where's the beef

i was sitting around at a friend’s house idly browsing netflix while waiting for somebody to show up, and happened to catch the trailer for this new show called “beef”. it's about two LA asians who get into an escalating feud after a minor road rage incident in a home improvement store parking lot, or at least that’s what the trailer made it seem like. the premise reminded me a bit of a book i was writing while bored in class during middle school entitled “the couch wars”, about two neighbors who fight viciously for possession of an exceptionally comfortable couch. it remained unfinished only partially because i lost the manuscript while visiting grandparents in florida.

i don’t usually watch tv, but while i was away briefly my friends watched it and told me i should give it a go "to get caught up". with what exactly, i'm not sure. there’s also some hype behind the show because it’s produced by this shadowy organization called “a24”, which i had never heard of before they mentioned it (of course now i seem to see it referenced everywhere). apparently they’re the puppet masters behind recent critically-acclaimed hits like “everything everywhere all at once” (e2a2o). i looked at their works and it looks like the only thing i’ve seen by them is midsommar (i don’t watch many movies), a horror movie that finally takes advantage of that strange latent scandi creepiness. what i thought of it can be described like so: midsommar. but regardless, they seem to have competent filmmaking abilities, so i gave “beef” a go.

the show started strong, delivering on the revenge schemes and ruses the trailer promised. however, as the show went on, the feud kind of took a backseat as the focus shifted towards the character’s emotional struggles or whatever. ah yes, they’re trying to make it one of those “psychological” shows, a classic trick for making people think a show is deep or realistic. it's not necessarily a bad thing, if it’s well done.

as i watched, something started bothering me, which i noticed after watching one particular scene where one of the characters talks about his floundering art career making poo-shaped pots, in the shadow of his successful artist father. everything about the emotional reactions and actions of the characters felt too... explainable. it was too neat, too clean, characters always do what you would expect, they do what makes the most sense in their situation. there is little ambiguity in character’s actions or reactions, you can easily sum up their motivations for acting a particular way in a scene using just a short sentence. actions are so explicit that you can put together unambiguous cause -> effect sequences for almost everything characters do, like they’re robots simply responding to inputs. it’s all ruthlessly rational, nearly autistic, as if the writers were worried they would get called out by people if every action didn’t have a perfectly logical “canon” explanation.

what’s the issue with this? well, it wouldn’t be such a huge deal if they weren’t trying specifically to make their show so “psychological”. but what ended up happening is that they made it far too “logical” and not nearly “psycho” enough. by trying to stay so logically consistent, the characters become unrealistic; there’s no element of irrationality to their actions like people have in real life. consequently the show is deprived of ambiguity, of depth: there’s little to discuss, to argue about, to INTERPRET. contrast, for example, evangelion, which is made so compelling by the mystery, the ambiguity, the seeming-irrationality behind some of the characters’ actions. there are endless interpretations and arguments to be had about character motivations and psychology, most of which can never be definitely resolved based off of the source material. people still argue about and try to interpret evangelion to this very day. will people be discussing beef in 25 years?

with all of this still in my mind, i opened up my inbox the next day and found out that i’d been completely scooped by terminally-grumpy cultural critic and essayist sam kriss, who had almost the exact same gripes. he writes:

Our two heroes start trying to sabotage each other in more and more extreme ways. This is not a bad idea for a TV show; in fact, it’s a very good one. A bitter, episodic half-hour comedy, like Tom and Jerry, or Wile E Coyote and the Road Runner, or Popeye and Bluto, but live-action and for adults. Or like the Icelandic sagas with their vastening spirals of revenge. A kind of giddy, lurid exploration of all the ways you can fuck with someone’s life. Doing it right would take a degree of creativity, but the result would be very fun. Real fun always has a breath of sadism.

...

This is not the Beef we got. Instead, our enemies mostly just leave each other nasty voicemails and obsess over their feelings.

...

I don’t mean that people never do things that are cruel, selfish, weak, petty, and vicious. But I do not think they ever do it in a way that’s so tediously explicable. It’s all far too neat; it all makes far too much sense, this moment on which a person’s entire being is supposed to hang. When actual people act, there’s always an element of the inexplicable at play, the sourceless molten stuff we call human freedom. An abyss in the other, the dark hole of their subjectivity. But these people are wind-up toys.

great minds think alike, i guess, although he’s clearly got me beat when it comes to writing those thoughts out. kriss goes on to roast most of a24’s body of work on similar charges, although he does end up dishing out some praise for beau is afraid. i haven’t seen it but i talked to a friend who’s seen most of the a24 movies and he said that that one was his least favorite.

