Pervert, voyeur, gambler or scammer

I’ve reached the part of my slow but steady Girls rewatch — now in early Season 5 — where we start to see the titular ladies really growing up, and it’s wildly satisfying. Hannah offering her support and patience to her parents during their mid-life crises; “quirky” Shoshanna taking a leap of faith and moving to Tokyo, where she’s finally not treated like a weirdo; Marnie barreling ahead with her doomed marriage to Desi with a kind of grim “the only way out is through” self awareness; Jessa grappling with her loyalty to Hannah and her desire to connect with possibly the only guy she’s figured out how to trust. I never felt much sympathy for Jessa as a character when I first watched Girls, but this time around, it struck me how her hypercompetence and magnetism so effectively mislead everyone about her own issues, leaving her isolated and scrambling to like, collect $30 that a random Coney Island carnie owes her. To say nothing of that Episode 3 needle drop with Børns’ “Past Lives.” God. Oh2BsoYoung.

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Did you know that you can just change your phone number for no reason at all, asks Ronnie Scott in a nice little ditty on identity in the “didge”-ital age for The NYT Magazine: “I could have explained that ghosting, cleaved from its negative valence, is a pretty good word for the exhilarating experience of controlled reinvention that a new number allows,” Scott writes. Not a bad way to get your kicks at the Verizon store, I guess! More interesting to me was learning that when you change your number, your old one gets recycled very quickly? But how will my long-lost secret twin ever find me then???

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Working on a framework called Pervert, Voyeur, Gambler, or Scammer: Ways of Being While While Living Under Threat of NPC Obsolescence, except the thesis is not very deep yet, it’s just that the anxious crunch of modernity has forced out approximately four modes of engaging with reality, and we’re seeing it play out dramatically in the news. At any time on the internet, you’re only ever like 3 clicks away tops from something on the pervert or scammer beat; then re: voyeurs, there’s obviously that giant gooner story, but also the recently reported phenom of YouTubers posting voyeuristic body-cam videos, usually of women; the secret filming of women and girls then posted on Telegram in China, that crazy Ring commercial in the Super Bowl that was basically like so yes we are definitely surveilling you and your neighbors!

On the gambler beat, there’s this Harper’s dispatch by Jasper Craven on the gambling epidemic as investigated in Vegas (it’s been a good season for those). This line summed up a lot for me:

A female bettor I met at Circa rightly noted that wagering is a universal opportunity to inject a bit of meaning and emotion into daily life. “Why not care a little bit?” she reasoned.

Then we also have Polymarket running a “free grocery store” (“We’re open to all New Yorkers. A real, physical investment in our community” ← dying to know know more about Polymarket’s conception of “community”) and the general betting app tsunami that will Attention Economy the way no category has actually Attention Economied before.

However! It may be worth considering the addition of a fifth archetype: the maxxer, as Sam Kriss went long on yesterday in ways only Sam Kriss can:

But sleepmaxxing does not mean getting a red light and taping your mouth shut; it means putting yourself in a medically induced coma. There is only one way of proteinmaxxing, which is to get one hundred percent of your daily calories from lean protein. Anything else would, by definition, be less than fully maxxed. Doctors will tell you that eating only protein causes something called ‘rabbit starvation,’ and if you keep at it you’ll experience vomiting, seizures, and death in fairly short order. They’re right, but the proteinmaxxer accepts his fate. Meanwhile the houseplantmaxxer has thick mats of algae sliming over every surface, the walls, the ceilings, swallowing the sofa, digesting the bookshelf and all its contents, blobbing and dribbling, wet in the middle of the bed, green on the windowpanes, covering everything except the UV lights and the massive pans of water left on a constant boil in every room, so the air stays oppressively, Cretaceously thick. This is what it means to be a maxxer … maxxing is not optimisation. The maxxer is not trying to have an enjoyable life. He’s trying to reduce himself to a single principle.

But then I also think we may need to expand with the addition of a sixth archetype — the Scold. Someone’s gotta stand here and wring their hands at all the objectively wrong ways to engage with reality. It’s only life if I can tell you how you’re doing it wrong!

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“I wasn’t aware of the dangers at the time, and I thought that the A.I. had statistical analysis abilities that would allow it to assist me if I opened up about my life,” Thomas told me.

^^So goes one of the many exceptionally dispiriting quotes from Tanya Chen’s report on AI psychosis support groups and the people who are finding their way back to the tangible world through — and I do find this part heartening — each other.

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If you’re still cramming Wuthering Heights, the novel, ahead of Wuthering Heights, “the movie,” (seems like critics are mixed on whether the film is good-bad or simply bad-bad) X user @chaandmami reupped the guide to parsing Joseph’s speech that would have certainly been useful for many a student of AP Lit. I’m seeing it next week; my hopes are weirdly very high.

@shainreads

(if you think about it, Heathcliff = the ultimate pervert/voyeur/gambler/scammer???)

mymind may be the only app that asks nothing from you. It’s literally just a beautiful place to keep everything you want to remember. Save it with a click and search to find it later. That’s it.

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You’ve got a date for Valentine’s Day. It’s REAL-ASIAN-SHIPS, an Asian American Dating Show, and the only dating show where the audience gets to make the match. Feb 16th, 8PM @Littlefield in Brooklyn.

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Distract yourself from the fall of civilization at Hack City Comedy, bringing to you the best comics you’ve seen on TV or at least your Instagram reels. Monday, February 13, 730pm at Union Hall.

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Introducing Make Your Pod Class! I, Harry Krinsky (co-host of the Nothing But Respect podcast), have finally corralled my informal conversations and my formal podcast consulting work into a 5-week virtual class! The idea is that by the end of the class my hope is that you’ll have learned the basics of making a show + actually have a version of episode 1 of the show done. For more info go to harrykrinsky.com/makeyourpod, or email me harryjkrinsky@gmail.com. I’m offering this first 5 week class for 150$ since it’s my first one. It will be Sunday afternoons starting March 1.