mojo dojo frat house

well AH will, well AH will

The snow came at last. It flitted down in snowflakes, hand upon hand upon hand, and rose up the steps of our house. If you really, really listened, you could hear it dampening the sense of climate doom. Everyone came out of their houses with their shovels and pushed the thoughts aside.

S and J put on all their snow gear, but only after I made them do so, and we went outside. They tried to make a snowman, but the snow was too dry, and it wound up looking like a mound of sugar with two eyes gazing up at the sky. We went sledding instead.

Later on, I told Scuttle that the boys at the frat house had built a properly big snowman to give her something to do. I could see it six houses down as I shoveled the neighbor’s footpath. They’re all engineering students, so it makes sense that they’d know how to make a structure with good integrity.

She had on her pink speckly coat and purple leggings, and walked carefully down the shoveled path to their Greek Victorian, where ten of them were standing in black coats around the snowman. As she got close, they scattered like crows. The coats flapped down the driveway. It’s hard to trace the edges of white on white, so it took another minute to understand why.

Scuttle turned back around to tromp home, unimpressed. “There is no face and it has big butt cheeks,” she said. I walked a little closer and sure enough, there it was: a glistening shaft rising up to a crystal glans. And below: enormous balls. Not to scale at all. Their monument.

I took Jaffles down a little later and he threw a snowball at it.

We watched Barbie as a family that night, and I went into it thinking mostly about whether S would be ready. She’s 8, and on the sensitive end of things, human condition-wise. She gets it. The vaguely oppressive feel of being female in public. She wanted to see it with Noodles because I had suggested it might be nice for him to sit with her learn about what it feels like to be a girl (sometimes there is a basicness to the ideas you have as a parent in the in-between land of growing up). I didn’t even THINK about what J would see in the film.

“The horses!” Jaff’s squeaked, cacking himself and flopping all over the couch as Ken mooched around his mojo dojo casa house, broncos* galloping in slow motion across the background (*man extenders). He loved the furs, the sunglasses, the Matchbox 20. “And I’m Allen!” he keeps saying, days later, pissing himself. We laughed together as a family, and as I laughed I wondered if he was laughing at the right thing.

I posted a photo of the snow penis on Instagram. “I’d be more impressed if they knew how to make a vulva out of snow,” said a friend.

I picture them standing around staring at the penis, all the Kens, “Push” playing on loop. Of course it’s melted now, down to the shovel that gave it integrity. Though not before someone’s dog peed on it.

On which note this is my child

author

Matty Acton on Instagram: “This is his favourite stick & it CANNOT be thrown away! #boys #kids #toy #stick”

January 12, 2024

“Sorry brah!”

Goodies

this by

Molly Soda

was so good!

When I first started being a girl online, 20 years ago, everyone else was my age, too. Of course, we were warned not to meet up with strangers (decidedly older men) from AOL chat rooms, but I was generally posting for and following other teenagers. Now, not only am I sharing the Internet with today’s youth, I’m sharing the Internet with the girl I was online 20 years ago and every subsequent age and iteration since then.

More on posturing, this absolutely mindblowing piece at The Baffler on how engineers at Google are incentivized to start projects they’ll never finish (boys, take note!) (As you know, I am a David Graeber acolyte)

Robin James

is honestly too smart for my dim mind but this piece on “copyright vibe police” was so great—on the plagiarism discourse and how IP works/is being used. I think a lot about how IP applies when the internet is such a stew and, as discussed, everything winds up reused, remixed, rediscovered.

Also relevant: this piece from last year I did on how meme culture has changed “comedy”—here’s

Josh Gondelman

nailing it in an interview for the piece:

“It’s also given people a way to SEEM funny at times without doing the work of being funny. Like, using a familiar/popular gif to respond to something is not a joke or an insight. It’s like how 20 years ago someone would say: ‘You are the weakest link … goodbye.’”

Guess I’ll end with a gif

those boys