in regret of lost time

i’m deeply ashamed to admit that i fell for a meme and read a book based off of a tweet. in my defense, occasionally there’s a viral tweet with legitimately good advice, like this one i saw recently about putting a pinch of salt into bad black coffee in order to make it less bitter. i tried it and it really works, although i cannot convince anyone else to. i might as well be asking them to eat a baby. anyways, recently the Algorithm shoved a laudatory tweet about this book called "this is how you lose the time war” onto my timeline, and it stuck around in my head. it’s probably because i’m an absolute SUCKER for anything involving time travel: back to the future, primer, looper, hot tub time machine, bill & ted’s excellent adventure, time bandits, source code, timeline (the original michael crichton book), the third harry potter book, the time travel episodes of every sci-fi tv show (stargate sg-1, fringe, LOST, among others), toki wo kakeru shoujo, time travel shoujo, every anime involving time loops (why is there such a fixation on this particular flavor in anime?), and so on.

so, when i had a flight coming up and was scrambling for something to read, it floated to the top of my head and i loaded it onto my phone. i didn’t really mind if it wasn’t super “literary” because i’ve been trying to read less weighty books on the plane. often i’m too tired to properly enjoy them, there are multiple books i’m probably going to have to revisit because i practically snoozed through them on the plane. usually i might do some sort of due diligence beforehand like reading the back cover blurb, but the tweet i saw also recommended going into it completely blind. i try to respect those kinds of suggestions because i know there’s many cases in which they pay off big time (e.g. madoka), however this was not one of those cases. in fact i might have dodged a huge bullet had i read the blurb because looking at it now, it screams “AVOID”. i can’t help but wonder if the “go in blind” thing is just a trick to lure in the naïve and unsuspecting.

i ended up on the flight with only this book loaded onto my phone. huge mistake. within five pages i could already tell it was going to be unbearably cringe, but i was cornered with no way out but through (i had already flipped through the latest issue of hemispheres before taking off). the writing was, for lack of a better term, extremely reddit. if you know, you know. the book is an epistolary lesbian romance between two time-traveling superhumans trying to alter the course of history towards their faction's desired timeline. don’t ask for more details because there are none. the world-building and explanation of the time travel mechanics was practically non-existent, and after reading the author bios in the back and finding out that they were big nerds, i wished that they had actually nerded out.

the main issue i had with the book is that it’s a romance masquerading as a sci-fi time travel book, that also manages to fail at being a romance. the romantic relationship between the characters seemed to go from 0 to 100 after they exchanged just three or four letters. during this time this was the only communication they had, they never met in person, and the first couple of letters began with them as rivals/enemies mocking each other. but i guess this was all papered over for most readers by the “flowery” love language used in the letters, the metaphor soup and college freshman-level vocabulary hypnotically convincing unsophisticated readers that they were reading some sort of beautiful blossoming romance. i came to this conclusion after reading a few nauseating rave reviews online (i never want to see the word "sapphic" again). to me it just looked like the authors were larping, i could see what they were trying to do but for someone who actually reads, the metaphors and fifty cent words only hit the ground with a dull thud.

i guess i could also complain about the sci-fi portions, but as i said it’s not really the focus of the book so i’ll keep it short. in time travel media there are some basic conventions you must follow: you start off by establishing the ground rules of your time travel mechanics, and then in the climax they must be cleverly exploited in an unexpected or subversive way to resolve the main conflict cathartically. it’s like how there are rules to writing a successful detective story, where the necessary clues must be subtly laid within the story such that the reader can potentially put it all together themselves before the detective solves it within the story. if you go against the rules you better have a damn good reason for doing so (e.g. the borges short story “death and the compass”), and i’m simply not seeing it in this case. the “schemes” the characters were involved in were barely described and basically all lame butterfly-effect type stuff. the vignettes in each time period before a character found the next letter were more or less nothing but window-dressing. kudos to the authors though for including some graham hancock “human civilization has been around a lot longer than you think” settings though.

fortunately the book (more of a novella) was mercifully short, and i finished it with time to spare on my flight. i think the length probably contributed significantly to its popularity. of course, soon after landing i load up twitter and what do i see? a picture of someone holding up a copy, captioned “this book is ass”. GREAT! i’m glad i pirated it. i probably should not follow this up by reading "solenoid", another book which i’ve seen people memeing pretty hard lately.

at the antique store

i “crashed” a concert or rave or something

there is an international brotherhood of event production workers who give each other free tickets to their shows, which is how my friend/business partner/former minecraft arch-nemesis ended up scoring tickets to some sort of big concert/rave. i describe it like that because my friend repeatedly referred to it as a “rave”, although to me it seemed more like a concert. i’m not an expert but the image i have in my head of a rave is sort of an underground affair, hosted in an anonymous warehouse or under a highway bridge or in the middle of the forest. certainly not the sort of thing issuing tickets via ticketmaster at a respectable venue with a well-known performer on tour selling merch at a stand. i’d never heard of the performer, some kind of electronic dj guy, but he must be relatively popular because some of my more normie friends had heard of him. it’s been a while since i’ve been to any sort of concert or rave and i wasn’t feeling very tired that evening, so i tagged along on a lark.

