i love filler episodes

20 minutes of zero plot development my beloved

Dec 17, 2022

this week’s Thought (singular)

started using ‘u’ instead of ‘you’ ironically, but now i fear the irony has been abandoned

over the last few years, i’ve been making my way through sitcoms. i don’t specifically look for them, but naturally gravitate towards their easy viewing, attention span-friendly duration, and light subject matter. they’re perfect for lunch, perfect for dinner, and perfect as background sounds when my parents are shouting at me to eat at the table instead of in my room. but the one thing about them, as a genre of television, that i truly adore and unfortunately don’t see too much of in the Shows of Today, is the concept of filler episodes.

i’m such a big fan of absolutely nothing happening in an episode. it’s just 20 glorious minutes of shenanigans, slapstick humour, and nil contribution to plot. it’s easy to watch, gives me a good chuckle, and i don’t have to retain any information. every dialogue or happening is in one ear, appreciated for a maximum of two seconds, and swiftly out the other, with zero necessity of recollection or mental storage.

currently, i’m watching abbott elementary, which gives me my fill of filler episodes (hehe) while also being very lovely and un-bingeable since episodes are still being released weekly. what type of shows do you prefer? are you some kind of monster who regularly enjoys a 50-minute long plot-heavy series? let me know!

adult brown cat — Photo by Lina Angelov on Unsplash

English Recitation Competition

The Lost Bird, Carlina Coronado (translated from the Spanish by William Cullen Bryant)

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Find him, but do not dwell,
With eyes too fond, on the fair form you see,
          Nor love his song too well;
          Send him, at once, to me,
Or leave him to the air and liberty.

Singing Funeral, féi hernandez

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It’s obvious I must avoid the eulogy that comes after talking about my brother’s death because it’ll haunt me, his death, it will follow me and take me too, and I want to sleep tonight.

Bottled Water, Kim Dower

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I take no chances, buy them both,
sparkling smart, purified real, drain both bottles,
look around to see is anyone watching?
I’m now brilliantly hydrated.
Both real and smart my insides bubble
with compassion and intelligence
as I walk the streets with a new swagger,
knowing the world is mine.

A Poll!

Middle School Book Review

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

so gorgeously and creatively formatted with some of the best fiction writing i’ve come across, super fun time-and-space skips, and weirdly well-characterised characters who aren’t explicitly human

find all shared books here.

A Picture!

(actually three pictures from the india art festival that i had visited last weekend)

The Good Side of the Internet

Insensitivity Training
Another year, another day, another afternoon lost to a compulsory online ethics “module.” This time the subject was sexual misconduct, but it could also have been diversity and equity training, the responsible conduct of research, or any number of other topics aimed at improving my moral behavior. Even worse than the online modules are the in-person lectures and workshops, which I can’t fast-click my way through or watch at double speed. Why do I resent these sessions so much? It’s not as if I am in favor of sexism, racism, or homophobia. I am on the record as opposing financial corruption and the abuse of human research subjects. Yet these exercises in moral instruction always leave me feeling like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, my eyes clamped open as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony blasts into my ears.
The Pathologies of the Attention Economy
In this case, I selectively trace the history of attention discourse back to the 19th century in order to observe a pattern we should take into consideration whenever we talk about the “problem of attention” and when we try to do something about it. And while this pattern emerges out of a consideration of attention, I think the pattern more generally characterizes our techno-economic milieu.
Elon Musk’s texts offer a rare glimpse at the billionaire boys’ club
Messages from Twitter’s lawsuit against the Tesla founder show billionaires offering support and cash to buy the platform.
Wither Adulthood
Much has been made of the nature, content, and valorization of contemporary youth culture. The transformations in our notions of childhood and the culture that surrounds it have been staggering and worth all the ink that has been spilled on the subject. To a culture fixated on youth, it is not out of place to once again call attention to the fact that the prominence bestowed upon children and the world they inhabit today would have been unimaginable—in ways both amusing and repugnant—to our forebears, not only in the West but in other parts of the world as well. But understanding youth culture is not only an exercise in analyzing its internal discourse, structure, and development; it is also a matter of understanding the transformations that have been linked to it. Perhaps the most important of these are changes in the meaning of adulthood. Indeed, the poignancy of change in contemporary youth culture in the late modern West becomes even clearer relative to the changing nature of adulthood.
I'm losing my friends to Taylor Swift conspiracies :(
TikTok is radicalizing my peers.