Seth Madej

“We Make Home Possible”

Seth — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:34:29 +0000

Freddie Mac, America’s taxpayer-funded mortgage guarantor, decided it would be a good idea to bet against American homeowners. The agency invested in “reverse floaters,” which basically means it made billions of dollars if Americans couldn’t refinance their mortgages to lower interest rates.

Even better, the agency’s head dipshit (i.e. acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency) Edward DeMarco says that he’s super cool with that and totes doesn’t get why everybody’s all going all psycho about it. I’m assuming Mr. DeMarco’s reading this, so I’ll give him a few reasons why some of us are a little annoyed:

1) Freddie Mac essentially controls the US mortgage market.

Project Mouth Slime: I Went and Cooked Up Mah Spit

Seth — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:33:18 +0000

It’s taken me three weeks to complete the final step of Project Mouth Slime because I’ve been sick for most of the last 10 days, and because in this crazy modern world it’s getting as if a work-a-day man doesn’t have eight hours to spend homebrewing saliva cocktails. Nevertheless, the deed is done and the results are in.

As promised, I tried mixing together saliva and Listerine Total Care Zero and leaving them in a near-inner-mouth temperature, 100-degree oven for several hours. All part of my usual Wednesday afternoon routine, yes, but I also was trying to determine if the culprit behind morning mouth slime is the combination of saliva and the propylene glycol in non-alcoholic nighttime oral rinse.

Chicken McNuggets are Holocaust Deniers! BOYCOTT CHICKEN MCNUGGETS!

Seth — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:24:00 +0000

Slasher! Alternatives

Seth — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:42:42 +0000

For those of you have been asking me to somehow relaunch the old The-N.com game Slasher!, which as I’ve said I have neither the authority nor technology to do, here’s some good advice from a couple of former The N users, Autumnforte and Lillian Noe:

The beauty of Slasher! is that it’s based on a set of rules that are very malleable. You can adapt it to play in person as a group, in a chat room, via text, over email, by spray-painting messages onto the sides of livestock, or by any other method of communication you can think of. My more nerdish friends and I sometimes use this play-by-email system called Werewolf, and you can buy card sets for home play.

Cat Killing

Seth — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:46:58 +0000

I wish this video from education broker Skillshare didn’t play like a bad commercial for an investment-management firm, because its message about the value of curiosity deserves to be heard.

The 14th Winner of #SethBuyMeLunch

Seth — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:56:36 +0000

I forgot to mention last week that the latest winner of #SethBuyMeLunch is photographer Liezl Estipona, AKA @liezl. I ran the entire contest on 1/17 before realizing that it wasn’t actually Monday but in fact the FALSE MONDAY created by Martin Luther King Jr. Day. #SethBuyMeLunch’s legitimacy has been compromised, but I’ve been unemployed so long that I should be happy knowing what month it is (which I don’t).

Liezl and I will be lunching tomorrow, but if you’re in LA you can win a free lunch with me today,1

A Bunch of Good Songs About Being a Good Person

Seth — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:34:12 +0000

Update, 2/19/2012: I’ve added a streaming MP3 of the one previously unlistenable song in this list, “Caroline” by Kirsty MacColl.

Maybe it’s just been my spending a couple of years unemployed, but I’ve noticed a subtle, glacial shift in the assholism of our culture. It feels like sometime not too long ago we crossed an invisible line on this side of which it’s ever so slightly more probable that people will act like assholes than not.

We choose to just be a tiny bit lazier and not return that email. We decide to spend just a little bit more time on our own stuff instead of doing that thing we promised to do for someone else.

The Weights That Were Sunk in the Water

Seth — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:30:41 +0000

ScoutMob’s half-off coupon for Skylight Books gave me the chance to go to a bookstore and shop for an actual new book, a treat as rare to me lately as Fabergé egg fondling. I chose In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes, one of the first fiction collections from IDW, a comics publisher that manages to put out some good stuff despite most of their cash flowing in from adaptations of Transformers, GI Joe, and for fuck’s sake CSI.1

Quiz: Bruce Springsteen Lyric or The Clash Lyric?

Seth — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:03:17 +0000

Here’s a particularly didactic quiz I created years ago in the heyday of Facebook’s Quizzes application.

Special Relativity Week 5: A Tale of Self Pity

Seth — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:52:32 +0000

Today marks the end of the fifth week of fundraising for my radio series Special Relativity, and the time has come for honesty. Things aren’t looking good. The project’s received only three donations in the last two weeks. It’s now so off track that I’ll need to raise over $140 a day for the next seven weeks to meet the campaign’s $8000 goal.

Yesterday I was thinking about the whole thing, and I realized how easy it might be to misunderstand why I’ve undertaken this uphill boulder roll. I can imagine someone looking at me and thinking, “This guy’s a writer who can’t get someone to pay for his work, so he figures he’ll take the easy road and just beg people for cash.” One could, very understandably, interpret what I’m doing with the same disdain one directs toward an obviously able-bodied guy panhandling on the subway.