Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis
05-18-2024
, 02:13 PM
The porn that's almost always SFW.
I've given this an amount of thought that may be surprising and/or boring. Can something be surprising and boring? Yes! Tax audits come to mind.
In a fair taste test, I would always pick the regular stuff over the diet. My taste buds prefer sugar and, failing that, high-fructose corn syrup, over the low-calorie sweeteners. Also, 60-something cups of corn syrup in the first round of the tournament would be a ****-ton to drink in a short time, so the non-diet drinks are out. Not that 60-something cups of artificial sweetener would be much better.
In a fair taste test, I would always pick the regular stuff over the diet. My taste buds prefer sugar and, failing that, high-fructose corn syrup, over the low-calorie sweeteners. Also, 60-something cups of corn syrup in the first round of the tournament would be a ****-ton to drink in a short time, so the non-diet drinks are out. Not that 60-something cups of artificial sweetener would be much better.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 05-18-2024 at 02:22 PM.
05-18-2024
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05-28-2024
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Yesterday
, 10:37 PM
Some Notes on Infinite Jest
I finished David Foster Wallace's 980 page novel. This was my second read-through of a book that is so packed with themes and storylines and character moments and subtle Easter eggs that in retrospect my first reading felt like a 3-hour visit to a massive theme park, in that I had a fun time and got a general idea of the layout, but that there wasn't any way for me see most of the rides until my return visit.
This time I read closely and leaned heavily on Reddit's 10,000-member r/InfiniteJest subforum, containing posts and discussions on every aspect of the book going back at least as far as 2009, with posts that are still being generated today.
I'm not going to do a full-blown review of the book. That would require a massive series of posts, longer than my aborted string of Apocalypse Now posts would have been, had I been arsed to finish it.
I've already written about the addiction recovery sections of the book in previous posts, and how important they were to me, so I'll just touch on the world building, the plot, and the ending, and the false lack thereof, and the actual hidden ending, without getting too heavily into spoilers.
Infinite Jest came out in 1996, and it's set in their near future, which means that it's set in our alternative near past. In that world, Rush Limbaugh defeated Bill Clinton in the '96 election, then Limbaugh was assassinated, and a third party candidate won the '00 election, and that candidate was the "former crooner" Johnny Gentile, very much a combination of fat old Elvis Presley and paranoid clean freak Howard Hughes.
Being a neat freak, Gentile formed the Clean US Party, or C.U.S.P., and he wrangled Canada and Mexico into an EU-like pact called the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. Onanism of course is an old-timey term for masturbation.
Gentile's plan for cleaning up the USA was to declare most of northern New England and upstate New York a no-man's land and forcefully expropriate the land to Canada, to become part of the province of Quebec.
Credit: Biblioklept
From there, the USA would employ massive suborbital catapults (or possibly trebuchets) to launch all of their garbage and toxic waste into the new no-man's land, known as the Great Concavity (aka the Great Convexity, from Canada's perspective). And thus was created a several thousand square mile (km) dump that served as the corner into which the USA swept their filth.
Added to this, Gentile built a series of massive fans that redirected air pollution from the USA north into the Great Concavity, and presumably on from there into the original Quebec.
Accompanying this was the invention of something called annular fusion, a form of nuclear fusion that was so clean that its production radically detoxified everything in the local environment to the point where the flora and fauna became uncontrollably lush and overgrown. So of course, Gentile built O.N.A.N.'s annular fusion plants inside the Great Concavity in order to counterbalance the garbage and toxic waste being catapulted and fanned in.
The result was not a happy medium of an environment, but instead of a fluctuating sine wave of heavy toxicity flipping into toxic cleanliness and back again. The latter unsustainably cleansed stage of the ecosystem caused massive overgrowth in plants and animals, resulting in feral former-pet hamsters the size of Volkswagen Beetles roaming the wastes, and reports of an abandoned 20-foot tall human infant terrorizing residents at the northern border of New New England.
