It’s been a fantastic 24 hours, I’ll tell you what.

When I put the previous essay, on Charlie Kirk’s shooting (because what else are we even allowed to talk about right now) under the subscription paywall, I felt bad. I always want to give everything away for free, but do enjoy eating and sleeping under a roof, and this time, more than anything else, I was already feeling a bit weird about the utter Cujo-ness of the right leaping tall buildings to seize their Reichstag moment.

Turns out, it’s both a good thing I did, and also didn’t really matter anyway, because speaking at all was enough.

On Friday night, when a tsunami of unhinged violent Purge-hooligan shit came flying at me on X, a site I barely use except to crosspost the occasional quip or promote a new piece of work, I genuinely thought it was because of what I’d posted an hour before, which was this: White on white crime is a tragic epidemic sweeping the country. How many more will we lose to white gang violence and rightwing turf wars?It’s the culture, you know. These white celebrities glamorize a criminal lifestyle & young inner-suburb kids get trapped in the school-to-influencer pipeline.

And I sighed, and chuckled, a little ruefully, because of course that riled them up, the people who cry IT’S JUST A JOKE when their lord and savior tells a reporter about a new group of people he wants to murder can’t recognize satire even when it’s wearing an oversized sombrero with SATIRE stitched on it in neon green fuzzy yarn.

Yeah…so that wasn’t it.

Somehow.

What had happened was—and I say this with an exhaustion no simile can encompass—Mr. Elon Musk his own full-chested self quote-tweeted someone compiling a list of “Microsoft employees” who had “celebrated” Kirk’s death to be marked for retribution.

And my name was right there in the screenshot.

Now, first of all, was that screenshot, or literally anything I’ve said on the topic, celebrating anything? Absolutely fucking not.

It was a screenshot of Andrew Tate calling for Civil War (because that’s perfectly all right) and a comment on influencers freaking out as CEOs did post-Luigi, and a link to the Charles In Charge, Apparently essay right here on Substack. An essay that they definitely didn’t fucking read, because it was under a paywall, so I know exactly who the new folks who got a subscription to read it are (hi guys!) and I don’t think any of the Garbagetown treehouse kids are…uh…regular visitors to FUCKING CLOWNTOWN. We are garbage, not clowns. Sheesh!

Second…do I work for Microsoft? Well, I guess, sort of, if you’ve warmed up and you’re ready for a stretch?

I’m a freelance writer. I have been for 22 years. I’ve worked for all kinds of people—that’s how freelancing works. I don’t work for Microsoft per se, but I have written three short stories, in three years, for World of Warcraft, and thus, Blizzard.

You see? It all becomes clear. Gamergate, as, I suppose, was always inevitable, never left our basement, psychologically speaking. I touched a game or two while being a woman, so I am very fun to try to carve up online. The list started as Blizzard employees (still not an employee) and I guess someone thought that didn’t sounds serious enough.

So long story short, I’ve received a number of threats in the last 24 hours, ranging from hopeful prayers for my personal ruination and “firing” from “Microsoft” to full on death threats. Ooh, and I’ve been called a cunt more in 24 hours than ever before!

I’m a big girl, I’ve been on the internet longer than 22 years, and you know that means I’ve had my share of death threats, rape threats, every kind of threat. I’m used to it.

But this has been…unsettling. X is a much darker place than Twitter was, and I don’t even just mean the amount of porn that poured in with the threats. And what’s happening right now, where the right is calling for wholesale slaughter of any and all liberals and having zero repercussions, but people are being fired for being insufficiently sad about Charlie Kirk on Al Gore’s internet, is through the fucking looking glass, even for America, which hasn’t ever really seen the proper side of the looking glass to begin with.

I’m a tough bitch, but I’ve been shakier than I’d like over the last day.

Has Musk deleted the tweet? No, but the person he was quote tweeting has. Microsoft tweeted that they were taking it seriously and investigating. Have I been “fired”? Not yet, and I can’t be, because again, I’m not an employee, though I certainly could lose my contract. Am I particularly worried about that happening? I’d rather not lose a contract, but if my work for Warcraft was a huge part of how I feed my kid I’d probably…you know…have worked for them a little more.

Am I worried I’m going to be killed, or that the people tagging in the FBI to hit the alarums over a link to a Substack essay that, once again, they definitely didn’t read because it was under a paywall? Not…really? They’d have to take a boat and that’s too hard even for appliance repairfolk out here. And these people clearly have no idea who I am or what I do and just think I’m some random Microsoft DEI hire because they’re all gloating about how fired I’m going to be come Monday, which, even if it happens, isn’t exactly going to devastate my life the way they hope.

But it sure throws me for several recursive loops. I guess I thought that paywall kept me a little safer than it does. Remember how I always “joke” that I do it so you have to pay me if you want to call me a stupid bitch and tell me you’re going to strangle me? Much like everything a Republican says, it’s not so much a joke as the dead-ass truth with no punchline. And I guess just being a woman and talking is enough, they do not in any way have to hear what I say to want me gone.

There’s more but I don’t feel like looking at their dumb jerkoff fantasies anymore. If someone can, without a flicker of dissonance, call me a terrorist while literally trying to terrorize me into silence, get me “fired,” and dox me to groypers because they don’t like what they imagine I must have said…well. What is there to say?

It’s died down somewhat. I haven’t engaged or apologized, because that’s how we do now. We’ll see what happens Monday, I guess. We’ll see what happens now that the shooter, shockingly, turned out to be a white straight right wing terminally online weirdo sheriff’s son who hated Kirk for not being Nazi enough.

In the meantime, I just feel very quiet and anxious. Not as anxious for me as I am for all of us. I’m not sure it matters who Tyler Robinson is (and he’s not dead, at some point people will just…ask him) when the right went so mask-off so quickly and elected officials were publicly tweeting about killing all Democrats. Half the nation. More than half, as there’s more registered Dems than GOP. Because they imagined in their dreams that one liberal killed a podcaster.

They aren’t going to put that rabbit back in the hat. Mostly because they don’t want to, and when I said no one was as excited about Kirk’s death as MAGA, I wasn’t fucking wrong, was I? They’re celebrating. We’re terrified.

This is just…what celebrations look like to Nazis.

They didn’t even read it. But I need to die. I simply cannot get my head around that. I could’ve said Charlie Kirk was my very best friend under that paywall. They have no idea. I’m used to being blasted into space for daring to speak—but usually the blasters do actually know what they’re mad about. No longer necessary, it seems. And that is where we are now. I don’t see a lot of routes back.

Does that means I’m going to stop yelling about fascism? No, and go fuck yourself, fascists. I started this Substack specifically to have a place to vent about all this that was separate from the positivity I try to bring to the world in the rest of my work. And they’re not done being murderous psychotic hypocritical assholes with the emotional regulation of an electrocuted cat in heat, so I’m not done calling them out.

Back in the time known as the day, if you weren’t getting a death threat every once in awhile, you were barely using the internet. But no one used their real names, so they usually stayed at about the volume and efficacy of a fart in the wind.

But I’ll tell ya. Being told how you’ll die does hit a little different when you have a small child.

So unless the goldfish use their typical attention span and forget about this in a week, I’ll likely put the next essay under a prophylactic paywall as well, just until they forget my name. And how fat and ugly I am. It didn’t stop it, but it did remove a lot of ammo, and I feel safer that way, just for the moment. I do apologize. I’m not even going to link to this post on the socials, I’ve had my fill of the abuse and I don’t want them to see me addressing it as some kind of victory because I noticed their lunacy.

Nevertheless, that’s about all I’m willing to give those bastards who pretty notably aren’t calling Nick Fuentes a cunt. I’m not going anywhere. You can’t be fired from being yourself. At least not yet.

Wouldn’t it be cool if that were funny?

For now, I’ll leave you with the ray of hilarious hope that was the most recent piece of poo flung at me on that nasty smear of a website. Because, baby, you go right ahead. I love that for you! In fact, I invite all your friends, every single conservative in the world, to do the same. Royalties is royalties no matter what you do with it. Please do go ahead with your powerful, manly, devastating plan to pay me for your piss-baby tantrum.

Keep biting those boots, friends. We still have each other.

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Let’s get this out of the way: Charlie Kirk was shot last night while specifically talking about, and, as usual, not giving a shit about, gun violence. Yes, I’ve seen the video. No, I’m not a monster, I was shocked, and disturbed, and still am.

See, but then five fucking minutes passed.

I find it just terribly interesting that within minutes of that shot being fired, all I saw anywhere online was a tsunami of scolding about “the left’s” reaction. Stop celebrating! Show empathy! This is a national tragedy you MUST feel deeply about! You can’t make jokes or not care! IT IS REQUIRED THAT YOU CARE. (Just let us hide the leftover balloons and streamers from Melissa and Mark Hortman getting assassinated two months ago super quick.)

I swear to whatever gods get it done for you the word empathy was suddenly everywhere.

I saw thousands of words of this before I saw one word of anyone “celebrating,” which consisted of…mostly posting Kirk’s own words about not giving a shit about gun violence, hating empathy, expressing fear about the right’s retaliation, and then conspicuously moving on to other topics.

DAMN, THE LEFT SURE KNOWS HOW TO PARTY.

In the cold light of the next damned day? Apparently Charlie Kirk was the most impactful and significant political figure in America today! Who knew? And despite it being 9-fucking-11, a day the right has turned into its own personal Anger Holiday, the only thing to be mourned or spoken of is…this guy, who was an influencer yesterday and today, I’m informed, is the most beautiful, illuminated pinnacle of the American intellect.

Frankly, over the last fourteen hours, I’ve come to the conclusion that absolutely no one is as excited about celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death as MAGA.

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While I was writing about the beautiful dream of Trump probably dying and how the media is handling it, which is to say barely touching it and enjoying a refreshing cool drink on the porch while still basking in the dopamine jacuzzi they filled to the brim by having hounded a sitting President out of his own re-election campaign for much less hyenashit insane behavior; I wrote a line, then kept moving it down the essay hoping to find a space to explore the idea…until I ran out of room entirely.

But that’s what the follow-up posts are for!

So here goes.

The line was this: legacy media no longer reports on threats to citizens or America itself, at least not with any real enthusiasm. It reports breathlessly on threats to the regime. We are no the presumed audience of the fourth estate.

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GOOOOOD MOOOOORNING, VALE OF TEARS!

Things are going great, aren’t they? All those problems we were having, the problems that were so bad, so intolerably painful, so fucking urgent we just HAD to turn to Insane Clown Fascism because there was no time to lose waiting for actual policy to work, those problems are all gone now, right? Inflation, crumbling infrastructure, cost of living, wages and the jobs that hate them, Gaza, Ukraine, broken immigration system, broking electoral system, broken media, broken real estate market, broken educational system, broken healthcare system, inflation again, AI creep, homelessness, mass shootings, the Epstein files, gas prices, ancient and crumbling husk of a President, and also inflation?

All fixed, right?

No? Absolutely all of that is way, way worse and no one is even working on any of it, nor will they ever? It’s just been nine months of arresting and torturing random people, yelling fucking cartoon nonsense at microphones, cancelling things that are so basic and fundamental ten years ago hardly anyone realized you could get rid of them, like vaccines and rights, various incredibly famous people clearly and obviously stealing huge sacks of money and data then tip-toeing off with a dramatic shhhh like old-timey bandits, and people wandering through it all in a daze while the media just COMFORTABLY FUCKING RETIRES FROM BEING A THING I GUESS?

Oh, man, that’s so fucking crazy, because I was repeatedly told, by people of all socio-political-economic persuasions, that these issues were so disastrous and so pressing we simply could not elect anyone but…the guy whose only plan for anything is to lower his own taxes, then murder an immigrant.

And I feel like…oh, gosh, it’s just so hard to remember, but I feel like the idea that the President was dummy old, couldn’t speak right, and might secretly be dying was a huge deal a year ago. And also a few months ago. And also Jake Tapper is still yelling at random passers-by about it—because not so very long ago, the age and health of the President of the United States was so cosmically fucking important a household-name national newscaster kicked his own entire career down a well about it, well after that guy wasn’t even President anymore.

Oh well, at least you guys over there festering on the right got your super duper massively important issues addressed by Big Daddy, right? You got Disney to only make exclusively and only Big Strong White Boy Uber Alles media, trans kids banned from JV softball in all 50 states, all women executively ordered to stop excelling and do a pregnant with the nearest 8chan shitposter, and the Epstein files released for all to see, right?

Oh, none of those, either, really?

SO WEIRD.

It’s almost like this whole Ten Years at Donnie’s ride through the fucking Wonka Tunnel of Nightmares wasn’t about anything real whatsoever, apart from securing the freedom to act like a total dick to everyone at all times, which we already had. At least nothing philosophical, ethical, moral, or even particularly political.

Now don’t get me wrong, Project 2025 is a thing and it has been for a lot longer than it’s had a name. Progress has been made on the “what happens if we just take everyone’s rights away?” front. Shit has been going down, and it is terrible, reeking, authoritarian, bugfuck bonkers shit.

Look, if I said today the administration announced it’s banning all vaccines because vaccines are gay wokeism, you wouldn’t immediately dismiss that at all. You might not even fact-check me. And there’s a whole strain of conspiracy theory that definitely does insist vaccines make you gay and trans, and since the country is by and large being run according to the contents of early internet chain emails and misspelled grandpa memes, that’s not even a particularly wild possibility. Certainly not for RFK (the F stands for fucking brain worms!) who looks and behaves like a mini-Thanos just super excited to snap them kids.

But most of it has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump himself. You know he doesn’t actually give a shit about any of that (other than mild interest in the murder parts) He clearly cares most about the monumental task of spray-painting every available surface with Home Depot brand metallic “gold.”

And he’s, you know, pretty obviously dying.

