Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about AI, coin flips, talk shows, weed, and more.
Kevin:
Had a bachelor party a couple weekends ago where the only planned activity was going to a gun range (shot an AR-15, absurdly loud/expensive, am good on never going again). For the rest of it, I spent four hours in a hot tub smoking a cigar and it was everything I dreamed it would be. Is there an ideal bachelor party weekend, or does it depend on the group?
The ideal bachelor party is just a regular vacation. I’ve done the Vegas thing. I’ve done the too-expensive steak dinner, the requisite strip club visits, and drinking shots until I have to boot right there at the cabstand. Decades ago, I assumed that this sort of bachelor party wasn’t just mandatory, but optimal. I wanted to get married one day specifically so that I could have a bachelor party Yes, I had a VHS tape of Bachelor Party starring Tom Hanks that I wore out when I was a kid (do you remember Tracy?). That movie, along with pretty much every other '80s comedic artifact, taught me that marriage is a prison, but that at least you get to have a bros-before-hos party beforehand where you fuck everything in sight before you’re condemned to live with the same woman every day for the rest of your life.
Turns out that line of thinking was a touch misguided. Every Vegas bachelor party I’ve been to has been the same flavor of grim. Meanwhile, one of my friends bailed on Vegas for his bachelor party and rented a house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina instead. We hung out the beach, smoked weed, and cooked ribeyes out on the deck. It was perfect, AND I didn’t lose $150 in 90 seconds at a craps table. That’s my kind of bachelor party.
Besides, I’ve already shown you how the very notion of a bachelor party is something of an anachronism. Back when I was working at Deadspin, my then-colleague Hannah Keyser wrote a post about how co-ed bachelor parties were cool and good. My inner bro blanched at that idea. But that was just as alpha bros were rising up in the online discourse, and their general nastiness soon ended my own sentimental attachment to old bro culture, stag parties/bachelorette parties included
A quick addendum: at one Vegas bachelor party, we did indeed go to a gun range. Each of us got to fire off a bunch of different weapons, including an old-school tommy gun. I’m anti-gun and I’ll never own one. But firing a tommy gun was, by far, the most fun thing that any of us filthy animals did that weekend. I’d happily do it again. Don’t tell my family.
Chris T:
Some of my good friends are beginning to lose members of their family. Like everything else, there’s some unwritten and often conflicting social etiquette that factors into these life events. We all want to support each other, but what are the expectations for the loss of a good friend’s family? Should we all be making our best effort to be present at these events? Should we feel disappointed if our friends do not attend these events? What grace and expectations should exist between one another? What are the social rules for this?
I’m pretty sure I’ve watched at least half a dozen Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes where Larry David is either trying to get out of attending a funeral, or is using a funeral to get out of some other social obligation. Funerals are useful for that sort of thing.
Anyway, if you’re emailing a professional blogger to find out if there are secretly established rules for this kinda shit, that means there aren’t any. Lucky for you, I’ve got wisdom pouring out of my ass, so I can still be of service. The bereaved won’t hold it against you if you can’t make it to a service. This is especially true if we’re talking about a destination funeral. Maybe you can’t make it all the way to Huntsville on short notice because you have work, or because your kids are sick with the flu, or because airfare costs $5,000. It happens.
That said, those same people will always remember it, and appreciate it, if you do show up. I’ll use myself as an example here. When my dad died last year, a few of my own best friends made the three-hour drive from New York to attend the memorial service. I didn’t order them to show up, or pull a guilt trip by telling them, “Oh no no no, you don’t have to come. I’m sure you have better things to do.” They came because they wanted to, and it meant a lot to me when I saw their bright, happy faces. When you’re grieving, it always helps to see a friend: someone who loves you, someone who makes you feel less alone, someone who makes you grateful for the living world that you yourself are still a part of. That’s how we all keep each other going. It’s a simple courtesy, and an optional one in the grand scheme of things. But it has a very, very long tail. Anyone who’s lost a loved one will tell you that.
