can only teach us so much

By the Guardian. Illustration is pure freshman art student color puke.

It can teach us just as much as eastern philosophy: nothing — which is, as it turns out, the entirety o’ The Guardian’s knowledgebase.

40 Years of Chronicling the Unnoticed

By the New York Times. Boring white guy in boring middle class white house.

“40 Years o’ Writing ’Bout Useless White People ’Cause the New York Times Hates their Readers”.

“‘Don’t you have better things to do than watch me vacuum apartments?’ wondered a cleaning woman I spent some time tagging along with”. ¡Ha ha ha! ¡Nothing’s wackier than some creepy ol’ fuck staring @ his probably-poor-&-desperate cleaning lady lustily!

Disposable America

By the Atlantic. A photo o’ straws spiraling together.

“A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside it. This is the stuff of tragedy, and America”. ¿Who needs serious philosophies that deal with real-world problems in concrete ways when you can have these o’erfed ditzes pontificating ’bout fucking straws. I would agree that America is disposable, but thanks to its nuclear power, it’s mo’ accurate to call it indisposable radioactive waste.

Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism

By the Atlantic. Fuckerberg clapping @ — I don’t fucking know. ¿A blue box with white lines drawn on it? I fucking hate you guys so much.

Unlike The Atlantic, the same geniuses who think ads for alien-worshipping cults count as “news”. ( ¡Ne’er live it down! ).

Like the Greenwald article before, this is pure business propaganda, like Coke criticizing Pepsi for not “understanding” cola. All that newspapers like The Atlantic know ’bout news is that Facebook is dangerous competition to them, so they, in all their integrity, puke out propaganda pieces that their viewers couldn’t give 2 fucks ’bout with the transparency o’ a Republic politician sucking an oil executive’s dick. It’s clear that “journalism” today is nothing but “advertisements” that only succeed so long as they make the papers who puke them out money. So, no, I would say that the problem for these newspapers is that Facebook knows “journalism” all too well.

Does Facebook Need a Constitution?

By NYMag. Ungodly, horrific, Naziesche Photoshop o’ Fuckerberg’s face plastered onto some founding father’s head & body ’cause NY Mag despises all o’ humanity & want to subject as many as they can to the graphical form o’ biological weapons.

No, but I’m going to need sleeping pills to quell the nightmares this Photoshop crime gainst eyes will cause.

Alternate headline: “Pot Calls the Kettle Black ’Gain”. ¿Where’s the Constitution for NY Mag, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Atlantic?

’Sides, considering the founding fathers were all racist, sexist bumpkins with backward views who believed in superstitions like bleeding as medicine, I fail to see how a constitution would fix Facebook’s problems. I can’t wait for such noble rules that Facebook won’t follow, anyway, as “Likes by black Facebook users only count as 3/5ths o’ a like”.

Capitalism is unfolding exactly as Karl Marx predicted

By QZ.

Nowhere in Das Kapital does ol’ ¡Rrring! ¡Bing! Karlos Marukasu say anything ’bout our most potent example o’ the decadent nadir o’ capitalism: the cancer o’ clickbait article ads crowding out genuine art. So clearly Marx was wrong in many ways: he totally understated the lows capitalism could go to.

In fact, this photo shows the exact ironic horror that is capitalism: a poor brown-skinned worker probably making less than minimum wage under the table being forced to shiny these big portraits o’ Karl Marx’s decapitated beard & some other bearded communist that wasn’t sexy ’nough for anyone to remember — all for a bunch o’ rich useless bougies to pontificate ’bout for a second before their mind wanders toward some other opiate fed to them by the next headline that crowds their minds in the anarchic cesspool known as social media.

Drawn from life: why have novelists stopped making things up?

By the Guardian. Illustration o’ a line-art person with their face literally in ’nother, bodyless, person’s face, all in front o’ a yellow void.

’Cause they’re lazy hacks who put only the minimum effort necessary to trick the mindless masses into handing them their money. It’s certainly not, as these narcissist hacks try to insinuate, ’cause the “tragedy” o’ the absolute boredom that is these Turing failures’ lives is e’en a crumb as interesting as they think they are.

¿Don’t believe me? Actual ( grammatically flawed ) line from this article: “You think this is dull? Knausgaard seems to ask. What about me? I have to live it and write it”. Clearly this is the only snowflake on earth to endure the hardship o’ slowly making reheated lefto’ers without any other thoughts, so surely ’nother dozen stories ’bout such will stand out & infect people’s memories just as well as Tolkien.

