20 young men fought a couch and lost
This week: guys headbutting windows, life lessons, how to best catogorise your Flat Earther uncle, and, finally, a thread of Star Wars characters tearing up a dance floor.
Hey there. Welcome to the kites can’t fly newsletter. I’m cory zanoni.
We’re failing young men
Question: how many drunk young white guys does it take to beat up a couch? More than 20, if you go by this video of a bunch of shirtless dudes failing at it.
I’ve been on r/IdiotsFightingThings a bit too much lately and it’s reinforced my belief that, as a society, we’re failing young men. For every lighthearted video of a small child being too uncoordinated for words, there are a few of young men, usually white, acting out their belief that they can act violently in a flippant, nonchalant, or just plain dumb way.
How else can you describe someone casually headbutting a bus stop? Or destroying a TV because their sports team isn’t all that great?
You don’t destroy things unless you think you’re allowed to do so (and that attitude doesn’t form accidentally).
Read more: r/IdiotsFightingThings is proof we’re failing young men.
The big lessons
Every so often, I start playing Threes compulsively. It’s a cycle: I’ll get a hankering for it, I’ll play it a lot for a few weeks, fall into a Threes hole, then put it away for a few months and regain some sense of equilibrium.
Threes, put simply, is a perfect game. It’s a puzzler where you match numbers on a board to make bigger numbers and nab a bigger score. That’s underselling it, really. It’s legitimately one of the best games ever made.
Like all great things, Threes has things to teach us beyond the confines of its rules and mechanics. Life lessons. Real ones. Big ones like ”All big things happen because of countless small things”.
Threes has taught me a lot about life. So I listed them. (There’s an important one that didn’t make the cut: commit to the bit.)
Read more: 1 + 2 = wisdom: Life lessons learned while playing Threes
Charting Flat Earthers and QAnon
Ever been at a Christmas lunch and thought “You know, I really wish I could chart the conspiratorial bullshit my family is spouting?” It happens to the best of us. Thankfully, Abbie Richards did the work for us.
She developed The Conspiracy Chart, grouping conspiracies from “grounded in reality” to, once you cross the final “antisemitic point of no return”, “detached from reality”.
Personally, I think a lot of my extended family will sit somewhere between “We have questions” and “Dangerous to yourself and others”.
Elsewhere on kites can’t fly
- A tech CEO was trying to say politics has no place in his company while totally ignoring the libertarianism undergird the mission guiding said company
- Missing macOS because it’s home, and because Windows is uneven floors and half-finished appliances
Some good stuff
Sometimes you need to get off the dread treadmill of Twitter, ya know? Here’s some good stuff I’ve been turning to instead.
Watching
It’s been a basketball kind of week. The WNBA Finals wrapped up, with my beloved Las Vegas Aces getting swept 3-0 by the transcendent Seattle Storm.
The Storm are no joke, even if you’re not a sports fan. One of their players, Breanna Stewart, boggles the mind: she’s 26 years old, ruptured her Achilles in April 2019, missed the 2019 WNBA season, returned for the 2020 season, came second in league MVP voting, won the 2020 Championship, and was named the Finals MVP.
After rupturing her Achilles. That ends careers. Stewart is a once-in-a-lifetime athlete.
Learning
I’ve been umming and ahhing about learning Japanese for years but hadn’t found a way into the subject that worked for me. Tofugu has changed that.
The site has a “ridiculously detailed guide to learning Japanese” and, yeah, it’s ridiculously detailed. I’ve almost finished the section on learning hiragana and been far easier than anything else I’ve tried. And it’s working! We watched Studio Ghibli’s The Cat Returns last night and I totally recognised some words and could read some signs in the background. Good times.
As a bonus, it’s made apps like Memrise and Duolingo a lot easier to use. Those kinds of apps kinda skip the basics in favour of drilling phrases. That might work for a lot of people, but I’m more of a “understand how things work from the ground up” person than a “commit helpful things to memory” kinda guy.
Worth a look if you ever want to learn Japanese.
That good thread
Ever wanted to watch Darth Vader and Padme dance to Taylor Swift’s “I knew you were trouble”? Of course you have. Now you can.
How about Luke and Leia dancing to “I never felt with way before”? (Which is perfect btw.) Or just Darth Maul tearing shit up?
This is seriously the most joyous, ridiculous Star Wars dance party ever staged. It just keeps getting better and better.
👋 cz