You only need to attend one such event to make that appreciation felt, by the way. Some families go the full Jeter and have like 26 different memorials/funerals/wakes/square dances for one dead guy. You’re not obligated to go to every single one of them. We had a separate, family-only service for my dad at the cemetery just this past weekend. My friends didn’t show up to that one; I didn’t even tell them it was happening. I’m not gonna be a bridezilla. They showed up the first time, and that was enough. A little bit of effort goes a long way. We don’t need to draw this shit out.
Matt:
Is all the pomp and circumstance of the coin flip overrated? Could it just easily be replaced by something more technical, like an AI generated pick a number or something else that NFL can sell naming rights to?
Do you REALLY want the pregame coin toss outsourced to Grok? These bots could fuck up a recipe for dry toast, much less something as ornate as the flipping of a coin. The ref asks Grok who gets the ball and gets back Jefferson Davis as an answer.
More important, it’s nice to leave SOME shit analog. That even goes for a pregame coin toss. It’s a relatively innocuous procedure, but it’s fun to see the team captains—all 39 of them—gather at midfield to get the pre-flip safety demonstration from the referee. It’s also fun whenever the human element somehow interferes with the toss, as newly minted free agent Jaire Alexander has demonstrated. I’m not glued to my TV for the coin toss, but I appreciate the ceremony of it. As trivial as it is, it has cultural value. In fact, culture is built on many such things. Let a machine handle everything and suddenly, you have no culture at all.
Also, you know damn well that team captains, especially in high school, are jazzed to be part of the pregame coil toss. Everyone sees you out there. Everyone knows you’re the BMOC. That makes you hot and sexy.
Shane:
Do you care about your music being AI generated? Say you discover your new favorite song and then you find out it's AI generated. I remember oldheads talking about how drum machines didn't have the human element.
Yeah but those drum machines were programmed by humans, as part of a production process overseen by humans. Humans on copious amounts of cocaine and ecstasy, but humans nonetheless. That’s what made New Order’s shit cool: they were analog minds using digitized instruments. Ask a thousand AI monkeys to write a song as good a “Bizarre Love Triangle” and they’ll never pull it off. Autechre, a band I like a lot, has long employed machine learning to help them craft material but abgain, they programmed that shit themselves. They didn’t just punch some keywords into a prompt and ask it to spit out an album for them. The magic of technology comes from when we interact with it, not when we leave it to its own devices (excuse the pun).
This is because, as Albert Burneko is always properly reminding us, there is no artificial intelligence yet. ChatGPT is just a simulation of intelligence, snatching up all recorded ideas and then spitting them back at people in digestible form so that they can cheat on a history exam. That’s not intelligence. An intelligent entity has original ideas, thoughts, feelings. That last one is important because, due to its inanimate nature, an AI bot can never have true feelings. It can only reflect feelings back at you, which means it can never connect with the deepest part of your psyche—your soul—the way that real people can. Only we have that power, and it’s quite a neat one.
I know better now than to assume that our tech overlords will figure out a way for AI to live up to its brand name one day in the future. That future is a lie; a bill of goods we’ve all been sold so that some Fake Steve Jobs out there can make a mint off of stock buybacks. Every interaction I’ve had with AI has felt like soulless busywork, and that’ll remain the case as long as I live. So I don’t worry about having AI write my new favorite song, because it never will. Android Metallica is never walking through that door.
Michael:
Can you actually lose time or make up time on a road trip? I got into a way bigger argument with my old man than I should have over this simple question.
A wizard is never late, Michael. Nor is he ever early. He arrives precisely when he means to! Sorry. Had to do that. Existentially speaking, there’s never such a thing as making time or losing it. Time is time, and a road trip lasts exactly as long as it lasts. Gandalf knows what time it is.
But if you’re a dad, as I am, you don’t accept that. You have a general estimatte of how long the trip should take, and then you make it your mission to beat that time decisively. This is especially true for any ETA calculated by your car’s GPS system. Oh, Google Maps says I’ll be there at 4:30? Well fuck you, GPS lady. You think I’m some slugabed who putt-putts down the highway at 45 mph? No chance. I’ll beat your estimate and make you look like a FOOL. And when I shave minutes off the GPA lady’s estimate mid-drive, I nod approvingly to myself like the hot rod that I am.
