“‘It’s me,’ someone says. It takes a moment to realize the words came from me.”

By Dan Brooks in Fiction 0 Comment
Charles Dickens, who would love Wattpad except for the part where he doesn't get paid

Charles Dickens, who would love Wattpad except for the part where he doesn’t get paid

The heading of this post is a quote from After 3, an online novel by Anna Todd serialized on Wattpad. I apologize for my poor scholarship, but I can’t tell if After 3 is the third part of one long novel titled “After” or the second sequel to the original. I’m new to this whole Wattpad thing, which I discovered via this article in the New York Times. It likens Wattpad to the serial fiction that dominated 19th-century literature, particularly in England. Like “The Old Curiosity Shop,” Wattpad novels progress in installments, reaching their readers not long after being written. Unlike “The Old Curiosity Shop,” no one gets paid for writing them. But readers can comment, so net improvement.

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Friday links! Declinism v. Triumphalism edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

Easter_Island_Ahu_(2006)

Enjoy your cat videos now, because a NASA-funded study has predicted that industrial society will collapse in 15 years. This is what we get for not letting them go to the moon. It’s also what we get for developing an economy that uses more and more resources to exponentially increase the number of human beings while concentrating control of those resources in a progressively smaller fraction of the population. I’m selling a bumper sticker that says exactly that. Unfortunately it demands a bumper eight feet wide, so it only fits on the kind of cars that we can make for the next 15 years. Today is Friday, and the mechanisms of our triumph hasten our decline. Won’t you become a forgotten god with me?

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Montana GOP offers “modified one-party system”

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 0 Comment
Montana Senate Majority Leader Art Wittich (R-Bozeman) reads a non-Bible book.

Montana Senate Majority Leader Art Wittich (R-Bozeman) reads a non-Bible book.

The cutline under that photo will not be accurate for long. After mistakenly filing his candidacy for a Senate seat that was not up for election this year, 2013 Senate Majority Leader Art Wittich has filed for House District 68 in Belgrade, where he will conveniently not face a primary opponent. Election season is nigh upon us, and the Montana GOP is in throes. Self-described “business Republicans” have organized an insurrection against the Tea Party wing, mounting as many primary challenges as they can against the people who brought you a 2013 proposal to pay state legislators in gold coins. Meanwhile, the Montana Democratic Party can barely contain its glee, the elation in its war room threatening to disturb the other patrons at IHOP. Montana is a tough place for a Democrat, partly because of its many bright-red districts and partly because state Dems have pinned their hopes on Republican infighting. You can read all about it in this week’s column in the Missoula Independent, which is what you get today instead of a blog. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

 

Hoax: Westbro Baptist plans to protest Fred Phelps funeral

By Dan Brooks in Hoaxes 0 Comment
Pastor Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church. Not pictured: men's parka.

Pastor Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church. Not pictured: men’s parka.

Fred Phelps is dying, to the internet’s unbecoming glee. A Wisconsin woman has created a Facebook page called Fred Phelps Death Watch, which announces that “1 like = 1 death prayer for Fred Phelps!” The exclamation point makes it fun. “Sometimes it’s easier to make light of an ugly situation and to just laugh at everything,” she told USA Today, missing an important aspect of being good-humored: you laugh at bad things that happen to you. The Westboro Baptist Church brings out the worst in everybody. For example, a Twitter account that once belonged to Phelps’s daughter announced over the weekend that the church would protest Phelps’s funeral.

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Campaign finance is dead. Long live campaign finance

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 0 Comment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrdTX8m5G98

The Mitch McConnell campaign—which refers to itself by the parody-proof name “Team Mitch”—posted this video on YouTube last week. As you may have noticed, it contains no diegetic sound. There’s a weirdly contemporary electropop soundtrack, but at no point to do events in the video sync up with a particular element of the soundtrack or even narrative. It’s just footage of McConnell signing papers, turning alarmingly to the camera, shaking hands with a man in a tam and goatee whose vote cancels out yours, et cetera. You can dub whatever sound you want over this video, which, as The Daily Show has pointed out, makes it hilarious. It also makes it a free source of McConnell footage for whatever 501(c)4 organizations might want to produce ads to support him—but not coordinate with his campaign, since that is forbidden by law.

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