Emchap's Shit from the Internet 05/13/20 🍠
I have spent most of the last few weeks watching all seven seasons of Mad Men back to back. There's no real reason for this beyond "I have depression" and "I didn't watch it when it was on the first time because I was busy being in college", but it has been a solid way to kill the infinite long hours in a way that feels mildly improving and costs me nothing. It is very weird to finally put the assorted "Peggy walks down the hall" and "Not great, Bob!" gifs in their actual context.
I had watched a little of the first and second season of the show when it initially aired—I was still living at home at that point, and my parents watched it—and so the early seasons were what I had in my mind as the general outline of the show. I had not realized that over the 7 seasons it goes from a fairly standard if painstakingly well-costumed workplace drama to a goofy, weird look at the west coast in the 70s/alcoholism. When the show is funny, it's very funny; Joan's season 7 foray into doing cocaine made me laugh, loudly, which it feels like I haven't done in a while.
(To some extent that's because I've spent my time not watching Mad Men watching Black Spot, which is a French show that starts as a grim, atmospheric cop drama and escalates into a BANANAS supernatural thriller in its second season. A+ would watch again, but very few laughs to be had.)
The TV has been a nice distraction from the fact that I have lost the ability to meaningfully focus on work or personal projects or anything; I haven't had a night of sleep that felt restorative in a week. I go to bed with my jaw tensed up and my muscles already in knots and I know that I'm grinding my teeth in the night. I don't fall into any sort of deep sleep, as far as I can tell, and I'm waking up exhausted. I have no idea what's happening beyond Everything, and I miss being around people, and I just want to sleep for three days but I don't think it would do anything.
Tonight is the Survivor finale, and in a nod to These Times it is being filmed in Jeff Probst's festive garage. It will quite possibly be won be an absolute dummy of a Jersey cop. These are weird times.
Shit to read
This look at what it means to shop ethically is of course oriented towards the consumers of a website that includes a shopping vertical but I found it useful to weight the impact of my actions.
This is an INCREDIBLY compelling longread about the guy who stopped WannaCry, it is wild from start to finish.
I loved this piece on food in nursing homes and what it means to provide dignity to those who can't easily chew or swallow.
A bananas longread for entirely different reasons, 100% made me cry.
God can everyone please talk to me about the Robert Pattinson interview forever.
Guy Fieri seems genuinely good and I have fond memories of the dive he came to in Atlanta, where I used to get drunk on Golden Monkey with my coworkers and which serves a food called pastarella sticks.
Humans are mostly pro-social, she shrieked as she was consumed by the sea.
I am increasingly in agreement with this author about the need for real harm reduction guidelines so we can make decisions.
This is an awful story, and it happened at the hospital where I was treated for my gallbladder.
Ask A Fuckup is back, baybee.
Daniel Lavery's turn to absolute fury has been a sight to behold.
Shit to eat
Buy shrimp. The recipe says to get pre-peeled shrimp. I did not.
When the nice grocery store employee brings you the shrimp, forget that they are in the bag until it's been an hour or two.
Put them in the freezer, it's probably fine, right?
Wait a week.
Decide you want shrimp scampi without 100% knowing what's in the dish. You have shrimp. You have scamp.
Toss half the bag of shrimp into a bowl of cold water to wait out their fates.
Boil a pot of salty water.
Chop up whatever amount of onion you have languishing in your fridge from another recipe. Put it in a bowl.
Grate 3 garlic cloves into the onion. Same with the peel from a quarter-ish of a lemon.
Grab a handful of parsley. Chop it up half-heartedly and leave it on the cutting board. It doesn't get its own bowl.
Make or buy breadcrumbs. With a tiny food processor and some stale bread anything is possible.
Toss half a cup of breadcrumbs into a hot skillet with some oil; grate a clove of garlic into them and add some salt.
Stir around until they're toasty and then put them aside in a bowl.
Clean out the pan, add more olive oil, and put your shrimps in the skillet. Realize that putting a wet object into hot oil is a bad idea.
Flip 'em over after 3 minutes or so. I see now that I was supposed to salt them, but honestly there's salt elsewhere in the recipe, it's fine.
After another 30 seconds, scoop 'em out and put them aside.
2 Tbsp of butter, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and some red pepper go into the pan. Toss in the bowl of onions and stir them around.
Once everything's soft, add a little bit of whatever you're drinking while you're making this, or water, or stock. I added a mango wheat beer and honestly: it was good. Take it off the heat once it looks like sauce.
At this point the water will have started to boil. Make the amount of pasta you have and want to use. I used angel hair and it was great.
Reserve some pasta water, take the pasta, and toss it in with the onion mixture.
If you are efficient, you will have used this time to chop and possibly peel the shrimp if you fucked up on purchasing peeled ones. I was not.
Toss some pasta water, 2 Tbsp of butter, and some oil in with the noodles and onion. Stir it all around.
In go the shrimp and the parsley. Squeeze some lemon on up in there.
Stir everything up, taste for salt, add more because you didn't salt the shrimp, and go with god.
To serve, take as much as you want and top it with breadcrumbs.
Shit to listen to
Honestly it's all Bon Iver and Mountain Goats over here.
Alternatively, this album made out of a washing machine.
Shit to buy
My local clothing store makes masks; mine just arrived.