Writing books ’bout the ordinary lives o’ ordinary people has been done since the early 20th century — & much better, too. These clowns’ drivel doesn’t e’en come close to Joyce, Woolf, Chekov, or Ellison.

Stephen A. Smith Won’t Stop Talking

By the New Yorker. Photo o’ presumably Stephen A. Smith.

To be fair, neither does the New Yorker, which is just as brain-harmingly unfortunate.

I Watched ’The Simpsons’ for the First Time and I Couldn’t Stand It

By Vice. Screencap o’ the Simpsons with angry mob with pitchforks.

I think I’ve mentioned in my many articles shitting on Ocarina of Time — which is seriously mediocre & lacks any artistic merit — how much I hate self-absorbed hysterics who be all like “¡Ooo! ¡I’m giving an unpopular opinion! ¡Bring the pitchforks!”, when the most likely response from the majority is nothing since nobody fucking cares ’bout you or Vice, which is also mediocre & lacks artistic merit.

Complaining ’bout The Simpsons not being funny is like complaining ’bout I Love Lucy not being funny or someone in the 2100s, after capitalism finally collapses & is replaced by Englesist Magical Socialist Paradise criticizing Vice as advertisement trash for upper-middle-class parasites. They’re all right, but unfair: 90s people were savages & had no taste.

I Faced Off Against the World’s Best Chess Player. You Will Totally Believe What Happened Next.

By Five Thirty Eight. Guy looking back @ the camera with the smuggest fucking smile I’ve e’er seen.

If this caption is any indication, it’s that the world’s best chess player also won the Guinness Record for biggest shit-eating grin.

“UNITED NATIONS — I nearly deleted the email.” ¡Suspense!

Nobody Trusts Facebook. Twitter Is a Hot Mess. What Is Snapchat Doing?

By Bloomberg.

I think a better question is what this photo o’ a guy who looks like a serial killer in front o’ a green background is doing ’bove this article. I guess this is the CEO — 1 hour after waking up with a hango’er.

Redirecting

By the Guardian. Photo o’ a bat hissing @ the camera in front o’ a black void.

( Laughs ). The Guardian & Pocket are such fuck-ups that The Guardian sent an error page to Pocket & Pocket just accepted it. That’s like if somebody sent into The Guardian a photo o’ their asshole & The Guardian just published it as is. Ne’er stop pushing the bar to its lowest limit, Guardian.

America Soured on My Multiracial Family

By the Atlantic.

“The US is still infected with racism & water is still wet. News @ 11”.

I’m sure all the racists who voted for Hairpiece & his ilk will read this article & take it to heart, so I’m sure it’ll accomplish much. @ the very least, we can be sure that plenty o’ middle-class ditzes will feel good ’bout their own “lack o’ racism”, only to 2 days later complain ’bout how Affirmative Action is unfair & the black populace should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Free Cash, No Strings Attached

By Slate. Photo o’ a plastic woman’s mouth ’bove handfuls o’ cash.

Slate sees all this other sluttish ( thanks, Shakespeare ) trash the New York Times & the Atlantic puke out & says, “Hold my drink”. @ this point these newspapers ought to just write stories ’bout whether some rando is the true father o’ some lowerclass pregnant hick & have articles ’bout some woman showing off her tits to win Jerry beads ( O wait — The Sun already does that, pretty much ).

Psychology Itself Is Under Scrutiny

By the New York Times. Shirtless longhaired man ’hind bars.

Tonight Psychology shall be played by the lead singer o’ your favorite grunge band.

Meanwhile, economics continues to stumble round in irrelevancy in their blissful lack o’ self-awareness.

Why Are So Many Political Parties Blowing Up? (Part 1)

By the New York Times. Photo o’ a bunch o’ light switches — ¿’cause why the fuck not?

’Cause nobody likes any o’ them & the unwashed masses have become so fucked by the rich that e’en their thick skulls have realized they should become politically active, but are also too soft to have a coherent strategy for fixing things, so they, as masses do, go in wild different directions while the useless classes tut tut & contribute to earth-choking climate change by typing these useless articles.

I thought ’twas obvious, NYT.