when we showed up at the venue, an open-air amphitheater, i really expected we might get turned away at the ticket booth trying to collect our will call tickets, but sure enough they had them there, printed out with the price “$0.00” stamped in the corner. they even got us in through the “VIP” side-entrance, which led directly into a not-very-bustling bar. i guess there weren’t many vips. it gets even better, though, because the guy who got us the free tickets said we could have a round on him at the bar, something i greatly appreciated considering the prices there and the fact that you definitely should be on a little something to fully experience a concert. unfortunately they did not have any wine.

as concert noobs, we showed up way too early and had quite a bit of time to kill before the main act took the stage. we mostly hung around near the crowded bar/bathroom setup for the plebeians, leaning against a railing while taking advantage of the opportunity to do some particularly interesting peoplewatching. many girls were wearing extremely wild outfits, most of which seemed intended to expose the maximum amount of skin. guys, on the other hand, largely seemed like they had just come in off the street, wearing shorts and t-shirts, maybe some “supreme”-style streetwear or colorful hawaiian shirt with the top buttons unbuttoned if they felt especially saucy. the only exception was gay guys, who either had EXTREMELY short shorts or were dressed about as flamboyantly as the girls. you might think it would also be a bit of a social occasion to meet new people, but i observed that for the most part people struck pretty rigidly within the groups they came to the show in. i also noticed that there was a surprising diversity of ages represented, including some crusty old boomers and a crazy mom who brought her toddler in.

soon it was time for the actual concert, so we headed in to the “pit”, the vaguely-circular area right in front of the stage where people stand around and get funky. pit tickets are apparently the most expensive at this particular show, probably because it’s supposed to be rave-y. there was a lot of activity setting up the stage, and then the main act came on. the music was extremely loud and every song sounded pretty much the same to me: a bone-shaking volley of BWAMPPPP BWAMPPP BWAMPPPP and then maybe a girl would sing a bit or a guy would hit the drums or play a little guitar and then BWAMPP BWAMPP BWAMPP again. i was tipsy enough to get into it a little and move my body to the rhythm along with everyone else, but honestly not my favorite.

what really captivated me most of the show was the visuals, which went pretty hard. there were extensive pyrotechnics, like fireworks and huge bursts of flame on occasion. at the most hype moments, paper streamers would burst from the top of the stage and rain down on the crowd. during the finale, they let loose a cloud of white confetti that drifted in the wind in the same manner i imagine would happen if you hit a blossoming cherry tree with a strong gust. the light show was extremely impressive, coordinated and moving in all sorts of patterns in time with the music, bolstered by a fog machine continually spitting fog in front of the stage to make the beams seem almost solid at points. the least interesting aspect ended up being the background videos they played on a huge screen behind the stage the whole time, which seemed to either be 3D animated in the style of a sci-fi/fantasy video game like destiny, or animated in the animesque style of “avatar: the last airbender”. the gamer dj, i thought to myself. whatever happened to basshunter, i wondered.

easy goulash recipe

you will need:

• - a bunch of beef, cut into ~1in cubes. i am afraid of cutting meat wrong so i go to costco or wherever and buy the wrapped piles of cheap pre-cut beef labelled “stew beef”
• - yellow onions, of nearly equal weight as the beef
• - caraway seeds, around 1 tsp per pound of beef
• - lard (lard is the most authentic but i guess you could use any oil or oil-like substance)
• - paprika, preferably hungarian, although i have also had good luck mixing multiple types. the important thing is to have a LOT of it.
• - tomato paste (not strictly necessary), around 2 tbsp per pound of beef
• - chicken stock (water also works in a pinch)

melt lard (or heat up oil) over medium heat in a pan. season beef cubes with salt/pepper and brown them in the pan. leaving all the juices in the pan, transfer beef cubes to a pot. chop onions roughly and fry them in pan until almost brown, stirring frequently. this part always feels like it takes forever but don’t get impatient and turn up the heat or stop stirring for too long because the onions will start to burn. once the onions become limp and look like they have lost a significant amount of volume, add in tomato paste, caraway seeds, and paprika (some garlic too, if you like). when you think you have added enough paprika, add some more. you basically cannot add enough of it. cook very briefly while stirring, 1-2 min, be very careful because if things get overcooked here it’s OVER. then, add the whole contents of the pan to the pot with the beef from earlier, add just enough stock or water to barely cover the beef, bring to a boil and then simmer uncovered until beef is tender. add some salt/pepper to taste, maybe some marjoram. if it’s not thick enough, you can simmer uncovered for longer, or carefully dust it with flour from a fine-meshed sieve, stirring it in after each shake to thicken while avoiding chunks. serve over rice or some sort of noodles or with dumplings, with a dollop of sour cream as well if you want.

