Five scalding hot takes way too dangerous for the internet (hide the kids!)

💎 We should train cops at comedy clubs.

Re: Tyreek Hill arrest, it sure does seem challenging for police to deescalate without being jerks about it. The crazy thing is comedy club bouncers seem to know how to do this better than actual cops. “Gonna need you to keep it down, sir” = problem solved 90% of the time. And they don’t even have guns. Screw the police academy, we need to start training wannabe cops at the local Chuckle Hut.

💎 It’s not Gen Z’s fault.

We should spend more time blaming Gen X for Gen Z (and Boomers for Millennials). How ya gonna bake the cake and then turn around and start complaining about how it tastes!? Look in the mirror, Dr. Frankenstein.

💎 Women’s standards are too high.

Women do more domestic labor because they have higher standards. Men can live in a hovel, eat TV dinners, and sleep on the floor every night and be fine with it. Yet instead of being praised for our adaptability, we are criticized for our tolerance. This LMS (Low Maintenance Shaming) must stop!

💎 We’re living too long,

The problem is we live too long now. No one was depressed 300 years ago because they were just happy to be alive. Then: "I made it to 50. Wow!" Now, you turn 50 and it’s like, "Jeez, I’m not even halfway there." This is at the heart of so many issues we’re facing (e.g. divorce, social security, geezer politicians clinging to power, etc.), yet we refuse to have an honest conversation about it.

💎 We screwed up evolution.

Dumb, ugly people are having so many babies. Meanwhile, smart hotties are like "I'm gonna wait." Reverse Darwinism! It's messed up cuz nature is tryna tell us to do the exact opposite. Must be really frustrating for Mother Earth that we're an OS that refuse to run her code properly.

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Quickies

🎯 Great dating hack no one discusses: Lower your standards.

🎯 It’s not that complicated. “The Bear” is transgenre: It’s a drama that identifies as a comedy.

🎯 introvers - person who can go either way on being an introvert/extrovert

🎯 There needs to be a documentary about blogging/internet stuff in early 00's if for no other reason than that it'll show young people that online life wasn't always (and doesn't have to be) a hellscape.

🎯 One big problem with "late night" is we all watch it at noon.

🎯 Dear under-25 bisexuals: No one believes you. Every lesbian thinks young bisexual women are actually straight. Every gay dude thinks young bisexual guys are actually gay. Get back to us when you're 40 and then we'll buy it.

🎯 Q: What is dark triad personality?
A:

🎯 I will not "get home safe." I will get home dangerous.

🎯 stoicoin - a cryptocurrency for people who believe in stoicism *

* My scam idea that seems like it'd have a 90% chance of success.

🎯 A great thing about being bohemian is it makes apathy seem intentional.

🎯 The problem with community is other people.

🎯 I am the mother of Dave Grohl's new baby. I will not be taking questions at this time and ask you to respect my family's request for privacy as we deal with these difficult circumstances.

Comedy

🃏 Get jokes on my social media: Instagram – TikTok – Threads – X – Substack Notes.

🃏 Watch my standup at YouTube. I post new Shorts there on the regular and got a new special coming soon.

🃏 I post clips at Punchup.Live too. Here’s one where I talk about drugs and conspiracies...

🃏 NYC: GOOD EGGS is uptown every Monday night at 7:30pm at the new NY Comedy Club on the Upper West Side. Also go these other weekly shows in NYC: HOT SOUP (Tuesdays) at Comedy Cellar and GOOD EGGS (Wednesdays) at NY Comedy Club (East Village).

Screenshooting

Well, lookie here…

👀 Binge fringe

Hear me out: Beer goggles are actually a GOOD thing.

When society stops binge drinking…

…it also stops screwing!

👀 Brat everything

“For the design: I’m thinking ADHD, but make it BRAT.”

👀Tacky

Relate so hard to this Tom Ford thing. When I was 8, I asked my mom if she thought I was good looking. She eyed me up and down and then replied, “Maybe after you get braces.” Thanks for the future therapy material, Ma!

I did have bad teeth though. I know because my orthodontist used the mold of my teeth as his before and after to sell other patients. Every month he’d pull out the mold and show me and I’d have to sit there, nod, and think, “Yeah, I was pretty damn heinous. Thanks for reminding me!”

👀 Oh, Elon

It's giving "The other day a veteran approached me, good looking man, tough man, and he said, 'Sir...'"

We need a term for when one's downward spiral coincides with manic sh*tposting on social media. “Shock bottom” perhaps?

👀 “…led to death threats”

I refuse to reward "led to death threats" with true victimhood status. There's been too much death threat inflation. This ain't 1993 anymore. "I got death threats" is the price you pay for going viral now. Anytime I hear someone complaining about death threats these days, I think, “We get it, you’re popular.”

5-spotted

🗯️ Speaking of, Nick Gillespie on threat inflation.

It's threat inflation--*everything* is an *existential* risk now, from Trump being reelected to Harris getting in for the first time to cell phones for kids to microplastics to AI to climate change to nuclear war to Target selling trans wear to seed oils to a million other things that we've fully absorbed, chewed on, shit out, and totally forgotten about in just the past few months.

🗯️ Sasha Chapin: 50 things I know. Good list!

I know that there are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative. Concrete example: let’s say you’re listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You’re in the appreciative mode. Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they’re consistent? You’re in the evaluative mode. Much of sanity, and happiness, consists of finding the right mode for the right moment. The appreciative mode is terrible for debugging your business plan. But the evaluative mode is terrible for having a first date. A lot of capable, intelligent people suffer because they do not have the ability to switch out of the evaluative mode, or even notice that they’re in it.

🗯️ Science vs. religion.

Science is essentially pessimistic. It identifies all the diseases that can kill us and those that might only maim us. Religion, however, is profoundly optimistic, believing as it does that all is from God, and therefore promises eternal life. It employs belief as a cure for death, faith as a vaccine against illness, and prayer as an antibody against hopelessness.

🗯️ Pamela Paul on euphemism inflation and Georges Carlin/Orwell. “The right euphemism not only removes blame, it also reassigns it.”

Active descriptors can be substituted with passive ones in ways that rob people of power or agency, deliberately so: Obese people become “people with obesity” — those with a condition irrespective of action. Likewise, an “alcoholic,” which itself replaced the derisive “drunk,” is now a person suffering from an “alcohol abuse disorder.”

In these cases, the obvious goal is to neutralize terms that have come to be seen as loaded. “Overweight” becomes verboten because it assumes a certain body size to be normal. Along the same lines, skin care companies like Unilever got rid of the word “normal” to describe skin that was neither especially oily nor dry.

🗯️ Roger Ebert: “A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself.”

It's all about them. They have mastered the Star Wars or Star Trek universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies.

Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to.

We did it! Thanks for reading.

-Matt

P.S. Listen to my podcast Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby. It’s like this newsletter but audio and with someone calling me out on my bullsh*t.

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 37 episodes