Emchap's Shit from the Internet 05/15/19 🍠
The night that Too Many Cooks dropped, I was drunkenly fucking around on the internet at 2 in the morning, like one does when one is 23. Someone I was internet-friends with tweeted about how weird the video was, so obviously I watched it. (Have you seen it lately? Go watch it again, it's weirder than you remember.)
As the video (which is hallucinatorily weird no matter what frame of mind you watch it in) unfolded, I was struck with the quiet feeling that I was being pranked. It turned out that much of the video was staffed with people I knew or had met (because I know a lot of comedy actors in Atlanta, where it was filmed), but of course I didn't know that and the person I'd gotten the link from had no connection to Atlanta or to these people at all. And it was this quiet moment of something being weird in the way that you expect, sort of ("it's an internet video, it's goofy!") and then not how you anticipated ("holy shit this is longer than I'd thought!") and then not in a way anyone intended ("ah fuck this video is staffed by every person who ever taught me improv!").
This happens sometimes when people I know show up in small parts in films I'm watching, and it's always a treat. But usually I'm alone when it happens, so there's less weird context collapse—I'm watching a movie, I know people who are actors, I know the movie was filmed in Atlanta, so.
But, I made a rare outing to see a film in a theater with friends over the weekend. (Poms, about a woman who is at a retirement community in Georgia after living in New York, because the film creators were too tired to pretend that it was Florida, I guess.) And the first 10 minutes of the movie involved Sad Dying Diane Keaton having a stoop sale, and I was with my LA friends and eating a hot dog in a recliner, and up on the screen popped a woman I not only know, but have known since I was 12, when she was my camp counselor (and later boss).
And I started laughing, because of course someone I knew was there, and of course I was in the most Film Town On Earth and still my connection to the movie was my far-away home town, and of course it was not a friend I'd made as an adult but a woman I'd known for more than half my life. It was a great and weird moment.
Shit to read
This is just a brutal story about family and violence and what we tolerate in men. (A chaser.)
I loved seeing where architects live.
Youtuber drama is my favorite thing in the entire world because everyone who is successful on that platform with like five exceptions is just a complete sociopath dumbass. See also. (This, about a right wing nightmare child gaining fame on the platform, is horrifying.)
I watched a documentary about a gay Chinese man negotiating coming out to his family over the weekend; an internet friend recommended this short story, which is a little piece of science fiction that I just loved loved loved.
I liked this post about identity and external approval and women from my aunt.
The "let people enjoy things"/"shut the fuck up it's a corporate property" arguments I see float by have always sort of baffled me and I thought this piece gives useful context on any of it.
I did not know that one of the girls in the church bombing survived; this article about/interview with her is pretty brutal.
New Doubleclicks album! I liked this interview with them a lot!
Fuck, this piece on Al-Anon and what we want from other people is so good.
I liked this piece about where the MCU goes from here. I have known the author of it since I was 16 years old and that is hilarious to me! Time comes for us all!
I watched and enjoyed (mostly) Wine Country; more interesting I thought was this interview with Rachel Dratch.
Eat a sub for breakfast, for tomorrow we may die.
I am so fascinated by the parts of the 90s that seemed normal in the background of my awareness of the world when I was a child, and which are now in retrospect BANANAS.
This is an infuriating article about one of those "coding jobs for miners" startups.
Medical abortion is available via mail order to those in the US.
I managed to be 90% unaware of Homestuck somehow and I still found this look back at it fascinating.
Shit to eat
Get up one morning and decide that today is the day that you finally make bagels.
After lounging longer than you intended, finally put on pants and meander to the store for bread flour.
Walk out having somehow spent $70.
Once home, pull out the various food processor bits and bobs, and dump in 530 grams of bread flour into the bowl.
Briefly wonder if your kitchen scale is accurate, and marvel once again that you inherited it in part because its previous owner found it insufficiently precise for drugs.
Great for flour, though.
Add a packet of yeast. Debate how much salt to put in because the recipe says a tablespoon, but no one seems very clear on the weight of the salt (and you use Morton's which is famously very salty for its volume). Decide to toss in two teaspoons, because you are a coward, and add the two tablespoons of sugar that you need.
Food process it all into a unified powder.
Slowly add a cup and a half of hot water as the food processor runs, and let the dough lump slap around while you debate whether it looks "satiny". Decide it doesn't matter, everything is cohered, and dump it in an oiled bowl with a tea towel covering.
Realize you have several more steps and an hour long rise ahead of you, and regret your choice to not eat anything beforehand. But, you've committed, so nothing for it.
After an hour, punch all the gas out of the dough on a floured surface, and put a dutch oven full of water and some sugar on to boil. Preheat the oven to 400.
Break the dough up into 10 pieces for reasonably-sized bagels or 5 for the sort of freak monster bagels you would like in your heart. Roll each into a rope, and wrap it around your palm to make a ring. Roll the ends together.
Once the water comes to a boil, drop them in three at a time, for 30 seconds on each side. They will bob around in a way that is sort of joyous.
Once that's done, egg wash the lot and put toppings on. Stick them on parchment sheets and pop them in the oven for 20 minutes on one side, 15 on the other.
Finally—finally—cut one open, scald your hand, slather it in cream cheese, and enjoy the best sort of breakfast at 2 in the afternoon.
Shit to listen to
How to Do Nothing is one of my favorite things I've read so far this year; I loved this interview with the author, who now has a book coming out.
Shit to buy
I want everything this store sells.