This Week’s Weird Stuff Includes:

• edgy Kutcher
• angry Reacher
• absurdist rapper
• speedy watcher
• famous illustrator

Not unusual to get great contributions from scb0212 this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

For The Ringer, Jake Kring-Schreifels looks back at the surprisingly cruel Ashton Kutcher vehicle The Butterfly Effect and how close it came to being to being even darker:

Today, the directors still have mixed feelings about it. The theatrical version, which scored big at the box office, offers a respite from the movie’s relentless pain and suffering. But the original ending, which was relegated to the director’s cut DVD, commits to Evan’s ultimate sacrifice and has since provoked ethical debates. Like their time-traveling protagonist, the filmmakers can’t help but imagine how things might have been different had the studio kept their vision two decades earlier. “I think the human mind is geared toward living in regret and what-if,” Bress says. “We’re kind of wired to do it.”

The culture writers of Defector gather together to discuss the recent phenomenon of Jack Reacher throwing a grill at a guy in his maybe-camp action-fueled Amazon show:

Chris Thompson: You’d have to be pretty horrifyingly irony-poisoned to only ironically watch a show where a guy throws a charcoal grill into a villain’s car in order to bring it to a stop. Like, do you even have a soul? […]

[Tom Ley]: I’m glad that the barbecue grill has come up so early on in this chat, because I have had a few conversations with people over the last few weeks centered around the question that Roth raised, about whether I am watching [Reacher] earnestly, ironically, or meta-ironically. The only thing that pops into my head when that question comes up is a single, purifying sentence: “Reacher threw a grill at a guy.” It clangs around in my head like a prayer, and I think explains pretty neatly what the appeal of the show is. It’s fun to watch a show in which the protagonist, without the aid of any kind of Super Serum you’d find in a Marvel story, comes equipped with both the physical prowess and disposition necessary to throw a grill at a guy.

Pitchfork‘s [sniff] Kieran Press-Reynolds dissects the Musical Age of Shitpost Modernism:

Rather than straight-up comedy music, the shitpost modernists aren’t often explicitly branded as “funny.” The humor and innovation is more oblique: It’s in the degraded structure of the track, the mutant vocals, the shock of a surreal high-low juxtaposition. What also separates this era of artfully inane music is the sheer volume of it and its wide-scale popularity. In a streaming world that prioritizes ephemeral dopamine hits and algorithm-piercing smashes, ideas like radio-readiness or conceptual heft can feel quaint. So instead of trying to appeal to the everyman or the critic, a mass of young musicians are fucking around. The result is a feast of freakiness that’s perfect for zoomer brains that have hatched to (im)maturity in a vat of digital absurdism.

Vice‘s Eloise Hendy speaks to people who watch movies and shows on 1.5x or 2x speed in an effort to figure out why the hell they do that:

Are our TikTok and Instagram Reel habits eroding our ability to watch anything longer than a few minutes without feeling bored? Perhaps, but Gray insists this isn’t the case. “I don’t believe this is 100 percent related to attention span or something where short-form content is at fault,” she says. “Often, I’m multitasking and watching something educational and there is a lot to learn and cover in a limited time. I’m able to process information quickly,” she adds, “so there is minimal downside to speeding up the learning process for TV or film in the same way I would do a podcast.”

At The Guardian, David Barnett reports on the efforts of Discworld and Star Wars illustrator Josh Kirby‘s family to conserve his legacy:

From the mid-1960s until he died in 2001 at the age of 72, Kirby lived and worked in a former rectory in Norfolk, choosing a cramped space as his studio. [family rep Rob] Liano said: “He painted the majority of the time in a narrow space with a large window letting in north light. This space was literally a pantry off the dining room. There was enough room for his chair, easel, a little radio and one wall lined with many, many piles of sketches and reference material. There may or may not have been a skull residing at the top of one of the piles, which has appeared in more than one of Josh’s horror illustrations.”