Last night, I went to go see the Mountain Goats play; today, I’ll be seeing them again. Neither show was a good idea (it’s a weeknight, and I’m sleepy), but there’s something very cathartic about screaming “I’m going to bribe the officials/I’m going to kill all the judges” with a couple hundred of your saddest friends after eating some greasy pizza and shotgunning a red bull to stay awake in This Our Present Moment.

In last night’s show, he ended the regular set with “This Year”, because of course he did. (And it was cathartic, because it’s always cathartic; it was cathartic when I was listening to it on loop while my mom died, and it was cathartic when Covid started, and it’s cathartic now as we go full End of an Empire.) But, much funnier to me, was that he ended the encore with “No Children,” a song that exists to be screamed at live shows and played at weddings of people who are absolutely going to get divorced.

The best Mountain Goats songs imo are the ones that have some incredibly blunt, furious narrator who has finally fucking snapped and is going to make it your problem now. The wordplay and child trauma and MFA energy songs are of course good, but there’s something very post-2015 about getting to just scream "and I hope you die/I hope we both die” and “I personally will stab you in the eye with a foreign object” in a room (in my mask, because of the FUCKING pandemic).

There’s just something very comforting about a skinny English professor-looking motherfucker threatening to stab someone with a foreign object when it feels like everything is bad right now. Like fuck yeah, man! Go for it! Put chalk in front of a bitch-ass senator’s house or dismantle a judge’s house slat by slat or just tell someone you hope they die! Why not!

Shit to read

A real bummer of a piece from 2013 about private child rehomings. This country doesn’t give a fuck about the well being of children.
The absolute fury of having to take Disney’s side in a copyright thing because of how much of a dipshit Hawley is.
Gawker pulling apart an absolutely dipshit internal memo from Axios is a real chef’s kiss.
A reminder that every late term abortion basically involves the saddest set of shit you’ve ever had to read about in your life.
A great and horrifying comic about Uyghur reeducation facilities in China.
This is just a very sweet story in which nothing horrible happens.
Fascinating piece about Old Enough, the show in which tiny Japanese children run errands.
Genuinely feel fucking insane to see how my coworkers are talking about the Heard/Depp case because of this tiktok shit. How the fuck did Depp get woobified.
A friend sent me this piece about how the woman who wrote the original Adulting blog’s life fell apart on the assumption that it was my sort of thing and it absolutely is and I hope it’s yours, too. (I always liked the blog, even if the term is now goofy.)
Absolutely existentially grim piece about Blippi, some fucking YouTuber for children.

Shit to eat

Get a meal kit.
Fail to make the meals from that kit for like a week. This is fine, the meat’s in the fridge.
After that week, take out a pound of now well-aged pizza dough from the fridge and a pound of ground pork.
Cook the pork through, and add a sauce to it. Mine was some ketchup hoisin thing, yours can be whatever moves your heart. Cook until good.
Use a bench scraper to very satisfyingly chop the dough up into ~ 75 g chunks, and flatten each into a 6 in circle or so.
Quarter cup of pork into each circle, and fold them up into balls and put them seam-side down on a baking sheet to hide your shame.
Egg wash them and put sesame seeds on top.
Into the oven at 450 for 10 minutes with a baking pan of water beneath them.
After 10 minutes, dump a quarter cup water right on the baking sheet, and cook for another 15.
Enjoy honestly dope-ass pork buns. Feel pleased.

(Adapted from the Marley Spoon char siu pork bun recipe.)

Shit to listen to

Moun! Tain! Goats!

Shit to buy

Aha, the caffeinated seltzer brand that is I think quickly becoming my favorite.

Emchap's Shit from the Internet

Emchap's Shit from the Internet 05/11/22 🍠