Phishing Is the Internet’s Most Successful Con

By the Atlantic. Grayscale photo o’ a guy in 20s get-up leaning on a wall covered in posters.

I think Google & Facebook’s stocks would show that stealing people’s private info & selling it to advertisers is a far mo’ successful con.

Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

By the New York Times. Photo o’ a frowny face made o’ pennies & quarters.

Maybe ’cause those who are prosperous waste that prosperity on making inane photos o’ frowny faces in pennies & quarters & then rail ’bout how we can’t afford to raise taxes to feed the pobres.

Nine Ways You’re Cooking Pasta Wrong

By Bloomberg. Photo o’ 2 bowls o’ pasta on either edge, divided by a long shadow.

¿What is this, Communist China? I have the right to freedom o’ choice, & thus any way I cook pasta is, tautologically, a rational economic choice, e’en if it gives me E. coli, Bloomberg.

The Critic Whose Olive Garden Review Went Viral Remembers How Anthony Bourdain Spoke Up

By Buzzfeed. Close up on ol’ woman’s face.

r/WarholWasRight

“‘The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day. The portion was generous. My server was […]’” This is right up there with the 10 Amendments o’ things children should be memorizing in school.

Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

By the New York Times. Image o’ a bunch o’ shitty 3D vases in front o’ some 90s-style purple void with an orange wireframe.

¿Why bother? The New Donk Times offers a just-as-good view.

How everything on the internet became clickbait

By the Outline. Illustration o’ a hook in the water with many pointer cursors pointing @ it.

In fairness, The Outline is surely an authority on the subject.

“Remember Yanny vs. Laurel?”. No, & I’d like to keep it that way. I’m glad to hear it’s “some science thing”, tho. Special credit to the 1st graders who wrote this article.

Yayoi Kusama: the world’s favourite artist?

By the Guardian. Photo o’ some ol’ woman with red hair painting circles.

Definitely. ¿Picasso? ¿Da Vinci? Hacks. ¿Osamu Tezuka? ¡Phhh! ¿What has that fool accomplished? No, this random person I’ve literally just heard o’ now is definitely the most renowned artist.

Why I Lied to Everyone in High School About Knowing Karate

By Longreads. Illustration o’ guy in trite geisha get-up doing a karate kick in front o’ a stage.

A better question is why you thought the wide adult world would give a shit ’bout some frivolous thing you did in high school. ¿Are these news articles or diary entries? I can’t wait till tomorrow’s hard-hitting piece, “Why I Pooped My Pants in College”.

When is a nation not a nation? Somaliland’s dream of independence

By the Guardian.

When it’s not militarily powerful ’nough to defend its independent status. ¿What do you think is the reason? ¿Not ’nough middle-class liberals care-stared ’nough?

I Learned I Have Sleep Apnea. It’s a More Serious Problem Than Many People Realize

By the New York Times. Illustration o’ some guy in a long stretchy sleeping cap yawning while surrounded by starry space, the moon, & serpentine twisted legs without a body.

Diary entries are not news.

“Now I am afflicted with a problem, so now I consider it important”.

Firefox Is Back. It’s Time to Give It a Try.

By the New York Times. Illustration o’ browser icons on clacker strings with Firefox ’bout to careen into the others.

Subtle, Mozilla.

Welcome to Powder Mountain — a utopian club for the millennial elite

By the Guardian. A bunch o’ smarmy-ass fucking millennials lounging in front o’ a barn in front o’ a mountain in the distance.

Burn it to the ground.

In The Guardian’s defense, they seem to share my utter disdain @ this mystic cult for the rich. It’s clear they made this article in support for Proposition 71, a law that would deem any rich person moronic ’nough to waste their money on this garbage objectively proven beyond doubt too stupid to have earned their money in any meritorious way &, mo’ importantly, too dumb to handle money, & would redistribute all their money toward actually useful things & people, like curing the climate change wrought by our O-zone’s destruction caused by all these blowhards’ hot air.

What 1,147 Men Think About #MeToo: A Glamour x GQ Survey

By GQ. Incoherent collage o’ profile face photos o’ various menu o’er random #s.

Asking men’s opinion on criticisms gainst them fucking o’er women ( literally ) is like asking the Chinese President’s opinion on whether or not he’s corrupt.

