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SHOWS:
Hopefully Spectacular Show. 8pm Monday June 12 @ The Mint. Genuinely great lineup and venue!
Broke and Bougie Comedy. 7:30pm Friday June 16 @ The Hollywood Comedy. This is one of my comedy homes and also a fun lineup!
Sternal Journalists,
I am pooped. It is late. I spent ten hours at a brewery yesterday for all good, wonderful, celebrating a loved one’s birthday reasons, but I am again pooped.
I also am very proud of my creative work of the weekend was recreating this cardboard birthday box for the DC Zoo’s Red Panda:
And only slightly…
turning the balloons…
…into the sperm you see here.
I will say that, as always, the experience of diving into a creative practice I have zero experience with or ego in is always a good time. If you have time to do something like that this week, do it!
But anyway, since I was painting a box for hours, I don’t have much to say this week, so I’d like to take the time to air out a complaint and/or quandary that many of us are complicit in.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE EXCLAMATION POINT IPHONE REACTION???
Literally every other one of the reaction options we’re given has a very clear meaning. But the double exclamation point, or “emphasize” as it is governmentally named, is used so creatively that I don’t think anyone has every actually known it’s purpose.
At various times, I have perceived emphasize to mean:
“Hell yeah!”
“Oh no!”
“Egads!”
“I very much agree with this!”
“I am astounded by this in a good way”
“I am astounded by this in a bad way”
“I am passive-aggressively marking a text much earlier in our conversation so you can see that I actually did indeed say what I’m saying I said.”
Some of these are different from each other and some of them are literally the opposites of each other. I believe that Apple should remedy this by splitting them into !<3, !</3, and !EGADS!.
This has all been a ploy to just bring Egads back into the mainstream. Anyway, how do you use emphasize? Double anyway, here are the things I liked this week.
Recommendations
I Think You Should Leave Season 3. Television Show. It’s back and great. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, watch this 3 minute video explainer.
DAVE Season 3. Television Show. Late to the game, but loving the new season of Lil Dicky’s semi-autobiographical. I’m four episodes in and loving it.
A.I.’s Inner Conflict. Podcast Episode. I love Hard Fork and think this episode did a great job of exploring the nuance of how AI can be so dumb and still so existentially important.
I didn’t read anything this week. I should have read something or listened to music, but this week I will!
That’s all for this now!
Much love,
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.