Conversely, if I hit a wall of traffic and get there an hour later than the original estimate, you better believe I feel the sting. I couldn’t outsmart the GPS. I am a failure. God damn that traffic for making me look like a chump. Google Maps will be sorry when I make the ride back home in 90 minutes by going 150 mph on the shoulder all the way there. The laws of physics say I can’t manufacture time out of nothing, but the American in me says otherwise.
Speaking of being incontrovertibly American, you better believe that I will give everyone a report on our trip time upon our arrival. Regardless of whether or not traffic fucked us or I got us there super fast, it’ll be all I talk about for the next two hours after getting out of the car.
HALFTIME!
Jeff:
Are late night talk shows still vital? Outside of music performances, does anybody care about them anymore? If you hosted a late night talk show, what would you do to get people to tune in?
They’re only vital to old people. Going by the Nielsen demographics, this has kinda been the case my whole life. Old people watched the 11:00 p.m. news, then stuck around for Carson so they could fall asleep with the TV still on. But in the 1980s and '90s, there was a niche audience of wiseass kids (like me) who couldn’t find innovative comedy anywhere else. You stayed up late for Letterman and SNL and those shows taught you who/what was funny and who/what wasn’t. That bred an entire generation of comic minds: viewers who ended up writing/creating shit like The Simpsons, The Larry Sanders Show, Mr. Show, and dozens of other milestones. That influence is what made the late night shows vital beyond ratings.
You and I know that’s no longer the case. You can find comedy everywhere now. Much of it is worse than Peak Letterman, but it’s good enough that no burgeoning comic mind feels compelled to stay up after bedtime to see what Jimmy Fallon has to say about the world. And if something cool does happen on a late-night show, you can just watch a clip of it the next day as part of your infinite scrolling regimen. Like everything else in American culture, it all gets lost in the wash.
This is good in some ways, because I spent decades of my life having to hear about What Johnny Carson Meant To Me from every boomer who ever existed. But it also means that the dream of having a platform that powerful, that influential, is now gone. I won’t get to be the next Letterman. No one will. Even if I got my own late night hosting gig, hired the best writers on earth, and told the network brass to fuck off anytime they wanted me to cut a joke, I still wouldn’t be able to make my show more relevant than any of the others. This is sad for me, because I’d like to make $35 million a year to make small talk with Brie Larson for 10 minutes on a random Monday night. But in the macro, you and I need more voices—comic or otherwise—that have the power to cut through the clutter. Right now, only Donald Trump has that power, and his jokes are dogshit.
Ben:
I'm about to be a junior in college and I rip the bong almost every day, mostly when I'm done with work. But I’ve slowly leveled up to smoking whenever I can if I know that I can get past that activity while high. I love it. My mom and any lame friends who don't smoke have warned me about losing my ambition. I understand the concern, but the other half of me realizes I'm in college and the world is going to shit, so who cares? I won't be able to smoke this freely forever, but how seriously should I take these weed concerns?
You can party harder AFTER leaving college. Or, at least, I sure did. Once homework was gone from my life for good, I could get loaded every night and not suffer a whit!
And then I became an alcoholic. Oops.
Cannabis is a less harmful drug than alcohol, but you can fall into the same addiction patterns if you’re not careful. The first time I drove drunk and got away with it, I figured it was because I was a good drunk driver (no such person exists). So I did it again, and again, and again. Eventually, I let my drinking bleed into most of my ideally sober responsibilities: driving, housework, childrearing, etc. That can happen with pretty much any other addiction, too: weed, gambling, porn. If it stops being an escape from your life and starts being the center of it, then you gotta check yourself. So keep on taking hits from the bong, Ben. But don’t overestimate your usefulness to the world once you’re high as balls. Otherwise you’ll slip, and you;ll be the last one to notice it.
Also, having to work while high sucks. If it doesn’t now, it will.
Evan:
I just heard someone say “oh my god” down the hall at work. Not a shriek, but a serious tone. I didn’t flinch, but it got me thinking: how many oh my gods in a row would make you check out what was happening? I think with two I’d peek in that direction. With three, I’d hastily walk over.