Or at least having some kind of allergic reaction to existence. Seriously, this guy is stumbling around puffed up like a demonic shar-pei that ate several thousand bees and his entire government keeps growling shut the fuck up he’s fine and anyway the bees were Democrats we’ve already begun construction on Bee Buchenwald and yes we are officially calling it that you’re a Democrat bee aren’t you, admit it, admit it! at anyone who so much as peruses the Get Well card section at CVS too long, except for J.D. Vance doing the chicken dance on camera and yelling I’m feeling fantastic, thanks! every time he does the stupid wing-flap.

Truly, you have done a spectacular job at life if the entire world starts putting champagne on ice and warming up the fireworks because you didn’t post on social media for a few days.

But something bothers me about how this is all going down—other than the 3-5 obvious things.

Is Trump actually at death’s door? Probably? Maybe? He looks like Violet Beauregard stuffed into a half-inflated rubber mask of James Austin Johnson, but evil just loves not dying when it should. Presidents have access to whatever Roswell-derived super serum medicine any lab could dream up, so he could go on for years as a vaguely human-shaped Franzia hooch-bag full of steroids, statins, stem cells, and probably adrenochrome, given the absolute state of GOP projection, that wobbles alarmingly whenever lightly grazed. (SCOTUS would decide that said wobbles constitute legally-binding Executive Orders, 6-3.)

Maybe that’s just what an old overfed vampire looks like past a certain point.

What bothers me is that if the last newsweek had happened in 2019, we’d know.

The first Trump administration was a constantly-rotating zoo display of monsters, to be sure. But they were, by and large, known monsters, who’d monstered their way through previous administrations monstrously, and rolled up their sleeves to kick it up a lil’ notch. They were creatures, but creatures of a long-standing system, invested in that system, with half an eye on where they’d stand in that system in the After Times. I mean, yeah, it’d be totally awesome if they could bring the whole thing down and crown themselves Kings of Eternity, but every step down from that goal was also a win, so they focused on partying while the party was hot.

Which is why they all leaked like fucking colanders.

They wrote tell-all books, they placed blind items, they whispered national secrets to anyone who even faintly smelled of social media clout. And as soon as they were fired, which was all the fucking time, they couldn’t repress their giggles about what an idiotic asshole Large Marge truly was for a second before running to blab it all to the first camera they could find. To the point that regular human people, neither part of the media nor the government, knew about a lot of things before they happened, things it’s literally insane for everyday citizens to know about, like January 6th.

Back a century or two ago when Trump was shot, I dismissed the various conspiracy theories about it being staged because I couldn’t believe a scheme that big wouldn’t instantly spew leaks like a football field full of sprinklers. None of them could keep a secret, surely we’d hear whispers the way we always did about everything.

But we didn’t. So it must have been real.

Oh and by the way, it’s sheerly astonishing how we’ve just helplessly accepted this empty-tabled no-chairs potluck of dork-ass potato-water-blooded failsons corralling us into a corner where we cannot even allow ourselves to consider any idea that remotely resembles a conspiracy theory, even when CONSPIRACIES SO MELODRAMATICALLY BLATANT THE WORLD’S RICHEST MAN IS OPENLY GIGGLING ABOUT DOING BIG CRIMES ON LIVE TV WHILST HIGH AS A CUMULUS CLOUD IN THE OVAL OFFICE are happening right in front of us, with only the most half-hearted attempts to hide them behind THE OCCASIONAL FUCKING HALF-DEAD POTTED PLANT. The President of the United States has repeatedly said Elon Musk secured the election for him with those gosh-dang computers he’s so good at and we just sigh and tell ourselves we can’t think about it or we’re just like them. Trump constantly panics, incredibly loudly, about the Epstein Files and hysterically screeches for people to forget they exist at least once a week, but we’ve voluntarily forbidden ourselves to even entertain the thought that, since he must know his base can’t stop slobbering all over him for longer than five seconds about anything, and everyone already knows he likes young girls, maybe there’s more to this than him being one of many customers. So now we just live like this, refusing to consider that several conspiracies might be underway from the exact kind of people who love doing conspiracies, and have done them before, over and over again, is a required demonstration of not being a fascist. So much so that I’ve almost deleted this paragraph three times because I don’t want to sound like those loose pinballs, either. FANTASTIC WORK ALL AROUND.

Anyway, the point is, that was my first tiny little alarm-bell ringing in the back of my head. It’s not 2019 anymore. It’s the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and this administration isn’t like the last one. Nobody’s been fired yet. I doubt they’re going to be. The people working for Trump Two: Apocalyptic Boogaloo mostly don’t have any real interest in government at all, unless you thought Linda McMahon just really passionately cared about education. For the most part, they don’t come from previous administrations. They’re not keeping their eye on a future in which the system goes on. They’re unearthly-rich tech oligarchs who are betting on AI removing the need for the masses entirely and parentless nineteen year olds named Big Balls and 80s celebrities trying out wildly off-label uses and a festive assortment of nepobabies and just Stephen Miller again because I guess he’s the squirrel-flaying little boy whose Christmas wish created this timeline in the first place or fucking something.

They don’t leak. Because they’re in this for themselves, not America or the GOP or even Trump specifically, except as the car the clowns came in. They’re all on their own individual grift and/or crusade for whatever (evil) cause they (evilly) dreamed about one time at (evil) band camp and felt a new tingly sensation suffusing their souls, which was all the evil.

Last time around, Trump was an unexpected limo appearing out of nowhere to pick up the hitch hikers of the old Republican party and get them to the church on time just when they thought they might have to change. The limo was rented, payments past-due, the muffler was barely holding on, and the floor was covered old stains everyone knew not to ask about, but no one really knew that yet, so they called it the best and most beautiful car ever and off they went.

This time, Trump is a crumbling meth-camper up on cinderblocks with a racial slur spray-painted on the side that will never move again but keeps pumping out product that keeps the addicts coming back: power, pain, and profit.

And I’ve started to wonder if the new Rogues’ Gallery knew it the whole time. That this was less an election than the handshake on a deal.

Because what’s happened here is REALLY odd. Trump is a storebrand freezer bag full of id-ichor, but he is actually the President of the United States, and the White House let rumors that he was fucking dead light up the planet for days before posting a hilariously hamfisted, half-assed, zero effort proof of life photo that made him look, somehow, more dead despite technically standing upright.

If you or I didn’t post on social media for a few days, and people started seriously speculating that we’d DIED, most of us would immediately log on and say we were fine, stop being weird. And the Trump we all know and hate would absolutely respond to any kind of rumor that he was anything less than the star of the new Superman franchise with a full-court media-barf of swaggering, pustulant Garbage Pail Kid villain-monologuing.

But that didn’t happen. Nothing happened, really. Other than things that made it worse, like clips of Trump whimpering about going to heaven and Vance volunteering that he was hyped to do Trump’s job, which, not for nothing, but Pence would never. Why, he’d rather actually have sex with his wife! And if by some chance his room-temperature water got spiked, there would’ve been severe consequences once Pizza the Hut heard about it.

But there weren’t.

It might’ve only been a few days, but that’s SUCH a long time for the Trump administration to let us laugh and rejoice at the prospect of his death. We all know they don’t care about the national security problems with that, but the psychological problems should’ve sparked some kind of response other than “nothing to see, it’s whatever” then “meh, here’s a shitty picture,” if Trump being active, in charge, or alive at all mattered to any of the people he brung to the ball.

The passivity of their side of it is genuinely remarkable. And I don’t think it’s about a distraction from Epstein or anything else, because Trump would never agree to look this weak, no matter how advantageous it might be. He hasn’t even done anything to punish us for openly cheering for his death for days on end. Anything he wasn’t already doing, anyway.

Then again, remarkable passivity seems to be a catching sickness. It would seem to be the motto of the era. It’s almost impossible to believe this quiet, unconcerned media is the same one that utterly detonated over Biden’s debate and continue to throw out wild theories about him even now. But the media is just…fine now. Fine with all of it. With their jobs being boiled down to copy-pasting social media posts for however long it takes for their bosses to figure out how to use ChatGPT and the President zombie-walking across the White House roof looking like RFK’s dead, decapitated whale isn’t even interesting enough to investigate.

If Biden, at any point, looked anything close to what Trump looks right now today, the uproar would blow out your fucking eardrums.

Instead, it’s already out of the news cycle.

Something isn’t right here, but not the way it hasn’t been right for a long time. Either he really is Reaper-adjacent or there’s some other reason he is or will be neutered enough that his own government (and their cute little three-legged rescue media) is acting like whether he lives or dies is none of our business, and barely theirs.

Look, I doubt he’s gone any time soon. I’m sure they’ll pump him full of orphan’s tears or whatever as long as possible. But it’s either bad enough that no one’s talking, or it doesn’t matter enough for anyone to feel like they have to talk.

That deal I was talking about? NOT TO SOUND LIKE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST BUT I wonder if, beyond the ego-wound of losing the last election, this entire downfall of America was a handshake between an already-dying old man who needed to keep his secrets secret, and a dozen different (evil) agendas crammed into an Amazon.com trenchcoat, who all knew that as long as the meth-camper crashed directly into the White House, it didn’t matter whether the driver lived. They weren’t going camping anyway. They never considered any of those problems up top, or any problems at all. They just wanted to get together with their internet buddies and steal everything, hurt some people, and have a go at forcing a future even they don’t want, but fancy they’d enjoy watching from afar.

And you know, much like those gay woke vaccines , now that I type it out, that doesn’t even seem like much of a leap.

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I know, I know. I’m so sorry, guys.

It’s been a real fuckwit of a summer, and between no childcare, a novel deadline, home repair catastrophes, and a bunch of life drama, I've done an insanely bad job with the whole regular upddating thing.

BUT!

The novel is DONE. School has STARTED. The house is STILL STANDING. And peace has returned to my little world. I mean, except for the entire lake of flaming sewage that is my nation and many, many parts of the world. EXCEPT FOR THAT HA HA THINGS ARE FINE.

So this is just a note to let you know I’m not dead (awkward unpleasant proofs of life are SO HOT RIGHT NOW), and I’ll be actually corralling my shit and not letting things slide slowly into the sea so much from now on, starting with a new piece here tomorrow, and every two weeks after that.

AFTER ALL, IT’S ALL STILL FUCKING GARBAGE OUT THERE, ISN’T IT?

See you on the flipside, faithful Garbagetowners. Thanks for sticking around.

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Welcome back to literally everything falling apart around us!

Hope you’re all having a great summer watching everyone be bizarrely chill with an ancient (guess that never mattered!) dementia-riddled President Pedo governing via ChatGPT and a half-drained Magic 6 Ball stuck on Tariff Again Later, roving masked gangs of money-choked secret police grabbing people off the street, the government fighting the weather, the government fighting the economy, the government fighting itself, the government fighting the planet, and the government fighting Superman, apparently. Turns out we were all just terribly silly biscuits because there isn’t and never was an Epstein list, and that, too, is miraculously super totally fine with the media and the exact same people who made sure we had nine thousand Congressional hearings to view Hunter Biden’s tool of the establishment. Looking out the right side of the flaming plane crash of all our lives, the word “deportation” has been redefined to mean all sorts of things it doesn’t, but mostly “alligator torture.” The Secretary of Defense openly slams whiskey at press conferences while abandoning Ukraine without texting the group chat and actively planning an invasion of Greenland at least, and the President’s personal advisor/Twi’lek dancer gleefully tweeted about feeding every Latino in the nation to alligators. The Temu Trujillo on his throne of skulls has decided to end satire forever and just hold a UFC cage match right on the White House lawn, shoved a bill through Congress that no one read except to get mildly concerned about the line items involving setting the entirety of rural America on fire, defunding trans hurricanes, and mailing every child an envelope full of neo-measles personally signed by President Mola Ram. Oh! Then he threatened to deport/alligator torture a Democrat for winning a primary and take personal control of New York City because we live in the shittiest straight-to-Betamax Bond movie. And again, no one’s really that upset. At least, not a tenth as upset as they were about ending a war in Afghanistan, the price of eggs, having a cold at a debate, or the existence of a new Superman movie!

Plus, while a brown person holding a job a white person imagines other white people (not them) should be doing is an affront so intense it must be answered by ripping each and every one of them apart until the Atlantic turns to a sea of blood, it’s very completely awesome for every single human profession and activity to be outsourced to a couple of billionaires’ poorly-socialized neopets that can’t pass their bite test, even though we can all see them being actively manipulated to spew hatred in real time right in front of us. Don’t worry, one of them is calling itself MECHAHITLER, and hundreds of thousands of people are actively using fucking MECHAHITLER as a goddamned therapist and/or life partner.

Am I caught up? Probably not. Hours to go before end of business, after all. I don’t know what to tell you, man. It’s weird living in whatever luxury living sub-development of hell managed to sprawl into reality. Every time I try to finish this series, something so fucking Jacobean happens, so dredged from the ultraviolent nethermind of Gargamel’s id, that I feel like my brain is being sawed in half with a broken spork. And all anyone does in response is get absolutely apoplectically furious with Democrats.

So I’ve been thinking about magic lately.

I’m not going full woo on you, relax. I’m fully vaccinated and this is still about the internet unintentionally ending human civilization. But I am a professional fantasy and science fiction writer, most of the time. I’ve invented a magic system or two. And it’s as good an explanation as any. Honestly, between you, me, and the ever-watchful eye of Mechahitler, if I didn’t know better, I’d say magic is the only explanation that makes any coherent sense.

Not crystals-and-potions magic. Not sparkly spells cast at the dark of the moon by elves of great power.

But maybe abracadabra magic. Maybe slight-of-hand. And, you know, maybe some light demon-summoning.

Because we all know none of this is coming from a place grounded in realism.

And while we all make jokes about Trump having made a deal with some devil or other to be able to, without seeming to actually try at all—in fact, occasionally attempting to try not to—mind-flay millions of people and turn them into extensions of his fish-greasy will, and still be converting new ones right now, even with all the alligator torture and public brainmelts and unforced economy-impaling, to be able to turn every single conversation to the topic of himself, every piece of art to address him first…he kind of did. We just didn’t understand the technology had already sufficiently advanced to become indistinguishable from magic.

