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Things Happen To Me
Left and maybe right-facing Homestar might fall for such pedestrian shenanigans.
Rusty Foster
February 14th, 2024
From Emanuel Maiberg in the (profitable!) 404 Media: “Service Jobs Now Require Bizarre Personality Test From AI Company.”
“Man I just want a dishwasher job,” was the title of one thread on Reddit in a community of food service workers. The post shared a screenshot for “assessment Instructions” for part of the hiring process at Olive Garden. The instructions tell the applicant to “go with your gut and answer honestly,” and that “there is not one right answer.” They then include an image of a blue, humanoid alien they introduce as Ash, “who will represent you in each image.”
“For each image, simply click ‘Me’ if the image describes how you generally are and ‘Not Me’ if it does not.”
Let’s take the test together.
Things happen to Emily Gould. Her story in New York Magazine’s (expanding!) The Cut today starts: “In the summer of 2022, I lost my mind,” and then just goes like hell for 5,500 more words. In one sense “I got restless seven years into my marriage” and “I had a mental health whoopsie due to stress and pharmaceutical adjustment” are both cliché canon events, but Emily’s genius is experiencing common life events with the kind of force that makes them national news, and then writing about them with an honesty that can’t be faked. As a little bonus this piece also casually includes a survey of the modern literature of divorce that’s so good it could stand alone in any city’s Review of Books.
Not Me. Among the things that bother me today: “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” isn’t even in the movie? What the hell. Last year Florida cops emptied two full magazines of bullets into their own cruiser with a handcuffed suspect inside it, after one of them heard an acorn. There is body cam footage from both officers and you should watch it. Yesterday’s Ask a Manager is wild even by AAM standards: “I was rejected because I told my interviewer I never make mistakes.” One one hand, I don’t believe the person who wrote this is the applicant himself. But on the other hand I absolutely believe it happened. “Even if it’s fake it’s real.” The Covid Distribution Committee “plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines,” because no one is following them anyway.
“Public health has to be realistic,” said Michael T. Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota… “You can be absolutely right in the science and yet accomplish nothing because no one will listen to you.”
Cool, cool, yup. That’s how public health works all right.
Me. Chili’s is paying workers in company scrip now. “Chili Bucks” are redeemable for promotional items, PetSmart gift cards, not cash. Kate Lindsey: Is rat.house “The first newsletter content house?“ Wait till Kate finds out that me, Casey Newton, Garbage Ryan, Tom Scocca, Delia Cai, and Matt Levine all live in a mansion in Los Feliz. I enjoyed today’s “5 famous rats and how to steal their fits.”
Me. A perfect world would include Crab Day:
And a perfect world would also include a new Homestar Runner cartoon.
Me. Ok this is more than a year old but it’s so good. Andi McClure: “The "baseline" scene [in ‘Blade Runner 2049’] was actually written by Ryan Gosling.” Not only that, but it’s an acting exercise that exists in both our world and arguably the continuity world of Blade Runner. Cells, interlinked.
Yona T. Sperling-Milner in the Harvard Crimson: “New York Times, Get out of My School.”
We considered asking the reporters about their Harvard obsession directly, but we didn’t want to enter the Lamont basement where many of them have made nests for themselves out of back copies of the Advocate and straw.
Gabriella Paiella wondered why Ben Mendelsohn isn’t into Method acting:
I don’t waste time. I come from the ground. I’ve learned a way of doing what I do. It’s all bullshit. It’s all absolute bullshit. It’s about how to make the performances work on stage. And that’s it. Nothing more than that. After that it’s a bunch of [jerkoff motion] king of the castle bullshit.
Eva Talmadge wondered why her mother hid “a memoir in eight binders that she’d handwritten and typed in 1990” about “a murder that she’d [allegedly] witnessed.” And Sophie Lund Rasmussen and Troels Pank Arboll wondered why people started kissing. Really they wondered when people started kissing but I have to respect the format.
In 2012 Scott Simpson tweeted: “Every Olympic event should include one average person competing, for reference.” This Stephen Rodrick Variety profile of Jennifer Lopez and her “new documentary, ‘The Greatest Love Story Never Told’” is like that, but for magazine feature writing. I hope it’s not his personal best.
Well how did you do? I can only assume I’m not getting the job at Olive Garden.
We Regret the Error: Yesterday’s Today’s Song was mislabeled in the email newsletter. It was in fact "Bon Appétit" by Excomungado and d.silvestre. Another flawless Music Intern Sam pick screwed up by my late afternoon inattention to detail. In penance today I am allowing him to bring you eight and three quarter minutes of turn of the century bleeps and bloops in…
Today’s Song: Underworld, “Moaner”
I hope I got that one right, however I will take no steps to ensure that I did. Gotta just let the chips fall where they may. But don’t you let the chips fall where they may! Eat those chips, they’re good. Happy Valentine’s Ash Crab Wednesday. Of course it’s also Star Wars Day, and as Jedi Master Yoga says: February the Fourteenth be with you.