Memes Are Becoming Harder to Monetize

By the Atlantic. That inane woman-jealous-@-boyfriend-staring-@-other-woman’s-ass meme, but with the other woman labeled “Novelty tees”, the boyfriend, “Meme retailers”, & the girlfriend, “Custom meme merchandise”.

Good. Maybe then writers will actually have to have creativity & skill & hacks like the Atlantic will be bankrupt & homeless, like they deserve.

Here’s How to Pick a Perfect Melon Every Time

How ’bout we fix the gaping hole that is your reason for existing that would cause you to fret o’er frivilous shit like whether the melon you picked @ the store is “perfect”.

¡For fuck’s sake, “Self.com”! — ¡that photo isn’t e’en o’ melons but watermelons! ¡They’re totally different things! That’s like calling grapenuts just “grapes”.

Everything You Fight Has Power Over you. Everything You Accept Doesn’t

Photo o’ punching glove on the ground, half-off the bottom left edge, with toilet paper half-off the top right edge. Most o’ the image is just empty gray floor ’cause the photographer is a fucking idiot.

See, it’s clever ’cause it’s obviously wrong — by definition, if you accept something, you allow it to have power o’er you. In truth, this is just romanticized nihilism: you have no power, so just pretend that everything that happens is what you wanted, anyway. This is a great philosophy if you’re the kind o’ impotent who reads Medium articles & will ne’er do anything useful.

& we have 1 “you” lowercase, but not any o’ the others. If I’ve learned anything from these news articles it’s that there are a lot o’ editors who are bad @ editing.

Friends and Enemies: On Slogan Tees

By La Review of Books. Photo is a close up o’ a woman’s chest. Her shirt has the words “The Future Is Female” on it.

Genius plan: now men have a ’scuse to stare @ women’s tits & pretend they’re feminists for it.

Fifteen years ago, Reebook and Adidas wanted him badly — so how exactly did LeBron James end

By the Undefeated.

He died by choking on that shoe he’s just starting to eat in this photo.

Life-Changing Lessons in How to Pack Right for Travel

By Outside Online. Photo o’ badly-folded brown pants in white void.

“I feel bad for most people I see in airports”. The kind o’ person who has their life changed by learning how to pack clothes better has no right feeling bad for anyone else — they are truly the lowest o’ lifeforms. Fucking flies feel bad for these people. “Man, we may eat shit & die after a couple days; but a’least we don’t dedicate our lives to folding clothes perfectly”.

There’s no escaping Drake on the internet

By the Outline.

( Laughs ). This is the best photo. Look @ him hug those trophies to himself like a momma cat her kittens. Drake will bite you if you try touching 1 o’ his trophies. They’re his.

JS hoisting by example

By Gist Github.

Featuring photo o’ cat with constipated face.

Unplugging From the Internet Nearly Destroyed Me

By the Atlantic. Photo o’ a wooden sign in the middle o’ a forest.

Typical Atlantic, bragging ’bout their lack o’ usefulness ’gain.

Trump Has Changed How Teens View the News

By the Atlantic. Photo o’ 2 teens standing in front o’ a crowd in a nightlit city.

“Everyone who doesn’t love us are filthy Trump-lovers who stupidly worship arbitrary memes, as opposed to rational people, who worship arbitrary traditions — effectively, ol’ memes — like nationalism or the Constitution”. I just realized that modern news has the mentality o’ butthurt webcomic creators like that guy who made So You Want to Be a Cartoonist: don’t waste your effort actually making good work to try & convince people to buy your work when you can just write a bunch o’ propaganda pieces whining ’bout how everyone who criticizes your work are evil.

The outrageous plan to haul icebergs to Africa

By the BBC. Photo o’ people climbing an iceberg.

It’s outrageous to move ice from a place with plenty o’ ice to a place that could actually use ice or water. That’s ’bout as outrageous as that plan to haul Chinese tea to the US in return for American corn — we call this crazy idea “trade”, & it’s quite swell if you like your countries to have both corn & tea.

The only thing shocking ’bout this is the idea o’ white people actually giving stuff to Africa, as opposed to their typical strategy o’ taking stuff ( & people ) from Africa.

My 84-Hear Old Neighbor Has The Only Good NBA Takes

By Deadspin. Photo o’ an ol’ woman sitting in front o’ a suburban home.

Out o’ all the clickholish articles in Pocket, this is the clickholiest. Truly, news has gone dada.