I would need to be called over. Hyperbole inflation means that I hear/read “oh my god” or “holy shit” 900 times a day, in response to news ranging from “Iran and Israel might play global thermonuclear war” to “Look at what Tyrese Haliburton’s dad is wearing.” So I can’t jump to anytime I hear someone cry wolf, even if it sounds like they really mean it this time. If what they saw/read/heard was genuine earth-shattering, they’d engage their primal instincts and cry out for backup. “Come quick! Hank is bleeding to death on the conference room floor!” or what have you. If they don’t, then I’m not getting up for shit. My attention is precious, and often too easily wasted.
Bryan:
I think about the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle at least twice a week. Is that too much? Not enough?
Oh wow, Let’s Remember Some Trump Fails. I don’t think about that incident as often as you do, Bryan, and that’s by design. I’m not as afraid to look at the news as I was earlier this year. Indeed, I’ve had to un-semi-retire from writing about politics because no one at the big outlets is calling Trump’s attempted fascism out for what it is. But I still have to practice load management when it comes to my news intake. If you eat up 5,000 Trump stories a day, the news will colonize your mind entirely. So don’t. Mix some real life in there. Otherwise you’ll find yourself thinking about Rudy Giuliani's running hair dye all the time, for no good reason. Maybe try to become addicted to bong hits like that one college kid up above.
Michael:
I know it's been a long time since you've worked an office job, but do you remember ever having someone send you an email and then walk up to your desk to watch you read it? They just stand there and stare while you have to drop everything! I'm struggling to think of something more annoying than that in a desk job environment. What are the equivalents to that working from home?
I don’t remember that ever happening to me when I worked a desk job. My boss still found plenty of ways to annoy me, but never anything quite that imperious. I’d tear my own skin off if they ever had. And why would THEY wanna be there to watch you read their shit? I’ve been a successful writer for decades now and I still can’t stand it when people read my shit in front of me. (Inspector Todd voice) Makes my dick itch. The whole reason I put these words down on paper is so that I don’t have to be around when you read them. Reading my shit in front of me defeats the whole purpose. Also, I don’t wanna see people, especially my wife, not laughing at my jokes. That’s torture. No thank you.
And don’t read over my shoulder, anywhere or anytime. That’s the real lesson here. Sometimes one of my kids will stand behind me and read my phone over my shoulder—usually when I’m ordering them takeout—and it drives me nuts. This is a fundamental breach of courtesy that transcends the advent of the internet. Never do this or I’ll be forced to thrash you.
Mark:
The other day my kids left the patio door open for 20 minutes and all the world’s flies took the opportunity to move in. This happens every goddamned spring. Now every magazine in arm’s reach is a potential weapon, as well as any relatively sturdy stack of paper. Killing one of those buzzing little fuckers is highly satisfying, but also feels like cleaning up sand one grain at a time. What’s your play here? How do I keep the flies out? How do I kill them most efficiently? How do I get the kids to CLOSE THE FUCKING DOOR?!
No parent has ever successfully convinced their children to close a door, turn off a light, or pick their clothes up off of the floor. It can’t be done. This is why I would advise Mark to force his children to eat any flies they inadvertently let into the house. That’ll learn ‘em real good.
As for the flies, store all of your food that’s usually out on the countertop, including the fruit. Especially the fruit. Flies go where the food is, so don’t give them any.
Email of the week!
Brett:
Three weeks into starting a new job I had a vasectomy. I was at my new desk with my new boss and had an ice pack precariously positioned down the front of my pants. It was uncomfortable but fine until there was an issue with the internet in my office. Someone from IT had to crawl under my cubicle desktop. It was a "oh they are coming down to fix that... here they are!" type situation where I had zero time to adjust anything. I had to stand, my thighs held gingerly together to keep the ice pack from falling down my pant leg.
But the gentle squeeze made the bag leak. So as the guy was on the floor under my desk, the ice water was running down my pants - both legs! - into my shoes. Simultaneously, my new boss of three weeks, a very nice lady, is making chit-chat with me and the IT guy. The internet issue gets fixed and everyone leaves. I am in extreme discomfort - the wet socks and wet everything - so I take the long walk to the bathroom to clean up. As I'm standing, paper toweling myself dry in the stall, I very nearly shit my pants from a bubble of diarrhea. Still, better than having another kid.
Agreed.
