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David Lynch Teaches Typing is probably not the best way to learn to type, but it is fun and very weird

David Lynch Teaches Typing is probably not the best way to learn to type, but it is fun and very weird

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Good job! Why don’t you reward yourself with a coffee and cigarette break?

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David Lynch Teaches Typing, a free game from developer Hyacinth Nil and writer Luke Palmer, is a terrible way to learn how to type.

For starters: if you’re a child and you don’t yet know how to use a keyboard, why are you familiar with the oeuvre of David Lynch? You’re not ready! I’m 24 years old and I’m not ready. That’s why I’ve seen only two episodes of Twin Peaks and 30 minutes of Blue Velvet, which I turned off because I was too unnerved to continue. (I don’t even think I’m out of line with that one. It’s so disturbing!) For children, there are many ways to learn how to type and most of them involve nice things like skateboards and astronauts.

If you’re an adult and you’ve not yet learned to type, you’ve still spent enough time watching TV and listening to boring dinner conversations about tweets to have a brain fractured beyond repair — which will make it hard for you to sit through a glacially slow tutorial punctuated by moments of disorienting surrealism.

For example:

But you may have fun playing David Lynch Teaches Typing if you are a fan of David Lynch. I did read the David Foster Wallace essay about him once, which contains this remarkable anecdote:

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. This is on [January 8th] in L.A.’s Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway’s exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. He is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the base camp’s trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take to run down the base camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. 

When I was in elementary school, our “computer teacher” told us we could have any — literally any — job we wanted in the modern marketplace as long as we could type 80 words per minute. I can type 98, and she was not correct. But thanks to David Lynch and friends, I have had, today, the incredible opportunity to think about how successful I was at age nine.

Very fun!