How to Process Information that Disturbs You to Your Very Core

When I was a kid, I knew a guy who blinked in a way that bothered my mother. He didn’t just blink as he needed to. He’d save his blinks up. If you watched him closely you’d see that he would not blink for a long time, then flutter his eyelashes for a full second. It’s the kind of thing you might not notice at all, but once you do, of more accurately, once my mother did, she wasn’t able to think about anything else.

She modeled proper behavior for me and my brothers by never bringing it up to my friend for fear of embarrassing him. Instead, she just complained endlessly about it when he was not around. Now here I am criticizing her on a website I know for a fact she has never read. A new generation learns from the one previous.

Note from Missy: Speaking of how Jenkins blinks, I kind of can’t believe we still have this website.

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How to Kill a Joke

In a lot of ways, creating comedy is like building a house of cards. One of the similarities is that you’re more likely to finish if you’re alone when you do it. If even one person is in the room with you and sees you building a house of cards, they will be tempted to either bump the table or “accidentally” startle you. My theory is that successfully building a house of cards is tremendously satisfying and very difficult, while destroying someone else’s house of cards is only a little satisfying, but very, very easy. It seems to be basic human nature, and the same thing happens with comedy.

One of the most popular ways to knock down a comedian’s house of cards is to deliberately misunderstand a joke, often before the joke has even finished, interpret it in the most offensive possible way, then demand an explanation or an apology. You’d be surprised how often this happens, even in the middle of a show at a crowded comedy club.

There’s a reason so many comedians seem to be fundamentally angry people.

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How to Have an Enjoyable Group Activity

More than once I have seen a gathering—built around the idea that several people are going to get together to do a thing they all enjoy but never get to do—get ruined by one person who comes along, doesn’t want to do the thing everybody else plans to, but also doesn’t want to feel excluded. Looking back at it now, more often than not, the person who killed the activity was usually someone dating one of the more enthusiastic parties.

The cliché is that people who play role-playing and tabletop games can’t get a date, but maybe the problem is that once they start dating they can’t get a decent game going.

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How to Explain Why Things Aren't Going Well

One of the locations where I worked in the theme park industry had several highly technical computer-controlled attractions, and one attraction was not technical at all. Occasionally, if a trainee on one of the technical rides “wasn’t getting it,” their trainers would suggest that they be transferred to that less technical attraction. It started as a way of moving people with different skill sets to a place where they could better thrive, but human nature is what it is. The practice began to take on a feeling of punishment, as if people who weren’t smart enough were being banished. Again, I stress, that isn’t really the case, but that was the perception, and some people who got the transfer began to take it personally.

Of course, if one was trying to work their way up the ladder, the next step after being a trainer was a sort of area-assistant-manager position that left one directly supervising the crew of that less technical attraction, so I leave it to you to decide who actually ended up getting punished in the end.

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How to Deal With Change

Between Discovery, Lower Decks, Picard, and the forthcoming Strange New Worlds, I think CBS All Access might have figured out that the only way to keep me as a subscriber all year-round is to make sure there’s a new episode of Star Trek every week, forever.

I am not against this.

I only hope that D+ is paying attention. If they are, this time next year, in addition to The Mandalorian, I could be watching The Gamorrean, and an animated sitcom that takes place inside the Sarlacc’s intestine.

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How to "Binge Watch" a TV Show

Ric is, in fact, a huge jazz fan. He subscribes to a magazine about jazz and jazz musician. From what he says, most of the articles seem to be about jazz’s waning popularity and the difficulty jazz musicians have finding enough work to pay their bills.

The magazine is called Downbeat, which seems fitting.

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How to Make a Prequel

If I had thought to have Omnipresent Man say “just ’cause I’m everywhere doesn’t mean I’ve gotta explain everything” a couple of years earlier it would have saved me a lot of trouble. Of course, I’d have also missed out on two or three comics that came from my attempts to make sense of Omnipresent Man’s powers, but at the time I would have happily taken that deal.

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How to Remember the Good Times

I have this theory that nostalgia is just a side effect of people’s well-documented inability to remember pain accurately. We remember that things hurt, but we don’t specifically recall the exact sensation. Because of that we remember being young, free, and having most of life ahead of us, but we don’t remember being broke, lonely, or worried about the future.

I believe another side effect of the inability to remember pain accurately is that women sometimes willingly give birth to a second child.

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How to Make a Goal and Stick to It

A long time ago, I worked at a video store. One of my coworkers was a young woman who was trying to quit smoking. She asked me to keep an eye on her, and if she seemed like she was considering having a cigarette, to talk her out of it.

Two days later, another coworker, her “best friend,” asked her to go out back and have a cigarette with her. I told her that I’d promised to try to talk her out of it. She said she remembered, and chose not to go smoke. Later her friend scolded me, saying that I didn’t know how hard it is to quit and that I should be more supportive. I explained that I thought I was being supportive by helping her be strong. The friend disagreed and maintained that the kind thing was to let her have “one lousy cigarette” with her friends to make quitting easier.

The one who was trying to quit smoking and her best friend didn’t work at the video store much longer. They were both fired, and prosecuted. The “best friend” talked her into helping her steal a customer’s credit card number and use it to buy an extremely elaborate bong. I’m certain she was extremely supportive through the entire ordeal.

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How to Deal with Mistakes

This was inspired by a real article I read, and yes, the writer did say that Apple’s design studio reminded him of “the last scene of the movie 2010.” And yes, I had trouble concentrating about anything else for several hours after I read that.

The last scene of the movie 2010, for the record, depicts mankind being reminded that there are more powerful beings in the cosmos and that we need to shape up. There are no obvious parallels to Apple in that, unless you’ve been following their legal battle with Epic Games.

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