Expertise For Sale

Noe Valley still barely has a video store. Of course Netflix is basically putting them out of business. But that’s a shame, because “loaning you the newest Avengers DVD” is only half their business, if that; half of it is recommending movies and having hard-to-find stuff. I want to pay people for the 2nd part, though; I want to give them $5 to just tell me what movie to watch.

This bartender started doing this on https://cocktailsforendtimes.com/. Tell her what you have and the kinds of things you like, and she sends you recipes using them. This requires pretty deep knowledge of drinks! I am happy to pay her for this. This is great.

Speaking of expertise, I would still pay for regular, customized, sports run-downs so I can keep up with a couple teams in like 5 min/week. Especially if they had a bit of:

Football for nerds

Scorigami, scoring just one point

y’all nerds: if you wanna Get Into Sports in order to talk with friends, family, SOs, whatever, read everything by Jon Bois. Including 17776 and 20020. (ok those won’t help you talk sports. but they’re great.) I wish I could talk more about the Browns and the Indians and college football and stuff when I see family, which brings us to:

Covid and travel worries

Actually, side note: I’ve seen very little actual advice about what to do if you get Covid. Here’s a thread; bookmarking this for later, just in case.

Covid and travel worries: I feel like despite how much I evangelize Microcovid, I’m the only one I know who actually uses it. A lot of friends have canceled holiday trips. And that’s great; collective risk reduction is cool. But I think it’s a little out of proportion; your individual trip to see 2 family members at Christmas, say, can be pretty low risk. Ok, ok, I’m not gonna tell anyone I know how to weigh risks for them; I guess I’m just feeling defensive because I feel like I’m the only one still planning on traveling. I feel like I’m doing the equivalent of “still drinking water at restaurants in a drought”, because your water glass is not the main thing causing a drought anyway. But I guess I’m still thinking about it because I’m afraid of getting called out! which leads to:

“Calling people in”

this has … just always been a good idea? problem is, most people who are “against cancel culture” are ass-clowns. (indeed; I fear that y’know Ben Sh*piro is gonna link this article too and then I’m agreeing with ass-clowns!) this is because “cancel culture” means everything from canceling some kid who misspoke once, to canceling bill cosby, and of course some of these are bad and some are good. maybe I’ll continue to steer clear of any conversation involving the words “cancel”, “woke”, “sjw”, etc; usually the people on the “woke” side are right; yes there’s a crummy edge where people don’t realize that they’re delighting in yelling at people for not being woke enough and not furthering justice and that’s a real thing that should be fixed BUT the bigger problem here is our society is so unjust; this is exhausting, I need a dose of:

Gen-Z absurdity

I think there’s something to this tweet. 2020 is messed up enough as a secure-enough 30-something; I can’t imagine if I were growing up or trying to make my way in the world right now. This goofy-ass humor would totally resonate.

An example: #wisemind is the best thing on twitter 6 months ago. this is poetry. if there were a pulitzer for tweets it should go to dril; if there were one for memes I’d give it to jay dragon.

It’s easy to look at this and see it as Dadaist post-war nihilism, but I don’t think this is? Or at least, not in a bad way? It’s flowering creativity, world-building using the tools we have available.