Double Feature #4: What a week, huh?
Some good links for you to click on.
Welcome to The Double Feature! Each week, I’ll explore two different, unrelated topics. Together we can find some meaning in the juxtaposition—assuming there is any meaning in the world.
It’s one thing to anticipate a chaotic, nightmarish election, and it’s another thing entirely to live through one. I am exhausted and my brain feels like Silly Putty! And my election day didn’t involve volunteering for a campaign, working the polls, or doing anything beyond watching cable news and yelling at the TV—two of the worst activities a human being can participate in.
As of now, things look headed toward a Biden presidency, but we may be stuck in purgatory for a few more hours (or days or weeks, fascists don’t often give up their power quickly or easily). So think of this newsletter as a brief rest stop as we wait to see what’s next. I hope you can sit back, click on these good links, and find some solace. I mean, hey! It’s almost the weekend!
17776 by Jon Bois
Published on SB Nation in 2017, Jon Bois’s 17776 originally ran under the headline “What football will look like in the future.” At first glance it looked like any old sports blog post, but as you scrolled down, the text seemed to explode and melt off the page before dropping you into the piece’s true form: an absolutely bonkers and brilliant work of multimedia speculative fiction. Weaving together chat logs, eerie elevator jazz, and Google Earth, 17776 tells the story of a far future where humankind has mysteriously become immortal. Faced with the threat of living forever, humanity finds solutions to most of its problems and now passes most of its time playing and watching bizarre games of football. Oh, and it’s told from the point of view of sentient NASA and ESA satellites. As all the best stories are!
If you’re not a sports fan, don’t let the “football” of it all scare you off. In 17776, football is absurd and dumb and weird, just like life, and there’s a lot of hope and beauty to be found in that absurdly dumb weirdness. It’s really, really good.
When I first read 17776, I would take in a chapter or two during down time at work. Reading it this way, its 25 chapters took me a couple days to get through. So dive in, and maybe by the time you’re done, one of the networks will have finally called the election.
And once you’ve finished 17776, good news! There’s a sequel, 20020 that Jon Bois and SB Nation put out in September of this year.
I Seem To Have Difficulty by Brendan and Cory
Most of Brendan O’Hare and Cory Snearowski's work takes place in a bizarro version of their real world hometown of Branchburg, New Jersey. In both their videos and their podcast This Is Branchburg, characters struggle with suburban life in sublimely idiotic ways, none more so than Cory’s “Difficulty Man” character. With his confident stride and severe misunderstanding of social norms, the Difficulty Man succeeds at very little besides learning how to do cartwheels at 30 miles per hour.
There’s something about Brendan and Cory’s brand of absurdity that feels like brain candy. Analyzing comedy is often a fruitless pursuit, but taking inspiration from the citizens of Branchburg, I’m going to do it anyway. A lot of their comedy comes from the specific wrongness of their characters’ monologues. They talk longer and longer, revealing more and more of their pointed idiocy, stacking joke upon joke until the whole thing topples over under the weight of their absurd stupidity. It’s a delight to visit a world that’s stupid in this way, rather than the harmful stupidity of the real world.
If you like I Seem To Have Difficulty, check out the further adventures of Difficulty Man:
And their podcast: This Is Branchburg.
Salted PB&J Ice Cream Pie by Sohla El-Waylly
This pie rules. It takes some time to make, but it’s not too difficult, and baking is the best distraction because at the end of it you get to eat something delicious. The recipe comes from Sohla El-Waylly, an inspiration to anyone who has ever wanted to destroy their toxic workplaces. As an aside, her new video series “Stump Sohla,” made in collaboration with Binging With Babish’s Andrew Rea, is another fun distraction watch. The glee that Sohla has as she handily tackles impossible cooking tasks (many of which are self-imposed) is contagious.
I made this back in July, which some might consider a more appropriate time for ice cream pies, but it’s 93° in Los Angeles today and even if it wasn’t, restricting yourself to recipes that are appropriate for the weather is dumb. Set yourself free. Make an ice cream pie.
Now for a second part to this newsletter because that’s what I promised you when you subscribed:
Get involved in your community! Find something that you, yourself, can do to make your immediate neighborhood a better place for everyone. A new president would obviously be huge, but nothing can match a surge of people going out of their way to help those around them.
That’s my piece! Sorry if you hated it! You can scroll back up and read the fun parts again if you want. But think about helping someone, they need it.
Thanks for reading The Double Feature! If you enjoyed it, please consider forwarding it to a friend.
The art at the top is by Isaac Benavidez. Follow him on Instagram: @bienvenidez
Follow me on Twitter to watch me get distracted in real time: @reidoconor