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    5 Tenants of a Negative Self-Help

    Mark Manson, writing at this site, has coined a new term, “Negative Self-Help.”

    Whereas positive self-help believes that we’re all wonderful and destined for greatness, Negative Self-Help admits that we’re all kind of shitty and we should come to terms with that. Whereas positive self-help encourages you to create ambitious goals, to follow your dreams, to reach for the stars—*vomits*—Negative Self-Help reminds you that your dreams are probably narcissistic delusions and you should probably just shut the fuck up and get to work on something meaningful. Whereas positive self-help obsesses over “healing” old “wounds,” and “releasing” pent up emotions, Negative Self-Help gently reminds you that there’s no end to the pain in this shitstream called life, so you might as well get used to it.

    Yes kids, you too can get your shit together and live a more satisfying and meaningful life by pursuing less, by letting go of all the stupid assumptions you’ve accumulated throughout your self-absorbed life, by forgetting about happiness and accepting that everything meaningful in this world requires struggle and sacrifice. So you might as well start picking out the scars you want for your birthday, kiddos, because we’re all going to get them anyway. Negative Self-Help can completely alter your perception of life, the universe, and everything. Just sign up now for a limited time offer of…

    …oh, what am I saying? It’s fucking free.

    He then proceeds to explain everything. You owe it to yourself to read it.

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    Impeachment Record

    Dana Blanton, reporting for Fox News, has a story the White House won’t like.

    A new high of 51 percent wants Trump impeached and removed from office, another 4 percent want him impeached but not removed, and 40 percent oppose impeachment altogether. In July, 42 percent favored impeachment and removal, while 5 percent said impeach but don’t remove him, and 45 percent opposed impeachment.

    So, even Fox News can’t deny the whole “lets get rid of the criminal grafter” movement.

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    Cardinals Manager Mike Fucking Shildt Gets All Fucking Riled Up After Beating The Fucking Braves

    Bill Haisley, writing for Deadspin, recounts a social media post by St. Louis Cardinal player Randy Arozarena that, undoubtedly, was not for public consumption.

    Pretty sure Arozarena is gonna be in deep, deep trouble for that video. I mean… he’s gonna not be on the NLCS roster methinks.

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    The Right Book

    Austin Kleon on recognizing a good book.

    If a book makes me want to keep reading, it’s the right book.

    If a book makes me want to start writing, it’s the right book.

    Any other book is not the right book. (Right now.)

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    Projects vs Tasks

    Seth Godin on understanding the difference between projects and tasks. This is the kind of observations I love that Seth does. It’s all about ownership.

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    Kenny Loggins and Richard Marx

    ’80s yacht-rock superstars Richard Marx and Kenny Loggins are still having a good time. Thankfully, The Angry Fan chimed in with an excellent bon mot.

    What a throwback to when Twitter was fun and not a cesspool.

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    Beating the Odds

    Anne Rogers, writing for mlb.com, has an excellent profile of St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Shildt.

    “Believing in individuals and teams only gets tested when things aren’t going your way,” Shildt said. “And the easiest thing in the world is to punt on somebody. Sometimes it’s necessary in competition if a guy just doesn’t feel or look right, but not necessary when you have guys that you believe in that you know their work is taking place in the right manner, their head’s in the right spot. You know they’ve got a process for what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.”

    Good read. Now go win Game 5.

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    Who else?

    Yadi is clutch.

    Time to put the Braves away on Wednesday.

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    The Outsized Importance of Stan Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics

    Jim McLauchlin, writing for Newsarama, has a great story on the importance of a book that came out in 1974 — Origins of Marvel Comics by Stan Lee. Without this book and the marketing showmanship of Stan Lee going around and promoting it, the Marvel Comics of today might not have existed.

    "Origins was the trade paperback before the trade paperback market even existed," says filmmaker Kevin Smith. "And it wasn't just some Marvel in-house compilation book. It was published by Simon & Schuster, a real publisher, a book-book publisher. Most importantly, that was an indicator that somebody outside the comic book market was treating this seriously."

    “If you were looking for a comic book in the library in the ’80s, good luck,” he says. “You weren’t finding one, except for this. That legitimized what Stan was doing, what comics were doing. This was a beautiful, perfect way into the Marvel Universe for someone who didn’t grow up in it, or a classic revisit, a nostalgia jolt, if you were reading Marvel back when this happened.”

    I had a similar experience to Kevin Smith. My father bought this book in hardcover, and I devoured it growing up. When I was a kid, all his comics were in banker’s boxes in the attic and was not a place I could easily get to when I wanted some Silver Age DC to read. However, Origins was on the bookshelf. Soon, Bring on the Bad Guys was in my possession too.

    These two books helped me become a much better reader when I was 7 years old and allowed me to understand concepts other kids weren’t thinking about, like not being popular, the importance of self-sacrifice, not being self-centered, and so much more.

    Now, I’ve got to go find those books at home and crack them open again.

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    Mid-Day News

    Shirley Li, writing in The Atlantic, highlighted one of the better sketches from the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live. The racial stereotypes and the “game” was funny and smart. SNL could use more sketches like this.

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    Black Sorcery

    One of the most interesting subreddits is r/blackmagicfuckery. Here are the best clips of all time. Here is the regular flow of posts.

    H/T: MetaFilter

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    “Obviously, we got punched in the mouth.”

    Kolton… shut up and play the game. Take that fire and apply it to your at bats and on the field defense.

