(i told you)
Tag: newsF
Flashback Friday: The Jimmy Hold
Straight talk: this still cracks me the fuck up.
The title sorta casts the whole thing in a new light…
… I mean, a severed Russian head is a pretty dope thrift-shop come-up.
Flashback Friday: Halloween Edition 🎃🦇🔪
A seasonally appropriate list of creepyscarry links:
- Teddy Has an Operation (short film)
- A Researcher’s Descent into Madness (short film)
- Actual pages from an actual children’s book from the American “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s (absolutely factual historical info; not fictional in any way, except for in that thoroughly un-fun mass-hysteria-and-the-delusions-of-crowds way)
- “The Slender Men” audiobook (fun horror fiction dedicated to all those adjunct professors out there)
- “Whatever Comes After Calcutta” audiobook (this one wigs me out a little because when I wrote it I was exaggerating about “red” America, and now it sorta reads as almost documentary)
HALLOWEEN TREAT 🎃👻🦑💀: “Mitochondrial Assimilation” by Khalifaziz @NightlightPod
This story resonates with me tremendously as a Jew. It captures the ambivalent, ecstatic trauma of becoming part of the thing that is America in a way that perfectly matches my lived experience.
NIGHTLIGHT (A Black Horror Fiction Podcast) # 422: “Mitochondrial Assimilation” by Khalifaziz
They also have an interview with the author, Khalifaziz, that’s well worth your time.
I sorta love local investigative reporters…
… yes, they are cheesy showboats—no doubt—but they are cheesy showboats performing what is likely the ONLY FUNCTION most folks ACTUALLY want out of the Fourth Estate: to warn them about shit that might harm them on a regular day-to-day basis.
A huge portion of “news” focuses on opinion and “analysis” (which is just another kind of opinion) and “commentary” (a third name for opinion). All of these are technically forms of fiction: a person takes a nugget of reality and weaves whatever the hell they want around it. (DISCLOSURE: I was an op-ed writer for years. I’ve looked hard and long at how these particular sausages are made. It has lead to me being pretty goddamned disgusted by the prospect of eating any.)
Meanwhile, the easily maligned local TV investigative reporter? Say what you like about the smarm and histrionic gotcha!ness, but those bastards are speaking facts: they smell something fishy, go and get pics, take samples to a lab, and report the results. God Bless ’em
Hold Up: Is that emblematic 1967 Armour hot dog commercial an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s classic film SEVENTH SEAL?
I mean, it’s weird that no one talks about the obvious visual similarities between the beginning of hot dog ad (top image) and the final image from Bergman’s Seventh Seal (bottom image), right?
Are we to understand that the Armour hotdog ad takes placed in some purgatorial afterlife, where we are all condemned to revert to a childlike state of un-knowing and follow a sinister hot dog man, terrified and singing? ’cause that’s a dark, dark Easter Egg, folks.
Here’s the entire VINTAGE 1967 ARMOUR HOT DOGS COMMERCIAL – KIDS MARCHING & SINGING:
And here’s the end of Bergman’s 1957 film, Seventh Seal:
Flashback Friday: “First Days”
Just a brief reflection on First Days at school. I wrote this back in 2017, when my youngest began kindergarten. I posted it now, because after 406 with no in-person school, it’s taken me a month to process that her first day of the school year came and went without dire consequences.
This old essay begins like so:
Tuesday was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten. At 4:20, when her bus finally arrived, she didn’t get off.
The driver checked, first calling out from the front, then shushing all of the kids and calling out again, then finally going seat to seat down the length of the big yellow bus.
My daughter wasn’t there.
Don’t worry—this is an “all’s well that ends” situation…
from First Days (or “To Hell with Mitch Albom and his Bullshit Flat-Earth Nostalgia”)
It goes on from there. And, no, I have no clue why I chose to defame Mitch Albom in the title of this pieces. I never mention him in the entire essay. He must have just pissed me off that day. Dude does that.
New Interactive Fiction: “Shoot First!”
I’ve added a new interactive fiction, “Shoot First!“, to my Patron’s Only Digital Vault. For as little as $3 patrons get immediate access to all the goodies in the Vault, including an analog horror film, audio books, new fiction and music, interactive goodies, etc.
Check it out on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DavidErikNelson
FUN FACT: Moderating Facebook Gives Facebook Moderators PTSD
The question for me is this: Does Facebook provide anywhere near the social value to justify what this man suffered? Does it provide enough value to justify the suffering of the likely thousands of workers who Facebook employees to protect us from Facebook?
As you reflect on this, you probably want to check out The Facebook Files, an ongoing investigative series from the Wall Street Journal (articles are paywalled, but the related podcasts are free and worth your time and attention).
Plainly put, Facebook profits from hate and misery. Further reads:
- “People are more anti-vaccine if they get their COVID news from Facebook than from Fox News, data shows”
- “Social media platforms are failing to monitor anti-Semitism, two reports say.”
- Failure to Protect: How Tech Giants Fail to Act on User Reports of Antisemtism
- This report notes that, of the posts reported to them as anti-Jewish Facebook acted on less than 11%. By contrast, Facebook claims to proactively remove +90% of child porn without anyone (outside of FB mods) ever having to see it, let alone report it. The second problem—moderating images of abuse—is a lot harder than setting up a grep to flag specific hate terms (let alone having a moderator check a user-reported post to see what it says). And yet FB gladly pours the resources needed to do the harder thing. Why? Because, broadly speaking, the world abhors the abuse of children—and thus advertisers find it toxic. It hits their profit center, and so they act. (I leave it as an exercise for you, in your quiet hours, to consider why it is that the world doesn’t abhor Jew hatred. I assume it’s because they believe that we often have it coming.)
Brass tacks question: Given what social media companies like FB can and will do, in terms of exerting editorial control when it is in their interest to do so, I’m left wondering if they really deserve Section 230 protection?
FB, of course, is far from unique here—or, maybe, is uniquely awful only in the magnitude and clarity of their disfunction and viciousness. For a Twitter-centric rumination on the fundamental design aspects of social media that are making it so damaging to both individual humans and larger human societies, please read Noah Smith’s rational (and, in the case of the later, research-backed) articles “The Shouting Class” and “The Shouting Class 2: Last Refuge of Scoundrels”:
“In other words, society has always had about the same number of shouty jerks. But with the rise of social media, we have moved our society’s political discussions from spaces in which the shouty jerks were at least somewhat marginalized and contained to spaces that preferentially amplify their voices.…In pursuit of personal glory, bad people turn neighbor against neighbor.”
Noah Smith in “The Shouting Class 2: Last Refuge of Scoundrels”