Welcome to the 60th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 59 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
I haven’t gotten photos developed since I moved and haven’t really taken any since then anyway, which means that I keep going to back to these winter scenes and it’s like, oh, yeah, time is passing. Today is May. We’re a third of the way through 2021, and it’s been fine.
Some content I wrote this week
Much of what I write now goes behind PennLive’s paywall, and I’m not exactly sure how reliable the site is with actually enforcing that, so if you really, really want to read something that I wrote, let me know, and I’ll PDF it or send you a Google Docs link. Or, like, subscribe to support local journalism!!! (It’s fine if you don’t.)
Penn State men’s soccer begins its NCAA Tournament tomorrow. The women’s soccer team got off to a good start a couple days ago.
An NFL draft preview of Penn State defensive end Shaka Toney, who said, “Everybody’s always more excited than me.”
An NFL draft preview of Kyle Pitts, who got picked No. 4 overall by the Atlanta Falcons. He’s really good. Here are high school highlights of him that I took back in 2017.
An NFL draft preview of Christian Barmore, who probably got picked last night, but I’m writing this at 4 p.m. and will not go back and edit it.
Some content I listened to this week
The 042k21 playlist is finished:
It started strong but faded kind of quickly.
I will re-up Tragedy Reel by Fog Lake as one of my favorite albums of the year so far, and I’ve enjoyed Tethers by The Natvral, aka Kip Berman from the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. It’s different, in a really good way, from what I was expecting from him.
Sweep It Into Space by Dinosaur Jr. has also been fun because J Mascis is still shredding in 2021.
Some content I read this week
A Welcome to Hell World on how Hawai’i handled/is handling the coronavirus pandemic. Another Hell World on Black cowboys.
Alicia Kennedy “on resilience” and Puerto Rico.
Real Life on ambience.
Good Discourse Blog piece on the weird St. Vincent stuff this week. As an aside, I’m glad I never became a “St. Vincent Guy” (you know the type of guy I’m talking about), though I guess I must come clean and admit that I had the CD insert of, uh, maybe Actor (is that a St. Vincent album?) taped to my wall at the end of high school. But I think I found those late 2000s St. Vincent albums a little too dense and boring, or something along those lines. I enjoyed “Cruel,” though.
A vibe can be positive, negative, beautiful, ugly, or just unique. It can even become a quality in itself: if something is vibey, it gives off an intense vibe or is particularly amenable to vibes. Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience. That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritizing audio, video, and images over text. Through our screens, vibes are being constantly emitted and received.
A very twisted look at the “slander industry” by The New York Times.
One of the more messed up things happening right now.
Personal branding exercises (like this one) suck.
Some other content I saw or thought about this week
There’s an ad for engagement rings that airs on a podcast I listen to, and in the ad copy, it says the diamonds are “responsibly sourced from Botswana,” for whatever reason, that strikes me as a darkly comical string of words.
I do not have much commentary on the NFL draft, but it was a little too on the nose Thursday night to have Kings of Leon open the broadcast with “Use Somebody” (though they later played another probably new song that I did not know). We love our 2008 hits in the year 2021. (Only By The Night is a good album with some underrated songs, and “Sex On Fire” is one of the best songs of the 2000s).
I have been thinking how life might be different if Joel Embiid had made that shot a couple weeks ago where he just kinda chucked the ball at the basket from the other end of the court and it was halfway down.
Thank you for reading the 60th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
[instrumental]
—D.G.