And Breathe Edition

The Weekly Click 024

Jun 13

Hello, Internet Stranger!

Welcome to The Weekly Click. I’m your host, Sean McDevitt. You’re getting this because you subscribed to it many moons ago. If you’d like to switch off at any time, simply unsubscribe at the link below. I appreciate your time.

Linky Goodness

An aggregation of five favorite links directly from the information superhighway.

The App That Monetized Doing Nothing

“There is no one or right way to meditate, but the general idea is to use external silence and stillness to cultivate internal silence and stillness, even if just for a few minutes. A common practice is focusing on the breath, observing cogitation as it happens but not attempting to follow or encourage or complete or entertain your own ideas. As Buddhists put it, this gives you “mindfulness of the mind,” the ability to separate yourself from your ideas and emotions.” I probably need to get back into using the Calm app.

Democrats, Stop Negotiating With Traitors

We can yell this at the top of our lungs and they still won’t listen. I’m extremely exhausted by all of this.

Baseball Is Broken

“Once a generation, the game of baseball suffers through a fun crisis, and the story of this MLB season so far is how alarmingly not fun baseball has become. These crises always seem to coincide with pitchers nosing ahead of hitters, followed by a nosedive in offense. Despite what the purists and baseball lifers and respect-for-the-gamers would have you believe, though, MLB has responded with drastic changes every time. And now it’s time to do it again. Modern baseball has lots of problems—too many strikeouts, too few runs, too little action on the basepaths—but all these problems are symptoms of the same root cause: Major League Baseball is afraid of fun. When you’re a humorless corporation with no capacity to distinguish between fun and controversy, between a charisma machine and a giant prick, they all look like time bombs. Stir in the game’s historical insistence on modesty, on keeping your head down and doing your job, even though this isn’t an oil rig, and before long, your sport turns into a snooze.” Do. Something.

J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 Was Ahead of Its Time

“Sure, Occam’s razor would suggest that if a film isn’t popular, it probably isn’t good. However: Isn’t it just as possible that it was ahead of its time? Consider that five years after Super 8 was released, the Duffer bros. project Stranger Things exploded out of Netflix and into worldwide domination. Set a handful of years after Super 8 but still in small-town America, Stranger Things was an homage-laden sci-fi series starring a group of misfits, all unknown, who solve an otherworldly mystery kick-started by a secretive military operation gone awry. The Demogorgon’s look even evokes the Super 8 monster’s. So maybe audiences just weren’t ready for Super 8 in 2011. But after the year our own world just experienced in the proverbial Upside-Down, it’s time to shun the cynical and embrace the wholeheartedly optimistic.” I need to watch this film again.

This Isn’t Normal, Either

Our politics is so mind-numbingly dumb. “But this appearance of normalcy is a thin veneer. Just beneath the surface, the United States faces a set of perilous, unresolved threats. The former president refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the election he lost. His party’s leaders are abandoning their commitment to democratic majority governance, and its voters insist that he won. Domestic terrorism threatens the nation’s tranquility, and ordinary violent crime is on the rise too. Relaxing about the state of the country feels irresistible, but doing so would be unwise.”

From Me to You

My latest essays and stories on fightingillini.com and in The Multiverse.

Raiders of the Lost Ark at 40

I was about to turn 13 in the Summer of 1981. Finally, a teenager. My family was on vacation and in an unfamiliar Florida town. My father knew about this new film coming out starring the cool guy from Star Wars. I knew nothing.