Canada did not appreciate this "gift" of highly problematic land. People in Quebec were especially incensed, as their rate of cancer and birth defects skyrocketed due to the toxicity being sent their way. Around the turn of the century, in both our world and in the Infinite Jest world, Quebec was a hotbed of separatist sentiments. Many in the province wanted to secede from Canada and become their own French-speaking country.
Enter the Assassins Fateuils Rolents, aka Wheelchair Assassins, a Quebec separatist terror organization composed of murderous men in wheelchairs. Most of the men in that cabal had lost their legs as children playing a game on the train tracks.
Credit: Jon from Infinitetest
216 Quebec boys start the game in 36 groups of 6 each. The groups separate and line up along the tracks, 3 to a side in each group, with one referee watching each group. When an express train comes flying by, the boys all jump from one side of the track to the other, just before the train smashes into them.
It's a test of courage: the first boy in each group of 6 to jump is sent home in shame. Jumpers 2-5 are allowed to stay and watch subsequent rounds of the game. The very last boy to jump across the tracks in each group gets to advance to the next round; that is, if he is not smeared across hundreds of yards (meters) of the tracks by the train, or also if he is not slightly luckier and loses only his legs, as seems to a be common enough occurrence in the game to eventually find those legless boys inducted into the Wheelchair Assassins.
If boy #6 is killed or incapacitated, then boy #5—assuming that he survived the jump—takes his place in the second round of 36 players: 6 groups of 6. The surviving last jumpers of the second round go to the final round of 6, and think of how courageous/foolish those final 6 would be, and know that the legless boys were even more foolish and courageous than that.
The Assassins Fateuils Rolents are the main baddies in Infinite Jest, and they are after a master tape of a film produced by the deceased father of one of the main characters. The film, known as Infinite Jest V (or possibly Infinite Jest VI) is so stupefyingly entertaining that anyone who watches it even once becomes useless for the rest of their life. The only thing they'll want to do after that is watch the film again and again and again; they will not eat or drink or sleep or do anything but watch the film until they die of dehydration or lack of sleep or what have you. If the film is taken away from them, they will make every effort to get it back, or die in the attempt.
The Assassins Fateuils Rolents want to copy the master tape (viral Internet videos haven't yet caught on in this world) and spread it throughout the USA and Canada in order to kill thousands, or more, and somehow achieve their goal of an independent Quebec—though it seems like they want to cause havoc and misery, much more than they want to break off their own country.
After almost 1000 pages, the book ends suddenly, without a seeming resolution to the plot, which like the ending of The Sopranos caused some people distress. But unlike The Sopranos, Infinite Jest actually does have an ending, it's just that we the readers have to extrapolate it from the clues that David Foster Wallace left in the extensive endnotes and in the almost-forgotten flash forward at the beginning of the book. It's a pretty cool ending, and it's not terribly vague or open to interpretation.
I did not realize this about the ending on my first read, but I still enjoyed the book, just like I would have enjoyed a few hours at that huge imagined theme park without being able to go on its most famous ride, especially since I hadn't known that that particular ride existed.
On my second visit to Infinite Jest, through the help of close reading and poring over a lot of posts and blogs, I got to experience the rest of the rides, including the cool one.
If you're interested in giving this book a shot, I would not recommend close reading and study on your first go-round. I think it would have been too much for me if I'd tried it, though your mileage may vary.
I've given just the most basic layout of the plot and the lore here in these notes; they're a lot more ornate and complicated in the book, and when all is said and done, the book is not really about the plot and the lore, they're just interesting trappings put in place to showcase the more important parts of the book.
After all, it's lonely to go to a giant theme park by oneself; the rides are in place for us to enjoy with others. The three main characters in the book are all loners, but they are also constantly in the presence of other people who are ostensibly close to them, as well as an occasional narrator who is sort of spying on them from beyond the grave, but that's another ball of wax.
And it's those obligatory interactions that the book is really about. The ways that the characters communicate and fail to communicate with themselves and others, and the ways that they hurt themselves and others, and the ways that they deal with the hurt and refuse to deal with the hurt. That's what I got from the first read-through, and that was enough.
