the 2021 internet dude thing

I have only a glancing familiarity with whatever the 2021 internet dude thing is because, defensible or no, I've largely retreated from living in the present day in any meaningful way. Was a time only a handful of years ago when I was still regularly reading NYT and WaPo and FT and the Economist and etc. and etc. and engaging with (non-ILX) online communities and trying to figure out the world from a variety of angles and then the world just got too gross for me to handle. And now I really can't cope with the full-force inundation of Media and Content like at all. I peek through the cracks in my fingers now and again just to get a sense of how close the freely-hurtling boxcar is to the cliff's edge. So like 'being online' for me at this point basically entails visiting this joint and a pleasant and supportive little subset of people I've found on Letterboxd who watch all of the same dumb semi-obscure garbage that I watch. Last month I watched something like fifty horror movies from 1988. It was great! This weekend I watched that new Michael B. Jordan Tom Clancy thing. It was kinda skin crawling in its COME AT ME BRO-ness. That isn't me. I don't know how redolent it is of the larger culture but I know it very much isn't me. I've shifted almost wholesale from reading the news to reading history, in an effort to get perspective on how we got where we are now. Every point in the past sucked in its own special way but there's enough remove in reading about past suckiness that it doesn't give me bleeding ulcers.

I don't know if that even comes within spitting distance of addressing the larger question. Based upon your presence here, I don't think you're a part of this, fwiw. I strive to not be a part of it. Admitting that you don't know everything and that you could be wrong about anything and always trying to be a better version of yourself and being responsive to the needs of people who aren't 2021 internet bros does a lot of the heavy lifting in that regard imo.

I'm still waking up. Forgive me.

however the solutions to these specific problems ("go outside! read a book!") will make you cringe so hard when you say them to yourself that you get whiplash from it

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Monday, 13 September 2021 11:38 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes this is unfortunately the hard truth alright

"you wont run out of things to be angry about on the internet, find the cutoff point that leaves you enough to live on" is maybe the best short version i can come up with today on short notice- it will be open to criticism

The human brain is not fit to contend with the weight and the breadth of the internet, is the thing I keep coming around to. It's like having a staring contest with the sun. You're gonna lose.

The human brain is not fit to contend with the weight and the breadth of the internet

new board description.

:)

i think you're all otm, fwiw. and i think JCLC is correct that it's so hard to do what you know is right (outside), too. knowing the right thing to do and carrying it out are very different things. i do have a camping/zine-making trip planned this weekend, though. "I Heard it on the River"

hmm.

i had this tab open, was about to type something conciliatory and just let the thread go back to the server. then, case in point, i saw the word "outbreak", i saw how people are, and i just hate everything again. can't wait to go fucking camping

I hope to hear nothing but cicadas on the river, so that instead of my zine being full text and illustrations of white racists who call me the f-word from the slow-motion canoes passing by, the text will be like "whiiir..whiirr....whiiir.r....whiirrr..WHIIRRR..WHIRRRR.WERR!" etc - however a cicada noise is put to paper

locusts

We are staying with my gf's parents atm because of plumbing issues at our place, and I've spent a lot of quiet time sitting in an actual back yard just like watching squirrels and chipmunks and various insects do their thing and it has been low-key glorious.

dudes rock

is dude related to penis?

epidudymis

At the beginning of the summer, I bought three firearms — not one or two, but all three at once, Sig Sauer P226, Barrett REC 7, Colt AR-15. That night, I took them into our suburban backyard, and there in the dark, I looked in at my father. From outside, I looked in. I watched this unremarkable man, through the window at night, in the flicker of his news shows — my eyes for once so sharp I could read the chyrons doubled in his glasses. I pointed the AR-15 at him. I stood in the grass of our backyard in this bland nowhere suburb and held him in my sights. And then I put the long gun down on a tarp I’d laid out, and took all of my clothes off, folded them, and stood naked in the backyard in the moonlight, and repeated the action: AR-15, REC 7, P226, sighting my father through the weapons, down the barrels, and past that big double pane of glass.

Back inside, I ran a towel, a clean towel, across my balls, even before the shower, and I sniffed, and there was a deeply masculine musk, and I understood that I was changing, and so were my balls, my great white balls, and everything they were emitting, the scents, the energies, in all directions. I was growing into something new, some new masculinity, and I jerked off three times in the shower, with shampoo, and it didn’t burn.

😎

New readers, hello.

i knew where that was going the second the clean towel was mentioned

lol

THE SURVIVORS
IT STARTED WITH the Banana Bunch Challenge. Everyone knows this part, but the way Austin felt about it was part of all the stuff that happened after. Because we were heroes and no one seemed to get that or they just thought it was a joke and that meant we had to try harder to show them. First, the Banana Bunch Challenge is not a gay thing. I mean, I’m gay and Austin’s either bi or straight or whatever, but it’s just something people said online, how it was some sort of gay meme. But it’s not about that. It’s just a thing you do where you take a bunch of bananas and he holds the bunch in his teeth and maneuvers one into your mouth — and I’d sprayed like eighty sprays of Cepacol and rubbed in some Vaseline — and the banana goes down your throat and on the way back up the razor blades you’re holding between your back teeth rip the peel off and he eats that banana while keeping hold of the rest of the bunch with the other side of his mouth, and you get in a rhythm where you’re sort of eating these bananas back and forth between you, stripping the peels off as they come out of your throat and him chewing and swallowing the banana inside and the point is to try to do as big a bunch as you can before one of you pukes. Eight was the world record, but that was Korea. US is five not counting the obviously doctored ones. Our channel was really good and Austin and I had had some great videos but the most views we’d had was 315 and this was something we could do that wasn’t stupid like the Bleach Butt Challenge and we had a real shot at getting to a new level on the steps outside the school’s side door only three bananas in and I was moving him up a few steps to get the right angle on him with the sun over the roof of the school and the blood from my mouth leaking-slash-spurting onto his chin and I was ready for the next banana but then he gags and doubles over and starts to spew banana everywhere and there’s a noise like blaw pkshhh, and it’s the shooter. The camera’s shaky now in the footage, but Austin’s puking up a banana slurry and I don’t think he even sees what’s going on, but there’s this guy in body armor walking toward us with a rifle pointed moving in this creepy slow way so it’s like time is slowing down, and I know he’s going to shoot me, and that I’m going to die. But that’s not what happened, as you know.

Where’d you get my diary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4v8rLEI4Pg

Those clips should ideally begin "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold...."

Hahaha