A list of people and things I am mad at

1. People who think every piece of media they consume has a much longer “director’s cut” that is being withheld from them by studios/fat cats/meanies. Tangentially, these people all seem to think that the point of story is “more story.” They’ve ruined everything
2. Americans who write crossword puzzles. We don’t know your ridiculous culture! We use the letter “u!” Stop presuming yourselves to be the centre of the universe you god damned oafs!!
3. “Jump up and down pick me!!” desktop apps, like Slack, which refuse to be loaded in the background while you conduct other tasks, preferring instead to consistently interrupt those other tasks — sometimes two or three times — by forcing themselves to the foreground
4. YouTube. Fuck YouTube. Fuck it (Full disclosure: I use YouTube)
5. Doug Ford
6. The wind. After a decade of unexpected relief from the pressure-related migraines I suffered from about age 16-40, they are… officially back! This is how the climate crisis will kill me. Not with heat; not with food shortages. By convincing me to drill into my own temporal lobe to stop the pounding.
7. Everyone who hasn’t subscribed to this newsletter. WTF is their problem, right? Feel free to forward this email to them to let them know they are hated
8. Conversely, people who are only reading this list to see if they’re on it. What, you don’t read the other stuff?? The other stuff’s good!
9. Scaachi Koul
10. You ever have that thing where you only realize weeks later that something was a dream? That shouldn’t be possible
11. “Ethical A.I.” startups
12. R-I-Z-G-O-D RIZGOD BABEE
13. I don’t know if I’m mad at Hulu for killing the Buffy reboot, because I’m fine with not pissing in the swimming pool on that one (or any other IP that ended just fine a long time ago, Hollywood!). But I will say: the way the studio treated the talent on this announcement was abysmal. Here’s something a lot of people don’t think hard enough about: it’s not actually that difficult to not be a thoughtless dick. Especially in a workplace setting, because the stakes are just so low.
14. Joss Whedon
15. 2-factor authentication. Enough. Stop this
16. Web site cookies. Enough. Stop this
17. Pop-up modals. Enough. Stop this
18. Basically, stop literally everything you are purposely putting between me and the thing I’m trying to do on your product.
19. I guess what I’m saying is I hate product designers with a blinding fury these days. How dare they turn in this slop and call it work. How dare they get paid for this. In writing this I am realizing I am probably mad at the wrong part of the hierarchical tree: it’s the David Ellison types who need to be brought down
20. David Ellison
21. David Ellison’s head
22. People who include photos of David Ellison’s huge, craggy head at the top of every article they’ve written about the collapse of Hollywood WarnerMount merger (but really it’s the collapse of Hollywood)
23. Idiots
24. Losers and bigots, Canadian-style
25. People complain about prequels a lot and hey, fair enough, but there is no actually deader narrative zone than the midquel, in which characters are stuck between baseline stuff we already know and more interesting stuff we already know. There is zero story there. Fuck midquels.
26. Speaking of WarnerMount, Gerry Cardinale got on the Matt Belloni podcast last week and, with his whole face, called David Zaslav a “man of the people” in the same week that Zaslav cashed out $120 million in stock while thousands of his current employees were quaking in fear for their jobs. Belloni, at least, called the CHUD out on it. But fuck Gerry Cardinale and the monster he carries water for, forever.
27. Anyone who expects me to stop whatever I’m doing and type out a whole god damned essay with my THUMBS I mean have you seen my thumbs??!
28. There’s a church near me which, a month or two into the pandemic, installed a 12-foot, wrought-iron fence around their entire property to keep unhoused people from squatting there. I’m an atheist and rarely expect the faithful to do anything more than sniff their own farts but even by the spectacularly wide margins of their misdemeanours, that one still pisses me off, six years later, to the point where I avoid walking by that church.
29. Cops
30. The American government and (at least) 77 million of their constituents

And now, a paid-subscriber-only diagram of what will show up in the MRI of my brain

This is a little experiment and it will be over on Ghost, if you’re reading this on tederick.com. Upgrade to paid to see it!

Linkrecs von Bloghole

• I might write more on this for paid subscribers shortly, but Corey Atad did a long, thoughtful interview with Tony Kushner about Steven Spielberg’s piercingly relevant Munich, and it’s a banger (GQ)

• If you, like me, are voting in the NDP leadership race, the Sandy & Nora podcast has done a week of interviews with four frontrunners in that race, to help you sort yourself. (Sandy & Nora Talk Politics)

• A great read about (ugh) A.I. which might make you think differently about the whole affair or, at least, includes such acidic turns of phrase as “A.I. didn’t create slop; it merely revealed that most of the people who claimed to have a taste level were actually just good at moodboarding.” (Enfant Terrible)

• “He is played by Elordi as a handsome Carel Struycken, with his face sown together like a glam-rock, mime-mask tetherball.” Fuck yeah, bring back cunty film criticism (n+1)

• Like the author of this next piece, I truly don’t mind if people don’t “get” Avatar, but I remain convinced that the straight-from-the-tap weirdness of the whole enterprise deserves much greater critical consideration. This one tries. (Bright Wall / Dark Room)

• This is an abhorrent story which came to me via the Scriptnotes podcast, which considered its tale of an undocumented girl’s first period under ICE in their regular “How could this be a movie?” segment and decided, it can’t. But I can’t get it out of my head: with the right touch, and a bit of distance (hopefully) from All The Evil, this isn’t a depressing story. It’s One Battle After Another. (NPR)