David Foster Wallace wrote his masterpiece in order to impress a woman: the writer Mary Karr, he wrote it as "a means to her end" as he once quipped, so the themes of loneliness, communication and connection ring especially true.
Unfortunately, although DFW did win over Mary Karr, their relationship was brief, and he turned into a creepy stalker ex-boyfriend type and caused a bad time for Karr, and he was posthumously cancelled for that.
I'd say never meet your heroes, but I'll venture that at least some of them are nice. Most people are. DFW was a creep, in some respects. And that sucks. But his book lives on without him.
I finished David Foster Wallace's 980 page novel. This was my second read-through of a book that is so packed with themes and storylines and character moments and subtle Easter eggs that in retrospect my first reading felt like a 3-hour visit to a massive theme park, in that I had a fun time and got a general idea of the layout, but that there wasn't any way for me see most of the rides until my return visit.
This time I read closely and leaned heavily on Reddit's 10,000-member r/InfiniteJest subforum, containing posts and discussions on every aspect of the book going back at least as far as 2009, with posts that are still being generated today.
I'm not going to do a full-blown review of the book. That would require a massive series of posts, longer than my aborted string of Apocalypse Now posts would have been, had I been arsed to finish it.
I've already written about the addiction recovery sections of the book in previous posts, and how important they were to me, so I'll just touch on the world building, the plot, and the ending, and the false lack thereof, and the actual hidden ending, without getting too heavily into spoilers.
Infinite Jest came out in 1996, and it's set in their near future, which means that it's set in our alternative near past. In that world, Rush Limbaugh defeated Bill Clinton in the '96 election, then Limbaugh was assassinated, and a third party candidate won the '00 election, and that candidate was the "former crooner" Johnny Gentile, very much a combination of fat old Elvis Presley and paranoid clean freak Howard Hughes.
Being a neat freak, Gentile formed the Clean US Party, or C.U.S.P., and he wrangled Canada and Mexico into an EU-like pact called the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. Onanism of course is an old-timey term for masturbation.
Gentile's plan for cleaning up the USA was to declare most of northern New England and upstate New York a no-man's land and forcefully expropriate the land to Canada, to become part of the province of Quebec.
Credit: Biblioklept
From there, the USA would employ massive suborbital catapults (or possibly trebuchets) to launch all of their garbage and toxic waste into the new no-man's land, known as the Great Concavity (aka the Great Convexity, from Canada's perspective). And thus was created a several thousand square mile (km) dump that served as the corner into which the USA swept their filth.
Added to this, Gentile built a series of massive fans that redirected air pollution from the USA north into the Great Concavity, and presumably on from there into the original Quebec.
Accompanying this was the invention of something called annular fusion, a form of nuclear fusion that was so clean that its production radically detoxified everything in the local environment to the point where the flora and fauna became uncontrollably lush and overgrown. So of course, Gentile built O.N.A.N.'s annular fusion plants inside the Great Concavity in order to counterbalance the garbage and toxic waste being catapulted and fanned in.
The result was not a happy medium of an environment, but instead of a fluctuating sine wave of heavy toxicity flipping into toxic cleanliness and back again. The latter unsustainably cleansed stage of the ecosystem caused massive overgrowth in plants and animals, resulting in feral former-pet hamsters the size of Volkswagen Beetles roaming the wastes, and reports of an abandoned 20-foot tall human infant terrorizing residents at the northern border of New New England.
Canada did not appreciate this "gift" of highly problematic land. People in Quebec were especially incensed, as their rate of cancer and birth defects skyrocketed due to the toxicity being sent their way. Around the turn of the century, in both our world and in the Infinite Jest world, Quebec was a hotbed of separatist sentiments. Many in the province wanted to secede from Canada and become their own French-speaking country.
Enter the Assassins Fateuils Rolents, aka Wheelchair Assassins, a Quebec separatist terror organization composed of murderous men in wheelchairs. Most of the men in that cabal had lost their legs as children playing a game on the train tracks.
Credit: Jon from Infinitetest
216 Quebec boys start the game in 36 groups of 6 each. The groups separate and line up along the tracks, 3 to a side in each group, with one referee watching each group. When an express train comes flying by, the boys all jump from one side of the track to the other, just before the train smashes into them.