And the thing about magic is, there’s always a price. A trade. For power, for ease, for plenty, for the objects of divers desires. For every magical gain, there must be an equal and opposite sacrifice.

If you let something out, you have to let something in. If you let something in, something will escape.

So yes, we worshipped assholes, told two and a half generations to study STEM and nothing else (definitely not rhetoric or history or critical analysis because fuck the blue curtains am I right fellow cool kids ha ha teachers suck thinking about stuff is dumb!) or they were wasting the lifeblood of their ancestors, removed, first the necessity, then the possibility, of having to interact with other people on a daily basis, got a huge percentage of humanity to spend all their free time in the same intangible, easily-manipulable place, and wrapped the whole thing up in a pandemic-colored bow that forced everyone who wasn’t living like that yet into their homes, away from other people, and glued their eyeballs open while they observed the unfiltered vortex of the internet 24/7.

But it’s not just that we replaced human life and activity with the internet at approximately the same time that a living (mostly), walking (sort of), talking (I guess technically) low-res edgelord meme failed at failing to get his burnt-out hamburger heat-lamp of a frontal lobe elected President.

We did do that; slowly, without a plan, excitedly perusing points-of-interest on a technological roadmap-cum-skill-tree for an entirely other country, one we were gonna speed through at the speed of loneliness, following the siren-song, not of Pleasure Island, but Convenience Island—where we could see our troubles were all monetizable and everyone knew our names because they’d stolen our data before we were born. By the time anyone clocked the donkey ears, they were trending on TikTok, the hottest red carpet accessory, required to qualify under business-casual dress codes, knock-offs for the plebs available from Temu in bulk, shipped to your door.

But as we let the internet into our deepest selves…we also left the door open, and the internet escaped into the real world.

And that’s what’s going on right now. What’s been going on for a some time. You can see it with almost every single scandal that hits the mainstream hive-mind—and it is a hive-mind, a constant feed of everyone’s most random, formerly private thoughts, good and evil, mundane and bizarre, running constantly in the background of every simple action we ever take? Yeah, that’s a hive-mind, and primitive as it is, we weren’t even close to ready to handle knowing everybody’s lunch order, let alone the nasty crawlies clicking around the brainpans of people who had never felt seen or valued until clickingcrawlies.com gave them an unlimited dopamine drip.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t a wrecking ball coming in for a kiss.

See, some of us have seen all this before. It just didn’t matter then.

Because we allowed, nay, encouraged and cheered on, the internet metastasizing into every corner of the real world and take it over, the problems we who lived online before it was decidedly not fucking cool, during the awkward adolescence of the internet, had to deal with in the 00s became the problems that are, right this very minute, dissolving this world in acid and dancing through its slowly liquefying flesh like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain.

Power mods gone mad, lolcows, fandom flamewars, sockpuppets, trolls fed and unfed, dogpiling, meme wars, scams, images having been pastede on yay, lies and facts being mostly interchangeable, walled gardens, weaponized irony, parasocial relationships, the economy of attention, viral everything, sea lions, slacktivism, hacktivism, the endless September…all of these have been ported directly into real life, where they are happily chewing away at the deepest root of society: the ability to connect to another human being in some way other than bashing their head in on sight.

What is Elon Musk but the ultimate Power Mod gone mad? He runs his little message board as he pleases, banhammering away, boosting those who praise him and running multiple sockpuppet accounts while insisting lurkers support him in email, making random shit up on the internet, calling his minions to dogpile anyone who suggests any of it isn’t the precise truth, and accidentally roping in a lot of lonely people who just want to feel something bigger than dread about work tomorrow…we’ve been through all of this when it was about Harry/Hermione fanfic or Slenderman or poorly photoshopped images of Dominic Monaghan and if you don’t know what I’m talking about THAT IS SIMPLY WONDERFUL FOR YOU.

But all that, in the early 00s, was going on online while the real world was real worlding along separately. The run-up to the Iraq War did not take place on Livejournal. Dick Cheney did not buy YTMND.com or SomethingAwful and turn it into a Nazi petting farm (real talk: wouldn’t have been necessary, really). But millions upon millions of young people who are far past youth now, and millions more all over the age spectrum, were super busy laying down dopamine mechanisms in their brains that they’d never escape. They were just too intense, too immediate, too randomly-reinforcing, too easy to refine into money, power, fame, and an infinite narcissistic supply of praise.

Sadly for the future of humanity, the early 2000s were not an overly kind time on the pimply, awkward internet, and one of the easiest ways to get that attention was through trolling, which did originally mean posting things you didn’t actually mean just to get a reaction. But the problem with irony is, if you do it often enough, no one can tell the difference between you being a dick for a laugh and you just being a deep-down dick. Not even you. After a couple of decades of saying the opposite of what you mean being the marker of a Cool and With It Person, FUCKING NO ONE KNOWS WHAT’S REAL ANYMORE. The Epstein Files fiasco is classic power mod behavior—lie, delete anything contradicting the lie, refuse to engage, ban everyone, change your username, and pretend it never happened. My god, how many times, in how many places you loved, has that shit gone down?

Elon Musk is 53 years old. He was part of that early internet boom, and as utter whaleshit as his version of his role in that is, he very clearly got hardcore addicted to internet attention long before ketamine. What he does is to get his fix, however he can. He will never stop, because it’s been 30 years of wiring his psyche to digest only the adulation and approbation of strangers.

Even the tsunami of bots, troll farms, and AI slop is just the industrialized Pokemon evolution of sockpuppet accounts, forum trolls, and shitty Photoshop wars. ChatGPT is a great chatbot, but it’s literally in the name, my friends. That’s all it is. A jumped-up Furby who fucked a Clippy.

My friends, the Blair Witch Project kids had real human adults totally convinced they released genuine footage of a real supernatural witch murdering people into theaters near you for $5 on matinee Tuesdays. And my siblings in Satan, that was in 1999.

And then there’s Donald fucking Trump. My god. If I hadn’t grown up hearing what a piece of shit this guy was, a hundred million years before I knew what a modem sounded like, I might think the internet had just invented a person. It’s so easy to forget that he was there from fairly early in the game, gossiping about celebrities and being a general-issue bloviating dork on social media talking shit about rubbish. The reality TV show was a big deal in terms of putting him in the living rooms of Americans, but—and when I say this, I am not meaning to downplay in any way how dangerous, horrific, or murderous this long, dark shart of the American soul truly is—but I think his real power, the reason his grip is so unshakable, is that Donald J. Trump is the Apotheosis of the Lolcow.

If you’ve never heard that word, or if hearing it in 2025 merely wakens something deep within you from a dark slumber, a “lolcow” is the subject of particularly fierce internet drama. Someone whose activities can literally be milked for laughs, both because they never, ever stop fucking up, and because their fuck-ups are so positively Byzantine in their elaborate, over-the-top, pants-on-Pluto stupidity that you simply cannot look away. More than that, people often encouraged the lolcow into even further, messier, more dangerous acts of life-ruining idiocy, simply to enjoy the show and consume the popcorn, literal and metaphorical, that accompanied watching someone ruin their own very real lives and others’ for entertainment.

Any of this sound vaguely familiar?

I honestly don’t even want to give examples because severe mental illness is a constant factor, some of them were deeply abusive people, others true victims, and either way, milking said lolcows was almost always an act of intense cruelty. It doesn’t feel kind to drag any of these actual human beings (or their victims, or their enablers) up again. But the fact is, Trump’s swollen udder has overflowed with unceasing bounty for over ten years, and will never dry even after his death. Chris-Chan could never begin to compete with the dairy production of the Little Caesar’s Caesar and his gang of edgy, edgy trolls.

Lolcows provide adrenaline to themselves and dopamine to everyone involved in the drama, whether they invited that drama or not. That’s why the big ones go on and on. Why people followed their trashfires so intently, why it became addictive, why to this day there are people all over the Chan boards still milking lolcows from twenty years ago. Unless a bigger lolcow comes along, it really did tend to keep going and going until someone implodes. I suspect that’s why Trump kept Elon so close for so long—Musk was the only one to actually threaten Trump’s deathgrip, by showing the potential to become a bigger mushroom cloud of stupidly dangerous clownshit and stealing his userbase. There was always a huge microeconomy of weird activity around a lolcow, pushing them into more extreme behavior, forming fake friendships and narratives with and around them in order to have access, outside sites documenting the whole thing and commenting on it—each one is a little industry.

Or a big one.

Back in 2015? The people who did support him almost always said they did because he was funny. The young Trump voters in 2025 often say the same.

And a lot of both groups are still laughing. They do actually think Alligator Alcatraz is hilarious. Because it’s abstract to them. It barely registers as real; they treat it as a meme. Our government goes on television and laughs about feeding human beings to alligators and the media barely yawns and that’s just life now.

Those who aren’t laughing have joined the document and commentate portion of the lolcow cycle—and because the internet got way better at monetization streams than it was in the aughts, shittons of the Fandom Wank mods of today rely on this lolcow for their entire income. They won’t stop, either. It’s how they get what they need, too. Unless a bigger lolcow comes along, it tends to keep going and going until someone implodes. I suspect that’s why Trump kept Elon so close for so long—Musk was the only one to actually threaten Trump’s deathgrip, by showing the potential to become a bigger mushroom cloud of malignant fuckery.

What is Donald Trump but the infinite lolcow that now dominates and nourishes every moment of the media cycle with his antics. No one can look away—because the internet got out and now online drama is threatening our lives and livelihoods instead of our fandoms. We replaced our everyday lives and connections with the internet, and then the internet poured itself into a carcass called Trump, the walking embodiment of the worst shit that went down on the worst sites you ever knew about. 4Chan, and later 8Chan, made the Trump Presidency. He was their lolcow first. Now he;’s our nocow to, and the nos and the lols define the whole being of the country..

And now we’re fucking stuck. Every newsday is about him. Every sporting event. Every movie release. Every fucking half-time show. Every holiday. When it’s not about Elon Musk or one of the other Big Name Fans on the periphery of the constant, constant drama. It all swirls around what he’ll do next. And even those of us who hate him beyond words spend the precious hours of our lives doomscrolling and commenting, dissolving into the adrenaline (fear at the next disaster for us, fear of the other for them)/dopamine (validation at others sharing our fear for us, Trump’s IV line to their entire endocrine system for them) combo it seems impossible for so many to turn away from. We aren’t enjoying this on any level—but we’re stuck. We’re engaging. All the time. We want it to stop. We need it to stop. But they don’t. They need it to go on. A lot of Trump’s most fervent followers were never really online much before his rise—they have no natural defense or suspicion of this stuff, because by the time they logged on, the engagement algorithm had already made a shitstew of the concept of the truth, and people who’d cut their teeth lying and manipulating on the internet were ready and excited to screw the noobs.

Now, please understand I’m not trying to make jokes by calling him a lolcow, it’s deadly, grimly serious. It’s a disaster that might very well be the end of us, and I am afraid every day. The other ghouls behind Trump aren’t anyone’s lolcow—they’re the same fucking assholes who were pulling puppet strings on the internet back then, too. And Stephen Miller. I’m just trying to explain why this wet sack of a man has become the hemlock of the masses. We’ve trapped ourselves in a forum flamewar without end, and the billions of words spilled on actual forums back then should tell you how truly long this can go on. Even though it truly seems that no one, least of all the trolls themselves, is having any fun whatsoever these days. Well. Addiction is like that. You always need more intense highs to feel anything anymore.

Gotta bomb Iran or send the army into California or kill the concept of schools and weather. I do think Trump, deep in the dim corners of his alleged mind, understands one thing with crystal clarity: his power comes from engagement, just like the demonic algorithm. If he lets things get boring, even for a few days, he’ll begin to lose ground. He has to produce for his audience, and yesterday’s drama will never be enough for today’s maw.

And when you combine that “one good trick” with a clear, step-by-step agenda from the Republicans who’ve always been sociopathic Christofascist white supremacist monsters in Project 2025, you get July 16th, 2025.

And it does matter now. It is serious now. Very real people are dying, families are being torn apart, the economy is exsanguinating jobs and every one of those jobs is a real person’s next dinner. But the problem is, for a very significant number of both left and right white, straight, cis, privileged, vaguely Christian-ish Americans, which demographics are still in the bare majority, all of that, and the resistance to it, is only happening online. It’s happening through a tesseract of screens and performances that occlude reality just enough to paralyze almost everyone in either horror or delight.

Politics, for those with the privilege to only experience them through screens, is precisely fandom drama. People all the fuck over the place refer to themselves as fans of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, AOC or DeSantis (not so fast, Vance) rather than supporters, and that poisonous toadshit’s been going on for a minute. What a victory for the media to finally fully be able to smash politics into a fire3hose of turbogruel with sports and Hollywood and spray it in our faces without too much of that annoying pretending to be serious about anything or anyone. The horrors of the Texas floods, alligator torture, Palestine, assassinations, loss of rights everywhere, it all flows by in the same font, on the same background, as news of the latest Marvel casting or skibidi meme, and it directly affects most of those groups just about as much—so far. As long as they’re not one of the targeted groups yet, it’s all just fodder for the machine, that now pays out not only in “lols” (which were always somewhat sadistic), but in money, power, attention, praise, and brain chemicals real life has struggled to supply with the same overwhelming intensity, especially since we all got together, held hands, sang fucking Imagine, and worked very earnestly to come up with a holistic method of running society without human beings interacting directly with one another during the pandemic.