The Trouble With Johnny Depp

By Rolling Stone. Illustration o’ Johnny Depp’s face with greasy olive skin, greasy messy hair, & thick lids under his eyes.

If this illustration is any indication, Depp’s real trouble is that he’s transforming into Atilla the Hun.

How to Talk to Little Kids

By Offspring Lifehacker. Close-up photo o’ young girl with bug eyes staring @ something off-screen to the right.

I can’t blame this poor li’l child for being so frightened @ the thought o’ some goober from Lifehacker coming to talk to them. That’s the most criminal thing: Lifehacker knows their advice is harmful to children, people’s health, & people’s good taste, but still give it out.

How Hunger Pangs Can Make Nice People ’Hangry’

By NPR. Illustration o’ a man in a green shirt with a fork & knife held up on the table ( as nobody but children do in real life ) before an empty plate.

Fun fact: scientists have objectively proven that NPR using the word ‘hangry’ means a loving, perfect god cannot possibly exist.

I think liberals & conservatives should make a bipartisan compromise on this: conservatives should defund NPR & let it die, but only if liberals can forcibly shut down all private media. Everyone wins.

The US has a 2.5 billion-pound surplus of meat. Let’s try to visualize that.

By Vox. Photo o’ multiple layers o’ meat paddies, separated by lettuce, with a slice o’ cheese on top.

Let’s not ’cause it’s disgusting, just like Americans are.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty these days. So here’s a comforting thought: The United States of America will not run out…”. Yes, what keeps me getting out o’ bed every morn is the knowledge that Americans will ne’er run out o’ corpses to devour to keep themselves fat. Truly this is a Marxmas miracle.

The Glory of Otis, Fattest of the Fat Bears

By Outside Online. Photo o’ bear in river chewing on a freshwater fish.

See, now here’s something that actually soothes me: photos o’ fat bears. What a majestic sight.

Distracted? Work harder!

By NYTimes. Image o’ headless cartoon man with scribbles coming out o’ their neck hole.

“Trouble focusing could just mean that your work isn’t complex enough, and that there isn’t enough of it”. Or, you know, I could have ADD or some other mental problem. ¿But who needs to talk to a psychologist or someone who actually knows true science when I could listen to a “productivity consultant”? I’m sure they’ve studied for years, writing many peer-reviewed theses.

Why Public Transporation Works Better Outside the U.S.

By City Lab. Purple photo o’ woman, um… ¿@ the metro? I don’t know what this shit is.

Pretty much every question ’long the lines o’ “Why [BLANK] works better outside the US” can be answered with a simple “Americans are helplessly incompetent”. You didn’t have to write so many articles to rub it on — tho I could see why you’d want to.

Hallucinations Are Everywhere

By the Atlantic. Photo o’ a bunch o’ people merged together in a spacey way.

Yeah, that’s what happens when you’re up past midnight typing shitty jokes ’bout shitty clickbait articles.

The epic rise and fall of the name Heather

By QZ. Pink line graph showing rising & falling parabola.

This is right up there with that other vital news story, “The epic rise & fall o’ my interest in Animal Crossing: New Horizons”.

Isabella: Er… Oh dear. I guess that doesn’t really qualify as “news,” does it?

“When people think of endangered species, they tend to think of the giant panda, the blue whale, or maybe the snow leopard”. Maybe that’s ’cause those are real living creatures & not fucking names, you asshole.

Ethan Hawke Is Still Taking Ethan Hawke Seriously

By NYTimes. Photo o’ some slack-jawed jebroni staring up into the sky.

He’s the only 1.

How One of Hitler’s Favorite Works of Art Got Stolen—Twice

By The Daily Beast. Picture o’ black-gloved hand reaching for painting.

The only thing worse than the fact that a man butchered mo’ than 12 million people & tried to annihilate entire races o’ people is that there was a man who did that & dumb fanboys who give a shit ’bout their favorite art — which, knowing what an edgelord Hitler was, was probably a Doom mod that takes place in a synagogue.

Why You Should Let Your Kid Be Annoyingly Repetitive

By Offspring Lifehacker. Image o’ open “Goodnight Moon”.

I mean, if Lifehacker’s allowed to for so long, it’s only fair that your li’l shits get to, too.

