Extra Evil – All Prayers, No Thoughts

Newsreel

No innocent lobbies were harmed this week.

American volunteers brought our signature generosity, humility, and intellect to Ukraine.

Nintendo finally got in on planned obsolescence.

Meatpacking plants promised to keep ball pits up to code.

The arms race entered its steroid era.

Fertility trends point to sperm banks outperforming real ones.

Today’s Mood

War Journal

A ways back, Jason Pargin tweeted a bit about the value of absorbing some bad media. Those posts will be lost in the Great Twitter Fire, so I’d like to steal that point today. You can learn a lot from a one-star effort.

When the story machine breaks, your brain starts picking apart why. Why’s everything in Birdemic feel even more stilted than the performances allow? The editing is jacked. The trilogy is the most pointed lesson in taught editing that a human being could hope for, short of a live C-Span feed of a zoning law debate.

I think it also makes you a little stronger, in a Masai-circumcision ritual kind of way. Reading trash is harder than writing well. And obviously, you get another voice to riff on/parody/imitate as will, depending on how odd your story needs are.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’ve read two Anne Coulter books, and am now invincible.

Note: all this presumes you regularly consume good media. Don’t create some kind of Uwe Boll super-soldier program. Actually, do that. The results would probably be incredible.

I see I’ve been signing each email off twice for about a year. I progress in spite of my overall intelligence, not because of it.

A bit of the unsexy half of my schtick is hanging over me this week. Hanging posters. Making lesson plans. Wrangling email. Making long sentences short.

Thank Darkseid for all of it. It is an immeasurable improvement over ad briefs in every non-monetary way. Knowing my luck, I’d be writing a jingle for Ozempic.

Speaking of diet shots, I’m reading my 1-900-HOTDOG comrade Lydia Bugg’s novella (good time), and it has me thinking about the unease industry. There’s more money in mining self-hate than writing the second half of comparisons.

Horatio Alger smothered our ability to think sanely about weight. Striving is the default EagleLand solution, and if you’re not succeeding, you just need to strive harder. And if you can’t strive harder, you must be that lazy newsboy from Act I.

Not particularly helpful. It’s hard to browbeat people into anything, except hanging out with you less.

The Present

Child labor’s back and better than ever.

The first hit of paid subscriber nonfiction’s free.

I have claimed the oversharing throne.

If you have to ask, she’s a wytch.

Read Everything Abridged to make it all make sense.

The Past

Another shooting, another repost of this piece.

The Future

Once again: April 11, Everything Abridged in paperback.

Next 1-900-HOTDOG column will be beloved by many and detested by one or two. Mea culpa.

Two New Yorker bits in the barrel.

My next fancy paid essay confesses to multiple crimes. Hop in.

One Sentence Reviews

Which Moped with Chrome-plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard?: Good luck getting a physical copy. (5/5)

Theodore Rex: Raw, golden, human failure. (1/5)

Fuck This Place, Vol. 1: It picks up. (3/5)

AEW Revolution 2023: Writing precludes watching fisticuffs on time. (4.5/5)

Car Bomb – Mordial: I need sheet metal clanging in 12/pi time to fall asleep. (4/5)

Bert Kreischer – Razzle Dazzle: Extant. (2.5/5)

Refused – War Music: Less inventive, more cursing at a burning police station. (3.5/5)

Open Question

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Signing off

Thanks for reading Extra Evil, the newsletter hiding Satanic codes. Share it to sacrifice a virgin.

-DD

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