Is it absolutely revolting? Yes, of course it is. It’s fucking gross. But I’ve been on the internet a long time, and I’ve seen people bend themselves into Escher’s own pretzels justifying their participation in these lolcow orgies of shame. People like watching others suffer. Some a little (heh that young fellow was struck in the testicles with a sporting implement, eh wot?) some a lot (Alligator Alcatraz). But most people have that in them. They come up with a way to feel it’s deserved. That they would never be the sufferers on display, since they don’t deserve it. Cancelling, outside of people like Weinstein and Spacey, is really just this sort of behavior with a superiority complex. And so they kept, and keep, watching, and participating, even though it’s clearly grotesque.

And Trump is the zenith of this. The one true talent he actually has, and has leveraged his entire life—because he was a much more benign lolcow in the 80s, too—is letting people laugh at him or seethe at him for money and attention. And I don’t believe it truly matters to him which one.

Is there a way out? I’m…not sure there is. Because it’s been way too long. Multiple generations have been trained to expect this cycle of adrenaline and dopamine to be the main service government provides. Back in the time known as the day, lolcows ended when enough people got banned effectively enough, someone got very seriously hurt, and occasionally, when people got bored and wandered off. I’m not sure analogues of any of those are really on the table at the moment. It truly is something to be the man to enshittify liberal democracy and simple every day life. The only thing that ended that adolescence of the internet was this. So where we go from here, I struggle to say. Except that finding some way back to each other in the real world, to connecting, to talking, not to the FUCKING VOID THAT IS AI, but to other actual people face to face, is probably the only possible road, not out, but maybe, just maybe, through.

Trump pulled off his deal for power by trading the rules of the internet for the rules of real life. He stands in the middle of a planet full of pain like a sloppy, drooling Virtuvian Man, gorging on the left dogpiling him with rage and the right dogpiling him with worship.

It’s all the same to him, just as long as he’s covered in bodies.

It’s going to be the work of the rest of our lives to dig our way out.

Epilogue to follow on Thursday (promise this time, it’s already done)

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I am alive!

Is the book done? No. About ten chapters left, because everything that could go hilariously wrong last week, from a massive heat dome in New England to my ceiling flooding and falling through, did indeed happen, plus more outlandish rubbish on top of it. Thus, I am still drowning in stress, plus more stress, plus bathtub water and it’s still too hot.

So hold tight, I shall not perish, yet. I’m looking to have the last post in Move Fast and Break People up over the weekend.

In the meantime!

I have a new short story out at Uncanny Magazine, and I’m super excited about it, so I’m taking the step of telling my political readers to hey maybe check out a bit of my fiction. The personal, and fictional, is always political, after all.

Plus…the premise is just a ton of cheeky fun and I don’t want to tell you what it is, because it’ll spoil the whole thing, but you will recognize it and laugh some minor, unimportant body part off before the whole thing veers wildly into new territory.

When He Calls Your Name

Give it a read if you want! And I’ll be back this weekend with some more yelling about our grim tech-lich overlords.

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Hey everyone!

I realize I have not yet finished the Move Fast and Break People series. I am often full of failures. However! There are reasons! And not just the totally bugfuck pinwheeling madness that is every single headline every single day!

On top of The Horror of It All, I am not just a Yeller of Swears, but a science fiction and fantasy novelist, believe it or not, and sometimes the Big Job makes Big Demands.

I appear to actually be near to finishing Nobody But Us, the near-future gender dys/utopia thriller I’ve been working on for quite some time, can’t imagine why I’d want to write about that sort of thing these days, total coincidence I’m sure.

I have not disappeared on you, I promise! But I will be a bit quiet for the next 10-ish days while I try to put this beast to bed. Trust I have many things to say and want to say them, but at the moment, I must attend to the world in my head, which is also on fire, only this fire I can fix. Writing books is nice that way.

Thank you all so much for your patience and support! The series will finish around the end of the month once the book is done and my brain can brain reality once more. Lord, I cannot fucking wait to see life on the other side of this.

See you all on the flipside, T-10ish days!

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Please excuse a brief pause in our series on the internet slowly absorbing and replacing all human life with yelling to…yell.

I just have some things I need to say. For my own health, because I’m pretty sure shoving all this what-the-fuckery down into my innards to rot with the absolute tonnage of reeking fucking trash I have to suppress my fury about every single day is bad for you. In fact, I’m pretty sure the entire reason middle-aged people are in such a sour little snit of a mood all the time is the crushing weight of years of bullshit, our own, others’, and most definitely the world’s, accreting directly on our lower backs.

AT SOME POINT, YOU EITHER KEEL OVER OR GET A STUPID SPORTS CAR ABOUT IT BUT WE’RE ALL BROKE SO BLOGGING IT FUCKING IS.

Oh, and this one’s going under a paywall. If you want to yell back at me about how super chill and cool the allegedly-lefty internet is being about Biden’s diagnosis right now, you gotta kick me a buck because oh my god, my back is killing me.

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Welcome back to your nuclear hellscape of infinite human torment already in progress! What a fucking beautiful day in the goddamned cursed-ass neighborhood of slowly-deflating dreams, in which the very concept of hope is being pilloried daily in every town square. King Friday just sent a kindergartner to a Salvadorean prison, then slept the guiltless, unperturbed sleep of a baby.

IT’S GREAT HERE. Did you know hell always had the option of adding more rings? That franchise opportunities for torment-expansion and new items on the Value Menu of Breathtaking Moral Putrescence was just…always on the table for us? NEAT FACT!

We last left our dingus century slowly burgeoning into a digital technocracy and blundering through the long process of kicking down fundamental pillars of civilization, replacing them all with apps, and expecting the overall structure to stay totally fine and cool and never, ever wobble despite no one taking care of it, at all, in any way.

But that wasn’t enough for us, oh no. We are such very clever, super rad, bold and edgy futuremonkeys. So we started kicking it, too.

Just a little bit. Not because we hated the basic structure of interconnected human systems. Because most of us never really understood anything about the basic structure of interconnected human systems. The particular pillars we were whacking on weren’t exactly obviously load-bearing. In fact, for quite a long time, a little vigorous boot-smacking seemed to improve things. And a bunch of people who confidently said they did understand those structures insisted it wasn’t kicking, it was industry disruption, and hey, who doesn’t love disrupting nasty fat greedy old industry? Yeah, fuck the system, give it a roundhouse this time!

So when, eventually, the janky societal stud-finder that is the American Electoral Cycle started coming up catastrophically empty, we’d spent so long saying fuck the system and getting rapturous, deafening cheers for it (and absolutely nothing but acidic disdain for maybe system good just need fix?) we never should have been surprised to find the system, well, totally fucked.

This essay concerns one of those not-obviously-integral societal pillars: trends in fictional televisual storytelling. OH WE GETTING HOT NOW.

No, but we kind of are. Everything we thought and taught about these two things was changing throughout the first quarter of the 21st century, converging on a new consensus at the exact same time as people slowly learning how much they genuinely enjoyed not having to deal with other human beings for every little thing and not thinking too hard about how the bedrock definition of society is human beings having to deal with other human beings for every little thing.

The thing is, the kinds of stories we take in on a daily basis and the professions we choose to pursue are enormous, broad-sweeping cultural movements. The issues this series is trying to address, concerning the dominance of the internet and digital living, are not uniformly experienced. How much or how little daily life has been made physically intangible varies from person to person, country to country. (And of course, all these thoughts are heavy on the American landscape because…well, the American landscape has been weaponized against both itself and everyone else plus I live here.) A large rural family, to whose address Instacart delivers only thoughts and prayers, does not have the same relationship with the internet, or daily direct human interaction quotients, that a single, WFH, recent college graduate living in a major test-market city does.

But they’ve all heard that Iron Man is a badass.

Here’s the lede, unburied above the fold: I’m not saying Tony Soprano ended the American experiment. That’s just silliness.

But I’m not not saying Tony Soprano ended the American experiment, either.

This whole digression started because a friend and I were talking about politics (it’s like doomscrolling! But you do it in person, and maybe there is whiskey, and maybe there is yelling, but yelling together, and at least probably also no one calls you a shitlib) and they asked: how could anyone think these assholes were actually going to be effective at solving any problems? I just don’t get how you can even trick yourself into thinking these are the guys, even if you’re a very devoted Nazi.

And I knee-jerk answered:

Oh, that’s easy! Because we’ve spent the last quarter-fucking-century consuming virtually infinite movies, shows, games, and books in which the Asshole Anti-hero is the only guy who can cut through all the bullshit and get the job done. Then we told everyone growing up or coming of age during that time not to study the humanities or they were a stupid waste of flesh destined to starve to death in a ditch, so they couldn’t think critically about any of it.

If you didn’t experience the pre-2K media environment in real time, it’s hard to express the size and depth of the sea change I’m talking about here. From the advent of mainstream televisual entertainment in the 20s and 30s up through the very late 90s, the heroes of major tentpole media units were many things, but they were almost always…you know…heroes. All narrative has a moral agenda, and while yes, a big part of the 20th century moral agenda was sit down and shut up if you’re not a straight white man or else, for straight white men themselves, the moral lessons of film and television was very much centered on a kind of post-doc Sunday School hey, I know you have this rage without form or focus inside you all the time, but have you considered being a good person about it? Here’s how!

The heroes of the stories America most liked to tell about its Golden Children were never screaming fucking sociopaths quipping the day away cleverly, clothed in the the tattered shreds of the lives they’ve carelessly destroyed, for whom everything more or less works out, even when they die, because when and if they do eat it, their worldview is almost always upheld, and their nihilistic dog-eat-dog death forms a supporting argument, or at least an emphatic underline, for their nihilistic dog-eat-dog way of life, Mr. I-Am-the-One-Who-Knocks SIR.

Before you hop on the comment section to note well, actually The Screaming Fucking Sociopath Show ran from 1971-1974 on CBS—look, there’s never 0% or 100% in media analysis, there’s always exceptions and outliers. GENERAL TRENDS, PEOPLE. Plus, on the rare occasion that an unutterable nightmare of human psychology was the protagonist of a movie or show, that was the point of the story, and they weren’t rewarded for it. For all Hollywood’s heavy breathing over the Italian mafia in the 1970s, Al Capone still dies in prison unloved and unmourned, and hubris was still a fatal flaw instead of a singularly required virtue. While the beginning of the douche-as-imperfect-but-semi-lovable-hero genre might have started with shows like The Simpsons or Married With Children or literally anything Martin Scorsese ever touched, Homer and Al are not effective at life, they aren’t right about very much, most people around them don’t really like them, and a huge number of plot points revolve around the Dipshit In Question learning some kind of basically pro-social lesson.

Pre-1999ish, monstrous, dick-swinging assholes and their tediously identical personal philosophies about how the whole system, whatever the system in question is, should be replaced with the hypnotic motions of that selfsame swinging dick, weren’t often presented, shot, or reacted to by others as attractive, or delightful, or highly competent, or posited as maybe actually a legitimate way to conduct yourself in real life. And the horrifying, violent, anti-social, hate-pickled soul-amputee didn’t regularly end up being pretty much right all along while regular people just moving through life trying to mostly do the right thing are lame suckers or even hateful bitches who exist only to be fodder for or obstacles to This Fucking Guy’s big plans because that’s a fucking crazy thing to embed in the brains of a traumatized post-two-different-world-wars population.

It might not seem important. It might not seem like it could really make much of a difference. But our brains crave stories and the stories those brains gorge on become the way those brains expect life to work, at least on some level. Millions upon millions of people spend more focused, intentional time with their favorite OMG SO BINGEABLE movie and TV show characters than they do with anyone but their actual immediate families, and for many, many more, the math may not actually come out in favor of family. That’s a tremendous amount of influence, whose hypnotic immersion doesn’t even break for commercials anymore. So when the most common archetype of the Successful and Effective HeroMan fundamentally changes, what people expect to find when they go looking for successful effectiveness also changes. Mr. Smith going to Washington starts to look like a gormless boring weirdo who doesn’t remotely understand what’s Really Going On and is defending a shitty system anyway so why root for him? Now, Walter White, Don Draper, Tony Stark, Patrick Bateman, Jack Bauer, Tyler Durden? Jaime/any Lannister, Jordan Belfort? Those guys are so fun—and they get shit done.

This isn’t a post-9/11 nihilism thing, either, though it ramped up a lot after that. I glibly blamed it on Tony Soprano, but that’s not really wrong. Oz has a real claim to starting the trend in 1997, but few shows have ever had the mainstream in the palm of their hand the way The Sopranos did from 1999-2007, and it was Ground Zero for the Age of the Rewarded Asshole.

1999-2001 saw an absolute supernova of televisual stories whose protagonists were dark, edgy, violent, cruel, angry at “the system” (always for denying them the status and rewards they’re clearly owed, never for the specific flaws of that system), totally without empathy, disrespectful and obnoxious to everyone around them, narcissistic, and 24/7 surly without for one second not being the absolute hero of their stories—Fight Club, The Matrix, Boondock Saints, 24, Boiler Room, American Psycho, Dark City, Memento, Snatch, Angel, even comedies like Pushing Tin, Futurama (don’t @ me, I love that show but they’re all assholes), Family Guy, High Fidelity, Black Books, The fucking Man Show…and yes, even my beloved Farscape. Because you could be pretty sure that if the hero wasn’t a complete dickwagon, the rest of the story was gonna work real hard to make you love the villain, think they’re WAY cooler than the heroes, and feel bad for their poor widdle hurt villanous feewings.

Suddenly there was a whole crop of assholes running around being pretty damned successful at solving problems, where before THE archetype of even the Complicated Hero was a basically decent guy put upon by life and doing his best to make the moral choice in an unfeeling universe.

