Etcetera #5: Tattoos, heroin and Facebook

A pop culture mystery podcast wherein the team attempt to find out why Jeff Goldblum seemingly has a tattoo that is only visible in one scene of one film.

I find this extremely bizarre but worth reading if, like me, you support the decriminalisation of certain currently controlled substances—the current laws cause yet more pain and suffering in a world that isn’t exactly crying out for it. However, Carl Hart seems to see how far he can stretch that general idea towards its logical conclusion, and how far he can take people with him. I can’t tell how much of this is genuine and how much is a sort of performative contrarian philosophy: I remain confused by his descriptions of functional addiction and his confidently delivered statements about ‘meeting parental, personal, and professional responsibilities’, as if being a spouse or parent is the sort of thing where the aim is to do the bare minimum and not be sacked. Very odd.

See also: it’s legal to buy and plant poppy seeds in America; less so to turn them into opium. Opium made easy is a terrific piece of long-form journalism.

An exploration of difficulty in game design. Back when I was a kid, my favourite games were NES/SNES 2D platformers, many of which have a deserved reputation of being very challenging. Since I started playing games again last year, I am mostly enjoying… well, the same genre. I do enjoy the thrill of beating these difficult games, but the question ‘What is this difficulty in service of?’ is one that isn’t asked enough. I enjoyed playing through Cuphead—it was very difficult to learn the patterns and respond to them, but a delight to see and listen to, and when you died you could very quickly restart again. I’m currently on the penultimate level of Super Meat Boy, in which you can die, respawn and die again 10 times in around a minute. Ditto Slime-San. But repeatedly playing long sections of games only to lose over and over again to a difficult boss—no thanks. Games don’t have to be challenging to be good; it is just one aspect of their overall design. (I say this before I play Ghosts ‘n Goblins Resurrection, the recent revival of a 30-year-old franchise that has immense difficulty as one of its defining features.)

See also: Chris Scullion on playing games on easy.

Liz Pelly describes the compelling case for an ‘American Music Library’ as an alternative way to access and distribute music. A tax rise unnoticeable by the population would be enough to revive an industry on its knees from the sequential effects of excess, then piracy, and now the mob-style shakedown that is Spotify. And if this sounds far-fetched, it’s not without historical precedent.

See also: Bandcamp is something quite different from Spotify, but what exactly is it—streaming service, platform, merch stall?

Frasier is coming back, and it will be terrible. We lost the wonderful John Mahoney a few years ago and the series, like many profitable US sitcoms, ran for many years past its prime. The absolute peak of it was the pilot, which always stood out to me as an extremely lean piece of screenwriting with a constant conveyor belt of clever setups and perfectly timed deliveries. This piece looks at the differences between the script and the pilot as broadcast. Even if you don’t like Frasier, this is a good article to read if you want to understand more about pacing and concision in any sort of writing, particularly comedy.

See also: two of the best comedy writers are Jack Handey and John Schwartzwelder, and that’s a fact; how Arrested Development does running gags.

The key takeaways of the piece are present in its title. The New Zealand-based Stuff had over a million followers on Facebook and Instagram: first they stopped paid activity, then they stopped posting altogether, and things turned out just fine. Still, it’s worth reading to see how some organisations are able to extricate themselves from what can increasingly be seen as an abusive relationship with Facebook. The process isn’t without its challenges: Stuff is a large publisher in a small country, and so getting out of Facebook might be much harder for smaller orgs; there is also concern that Facebook is currently the only way to reach some minority groups who would otherwise be over-exposed to mis- and disinformation.

Ram came out in 1971. McCartney’s second solo album, it was reviled upon release but its reputation has soared in the past 15 years or so. It can be variously seen as a gentle slice of domestic bliss, a full stop at the end of the end of the sixties, and/or the first indie pop album. I don’t know if it is the best album by a solo Beatle, but for me it’s definitely top 3.

See also: McCartney on the making of Ram; a similar story, but in his own words. Dreaming The Beatles is the best book about The Beatles to come out in the past 5 or 10 years.

My favourite album last year was Bartees Strange’s Live Forever: a 35-minute journey through indie rock and hip-hop with elements of blues and jazz. It was critically acclaimed, but it seems like it’s only in the past couple of months that he’s had the deserved level of exposure—slots on late night chat shows and now this Tiny Desk concert, which includes two songs performed as they appear on the album, and two that are a bit more reimagined.