u/world-endingdoom

Hello party people,
Above is a really neat survey of the first manuscript of Infinite Jest by scholar and critic Steven Moore. I found it a while ago — I kind of forget how, probably a bit of aimless google searching — but as I was going through it again today, I realized that it probably never received wide discovery, at least not here.
I think there's some really interesting stuff in here, and it makes me wish that some version of the first manuscript was a bit more widely available. While there is technically no definitive evidence that any of this is legitimate, the excerpts are so familiar-sounding and appropriate that I would have a hard time believing that this is the work of an imitator.
Check it out! I'm interested to hear what sticks out to you fellas. The Moby Dick-esque intro is noteworthy, though maybe not necessarily good (I can see why they cut it). Enjoy! Big Chungus.

This is a post whose variants semi-frequent this subreddit, but I love reading what you guys have to say!

To get the ball rolling, in no particular order:

The A.I. writing style (and A.I. in general), the changing porn industry, political debates on the internet, the rise of mental health problems through social media (and people claiming that other people are faking it, basically a gatekeeping of mental health problems), doomscrolling (obviously, although doomscrolling has a different energy to it than binge-watching TV), Trump's first and second term (another obviously, though I still would have killed to read his J6 and DOGE pieces), the limp-dickedness of the Democrats, 4chan, Neo-Nazis, autism (I feel both like I kind of have to elaborate on this one and that I just totally can't), Lynch's projects post-2008, Jordan Peterson, Covid, the movie Challengers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Russian State media seeping into the U.S. mainstream, and the rise of misinformation (I think I've seen some of these in other places, I'm sorry I can't cite the original sources, so if I've stolen from you, I'm sorry). Okay goodbye David Foster Wallace subreddit I love you.

Okay, in the TV Show Invincible, Omni-Man is like the strongest guy ever. He's destroyed planets, withstood the gravity of a black hole, whatever. This got me thinking — if this guy is several orders of magnitude stronger than the average person, could his blinks, like... kill people? The force of his eyelids hitting each other? Does this make sense?

I guess you would have to calculate his most physically demanding feat, then see how many times stronger he is than the average person, then find the average amount of force released by an average human blink, then multiply that by how many times stronger he is than the average person. But I would have no idea how to do that. I know that this show isn't scientifically accurate, like, at all, but I think it would be interesting to see how the logic of the show would work if you were to follow it. Please help!