And then, saints and ministers of grace defend us, there’s The Phantom Menace. George Lucas created from the definitional SpaceGood vs. SpaceEvil clear-cut heroic trilogy where decent people try real hard to make decent choices and it works, in the 70s, when nothing was clear-cut or very heroic. Then, before anyone had anything bad to say about Star Wars, spent the entire first decade of the new century spending hundreds of millions and bending everything he’d ever done into unloosesable narrative knots, all to make us love and empathize with Darth Ever-Fucking Vader because reasons. And then Disney built the sequels and almost all their sequel-merchandising around Han and Leia’s psychotic dirtbag homo/geno/patri/regi/avunculi/arguably matricidal son as some kind of “blood-drenched fascism is fine if you’re hot and tortured while you do it” brooding hero and it worked. (not to make a thesis out of it, but the only reason any of these brooding heroes brood at all is that people just inexplicably refuse to treat them with the deference and awe they’re owed by their very nature. Probably because people are bad and need to be punished into worshipful adoration. That sounds right, doesn’t it? It also sounds like a certain voting bloc’s bedrock policy complaint.)

And all those movies were ostensibly aimed at kids. Whose moralities were under construction, excuse the mess.

It’s like there was a meeting and we all just decided good people are boring and stupid and we wanted to hear way less of them for the foreseeable future.

There was another huge explosion of this in 2008-10, not coincidentally as Obama was elected, the shadow of Bush/Cheney, a decade of war, fear, and disastrous Wall Street auto-fellatio seemed to be lifting. A good dude was in the White House, so no need to push hard on stories about doing the right thing to attempt some kind of pressure on the powers that be to maybe think about not being shrieking beholders all the time. It was definitely time to shove our faces right down into Bad People Fiction like a pile of freesia-scented cocaine. Breaking Bad, The Dark Knight, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, Archer, Fringe, Luther, Iron Man, Sideways, Inglorious Basterds, Inception (and also everything Christopher Nolan has ever done), on and on.

Gen X had a lot going on. Just…a significant number of issues to work through.

And these heroes are literally all the same person. “Morally grey” always means the same guy is about to fart his way into your psyche.

SEE IF THIS SLUDGE RINGS A SHITBELL:

• Doing pretty solidly at life within the parameters of the socio-economic class to which they belong, but hasn’t gotten to the tippy-top of that class, either, for reasons the story insists are beyond their control.

• Either extremely physically attractive or conspicuously not attractive whatsoever, yet possessing a seriously obscene amount of weird, cruel charisma/affability that comes out most entertainingly during his worst actions

• A consistent garbage asshole to any wife, family, social circle, and co-workers, who gives nothing back for the mountain of love, grace, patience, time, money, and favors showered upon him, yet somehow the shower never ends because occasionally he shows reluctant affection to a child or animal or the memory of a dead wife. Maybe a sled, idk.

• Hates the system, man. What system? It doesn’t matter, he hates it and he’s gonna bring it down. And he’s not gonna do it by being a good boy, no way! Fuck you, DAD! He’s gonna do it with a bunch of crazy shit that looks suspiciously like just acting on your id 100% of the time but totes isn’t that, promise. Whatever plans he has to get rid of the old system or building a new one are nebulous at best, the point is SYSTEM BAD, SYSTEM DOWN, MAN AWESOME. He’s so edgy and cool! He says things you’re not supposed to! He’s above the law! You want him to be above the law because that’s the only way the story continues so FUCK YOU, LAW. And when he does his cool violence the audience isn’t supposed to have uncomfortable feelings about it the way they normally would if anyone else did them, because having uncomfortable feelings about things is just another part of the system, my dudes.

• Because it’s so entertaining, the story has now taught you to fucking hate anyone who stands in the way of this super cool swaggerboss, even if they’re doing that by committing such heinous acts as…asking any questions at all of Broody Mclotsadrugs or politely offering an alternative course of action to Bigjaw Gruntybear’s “fuck everyone who isn’t me” plan.

• Because, you see, the normal rules just don’t apply to this zomg so cool and fuckable and powerful lone rebel, vessel of dgaf masculinity and mechanism of applying irrationality to rational life that he is! Normal rules would actually be taking something ineffable away from him, damaging his soul, making him less of a man, nay, less of a human.

• Has zero hesitation about hurting people (physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, socially, etc depending on genre) to achieve their goals, in fact, profoundly believes their goals are unachievable without hurting people. The story itself usually revolves around incredibly vivid and creative expressions of that hurt, without depicting the aftermath. The story rarely presents any other workable means of achieving the protagonist’s goals, ultimately proving him right without having to say so and letting all the creators do a Dr. Evil pinky-smirk about how they never meant these characters to be attractive role models admired by millions.

• White dude, because obviously we get super uncomfy when any other kind of human acts like this. Straightness may or may not wobble, but if wobble, must wobble at a decidedly masc angle.

Now, it’s never been so concentrated in slower media like books and plays, other trends were also going on, and certainly, in recent years the trend has recoiled a bit in the face of this shit not turning out to be so thrillingly fun in real life, but the visual (i.e. easiest to consume) storytelling landscape of the 21st century was colonized by assholes to a truly clownshoes and their accompanying clownstockings degree. By the end of the aughts, the vast majority of stories committed to film involved some kind of anti-hero, and they were almost always proven effective at their goals in the end, often the only people who could accomplish them, and only by their chosen means. Those means might look insane at first, but they always prove more, or at least more quickly, effective than being good and moral. And then Game of Thrones premiered!

Even Michael Scott was repeatedly shown to be the best salesmen in the company despite his horrible behavior and clear idiocy. (So we get the “even an idiot asshole is more effective at the same job than a competent person” narrative in the most popular comedy of its decade) And Ron Swanson, much as I love him, was regularly a totally heinous shit to everyone around him, at times even approaching malevolent sabotage of the entire local government apparatus simply because it is the government apparatus. And the show made it, and his school of pug-nosed libertarianism, so endearing and cool people were actively disappointed when he grew and evolved. The Marvel movies are absolutely chock full of horrifying narcissists, now with SWEET BRANDING AND MERCHANDISE.

Of course, there’d always been bad people and complicated protagonists—noir wouldn’t exist otherwise. But usually, especially in the period betwen the end of WW2 and the end of the Cold War, when America felt the need to at least appear morally upright to contrast with those nasty communists, those guys got some kind of comeuppance. Citizen Kane still dies alone and unloved, no matter how sick his sled was when he was 8. Michael Corleone doesn’t exactly have a nice time, and his methodologies become obsolete almost as soon as the sequel rolls film. Most people involved in noir stories end up face down in a pool of their own consequences.

The difference wasn’t necessarily that obnoxious bullies were in media, but that they suddenly were the heroes we needed.

Because they always won, even though they had to suffer through one or two Good Person DEI Hires on the way. They always win even when they die in the end. Yeah, Walter White ate it…in the series finale, in very epic fashion, after accomplishing literally all of his goals, none of which were ever “be a nice family man people enjoy spending time with.”

And that’s without even mentioning Reality TV, the Skinnerian Box that disgorged Donald Trump’s final form, in which the villains very often triumphed, and the promise of cruelty meant a great episode.

The worst part is, nobody telling these stories was necessarily doing anything wrong or bad. This was a new(ish) way to tell stories to a massive worldwide mainstream audience in a world with precious few of those. It was exciting and fresh and so fun to write, to act, even more fun to watch and discuss. We liked watching it because it was made to be liked. We liked making it because it feels good to make art that feels challenging and dangerous.

Unfortunately, it also trained us, over the course of almost three decades, to see slick monsters as necessary heroes, victims as suckers, and the smashing of all systems as inherently moral and FUCKIN’ BADASS, no matter what the qualities of the system itself.

Which had also, not coincidentally, been the underlying message of most of the heroes of the previous generation—they were rarely out-and-out psychopaths and monsters, but almost all of them were edgy outsiders with contempt for “normie” life, who could eat 50 eggs, who couldn’t forget about Chinatown, who made offers that couldn’t be refused, who always wanted to be a gangster, as far back as they could remember. Boomer media is FULL of guys raging against the system and being totally unsatisfied with even the richest rewards of that system. That the system existed was enough reason to hate it and punch it in the face while laughing at the dumb rubes who just wanted to have an okay normal time in life and maybe a job. Right or left, it didn’t and doesn’t matter, the only unforgiveable sin, artistically and politically, for the last thirty years, has been to be seen as part of, beholden to, or standing up for any tiny sliver of, any kind of established societal system.

Was it really any wonder no one cared about defending the system by the time we crawled over broken glass to 2025?

After all, the angry, unpleasant, rude, anti-social, obnoxious, violent, capricious, sadistic, unrefined, swaggering, totally emotionally unregulated anti-protagonist who blasts through everyone else like a demented Kool-Aid man always turns out to be right, or at least, the very coolest one of us all.

At least, that’s what I’ve heard. FOR MY ENTIRE ADULT LIFE.

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Good afternoon, this is your very stressed-out captain speaking. Welcome back to the most depressing shit imaginable! We are flying at dangerously breakneck speeds above what appears to be a couple of hundred million Artaxes stuck teeth-deep in a nationwide Swamp of Mudsucking Sadness on our long-haul flight from Normal Fucking Life to the Inevitable Burning Wreckage of Ostensibly-Civilized Society. We hope you’re enjoying our in-flight Long Form Socio-Philosophical Essay service. Out the left windows, you can see just exactly where it all went wrong, but don’t worry, this is a non-stop flight, and we’re not going to do one even half-assed thing about it. We are expecting an absolute rustic pigfuck of a journey through the end of liberal democracy and anticipate noisily facedrilling into medieval fucking feudalism within the year.

Last time on I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Tell You to Get Fucked, Die Broke, and Worship Dear Leader, we talked about how, over the course of thirty or so years, we replaced every part of regular, everyday human life with the internet, and when we couldn’t quite totally replace something with various iterations of a live feed of people screaming at each other about politics, we just went ahead and stapled the internet onto the side of it, whether anyone wanted or needed that or not, we were not fucking fussed.

But we might have sort of kind of basically held together, with wishes, imagination, a lot of caulk and emojis, and people’s annoying habit of actually wanting some kind of social interaction aside from blood relations and toner relations work colleagues. After all, we’ve had malevolent dickvoids moaning over their weird ergot-dreams of total domination running things for pretty much always, in all places and times, forever.

They just couldn’t get us all in one place before. I’m not even specifically talking about the walled gardens of Facebook or X or TikTok, I mean the internet itself. A place whose points of ingress and egress they already controlled, and whose activity they could manipulate for, quite literally, less money and effort than it takes an average consumer to buy a new car.

And now it will become clear how a little musing about hey maybe we shouldn’t have relied on that whole “caring about other people” thing to get us through an election against Goblin Fascism, seeing as how we just got done rearranging all of society to discourage interaction with other people as much as possible and then just let that bin-bag full of trauma-diapers marinate in its own fetid juices for four years turned into a four-part series: it’s all just so much. Once you start pulling at the threads, it’s everything.

(And I swear by the ghost of Usenet I’m not just shuffling around the house being 45 and complaining about how much better everything was back in the time known colloquially as “my day.” A lot of this was not better. That’s why we replaced it with the internet. It was slow and clunky and annoying and unexciting. It sucked up all the extra hours of your day, and then a few more, like a gluttonous anaconda of time and energy. There were definitely nefarious schemes afoot from the earliest of digital days, but the most nefarious of all turned out to be that almost everybody is just a comfort-seeking human animal who would like things to just be a little easier and less scary than they were yesterday, to have just a few more minutes between work and sleep to exist, to be just a little more comfortable, have less on their mind, experience a little more of life. What a bunch of assholes, right?)

So how did we get here? Well, to put it plainly, without jokey profanity?

We tried to use technology to fix our very human loneliness and increasing alienation from the modern world and accidentally got close enough to making progress that way too many of us were all gathered in one place for way too many hours in the day, until it became so easy and convenient for the people in charge of that place to control public opinion that not doing it, to these edgelord minds, was not only lame and cringe, but approached fiduciary negligence.

Plus, being able to control how and what people think and not doing it really annoyed them. Some humans find pleasure in nothing so much as controlling other humans, and if you were that kind of person in the 90s tech boom, you probably gravitated toward the big shiny new thing with no rules that could reach right into the brain of those oh-so-controllable human toys and let you play.

We let ourselves get corralled. Brought in from the prairies and fenced off in one place, where it was trivially easy to get to all of us at once. And it’s just so unbelievably fucking sad that we did it, not entirely, but largely, because we were lonely.

Because, as the digital age ascended and the structures of the analogue world decayed, we went looking for a new third place.

I remember the first time I heard the phrase “third place,” meaning a place humans go to be human at each other which is neither home nor work. The loss of such places has been a subject of great distress, handwringing, and much scapegoating for most of my adult life, even before such places were really lost at all.

I heard the phrase first in 2001, but it was only coined in 1989, by a sociologist named Ray Oldenburg. Before that, such a phrase would’ve been mostly non-sensical, even apart from the fact that, for most of history, it would’ve had to be a fourth place, neither home nor work nor church. But we very intelligent, enlightened lefties only saw the (admittedly terrible) religious part so we already went ahead and ditched that useless thing where you had to go somewhere every week, dress vaguely well, look your neighbors in the eye, talk to them in a manner that wouldn’t get you ostracized from the entire town, hear about their problems, meet their children, let them witness how you treat your family, and be forced to at least pretend to consider stupid shit like hey maybe be nice to each other you leaky fucking bin bags, if you don’t someone’s gonna set you on fire forever, just saying.

The weird thing is, even in 2001, the context in which I heard “third place” was…a bunch of young people bemoaning that they were extinct, and that extinction was dooming humanity forever. The internet was the only third place left; it would be the lone hope of our generation. In the future, they said, the internet would be everyone’s third place.

The irony of this sentiment being uttered by a bunch of young people hanging out in an internet cafe, itself very obviously a third goddamned place, was completely lost on me at the time because I was a dork-ass child. But, in my defense, it was lost on everyone else, too. In comparison to 2024, in 2001, third places were absolutely bloody everywhere. Pubs, clubs, rec centers, cafes, bowling alleys, hell, even Grange Halls were still kind of a thing, if only for the olds. There was literally no shortage at all of places to go or things to do. And those places were packed and they were cheap, even for the young.