It's a test of courage: the first boy in each group of 6 to jump is sent home in shame. Jumpers 2-5 are allowed to stay and watch subsequent rounds of the game. The very last boy to jump across the tracks in each group gets to advance to the next round; that is, if he is not smeared across hundreds of yards (meters) of the tracks by the train, or also if he is not slightly luckier and loses only his legs, as seems to a be common enough occurrence in the game to eventually find those legless boys inducted into the Wheelchair Assassins.
If boy #6 is killed or incapacitated, then boy #5—assuming that he survived the jump—takes his place in the second round of 36 players: 6 groups of 6. The surviving last jumpers of the second round go to the final round of 6, and think of how courageous/foolish those final 6 would be, and know that the legless boys were even more foolish and courageous than that.
The Assassins Fateuils Rolents are the main baddies in Infinite Jest, and they are after a master tape of a film produced by the deceased father of one of the main characters. The film, known as Infinite Jest V (or possibly Infinite Jest VI) is so stupefyingly entertaining that anyone who watches it even once becomes useless for the rest of their life. The only thing they'll want to do after that is watch the film again and again and again; they will not eat or drink or sleep or do anything but watch the film until they die of dehydration or lack of sleep or what have you. If the film is taken away from them, they will make every effort to get it back, or die in the attempt.
The Assassins Fateuils Rolents want to copy the master tape (viral Internet videos haven't yet caught on in this world) and spread it throughout the USA and Canada in order to kill thousands, or more, and somehow achieve their goal of an independent Quebec—though it seems like they want to cause havoc and misery, much more than they want to break off their own country.
After almost 1000 pages, the book ends suddenly, without a seeming resolution to the plot, which like the ending of The Sopranos caused some people distress. But unlike The Sopranos, Infinite Jest actually does have an ending, it's just that we the readers have to extrapolate it from the clues that David Foster Wallace left in the extensive endnotes and in the almost-forgotten flash forward at the beginning of the book. It's a pretty cool ending, and it's not terribly vague or open to interpretation.
I did not realize this about the ending on my first read, but I still enjoyed the book, just like I would have enjoyed a few hours at that huge imagined theme park without being able to go on its most famous ride, especially since I hadn't known that that particular ride existed.
On my second visit to Infinite Jest, through the help of close reading and poring over a lot of posts and blogs, I got to experience the rest of the rides, including the cool one.
If you're interested in giving this book a shot, I would not recommend close reading and study on your first go-round. I think it would have been too much for me if I'd tried it, though your mileage may vary.
I've given just the most basic layout of the plot and the lore here in these notes; they're a lot more ornate and complicated in the book, and when all is said and done, the book is not really about the plot and the lore, they're just interesting trappings put in place to showcase the more important parts of the book.
After all, it's lonely to go to a giant theme park by oneself; the rides are in place for us to enjoy with others. The three main characters in the book are all loners, but they are also constantly in the presence of other people who are ostensibly close to them, as well as an occasional narrator who is sort of spying on them from beyond the grave, but that's another ball of wax.
And it's those obligatory interactions that the book is really about. The ways that the characters communicate and fail to communicate with themselves and others, and the ways that they hurt themselves and others, and the ways that they deal with the hurt and refuse to deal with the hurt. That's what I got from the first read-through, and that was enough.
David Foster Wallace wrote his masterpiece in order to impress a woman: the writer Mary Karr, he wrote it as "a means to her end" as he once quipped, so the themes of loneliness, communication and connection ring especially true.
Unfortunately, although DFW did win over Mary Karr, their relationship was brief, and he turned into a creepy stalker ex-boyfriend type and caused a bad time for Karr, and he was posthumously cancelled for that.
I'd say never meet your heroes, but I'll venture that at least some of them are nice. Most people are. DFW was a creep, in some respects. And that sucks. But his book lives on without him.
Last edited by suitedjustice; Yesterday at 10:59 PM.
Yesterday
, 11:19 PM