this newsletter has nothing to do with oysters, i just thought the image of a bunny that looks like an oyster was funny

Greetings, fellow Belvilleans. Belvillains? Look, I can call you one or those or I can call you Baguettes, which would be kind of funny. Greetings, fellow Baguettes. Welcome to another thrilling episode of The Newsletter. Boy do I have some updates for you. SHOCKING updates about, uh, TERRIFYING things. But I’m going to put them at the end of the newsletter to force you to read through this whole newsletter first. NO don’t scroll down to the end, I was lying, I don’t have any super cool updates, please just like me, okay? Grade me! GRADE ME!

Well, I guess I have one update: I have the Substack Notes thing now. Notes is Twitter but for Substack. I don’t know how it works for you. I don’t even know how to link it. I think it’s substack.com/notes? Does that work? Click that and find out. Maybe you just go there and see the things I’ve written and then you can comment on them? Who fucking knows anymore, people. These apps are tossing undercooked spaghetti at the wall at this point.

I also have the Chat thing but see my small rant above. Feel free to use it to ask me about broccoli or something, I don’t know. How many avenues do you need to access my content? Why would a newsletter app also have a separate space where I can do mini-newsletters? What even is the internet anymore?

News Re: Substack Itself

Well, it happened—another social media app, another buffoonish CEO being an absolute fucking idiot.

I’ll link the article here: Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best

And then I will show you these two parts of the interview:

So, this is really infuriating. It’s infuriating in the fact that Best is basically inviting people to be racist on his platform, and it’s infuriating that these rich white CEOs keep doing this shit. I don’t want another Elon Musk running a fucking social media company anymore, and I’m sick of the popular companies being run by these weird libertarian buffoons.

Now, if I was a big popular Substack guy, I would probably weigh the pros and cons of staying on this platform. But I’m not. I’ve got like 15 subscribers (hi mom). So, to me, leaving Substack is an easy choice. Especially now that I’ve got my blog up and running. I know people like the condensed version of my life on here, but man am I sick of these dudes running these social media sites and then having a shit response to “Should you moderate the content on your site?”. (I’m also sick of “content as business” right now but that’s a whole other thing.)

I’m going to stick it out on here for a bit but if Chris Best doesn’t reel back what he said in that interview, I’m out of here. I’ll take all your emails somewhere else, or hell I’ll just email you directly from my friggen Gmail, I don’t care.

Random Movie!

Sometimes I want to watch a movie but I don’t know what, and also I have like 50,000 pairs of polyhedral dice, so recently I married these two concepts and started watching movies randomly, by rolling dice. These are the results I’ve gotten so far:

• The Duellists (1977). Not bad! Ridley Scott’s directorial debut.

• The Land of Short Sentences (aka Meter i sekundet, 2023). Couldn’t find it online!

• About Last Night… (1986). Film version of the play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” by David Mamet. It was alright. Lots of Demi Moore’s boobs and Rob Lowe’s butt if you’re into that.

• Temple of Venus (1923). Couldn’t find!

• Safety Last! (1923). Watched this instead. Pretty good, some neat moments and cool cinematography for the 20s.

• Thank You for Smoking (2005). Somewhat interesting but mostly bland movie. What happened to Aaron Eckhart? What is he doing these days? I hope he’s well.

• The Rocker (2008). Kind of a terrible movie for the first hour, kind of a decent movie for the second because it stops being about Rainn Wilson’s stupid character.

It’s cool because never in my life would I have ever watched any of these movies on my own. How do I do it? Basically I roll for decade, then year of decade, then whether I watch a top 100, worst 100, or cult classic film. If you want more detail, I wrote a Google Doc for it. I recommend it, but please get your movies from the holy bastion of streaming sites. Please do NOT pirate movies, especially movies from 1923 that are making basically no money so who cares but DON’T do it okay? Or else the Pirate Police will come to get you.

If you have any ideas for further dice rolls, fuckin’ … put it in the Chat thing! Or comment or god damn it I don’t know, just send me a postcard.

Race Season

Race season has begun for me. And by that I mean, I signed up for too many 5ks. Between April 8th and July 4th I have eight races. The 4th being my first ever 10k. (That’s a little over 6 miles for you gun totin’ Americans.)