So what were we bitching about in our cozy, cheap, easily accessible by bicycle, third place?

Well, none of the third places available except internet cafes, and the internet itself, were meant for, or appealing to, people like us. People who were young or at least not 100% sold on adult conformity, weird, disinclined to participate in things “everyone” liked, maybe not the best at raw-dog socialization, interested in niche culture, not mainstream, possibly overly arrogant in our assessment of our own intellect, often traumatized and bullied or just ignored in real life, depressed or angry or shy or otherwise unable or unwilling to fit in, go along to get along, blend in with the other good workers with good futures, but rarely pretty or charismatic enough to make that an intriguing movie-script-ready personality trait.

You know, geeks. Only geeks weren’t cool yet. Geeks weren’t profitable yet. Geeks weren’t even a demographical term anyone with influence was talking about without a curled lip of disgust. And we found each other online, developed our own in-group lingo, rules for behavior, trends, fashions, ways to spot one another in the real world.

Unfortunately, so did a lot of other folks who weren’t very good at fitting into society before society learned to function without direct human interaction. I’m not talking about your average neurodivergent introvert. Your average neurodivergent introvert is lovely, and made pretty art online, or argued about Kirk and Picard, or got weirdly into reading long recaps of television shows they’d already seen. I am talking about people like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, Curtis Yarvin, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and all the C-Suite Children of Gmork whose names you don’t even recognize because they’re just sociopaths, not narcissists, and they don’t need constant adulation to serve the Nothing.

And those are the people, good and bad, optimistic and opportunistic, who set up the scaffolding for the way online life was going to work before the people who were pretty okay at offline life even knew what was up. They are also the people who have been able to live longest in the antiseptic world of not actually needing to wrangle with the radical concept of “other people” at all unless they want to. (VCs do not count as other people, obviously, the whole ecosystem is literally just a weaponized frat) Every app that kicked another societal pylon down in slow motion piloted in Palo Alto or Cupertino first, or somewhere very nearby.

Not for nothing, but that conversation about third places back in 2001 took place maybe thirty miles away from Palo Alto.

But back then, my age cohort was just a bit too young to have made fortunes in the 90s tech boom, and were, instead, rushing to a terminal in our spare time to take apart this new thing and see how it worked, or could work. We, and everyone else, still had to talk to another human being, in a minimally socially acceptable manner, to accomplish a majority of life’s necessities—and even when you didn’t, a lot of people still preferred to, and could, run their shit that way. Face to face or over the phone, with paper and pen or printed from a computer onto paper and notated with pen, slow as Heinz, exhausting, and yet a lot of people still pretty consistently chose it over the new digital world.

2001 was a seriously transitional time, even apart from 9/11. Conventional wisdom holds that the internet went mainstream in 1997, but the vast majority of people were still not very online at all four years later, and certainly not for daily logistical activities. Not just because the tech wasn’t there yet, but because “normies” vaguely, yet holistically, disliked and distrusted the internet on principle, if they took it seriously at all.

Most regular people were not very active online yet. Vanishingly few celebrities were. No one’s grandparents were—they were too busy having to sit the fuck down in an office with another human person whose demeanor, apparel, personal scent, and manner of speaking determined how much car insurance said gramps was going to buy that day. It was like San Diego ComicCon before it was OMG COMICCON. And that was why we all felt so comfortable being as raw and open and actually bonkers inappropriately personal on Livejournal or Diaryland or our own scattered and be-webringed blogs—none of which we called social media, because we did not yet consider it to be media. Because our parents weren’t looking. Our bosses definitely weren’t. Even most of our IRL friends weren’t. We were still writing emails with full and correct grammar, openings and closings, like 19th century letters, and Google wasn’t a verb yet.

Going online felt like a fucking miracle back then. And the real heartbreak is that most of the moving parts of that miracle were the exact things that, over the years, curdled into the poison we won’t stop chugging straight out of the bottle now, even though we know we could.

We young pioneers had to interface with the meatspace, all the time, in all its difficulty and pressure and how little it seemed to enjoy us, so we valued real life just about as much as famed documentaries The Matrix and Fight Club would lead you to believe. You didn’t even have to use your real name. No one ever had to know what you looked like. You could be whoever you wanted on the internet, which was both an almost knee-buckling blessing and a monstrous curse. It was both those things, but it still is, too.

And one of the biggest draws to that digital world was how obnoxious and separated the real world so often was. Maybe you find the one other kid at your school who has every line of Monty Python and Hitchhiker’s Guide memorized and maybe you don’t, but when you log on to your forum of choice everyone there knew the parrot sketch and where their towel was and someone was working on a full babel fish cosplay and someone else re-wrote the Galaxy Song with more accurate numbers and it felt like coming home.

So that’s where we went. To discuss our interests and relax after work and trade stupid jokes and gossip and learn cool facts and meet new people. A third place. Not work, not family. A new home.

And you trust your home, don’t you? You know it so well. It knows you. It belongs to you. It wouldn’t hurt you. It wouldn’t trick you. Not like the outside world.

The problem is, third places had always been the one realm where the Man, however you should like to define said Man in this, the Year of Depends Adult Undergarment, couldn’t quite get to you. At work, you were subject to management, the business day, pressures to conform and perform, the tension at whatever points in which government entities interacted with your industry. You had to look, act, speak, and deliver in certain stratified and expected ways order to not get fired. At home, you were subject to your spouse, children, extended relations, neighbors, the needs of the home, the need to model your values for the next generation, whatever they were, and television was super excited at all times, eager to sell you acres of useless plastic, convince you you were ugly, encourage you to imitate fake people in fake places doing fake things, and coax you into really committing to getting your whites their whitest. And church-as-third-place never helped at all with this one, because God could get straight at you there.

But at the pub, or the arcade, or the VFW, or the Rotary, or bridge club, or indeed, the internet cafe, you could simply exist, subject to yourself alone and the barest minimum of please do not piss directly on the ceiling, actively rob the place, scream uncontrollably into the face of strangers, or rip the larynx out of any of the other patrons in order to express dominance standards of behavior, for the price of a shitty beer, if that.

We didn’t think about that stuff then, at least not much. We were just happy to find somewhere we could build into a place to fit in. We couldn’t see that, if the internet actually became everyone’s third place, then the eternal abusive spouses that are the 1% would have the societal Triforce fully assembled in their pockets.

Anywhere you can be your own self alone without being constantly fucked with is going to feel precious, more than precious, authentic. You’re going to believe the things you hear there a little more, because they didn’t come from a random media figure, they came from Bob from the grocery store or Sarah who has a kid in your kid’s class. Value the thoughts of the other humans you meet there just a little more deeply, because they’re just people talking, and you trust that Regular Dude doesn’t have the kinds of ulterior motives Work Dude and In-Law Dude might. Get a little more personally attached to the way things work in that place, because it matters so very much to you to have a place like it. React a little more strongly to any perceived change, any possible whisper of a threat. Defend the owners who provide it to you just a little more strongly.

It certainly wouldn’t occur to you that Regular Dude chit-chatting about Star Wars at the pub is a fucking agent of a foreign government or an actual robot. That is nightmare fuel, when you imagine it happening in the meatspace. But online, we just accept that every time we talk to someone we don’t personally know, there’s a solid chance one of those is what’s up. And somehow we go about our day.

It was never possible to manage public opinion the way it is now because after Work and Home, there was a wide, varied field of wildly different places where people existed and formed their identities and found meaning and authenticity.

Slowly, over the course of this century, because everything got scary and expensive and weird and it was just so easy and cheap to log on instead of go out, because the new third place had dopamine on tap and seratonin shots on the bar, we moved toward one place. One place that could be owned. That could be shaped. That could be, at trivial expense and with trivial effort, made to serve.

Almost as soon as anyone whose job it was to notice such things noticed the premium desirable consumer demographics were beginning to put on a kind of DIY authenticity that rose from internet culture specifically because it was separate from, less gatekept, rougher and less stage-managed than mainstream culture, an arms race began among marketers, politicians, and all sort of media entities to repackage all their old shit into something that appeared as authentic as possible, appeared to be coming up from the masses rather than down from above. To very consciously trick a massive audience into believing anything, so long as it looked a little off and unprofessional.

Because the internet itself looked a little off and unprofessional back then, and that was where the people who understand money knew the future was hiding. It was a goddamned hamster-dancing mess of technicolor vomit. A million different fonts and colors and obnoxious braying auto-play songs and animated wallpapers and wonky homespun photoshop images. Which slowly, over time, became two or three fonts, standardized (and muted) colors, profile pics so small it’s difficult to tell who’s talking, and a handful of websites whose graphical layouts became the almost-unseen window through which we experience the world outside our neighborhoods, commutes, offices, and families.

I remember the first time I saw a commercial that put the standard ecstatic housewife belting out a Euripidean paean to laundry detergent inside a jank-ass old school YouTube frame. Other than that, it was a normal commercial. But it all took place inside the insnantly-recognizable grey toolbar and icons of YouTube. The young had already started valuing YouTube over other sources of information—and that simple frame was meant to trick our brains into receiving Big Soap’s buy-begging along the same neuro-pathways that it received the Vlog Brothers and Lonelygirl15 and fucking Dramatic Squirrel.

And it worked.

Thus began the Authenticity Wars of the early 00s. An arms race to be the most trusted bullshit-slinger, to reinvent the vibe of the internet into all other marketing and culture, until the hero’s journey in mainstream films, up to and including animated Disney features—looking at you Wreck-It-Ralph 2—involves having something go miraculously viral to solve all the protagonist’s problems.

Here in these godforsaken 2020s, God appears in the form of the view counter at the bottom of a viral video.

The problem is, when everything gets carefully re-skinned with the New Authenticity, it’s impossible to tell what’s real. When you scroll through a feed, there is no visual differentiation between an actual elected representative notifying their constituency of a legitimate emergency and eaglebazooka1488 notifying their followers that Ozempic is made from the tears of pure Aryan conservative children collected after they saw a trans exist, and no matter how evolved we might like to think we are, our brains receive those two pieces of information the exact same way, and lend it the exact same legitimacy, because they look identical, and both came at us out of the corners of our very precious, authentic, third place megapub where Bob and Sarah tell us the truth.

Ask yourself why the most unhinged accounts have anime profile pictures. IS it because that obscures identity and it’s easier for bots to be mistaken for people that way? Sure. It’s also because geeky shit became synonymous with authenticity, intelligence, and in-group coolness for about ten years and our skulls are filled with electrocuted meat that’s SUPER slow on the uptake. Why, the pink galactic fox with stars in her tail couldn’t possibly be trying to socially engineer liberal democracy into the fucking Sarlacc pit! That’s just so silly!

When the internet is everyone’s third place, that is a very, very big target. Once such a huge swatch of humanity, across country and demographic lines, is in one place, not only does it become trivially easy and trivially cheap to reach them all at once. For quite a long time, the buy-in to become Sarah down at the pub Who Knows What’s Up was fairly high: you had to be able to write interesting long-form blog posts, even if they were just about Julia Child or cats, or you had to be able to produce unique videos quickly, you had to be knowledgable enough to build an audience, to cultivate comment sections. And the second it’s possible to automate that hero’s journey—via AI or bots or fake followers or the utter pure unalloyed evil that is the engagement algorithms—it’s simply to easy to change what people think for the kind of people who like to control what people think to not do it all day every day.

Neuralink is so unnecessary. We’re already there. The neo-oligarchy that grew out of the tech boom got access to the one thing only religion had even managed to sip at before: the little voice in the back of our heads that we trust more than anything because it’s our own voice. The voice of our conscience. Of our most intimate selves.

And then COVID happened, and the last of us who weren’t Doing This Shit had the world reduced to a small glowing screen in their homes for a year. Everyone who’d held out got sucked in.

That’s why it’s working. And that’s why it’ll be almost impossible to put any of the china cups back on the shelves when and if this particular meth-addled fuckbull ever leaves the shop. Fiscal and governmental entities have rarely been able to access the most intimate backwaters of the human mind, much as they’ve tried. And once we all had to stay inside for a real expanse of time…we all logged on.

And they got to replace that little still voice of our genuine selves with an infinite feed of what sure the fuck seems like human beings, but only sometimes are, screaming and selling and fighting and monetizing and attacking and defending and going at each other as though there’s only one pint of dopamine left in the universe and it’s on fucking Twitter. It just hadn’t been possible to access the little voice in our own heads as a megaphone before. Not at scale. You’d have to go on one crazy road trip to seed even a simple idea in every pub, church, rotary, grange hall, barcade, sports stadium, book club, craft night, bowling league—anywhere people could be themselves apart from work and family.

That still little voice got replaced with Gmork. With The Nothing.

The internet will be everyone’s third place in the future! Oh, how optimistic we were, never once considering that “everyone” included Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin, all of whom used the adolescent internet to convince people who would never worship a craptastic programmer, a game show host, and a dictator as the risen gods of their world, that they were cool and authentic in a way they never EVER could in face-to-face real life.

You can be anyone on the internet. You’re not chained down by the old ways. But so could they. And neither are they.

Back in 1938, a large part of the nation tuned into the radio and heard a broadcast concerning an alien invasion. It was just Orson Welles reading The War of the Worlds, but people believed it. Because it came through the radio, whence all the other True Things came. Some people—many weren’t fooled. But many were. It took a a bit of effort to convince the fooled to join the unfooled, but it didn’t become a crisis. You could still look out your window and see a startling lack of aliens.

But in this un-brave new world, we live in 1938 all the time. In many more ways than this one. And when we look through the window of a social media site’s algorithmic authenticity-generating machine, we might see a startling lack of aliens…and we might see an AI-generated video of aliens landing. Or the President talking about how serious the alien problem is. Or the richest man in the world blaming the invasion on trans athletes. Or a famous man telling you to vote his way if you don’t want to get eaten by Martians.

And all of them sound as convincing as the voice in your head reading this sentence out loud right now.

Part 3 Next Week.