    One run in 18 innings doesn’t get you anywhere.

    Also, never slide into first base. I hope Shildt tore you a new one for that.

    And, by the way, Mike… tell Carlos Martínez to grow up and shut up.

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    Old Friends and New Secrets

    James Whitbrook, writing for Gizmodo, takes a deep dive in “Breaking Down the Old Friends and New Secrets of Star Trek: Picard’s Latest Trailer.”

    Nice gifs. Stay for the analysis.

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    Hairdoo

    Hairdoo
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    The Scandal Has Spiraled Out of Trump’s Control

    David Graham, writing in The Atlantic, outlines what we know so far in the Ukraine scandal and how it has ballooned into something that involves nearly all levels of the Trump administration from the vice president to his personal lawyer/fixer to the top U.S. diplomat in the Ukraine to the European Union ambassador to the secretary of state Mike Pompeo to President Xi Jinping of China to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and to who know’s who else we’ll learn about tomorrow.

    To my mind the most damaging thing that happened so far was this bit of craziness.

    Thursday morning on the White House’s South Lawn, Trump told reporters that China should mount a probe: “They should investigate the Bidens, because how does a company that’s newly formed—and all these companies—and by the way, likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.” There is no evidence to back up his charges. The moment was breathtaking, because Trump, under threat of impeachment for asking a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 election, opted to ask a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 election, with cameras rolling.

    That afternoon Chuck Todd began his Meet The Press Daily show with this declaration:

    I don’t say this lightly, but let’s be frank, a national nightmare is upon us. The basic rules of our democracy are under attack from the president. We begin tonight with a series of admissions by the president that all but assures his impeachment in the House of Representatives. It’s a moment of truth for Republicans and they’ve been largely silent on what we’ve seen from the president. Today, he publicly called on two foreign governments to interfere in the election by investigating his chief 2020 political rival…

    He then played the video of Trump calling on China and the Ukrain to investigate Joe Biden.

    What you just heard is a public admission of the allegations of the heart of the House’s impeachment inquiry and at the heart of the whistleblower’s complaint. That the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump is using the power of his office to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 election while doing it relying on a debunked conspiracy theory or two.

    By the way, this is not hearsay, this is not a leak, this is not a whistleblower complaint. It’s not a memorandum of a phone conversation. You heard the president did it on the White House lawn. This moment should arguably be a national emergency. The Founding Fathers would have considered it a national emergency if the president publicly lobbied multiple foreign governments to interfere in the next election.

    And yet there has been virtually no condemnation for the president’s party at all for this remark which was remarkable considering the precedent it would set and the lasting damage it would do to our democracy. It is tough to say lightly, but this is the moment that we’re at.

    And here we are.

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    Puddles Covers Crazy Train

    What a totally cool version, however the end mash-up was genius.

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    KISS Cover Band Guitarist Leaves To Start Vinnie Vincent Invasion Tribute Band

    KISS fan website KISS Asylum pointed me to an old Onion article that made me laugh.

    AKRON, OH—Citing growing tensions between bandmates, Harvey Shapiro—aka “VeeVee,” the guitarist for KISS cover band Destroyer—left the group Monday to create VeeVee’s Occupying Force, a Vinnie Vincent Invasion tribute band. “I felt I had hit a creative ceiling with the cover-band experience and was ready for the challenges of a tribute band,” Shapiro said. “VeeVee’s Occupying Force will debut Dec. 3 at Rubber City Lanes. We’re opening for Second Sighting, my brother’s Frehley’s Comet cover band.” As a part of his new band’s act, Shapiro said he is contemplating suing Destroyer for $6 million over damage to his reputation following some badmouthing at the Rock ‘N’ Bowl.

    It’s the Frehley’s Comet cover band that made me almost snort.

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    52 Things I Know at 52

    Patrick Rhone has put together a pretty cool list of a bunch of posts of his. I need to do something similar.

    Love this concept.

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    This is the Moment Rachel Maddow has Been Waiting For

    Amanda Hess, writing for The New York Times, has an incredible profile of Rachel Maddow.

    Maddow has hosted “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC at 9 p.m. five nights a week for 11 years. But over the past three, her figure has ascended, in the liberal imagination, from beloved cable-news host to a kind of oracle for the age of Trump. If her show started out as a smart, quirky, kind-of-meandering news program focusing on Republican misdeeds in the Obama years, it has become, since the 2016 election, the gathering place for a congregation of liberals hungering for an antidote to President Trump’s nihilism and disregard for civic norms.

    Maddow does not administer beat-downs or deliver epic rants. She is not a master of the sound bite. Instead, she carries her viewers along on a wave of verbiage, delivering baroque soliloquies about the Russian state, Trump-administration corruption and American political history. Her show’s mantra is “increasing the amount of useful information in the world,” though the people who watch it do not exactly turn to it out of a need for more information. They already read the papers and scroll through Twitter all day. What Maddow provides is the exciting rush of chasing a set of facts until a sane vision of the world finally comes into focus.

    That last sentence is a brilliant distillation of The Rachel Maddow Show. It’s what smart people want in a “talking head, news as entertainment” show.

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    The Murder of Jamal Khashoggi

    Evan Ratliff, writing for Insider, has an incredible long-read on the disappearance and murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It’s a good reminder that the Saudi government isn’t really our friend and the indifference by the White House is indicative of how they would like to treat journalists who tell the truth.

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