The Ruthless Furnace of These Tabs

Crabpocalypse! (100 gecs remix), things of that nature.

April 17th, 2023

I’ve had a stressful morning with the tabs so now I’m gonna make it your problem. David Marchese picked several fights in a row with Stephen A. Smith who spent the first half of this interview riding a precarious unicycle along a high wire over Gender Discourse Gulch, and then impossibly claimed he’d heard of neither crab rangoon nor things of that nature. Harper’s sent Lauren Oyler and the ghost of D.F.W. on a Goop cruise. If you read it please let me how it turned out for her, I bailed when she started talking about her throuple, which was distressingly early. I did read all of Merritt Tierce’s Slate stream of self-consciousness about her personal experience but also our collective experience helplessly plugged into the matrix alone together:

I don’t think we’ve evolved enough to handle being aware of as much as the internet makes it possible for us to be aware of, which is another circuit-breaker, as we have evolved enough to feel like it’s important to be aware of everything it’s possible to be aware of. I don’t know if persons are volumetric. But I feel like the internet has increased experiential capacity and exponentially exploded the quantity of events a life contains, and the things a person can know, without giving us any more time.

It maybe didn’t help that I also spent the morning listening to the 100 gecs Boiler Room DJ set from a few weeks ago, which is like a triple ADHD on the rocks with a meth chaser (complimentary). The Kids Know: Jump in the Line, Feel Good Inc., Jump Around. The Kids Don’t Know: Walkin’ on the Sun. Unclear Whether The Kids Know: Operation Ivy.

It’s National Poetry Month, and Tierce called out W.S. Merwin’s poem “Convenience” which I liked. In the Tabs Discord, a Jessica Joy Kerr blog post about “systems sense” and the dissonance between knowing (too much) about everything that’s wrong but not personally experiencing it every moment reminded Max Fenton of Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense:”

We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If you’re wondering what all of this has in common I can only quote Tierce quoting Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “What... is the height and ideal of mere association? Delirium.”

Tweet by @rajandelman: The popular -ussy suffix derives from the major 1972 political scandal, when the Nixon administration tried to cover up its involvement in the penetration of the Watergussy Hotel

Also in Slate, which I feel like has had a streak of decent posts lately, was Phil Christman on the rise and fall of Rod Dreher and particularly the way that “it was his ideological enemies who seemed to mourn him the most.” Would you piss on me, old friend? Miles Klee investigated when exactly Elon Musk started styling himself a memelord, which was 2018 when he had a huge midlife crisis and hooked up with Grimes, as you could have guessed.

Today in Kiwi Crabs Korner (Remix)
Image of a pink porcupine crab looking like the crustacean Pinhead of the sea, with the caption “We have such sights to show you.” —crab.

One friend left me giggling uncontrollably when he explained how he’d told an American that he’d done a math camp before starting his graduate course, only for them to think he’d just finished “meth camp.”

And Tasmanian Senator Helen Polley went on Tiktok to explain that she “cooks eggs in her microwave by covering them in foil and submerging them in water.” Magnificent, baffling, absolutely depraved.

Screenshot from Instagram of a guy with long brown hair and a short beard whose left eye is shining bright LED light toward the camera. The caption reads “I lost my eye to cancer so I made this and turned my head into a flashlight 🔦”

Researchers finally figured out why bugs are attracted to lamps at night. Basically they stay oriented in flight by pointing their backs to the brighter hemisphere (i.e. the sky), but artificial lights short-circuit this behavior and “can produce continuous steering around the light and trap an insect.” Norm McDonald knew it.

Shocking: Service industry workers in New York are smoking weed now! The only way to combat this deluge of the devil‘s lettuce? Lower the minimum wage of course. Sorry for Post-posting but this one is too flawlessly tone-deaf to pass up.

Microsoft posted its March 2002 drafts.

Tweet from Microsoft on April 14th of the year of our lord 2023: “It’s time to embrace goblin mode.” followed by the even more baffling assertion that ”Goblin mode can look like showing up to work as more of yourself.” Microsoft you’re drunk.

Reply with how you’re feeling today.

The Mood Meter, spanning the X axis from “Unpleasant” to “Pleasant” and the Y axis from “High energy” to “Low energy.” Zones include: Fuck it we ball, We are so fucking back, Let’s fucking goooooooo, It is what it is, We vibing, It’s so over, and Mom would be sad”

Today’s Song (Literally): “The One That Got Away” by MUNA

I’m the one that got away. The Tabs Subscriber Discord is my co-pilot. Sam Gavin is the Song of the Day Intern. Personally I spent last week in Mom Would Be Sad but today is 100% Fuck It We Ball. I know I said I’d be off this week but then I got sick (again (again)) so: NY trip postponed. Fuck it we ball.

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