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This is just a note to say that I know I started this big giant series and a regular posting schedule plan and all and then promptly disappeared for three weeks, like a BOSS.

Welp, I got the flu. The bad one that’s been hopping around and takes forever to get its shit together. I’ve been so sick for so long it’s bordering on the ridiculous. Then my child got it.

Then I got it, or something just as nasty which I suspect might have been undetected covid because the brain fog is so bad, again.

Then we got hit with five snowstorms separated by a few days each time, and school more or less gave up because the ice subsumed us all.

And my instinct, when faced with many pressures and deadlines and guilt piling up and a body not co-operating, is and has always been to hide and say nothing so no one will notice the disappointment of me—which is a very good instinct I wholeheartedly recommend and has definitely never steered anyone wrong.

WELL, WE’RE ALL TRYING TO GET BETTER, AREN’T WE?

So: I am only just now wobblingly back on my feet, still coughing eldritch ichor out of my lungs, and will have Move Fast and Break People Part 2 up very shortly. (Just for this series, each part will go up under for paid subscribers only for 24 hours, then open to the public, as I mentioned in Part 1.)

Apologies again, we will resume our regular programming momentarily. Thanks for your patience.

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Happy International Bloodfeast Season, fellow shattered husks of thinking human beings! Here we are on the flipside of several deranged politico-cultural orgies of pain, and I don’t think it’s a terribly scalding take to say, details aside, in a holistic, big-picture, view from 10,000 feet sense, that shit’s not right.

Really not right. Surreally so. I’ve personally spent this dry-heave of a year so far feeling like Han Solo; not the heroic, dashing, man of action part, no, no, perish the thought. The part where he spent like a goddamned year frozen in carbonite hanging on a filthy bathroom wall while who knows what kind of 24/7 grotesque violent slime-n-crime worm-orgy went on around him.

No one wants to see any of that shit, but it’s happening anyway, it isn’t going to stop, it’s oozing and moaning right there in front of you, and you physically can’t close your eyes or move away or do anything about it until some unspecified time in the future that may or may not actually arrive, so you just hang there stuck in a timeless helldream limbo of unending horror while a fat slobbering barely-verbal rapist crime boss stuffs his face with garbage, shreds people for entertainment, and somehow stays in power despite visibly doing fuck-all to run a government.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY EVERYONE.

It’s hard to know what to say about it all. It’s hard to even know where to begin. It’s hard to keep up with the Macy’s Parade of “unprecedented” pit-sludge that may or may not end us all. Just getting through each and every gom jabbar of a goddamned day around here requires a level of dissociation and compartmentalization the human brain usually reserves for abuse, war, loss, severe injury. Only now we have to go all the way to deep trauma responses just to scan the headlines in the morning, or, occasionally, walk into a restaurant with the pure sadistic audacity to air the news on the TV behind the bar.

So I want to talk about something bigger than the Regular Morning Horror Breakfast that will be out of date by the time I finish writing this. Because really, it’s not just the crusty worm on the big murder-chair. Or his nasty little shrieking sidekick. A lot of shit isn’t right. It hasn’t been right for awhile. It’s easy to point to COVID, that massive unresolved trauma we’re not even allowed to talk about anymore, let alone remember or process in any infinitesimally small way, but shit, in the grand, Sagan-esque, universal sense, was upside-down in its mortgage on reality long before that. COVID just tried to cash a payment on that mortgage and found an account that long ago ran dry.

So what happened? Because it’s not actually Trump per se. Trump isn’t even just a symptom. He’s not the reason we’re so clenched up and angry and self-loathing and paralyzed and isolated from each other, he’s just the baseball bat with a nail shoved through it a bunch of folks grabbed to take it all out on someone. Anyone they can find. Even if they couldn’t tell you exactly what they’re taking out on everyone around them.

Babies, what happened to us?

Well, gather in, children: Granny Minnesota is here tell you another tale of the Internet Olden Times. And it’s a beast of a tale. Approaching a Grand Unified Theory of What the Fuck Happened. I started writing this six weeks ago, and it’s grown and grown until it was forced to become a multi-part series due to Geneva conventions regarding the length of self-indulgent, navel-gazing, insufferably meta blog posts on the internet about the internet.

So. Bear with me.

Once upon a time before the invention of the wheel, we had no choice but to watch commercials to get to our scheduled units of televisual entertainment. And they didn’t just air before and after the show! Goodness no! Repeated every 6-7 minutes, taking up fully one-third of the show’s timeslot! Nor were they specifically targeted to our interests and buying habits by a massive data-mining operation that inadvertently, or possibly advertently, ended civilized society! No, no, my pets, these were the same commercials, blasted out blindly to every household from Manhattan to Modesto, with minor variations for large designated market areas, taking up 23-28 minutes of every single hour of broadcast television. I literally grew up seeing ads for a particular fast food chain that had precisely zero locations in my home state, and dagnabbit that’s how we liked it! (Spoiler: no one liked it.)

But the upshot of all this marketing monoculture was that, every-fucking-body, down to the smallest child, knew the longer-running slogans and jingles by heart, and they became something like memes today, used as punchlines, shorthand, and socially-lubricating references signaling in-group membership.

One of the more famous came from the, at the time, very popular Folgers’ Instant Crystals. Not just plain old iguana-bile Folgers’ Coffee, mind you, but the even more demonically foul instant crystals, made by taking an industrial vat of coffee leavings drained out of the drip-grate below a 7-11 coffee dispenser on the banks of the fucking Styx and freeze-drying it into poop-crumbs of total despair.

I don’t know what to tell you. No one told Americans what a latte was until like 1994. Then Americans immediately said coffee that tasted good was a gay liberal plot. We’ve just…always been like this.

The commercial opened on a fancy restaurant full of linen tablecloths, wine glasses, candles, a rack of lamb served with those white scrunchees on the top bits, and young sophisticates, presumably talking about books or foreign films or whatever while they waited for podcasts to be invented. The announcer walks through a haute-cuisine kitchen, saying in an authoritative newscaster voice, as though we’re about to witness a cutting-edge social experiment: We’ve secretly replaced the fine coffee they ordinarily serve with Folgers’ Instant Crystals. Let’s see if they notice!

You’ll never believe it, but they do NOT notice! All the young professional folk rave about how amazing the coffee is, how rich and robust they find the taste, how they simply cannot believe it’s Folgers’ Instant Crystals omg you guys just empty that can of dry-ass caffeine sprinkles directly into my discerning patrician mouth! Screw the real thing! I just can’t get enough of bitter awful freeze-dried science-droppings!

So anyway, I’ve been thinking about the election a lot lately. CAN’T IMAGINE WHY. Not in terms of what’s going to specifically happen over the next many months and years, or what’s happening literally today, because I think it’s being made pretty resoundingly clear how little any of us down here in the vomitorium can do about that, but in terms of what’s been happening for the last twenty years that got us to November 5th, 2024. To a place where no one seems to particularly care about the concept of any kind of objective truth existing anywhere, accelerationism and nihilism are the Pantone colors of the year, and giving a shit about anyone else is regularly punished at the ballot box. To this carnival of shit in which we’re all now forced to live, an unending janky Gravitron Wheel O’ Chaos spun up to Intestine-Extraction speed and the only music is screams. Every few hours, the wheel spins, and the flashing neon arrow selects a different soul-slurping subterranean clown-wendigo to be in charge of some massively important part of all our destinies, just as long as they know absolutely nothing about that part specifically, and the only person seeing any kind of consequences for doing a chaos is the guy who denied a CEO’s claim to life on the grounds that being a fucking monster is a pre-existing condition.

As the children say, we’re cooked.

Though I’m not sure how many of the people obsessively over-using have considered that once something is cooked, it’s not exactly finished.

Traditionally, the next step is being devoured. With relish.

And that doesn’t exactly seem like a sustainable situation for humanity, but the general reaction to it all, not just post-election, but for awhile now, to a lot of events, even as things start to completely fall apart at the seams, seems to just be minor variations on the sentiment of Maurice Sendak’s Pierre:

And that old coffee commercial keeps popping into my head.

Because I think that’s what happened. The big gnarly rootball at the bottom of the many, many seemingly unrelated branches of what’s still happening. What has almost zero likelihood of slowing down or unhappening anytime soon. Slowly, inexorably, profoundly, thoroughly, and on purpose. We hunted down every part, down to the scraps, of normal human everyday life, down to the most basic social, commercial, political, logistical, financial, educational, parental, informational, psychological, romantic, religious, military, technological, artistic, and familial interactions, and secretly replaced them with the internet.

And for a long time, because it was slow, and because it did make that humdrum normal everyday life so much easier, so much faster, so unfathomably more convenient, and even, god help us all, more diverting and exciting and personally validating, hardly anyone noticed. When we finally did start to catch on, we all sat around raving about how much better it was than the old world, how rich and robust and almost exactly like real life it tasted, how excited we all were to make the switch, how young and urban and professional and haute we all were for taking to it so easily and just vigorously motorboating the future with such uncritical enthusiasm.

Come on, guys! It’s new! It’s Science! It’s fun! It makes everything fast and easy! There could never, ever, be any downside to this, or any, new technology!

Now, this isn’t about enshittification. At least, not exactly. It isn’t about the tendency of all systems to rot and self-corrupt in the presence of dipshits who look at human beings interacting and only see financial opportunity. Because…that’s what dipshits do. They’ve been doing it to every new system that pops up since Uruk and Jericho. Some percentage of humans are just born assholes. You can’t really stop that or change it beyond nudging the Rate of Asshole Production up or down a bit, which is why communism works so nice in your head and so horrifyingly in real life. The existential malfeasance of that problematic population of resource-greedy psychopaths is a problem, but it’s old news. It’s consistent. You can set the watch they sell you by it. And it’s practically boring in comparison to the voluntary wholesale replacement of human-to-human life with intangible digital gladiatorial combat.

We, as a species, simply were not ready for the internet. We, as a species, were not ready to spend our waking hours inundated with the interior monologues of billions of other beings piped directly into our brains as though they were our own. Especially when those thoughts, just because existence is hard and sad and fucked up and weird and no one really escapes that for more than a couple of hours at a go, are more often than not, the thoughts of beings in pain, facing the future with extreme anxiety, desperate to feel seen and loved, desperate to not feel helpless and lost in the face of vast forces, beings who felt invisible and alone for most of their lives, suffering in ways large and small, most of the time.

My first grader has mispronounced “screens” as “screams” since they were three. I’ve never corrected them because it was cute and they’ll say everything in the usual way forever soon enough. But…they’re not wrong. We are being screamed at all the time. We are screaming all the time.

And the screams are our major source of entertainment.

There’s a reason every TV show that does an episode about someone suddenly getting psychic powers depicts it as an absolute mind-shearing hell. It is, and now, that Sea of Screams is humanity’s home. Just trying to exist while constantly being mentally hammered with the cries and wails and bitchy petty complaints and narcissistic judgments and pleadings for love (in one form or another) of all mankind will literally make you fucking crazy and it will do it incredibly fast. At no point has anyone suggested having a shit-ton of voices in your head is a good and healthy thing for a happy, fulfilling life on Planet Earth, but these days we all have a shit-ton of voices in our heads 24/7 and they never, ever stop screaming.

We made a hive mind. We did it too soon and too fast, and it’s eating us alive. Back in the old digital days, people used to talk a lot about the Singularity—a future event or technology that would change the world so fundamentally and radically that it’s simply impossible to imagine life afterward from the vantage point of life today. This was often applied to true, sentient AI or other science-fictional concepts, but the truth is, while we early-adopting children of the computer age were having those conversations, it was already happening all around us, so truly transformational we couldn’t see the water for the ocean.

The mass adoption of the Internet was the Singularity. People still talk as though the Singularity hasn’t happened yet. That without flying cars and affordable interplanetary travel opportunities, we can’t possibly have arrived at The Big Future already. But we’re long past it, into the Previously Unthinkable Mess Beyond. Of course, as William Gibson said, it’s not evenly distributed, some of us are less online by choice or circumstance, but COVID took the last band-aid off by confining everyone in their homes, and the powers that be keep chipping away at the option to live mostly offline.

Think about what we’ve done with the 21st century. We took almost every job, every form of entertainment, every logistical task, every virtue and vice, every path to forming a personal identity, every simplest transaction between living beings or previously unavoidable reason you had to interact with another living being, every way of actually meeting and creating a connection with another living being as well as every method we ever came up with to maintain connection with other living beings, and either moved them entirely online or made the internet such a massive, mainstream sidecar to such units of social structure that trying to accomplish it all offline requires extra, dedicated, conscious effort or privation. And possibly a detailed mission statement just to underpin a personal philosophy of maybe putting your phone down sometimes.

You know, back in the time known as the Age of Folgers Instant Coffee Crystals, people used to be, generally, fairly concerned with how much TV everyone was watching when I was younger. Rots your brain, don’t you know. Makes you lazy and passive and stupid. Kill Your TV was a major movement. Bumperstickers, posters, the whole nine.

No one ever says Kill Your Computer, Kill Your Phone, Kill Your Internet Connection. Because we can’t. Our entire culture is tentpoled around internet access. It’s been inserted into even the smallest interactions, not just between humans, but between humans and everything.

At the risk of crumbling to dust before your very eyes, I do not know how to explain to any young person the sheer number of other human beings we used to have to interact with, on the phone or in person, in a baseline socially competent manner, just to get from one end of the day to another.

To deposit your paycheck. To pay a bill. To purchase anything. To get a refund on a product. To speak with any incarnation of customer service. To get a bit of advice on childrearing or fixing a leaky faucet. To address any sort of issue whatsoever with anything. To plan a vacation. To put gas in your car. To insure that car. To choose classes for the next semester. To get a nice family photo taken. To apply for a job. To excel in that job or ever hope for a promotion. To organize for a cause. To get food delivered, if you even could. To share your thoughts on recent elections or a new film with someone outside your immediate family.