my brother's bookshelf

he recently went missing in California

bookstore

i recently went to the big bookstore. this should be an enjoyable experience for me, except that it never ceases to annoy me how they make all the good books extremely difficult to find by polluting the shelves with stacks upon stacks of the most wretched rubbish. there is almost always a “literature” or “modern classics” section, but every single time the level of curation is absolutely abysmal. i used to be one of those wishy-washy “oh every book is literature!” types but that was before i had read much actual Literature. now with a glance i can see that 90% of what’s shelved under literature is completely out of place. putting the likes of nicholas sparks in the literature section, REALLY? get a grip.

so browsing the bookstore, even in the literature section, ends up feeling a little bit like hunting for gold nuggets that have been mixed into an enormous pile of manure. there’s a lot of gold so it’s not too hard to find some, and sometimes it’s even near the top, but at the end of the day it’s still unpleasant because you're rooting around in manure and it's stinky and gross and getting all over your clothes. the most enraging part, however, is the people around you. what are they doing? they are frolicking about in the manure, rolling around in it, talking to their friends about how great it is. maybe they are even eating some of it. could they possibly... be here... for the manure? absolutely disgusting. as we walked out of the bookstore i was informed that big corm has passed on to the great ranch in the sky. now we only have pinecone left...

of course i simply let all of this silently stew within me, slowly approaching a boil. in fact i try not to tell anyone irl that i’m into literature, it makes it seem to them like you think you’re better than them (which you objectively are, but making it explicit is a bad look). so when i’m reading an ebook on my phone and people ask what i’m doing, i tell them i’m watching funny family guy clip compilations on tiktok.

the great ████ █████

last weekend’s █████████ unexpectedly turned into my last one ██ ████ ██ ███ ████████, so it was time to really let loose and ████ ███ ████ ████ farewell █████. i started off by driving to ███ ███████ instead of taking amtrak, █████████ ██ █████ an extra ███████ █████ for the mileage (and essentially getting a free visit to ████████ while i was at it). then i parked in not the cheapest, but the SECOND cheapest parking area at ███, in the back of the parking structure within walking distance to ███ ████████, because i was not about to bother with █ ██████. all of that is of course █████ ███████ ████████ and frankly i should have been doing that from the start, why was i bothering to inconvenience myself and my friends to ████ █████ ████ ████ █████? then, for ███ ████ ███████, filet mignon for dinner multiple nights? sure, why not, it’s ███ ████████ ████.

but the ████ █████████ began ██ ███ ██████ ████, where all of the ███████ opportunities that had tempted me before were now possible because [DATA EXPUNGED]. he said █████ and i could ████ ██ █ ███████ ███ with the ████ we wanted ██ ████, and he’d help us [REDACTED]. it was going to be a piece of cake since all we had to do was [REDACTED] and then we’d be golden. [DATA EXPUNGED] like kids in a candy store, we [DATA EXPUNGED], mostly from ███ ████ ████ botanical ██████████, and filled up ███ █████ ███ ████ ████ for ourselves and gifts [REDACTED]. i finally got my mom the ███████ i promised her as a late mother’s day gift, and a couple of ███ ██ ████ ██ my dad for father’s day.

then, right before clean-up, █████ [DATA EXPUNGED] exfiltrated ███ ███ ████ ███ █████, hiding it ██ ███ █████ ████. the next day, just the three of us headed downtown to a █████ ██████ store and [REDACTED] back home. [DATA EXPUNGED], the ████████ ████████ option was $120, which i paid in ████ using [DATA EXPUNGED] (another part of the █████████). then, using the [REDACTED] i got from selling █████ ██████ for $20 (which, for some reason, was really popular with older ladies), █████ and i went to this extremely good bbq place and split a massive platter that included basically everything on their menu. all in all, a fantastic ████████ ████, although it sounds like there are some even BIGGER plans for [DATA EXPUNGED] in august...

いざ！紀伊國屋きのくにやへ

もう直ぐ「魔入りました！入間くん」11巻を読み終わりそうだから、先日次巻を買うために紀伊國屋という日本専門書店に行った。いつか全巻集めるつもりだけど、一遍にたくさん金を使いたくないから、毎回三巻ぐらいしか買えない。でも、今回は書店で次巻だけがなっかた、少し悔しかった。イーベイかアマゾンで買わなくてはいけないかも。

それでも、やっと「坊っちゃん」を買った。坊っちゃんって良くて読みやすいと聞いたからずっと紀伊國屋で探していたけど、今まで全然見つからなかった。