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist sold his medal for $765,000 to pay medical bills

By Vox. Photo o’ ol’ man looking smug as fuck for a man with unpaid medical bills.

This is genuinely surprising: I can’t believe a Nobel Prize would sell for so much. I’d expect it to go for maybe… $10.

Should Art Be a Battleground for Social Justice?

By NYTimes. I’m too tired to e’en try to decipher what this stupid photo is ’sposed to be. It’s irrelevant.

I think a better question is, after millenia o’ art being used as a battleground for social justice, going all the way back to the oldest o’ religious works, ¿are there truly people moronic ’nough to think that art shouldn’t have morals in them? Before this whiny fucker was e’en born George Orwell had been saying that all art is political; but sure, only now has that changed. & I’m sure this guy’s the only one to e’er have to pick up his dog’s shit when he takes it on walks, too. ( I’m kidding — this is kind o’ degenerate filth who just leaves the dog shit on someone else’s lawn. )

Man, I’m so sad I didn’t pay for a New York Times subscription. ¿How else will I hear some Boomer-ass fuck whine ’bout the kids these days & their YouTubes? O wait — I can just go to an ol’ folks home.

“The civilized dinner party is probably over — even when you’re dining with friends. Everything means too much now. Everything. Our politics, obviously”.

“¡If I can’t rant ’bout the negroes @ dinner any mo’, then truly civilization is doomed!”.

Throw Your Children’s Art Away

By The Atlantic. Photo o’ li’l girl hiding her mouth from ’hind an ugly drawing o’ a li’l girl. The li’l girl — the real-life 1, not the drawn 1 — glances down & to the side in horror.

“It’s shit, anyway”.

You laugh @ this spiteful advice, but these brave souls are saving your children from a fate worse than death: being a webcomic artist. They may be drawing a face with curly hair now; but 12 years from now they’ll be drawing nothing but misshapen anthropomorphic fox tits.

Was Aaron Sorkin Right About the Internet?

By the Ringer. Illustration o’ a laptop screen showing Aaron Sorkin sneezing into a tissue — ’cause that’s this artist’s fetish, I guess.

No, ’cause just ’cause he’s loud doesn’t mean this coke addict has any idea what he’s talking ’bout, no different from that living helium pump / pill-poppper he took after, Rush Limbaugh.

My favorite out o’ his long list o’ catchphrases this journalist has punished the reader with was, “From time to time I’ll read some of the comments under stories … to get a sense of what it must be like at a Klan meeting”. See, it’s funny, ’cause Sorkin is such an uneducated druggie that he doesn’t know that the Klan existed centuries before the internet &, in fact, had a lot mo’ power back then, too.

My response now: Sorko really called the whole imminent-rise-of-white-nationalism thing, and we should have listened to him.

I love how this journalist reveals that they’re e’en mo’ ignorant ’bout the internet than the guy whose only experience with it is making up strawman characters who use it by their lack o’ awareness that white supremacy was a thing on the internet long before Hairpiece turned it into a meme.

This journalist also reveals themselves to be a living offensive stereotype by concluding essentially that, “tho Sorkin was right [ sic ], but he sure was mean ’bout it…” — ’cause moderate liberals are such useless tools that they reject or accept an opinion based purely on how politely it’s stated. This is why these same hypocritical clowns eat up white supremacy when it’s tied up in a bow o’ pseudoacademics & given a nice name like “The Bell Curve”.

What Sorkin was “right” ’bout was that the internet is bad ’cause it’s speeding up his inevitable irrelevancy it lets everyone get a voice, when only TV-show writers who have no political or historical expertise should be heard. He proves this with his patented theorem o’ having fictional Mary Sue characters that look like how he wishes he looked declare it in multi-minute long unsufferable speeches & then having fictional audiences applaud. & the sad thing is that it worked, as now this idiotic journalist has wasted precious electricity regurgitating opinions no mo’ profound than my hick neighbor & now the joke’s on me, ’cause now I’m degrading myself by answering it. This is what Pocket does to you.

You know what, I take back what I say: Sorkin was right — the internet is bad, burn it down. I mean, it has Sorkin & American journalism on it, & we all know what mindless trash that is.

But, seriously, Sorkin: Republicans have ne’er been honorable or civil, you fucking tool; they’ve kept on fucking that rat since the 70s.