Why did I sign up for so many races? Well, you know how when you’re using a table saw and you accidentally start to saw your thumb off, and for a split second you think, Well, I could pull back and have a dangly thumb that might not ever heal right, or I could just rip right through that sucker and put the thumb in resin and set it on the desk in my den as a little reminder of that time I severed my thumb with a table saw… what was I talking about? Oh, right. It’s like that. I’m the pushing my thumb through the table saw part. Hmm.

Okay, here’s a better analogy: it’s like Katamari Damacy and I’m the ball that keeps rolling over races. That … sounds bad in a different context. Running races. I’m collecting them until I turn into a star from the gravity of all the races—analogies are hard, people!

The 8th was the Lacamas Hop Hop 5k, which is detailed more on my blog. Basically, if you want the more nuanced and technical running stuff, go to my blog. Here, I’ll just say: there was a petting zoo.

I will relate a funny thing that I forgot to mention on my blog though: when I was walking up to the venue, the petting zoo trailer was pulling up. At the exact same time, the DJ at the venue was playing Taylor Swift’s “Trouble” and, I shit you not, I swear on my mother’s grave (after she dies of course), a goat inside the trailer bleated A FEW SECONDS before the popular goat screaming “Trouble” video remix.

Thankfully it was just a bleat and not a scream that would have terrified all of us, but it was still funny to me.

Re: the race, I did pretty good! I still walk a bunch, but not for long each time. My time was 36:57, a 5k PR and a good indication that my time should continue to get faster over the course of the year. I will get a 30 minute 5k. Maybe not in 2023, but eventually. There were mimosas and goats and it felt kind of bougie, but the medal is cute and kind of trippy, like maybe the designer took LSD before they designed the artwork for this year.

Also, my injuries that were a hindrance before are basically gone now, which I entirely attribute to my new shoes. Thank god.

The day after this publishes I am running the Five Fifty Fifty, which I signed up for like two weeks ago on a lark. I think it’s an untimed race but it benefits the AB Korkor Foundation for Mental Health, which, I’ll be honest, I did not do scrupulous research on prior to signing up. I just saw a 5k in Laurelhurst Park (close to where I live) and went for it. AB Korkor is the founder (A stands for Adel, not to be confused with Adele, who is a popular British singer), and the vice-president appears to be his son, which feels kind of nepotic. Let’s not think too much about this, okay? It’s a run/walk so I’m not planning on going all out.

After that is the Lilac Run in Gresham, so two races before my next newsletter. Are you sick of me yet?!

A Videos for You

Here’s the music video for Caroline Polachek’s “Smoke.”

I’m having weird feelings about this video, namely that it was clearly inspired by music videos from the 90s and—are we at a point where 4:3 aspect ratio is nostalgic now? It was only a decade ago! (Not the 90s, 4:3 ratio.) I have screenshots from my monitor from 2008 that are in 4:3. Anyway Caroline if you’re reading this I’d love to take you out for a lovely steak dinner, just shoot me a comment or whatever, I dunno. We have a lot in common: you were born to wealthy parents in Manhattan and lived in Tokyo during your early childhood, and I one time ran down a hill too fast when I was a kid and ran facefirst into a tree. We’re meant for each other.

I’m also going to link this because it was cool to learn Lindsay Buckingham’s picking style but also because hot damn is Never Going Back Again a great song. I tried listening to Fleetwood Mac’s discography from the start but the early blues stuff wasn’t my cup of tea, and really the band didn’t take off until Lindsay and Stevie Nicks joined. Which we all know, because this band has been studied relentlessly.

But seriously, I was listening through the early stuff and felt very meh about it, but once you hear Stevie start to sing “Rhiannon” on their 1975 album, you realize the band has just leveled up big time. Really wouldn’t be too off to say that Fleetwood Mac was really Buckingham Nicks¹ all along.

The End

When next you hear from me I will regale you with stories of not one, but two! 5k races, because I have gone insane. Until then.

1. Yes I am aware that Lindsay and Stevie’s first album was called Buckingham Nicks, I do have google, you know. ↩︎