Emchap's Shit from the Internet 06/26/19 🍠
There are lots of odd things about working from home, but this week I've been stuck on the idea of sick days as a remote employee. I've been dealing with a cold since late last week, and the main social pressure that might prompt me to take a sick day normally (it's a dick move to infect your coworkers) doesn't apply here, which makes me want to keep working until I fall over because of some weird Calvinist guilt. But, after a truly miserable and completely inert weekend spent feebly propping myself up on the couch, I gave up and took Monday off, which was for the best.
(A thing that is very funny to me about remote work is that there is—despite the fact that none of my coworkers really live near each other—a cold going around the office. We're dropping like flies whose children just started daycare, it's terrible.)
I'm awful at being sick, particularly since I live alone. My space is comfortable and I have good lounging clothes, but at the end of the day, if I'm dripping snot down my front what I really want is someone to pat my head and bring me soup and generally coo sympathetically at me until I feel better, which is I assume why people get married and have children—built-in soup-and-patting brigade.
Since my cat is a terrible soup-and-patting brigade (he can't hold the bowl very effectively), I had to make do with what I had, and what I had was apparently a profound desire to revert just 100% completely to myself at 14.
It started with watching the Good Omens miniseries (which I absolutely didn't think would be any good, and which was delightful) and moved on to just mainlining fanfiction and press interviews. I think I've seen probably every single press junket David Tennant has hit in the last 5 years now, filtered through a gentle Dayquil haze.
By the end of it I'd gone just full adolescent and reverted to scrolling through Tumblr posts. (In the midst of this I discovered that David Tennant is wisely not on any social media—though his much-younger wife is and seems to mostly use it to dunk on him, which I approve of—and Michael Sheen is unexpectedly good at surrealist shitposting for a man in his late 40s.)
It has not been a productive week (my sister, hilariously, keeps pushing me to finish a book we're both reading so she can talk about it with me, which is a wild role-reversal), but it has been fun to dive back into these things that used to be such a big part of how I spent my time. I was writing LotR fanfiction as a middle schooler (I still have it in Dropbox and one day I will get drunk enough to go read it) and I spent ages 14 to 20mumblemumble just mainlining British quiz shows pirated on Youtube and memorizing facts about just an astounding number of British comedians who are mostly slightly odd-looking and made of legs and/or Cambridge-educated. The fact that I wound up an extremely-online adult is in no way surprising.
The energy that I used to devote to those not particularly useful but fun hobbies has in more recent years been routed to getting in fights about authentication standards on Twitter and reading memoirs, but the goofy fan things—it turns out—are still super fun! David Tennant is very charming! The deep text analysis the #teens are doing on Tumblr is still great and introduced me to the very gay angel statue in the back of Crowley's apartment and a whole bunch of asexual teens who really identify with genital-free ethereal beings! (Godspeed, teens! May you all expand our understanding of gender!)
Gaiman has (finally) stopped doing the weird "no homo" 90s dodge around Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship that he did for so long when asked about the book, and the press pitch for the show has just been Michael Sheen and David Tennant talking about how the characters are in love with each other. (Would you have gotten this from a Lord of the Rings press tour in 2002? You would not!) All the fanfiction authors who I subscribe to for, like, X-Files reasons (yes there are still people writing X-Files fanfiction in 2019, yes it rules) have all started writing things for this new show we all watched, and it's fun to feel part of a weird, joyous 2019 zeitgeist.
Once the mucus is cleared out of my lungs and I've really cleared out the friends to lovers slowburn 5+1 tag (this was a joke but there is one thing in there, I have already read it, and it is fun, and wow is this issue of the newsletter going to be appealing to like six people) on AO3, I'll probably go back to other things. But certainly there are worse ways to spend a sick day.
Shit to read
Just gonna frontload the Good Omens shit into one tidy bullet for everyone: this is sort of a fascinating David Tennant interview just about his career 10 years ago (I did not start watching Doctor Who until Matt Smith was on it, so I am like 30% aware of any of what he's talking about), this GQ interviewer is super a fan, and Neil Gaiman wrote fanfiction for his own-ass book.
I thought this was a really fascinating history of Brand Twitter.
Obsessed with this profile about babe.net's collapse and retroactively so, so grateful that the dudes who ran the site I wrote for when I was 20 and decided to just go fly to meet my internet coworkers a SXSW where we all piled into a single hotel room were good dudes, and not super creepy in the way this dude was.
Exploring cross-cultural domestic abuse tactics.
I really, really loved this takedown of some of the garbage dumbass wellness writing targeted at cis women. (And like, I say this as someone who had some truly awful experiences with oral birth control.) Good science writers writing wellness content instead of personal essay writers grown slightly up are so needed.
The oral history of 4 Loko is exactly as great as you'd imagine.
The several of you on my list who care about digital privacy and international law should get at this.
Humans should not live longer.
Just more absolutely horrifying writing from the Facebook content moderation contractor offices.
Shit to eat
Realize that the sore throat is not, in fact, going away.
Stand up to make yourself food and realize that—due to feeling slightly like you're going to pass out after about 30 seconds—that that is ill advised.
Consider ordering something soothing, like ramen.
Discard that and instead cue up Grubhub to order Taco Bell, because you are actually a very large raccoon with a data plan.
Order a crunchwrap supreme, no beef, and a non-diet Doctor Pepper. (Live mas.)
Eat, curled up on your couch, before falling asleep at 8:30 pm.
Shit to watch
I laughed so hard I cried at this video of Tan France giving John Mulaney a hypebeast makeover.
Shit to buy
A man I used to work with has made this dope-ass customizable generative art purchasing website. It's really interesting and you should look at it.
I am obsessed with this bra.