Buying frozen fish isn’t what it used to be. Here’s what you need to know

By Washington Post. Illustration o’ woman chiselling giant ice cube with a fish inside.

What I need to know is why article headlines have gone from being so obsessed with being punchy that they used to abandon helper verbs, but now they just add extraneous sentences that could apply to any article. I can’t wait till the sequel: “Picking your car color isn’t as easy as it used to be. Here is a newspaper article that you read to learn information ’bout the real world”.

Ever felt jealous of a Friend’s Achievement? Here’s How to Get Around It

By New York Times. Picture o’ men facepalming in school.

Rat poison.

I do agree with the expression on that middle guy’s face, tho — I do that in reaction to every New York Times article I run into.

I’m Sorry to Report Instagram Is Bad Now

By BuzzFeed. Painting o’ Rome burning next to Instagram’s dumbass rainbow icon.

The good news is that BuzzFeed has always been shit — so some things to last fore’er. Just like AIDS — or “Aids”, as The Guardian spells it.

You walked into that 1, guys.

“Look, I don’t want to talk about this any more than you do”. Then don’t. Clearly this amateur’s ne’er heard the age-ol’ writing advice: starting a work by apologizing for the work being shitty does not make the rest o’ the work no longer shitty.

The Western alliance is in trouble

By Economist. Image o’ earth cracking in half.

O shit: Kefka moved the Warring Triad.

I would forgive The Economist for every milquetoast simplistic moderate laissy libertarian pap they’ve spewed if they began speaking o’ the pre-Trump era as the “World o’ Balance” & the post-Trump era as the “World o’ Ruin”.

Why Whales Got So Big

By the Atlantic.

I think a better question is why humanity has to not only drive them near extinction, but now rub pepper in the wound ( ¿is that as painful as salt? ) by fat-shaming them.

Wall Street looks overvalued

By Economist.

That’s not news: they’ve always been scamming people into thinking they’re valuable for centuries.

Stephen Malkmus on How to Be a Useful Human

By Pitchfork. Photo o’ some ol’ guy walking thru a smoky city.

Step 1: Write articles ’bout serious issues, not random rich white people nobody’s heard o’.

Yes, Adults Can Have Chocolate for Breakfast. Really.

Gee, thanks for the permission, New York Times. I had no idea you became world dictator.

Why South Asia’s majorities act like persecuted minorities

By Economist. Illustration o’ a giant finger pointing out a single green stick figure surrounded by orange figures.

Presumably the same reason white people do: they’re narcissists.

Why new tax rules make Roth accounts better than ever

By MarketWatch.

I love how the photo shows a young couple sitting in front o’ large stacks o’ cash sitting on their table — you know, ’cause normal rich people just carry round large stacks o’ cash & don’t have these things called bank accounts. Nothing gets me in the mood for reading ’bout tax rules & Roth accounts like a couple whose Roth account exists simply to launder the money they gained, presumably, thru illegal drug sales or human trafficking.

I gave up my IBM job to become an organic farmer—and learned a bitter truth

By QZ. Photo shows woman in foreign costume my white ass is too ignorant to know the name to… ¿gathering hay?

Let me guess: ¿was that bitter truth that pretending to be 3rd-world worker is far mo’ miserable than a cosy, o’erpaid white-collar job sitting round typing out unit tests? ¡You don’t say!

This Is What Record-Low Unemployment Looks Like in America

By Bloomberg. Photo o’ an empty street.

I’m kinda glad I waited years after I compiled these together, during a country-wide quarantine due to “¡My Corona!” & race riots, ’cause articles like these are much funnier in hindsight. It’s like a parody o’ all those dopey “This is what peaceful protests look like” glurge, but gainst our quarantine-inflicted mass unemployment.

Also, I love how this article’s illustration implies that record-low unemployment looks like a ghost city with not a soul round. No, that’s what quarantine looks like — psyche: Americans don’t obey quarantine. If they’ll give themselves heart disease just to eat McDonalds, they’ll certainly risk a deadly disease to hang out on the beach during the summer.

How the Bernie Wing Won the Democratic Primaries

By Politico.

¿See what I mean ’bout these articles being much funnier years later? This is right up there with all those morons who wrote “20 Minutes into the Future” stories ’bout the glorious Hillary Clinton presidency.

5 Minimalist YouTubers Who Will Inspire You to Throw Everything Out

By Foods2.

Thinking ’bout a species as insignificant as “minimalist YouTubers” would, indeed, make me want to throw everything out with a good ol’ fashioned gunshot to my own temple, since that would mean I have nothing left to live for.

I love how 80% o’ Pocket articles exist purely to remind people how pathetic they are. I almost feel as if Pocket is run by a subtle supervillain conspiring to drive up suicide rates out o’ pure venomous bitterness.

What Happens When ‘the Justin Bieber of Food’ Grows Up

By Grubstreet. Photo shows nerdiest fucking kid in the world with Timmy-Turner-shaped hair.

He realizes how hollow his existence is & becomes alcoholic like most 30-year-ol’ fry cooks.

Bomani Jones Has a Funny Joke for You

By GQ. Photograph o’ a very solemn man’s face.

It better be the funniest fucking thing in the world to deserve its own news article.

Bomani Babatunde Jones was born in Atlanta to an economist mother and a political scientist father. Bomani means “warrior,” and his first two names are a

What a laugh riot.

Henry and Baloo: Dog and cat travel companions gain cult following

By BBC. Photo o’ a dog with a cat on its head like a hat.

Enlightened people like to mock ol’-school religions like the Abrahamic religions; but the kind o’ inane trash our money-fetish capitalistic world shovels @ us every day makes me appreciate how much less stupid those ol’ religions were. A’least people back then didn’t worship a dog who wears a cat on their head like a hat.

11 Reasons You Might Be Tired, Even After Sleeping Well

By Bustle.

’Cause I’m reading boring shit like this.

Drake Is Too Big to Fail

By The Ringer. Photo o’ Drake’s giant head in presumably heaven with an angelic glow.

Cool. I can’t wait for the federal government to give him millions o’ tax $ while whining ’bout how they can’t afford to pay social security or forgive student loans.

Suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder? Try Forest Bathing

By NPR. Stock photo o’ forest.

¿How ’bout I just go to a forest, something I could’ve always done, & not just make up a stupidly pretentious term for doing so?

China’s radical plan to limit populations of Beijing and Shanghai

By The Guardian.

¡Sounds like Lottery Time!

The Guardian truly has a thirst for culling the herd. I’d be fine if they were put @ the top o’ the list, ’cause let’s be honest here ’bout who’s the most vital & who’s the least.

This Delightful Christopher Robin Trailer Will Relieve Some of Your Existential Dread, At Least

By Gizmodo.

No, if that illustration is from the trailer, it will ensure I can ne’er sleep ’gain for fear o’ the nightmares it’ll bring.

Why Are Modern Debates on Morality So Shrill?

By the Art of Manliness.

If we e’er develop a time machine I think 1 o’ the 1st things we do is find every one o’ these hypocritical whiners complaining ’bout how “shrill” the modern world is & send them back to a time when you could literally be imprisoned or executed for straying from the narrow dominant ideology & we’ll see how much they like it better.

’Cause nothing’s “manlier” than bitching ’bout the kids these days.

A record number of folks age 85 and older are working. Here’s what they’re doing.

By Washington Post.

Wishing they were dead.

My favorite genre o’ economic analysis is economists getting off to the misery o’ the proletariat.

When do you know you’re old enough to die? Barbara Ehrenreich has some

By the Guardian.

With that look o’ pure despondency on her face, I’m going to presume this cut-off headline ends with “cyanide tablets”.

But I saved the best for last:

Waking up early won’t change your life—but it’s awesome for capitalism

By QZ.com. Photo o’ cats snuggling together. The internet really wants you to start getting up earlier. Everywhere you look, there’s an article touting waking during

If I could choose 1 thing from the internet to show Martians or people centuries in the future to make them understand 2010s internet, it would be this article with this unrelated photo o’ cats. Thank you QZ for finally doing good work.

Now, I had to finally dig into Firefox’s configuration so I could get rid o’ Pocket, ’cause ’twas legit making me too depressed with the uselessness o’ humanity that it flaunted — ¡What a relief it is to see a clean search bar after carrying such a weight for so many months!

Now sing it with me:

& there are no letters in the mailbox

& there are no grapes upon the vine

& there are no chocolates in your boxes anymo’

& there are no diamonds in your mine.

Actually, a mo’ fitting song is this nonsense I crapped up as a break from all this trash:

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Posted in Yuppy Tripe