You stood in a line and you waited and then you talked to someone, and if they didn’t like they way you handled any of that, if your social skills weren’t ready for prime time, well, you might just…not get what you needed. At all. And if you didn’t like the way someone else was behaving toward you, you didn’t really have to give them what they needed, either. You had to make it work using human psychology, rhetoric,

It all used to require human beings, face-to-face, or at least mouth-to-ear, and so most people encountered and had to learn to deal with, many, many different kinds of other humans in their environment. That was how, by and large, people met romantic partners, friends, that famous “guy who knows a guy.” Mutual connections, co-ed classes, and just…interacting with random strangers all day every day.

It was exhausting! We were thrilled to be able to do a whole heap of that annoying everyday crap automatically. IT WAS FUCKING GREAT. It saved so much time, so much energy that we could use for activities! I’m not a Luddite here, I’ve been terminally online since before we had a word for that. No one did anything wrong by cannonballing into the digital age before actually learning how to swim. That’s how tragedy works. Nor do I honestly think there was ever any real possibility that we wouldn’t embrace that gargantuan level of convenience. It IS easier to do things online, other people are fussy and difficult and there’s a lot of rules and even if neurotypicals don’t call use the word, they still mask, and it’s annoying to have to do it all the time.

We took to the internet like fish to bleach. But damn, it sure did look like water for a long time.

And then, having steadily, determinedly, removed or made voluntary so many of the tiny ways in which you were forced to behave yourself toward others, even so much as talking to your taxi driver to tell them where you wanted to go or checking out at the grocery store or ordering food at a restaurant, we stood back, very proud of ourselves, we liberal digital folk, and told everyone to care A WHOLE LOT about the person next to them. More than they care about themselves, in some cases. To protect those others, to value their issues, problems, and needs equally to our own, and to vote that way.

The problem was, as a great many people looked to one side and then another, there was no one actually, physically next to them anymore.

The internet has become the lens through which Other People can be seen, heard, understood, and interacted with, and on a good day, 78% of the internet is a goddamned Jacobean nightmare parade of lies, scams, rage, and a howling labyrinth of the opinions of maladjusted dopamine addicts who may or may not be 13 years old, or fuming after a fight with their spouses, or in the depths of despair, or a content-scraper, or addicted to conflict because they’re desperately lonely, or employed specifically to piss other people off as efficiently as possible, or a really nice person trying to have an intellectual conversation, or fucking AI, and there is no way for the human brain to tell the difference between any of these at a glance.

People are not good at caring deeply about abstractions. They are extremely bad at valuing others’ needs over their own wants, but catastrophically bad at doing that when they don’t actually have to physically see those scary, weird, oh-so-different others with their own gooshy corneas. This is a huge part of why cities are usually blue and rural communities usually not; because in cities you still have to acknowledge the existence of, and navigate through, millions of real, thinking, breathing, sweating, yelling people who are nothing like you.

Not only did we make a hive mind way too soon, but we also jumped several guns on uploading our minds to servers and abandoning the meatspace. Because we can’t abandon the meatspace yet, but we all went ahead and put our brains in digital jars anyway.

The internet turned most of human existence into a series of abstractions viewed through a 6x3 inch black rectangle with a heart of lithium and sadism. And the guys who have been able to live longest in a cozy bubble of convenience, instantaneity, and constant stimulation without the annoyance of having to deal other human beings or see them as anything but flashy lights on a fashy screen, are the malevolent, solipsistic Silicon Valley Smaugs who built the abyss in which we’re all drowning, brick by fucking brick, and are even now ransacking our government for virtually no one’s benefit, not even, ultimately, their own.

No one can care too much about things they don’t have to deal with pretty regularly, not even the best of us, which that tech most certainly are not. Unfortunately, by making it so easy to not deal with other people at all, we kicked the legs out from under the barest concept of society itself being a pretty good thing we should probably not set on fire for the clout.

Over the next several weeks, this series is going to look long and hard at what we’ve done to ourselves and why, exactly what the internet has and hasn’t replaced, the effects of it all, expected and unexpected, the little UI tweaks and algorithmic adjustments that might have fucking ended liberal democracy, and what the hell we can do about it now.

I don’t know about that last one. Maybe. I’m hoping. If we’re lucky. And I have enough Folgers’ Crystals on hand.

Because maybe the smartphone was humanity’s gom jabbar, and we failed by passing. Put your most vulnerable self in this shiny black box, connect to the person on the other side of it, and experience unfathomable pain, but also unfathomable reward. You’re only a real person if you keep your hand in the box. If you pull away, you might as well’ve never existed.

I doubt even Frank Herbert could have imagined Paul rocking up to the space nun the next morning and asking to have another go at Happy Fun Box. Let alone rolling over in bed and grabbing it first thing. But we got so used to the pain only the reward remained: the confirmation that we’re human, we’re real, we’re seen, we’re valued, at least by someone, somewhere, for something, even if it’s dark and awful. Once you have that, it does feel like dying to disengage.

And a little while after that, the weird fascists who made the box don’t even need the needle at our necks anymore.

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Hello, everyone!

I am getting ready to post my first multi-part series (!) but work has been severely curtailed by my child acquiring a movie-monster version of the flu that’s been going on for almost two weeks now. Tried school today and got sent home before noon because poor love is too weak to sit at their desk.

Aaaaaand my cat was sort of scarce over the weekend? Which is hard because he is a massive Maine Coon? So massive msall children have to ask if he IS a cat and not on loan from the zoo? Turned out the magnificent, majestic, and in all ways extraordinary feline Lord Byron, Stormageddon, was hiding and starving himself to death because he has a massive systemic infection that filled his ears with the most grotesque xenomorph pus-blood-foul-ichor fluids I’ve ever known about. Honestly I’m still traumatized from the vampiric theater bukkake of it all (the vet spread the ear open to look at it, the skin split, and pus flew all over her face and across the walls of the room. YEAH.)

In addition to that, my dryer broke, my 17 year old Facebook account was hacked and YOU CAN GUESS HOW EASY THAT IS TO FIX, you don’t even want to know about my water bill last month because I didn’t know a toilet was running for like five weeks due to SOMEONE who is SIX YEARS OLD but I would never SAY WHO, snapped off an Important Part and hid it), and I’m on a crushing novel deadline…with a sick kid and a sick animal both of whom basically need physical contact with me to continue existing at the moment.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING UP IN HERE. LIKE ALL AT ONCE.

So hold tight, I’ll be with everyone in a moment, I have way too much to say about literally everything that’s been happening. I just…am under several wailing bodies at the moment.

And, you know, awkward moment, but Lord Byron is in surgery as we speak, and cat surgery (not to mention dryers and apparently the gold-infused water a toilet produces when it is broken) is very not cheap, so if you were thinking or hemming and hawing over whether to sign up for a paid subscription (and get the extra spicy essays that accompany the main pieces), now would be an awesome time to do that, just saying, no big, totally idle comment you can feel free to ignore. That said, you know…we’re also 5 paid subs away from posting every two weeks on the reg.

Just giving you information. Definitely not feeling the cringe in every cell right now.

Anyway! I’ll see you Monday with part one of Move Fast and Break People: How the Internet Gave Us Everything and Then Took It All Away.

Lord Byron appreciates the support as he journeys through the mad dreams of morphine and wet food post surgery…

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It is the hush at the close of the year.

It always feels hushed to me, even if it's full of noise. The Northern Hemisphere in me, I suppose. There is always some flavor of excess dark, some flavor of excess cold, some sense of putting things away for the long white road of January. Even though New Year's Day is meant to be all new beginnings, December 31st has always felt like an ending to me.

I don't know too terribly many people mourning the end of 2024. It's been a strange, sour time. But as I've thought so often lately, maybe that's because I'm in my 40s, also a strange and sour (and sweet, yes) time when things start to wobble, even for those who did pretty well with the first act or two. Family starts to die, friendships and marriages fray and tear and shred, children and houses are either a constant responsibility or a swiftly-retreating option. Your health starts to whine, if it doesn’t scream. If not your health, at least your strength. If alcohol or its assorted dirtbag friends are going to be a problem, they often start becoming one in the late 30s and early 40s. Careers stall more often than they take off or wither suddenly on the vine. We 40s folk are acutely aware of politics; if we weren't before, because we're now at the stage of life where we need to think about the future, and if we were aware before, the effects of the politics of our youth come home to roost in middle age.

And if the world outside our hearts starts to go seriously corkscrewed around the same time these very normal crumblings tumble through our personal lives, it all gets jumbled up together into a ball of discontent without beginning or end.

There's a reason Dane's Inferno begins: Midway through the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood, the good and right road lost to me...

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Well, that happened.

Followed by a simply wonderful fortnight of sifting through the ashes of the social contract looking for charred chunks of hope and decency and finding pretty much FUCK ALL. Also sifting through the WhAt WeNt WRonG hot takes of everyone from Bernie Sanders to Elon Musk’s ketamine dealer to the feral diaper-hunting meth-opossum prowling around behind my house who’s got all the answers.

It’s been a real treat.

There is a palpable, completely revolting sense excitement among the media. They got what they wanted—Hate Island is back on! All new episodes! Ooooh what hot little monster is Trump gonna couple up with this week? Time to get called heroes of the resistance for shitposting on the internet just like we were going to do anyway! But among regular goddamned people who didn’t want to actually set the world on fire to cook their horrible burgers and yuk it up with the other sadists in the Bad Uncle club, there’s a real well, fuck it vibe going around.

What else is anyone even supposed to say at this point? It’s gonna be real bad? Yeah, we’ve all been saying that. No one cared. Trump is going to fill the cabinet with whatever Spirit Halloween remote-controlled jump-scare ghouls he thinks will make out with him most enthusiastically or hurt the most people or piss off liberals or, hey, fingers crossed, all three? Yeah, apparently that was a plus. Nothing’s going to get fixed, rights will be lost, and every piece of the country that still works in any way is gonna get its teeth kicked in while a nation of aspiring Mad Max extras laughs and pretends it’s awesome? And all that’s assuming we don’t get into a war because Putin told his monkey to get dancing? I don’t know, man. Guess so.

I’m not a politician, I’m not an analyst, I’m not an economist—hell, I don’t even have a podcast, which means I’m barely a real person. I feel just as fucking defeated and cynical and scared and hopeless and holistically disgusted as everyone else who can define the word tariff without Google and doesn’t own a major newspaper.

But as the shock has begun to wear off, and the sadness numb, what’s left over?

Oh, Christ on a fully-fueled megayacht I am so fucking angry.

And finally, I get to say: IT’S BOTH SIDES, BABY.

And that’s why this particular primal scream of useless rage at the oncoming Snowpiercer baby-eating bug-train of the future is under a paywall, because EVERYBODY’S GONNA GET SOME today, and if you want me to fight with you about it, you gotta pay the troll toll.

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I have things I want to say, and swear about, you know I do. But today I just want to sit with all of you a minute and share something.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book, mostly, but not entirely, for children, called The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Rather a lot of people liked it.

Over the years, that one book became five. Five, and two short stories. And then, in 2016...well. I don't have to tell you. And back then, devastated, not knowing what to do, I got very political online very fast. And I had to deal with a lot of entirely manners-challenged people online who sailed in to tell me how stupid and wrong I was and how much they enjoyed my fear. Because that's a normal thing to feel and do, apparently--and apparently still. But these people would take one look at my profile, see the word "Fairyland," and instantly assume they knew everything about what a dumb, flighty, empty-headed girl I was. Inevitably, they'd screech GO BACK TO YOUR FAIRY TALES at me like they'd just won the argument.

So I did, and I wrote a standalone prequel story called The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End--and Further Still. As a way to process, and to help my friends and readers, perhaps, explain what happened to their kids.

In 2016, I didn't have a child of my own.

Now, I had to take that story down when the big anniversary Fairyland box set came out, Beasts was included in it. But several people contacted me this week to tell me how much the story helped them back then. And it would seem nothing matters and there are no rules anymore, so I don't really give a shit and I'm going to put it back up in case it might help someone else. It's not right for it to be unfindable right now without paying for a five-book set. (You do not have to have read Fairyland at all to read this story, it’s meant to be entirely standalone. The only trick is to know this all takes place long before the action of the novel, in which these forces are defeated by the usual rag-tag group of heroes. The big epic story everyone likes hadn’t even begun, and these characters couldn’t imagine something like that even being possible in their darkest hour.)

It's so fucking sad that, reading this story over this morning, eight years later, there wasn't any need to update it to speak to the present circumstances. Same as it ever was. We're stuck in a time loop, all of us. I was 36 when that man came down his golden escalator. I feel ever so much older than 45 now. And I'll be almost 50 by the time there's any path out. A sobering thought, to understate it rather dramatically.

Do I believe in the hope this story contains today, written when there was some possibility of believing it wouldn't be as bad as we feared, and that the country didn't actually want this? I'm not sure. I don't know what I believe right now.

Except that I do believe in stories. You gotta believe in something.

And I do think, even if you don't feel hopeful, maybe especially if you don't feel hopeful, you have to put on a good face and try to find it, and if you can't find it, fake it a bit, for those who need something to hold onto. We all have to give each other something to hold onto. And sometimes, if you fake it for a minute, it becomes real enough. A small magic the mind can do for itself.

So here is that story, and I dearly wish that it provides somebody out there with a little hope to lean on until their own homegrown is strong enough to stand tall.

The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End—And Further Still

Once upon a time, three rather large and unusual creatures grew very tired indeed of fighting, day and night and day again, fighting the same overwhelming and unyielding enemies, fighting with all their large and scaly might, as well as their claws, teeth, flaming breath, and occasionally, walloping rune-carved giant’s hammers they found lying about where others had fallen. Because the sun was setting rosy in the sky, and because they could hardly bear to put one foot in front of the other, and because, at long last, their fates had been tucked firmly into bed and told to stay there or else, these three rather large and unusual beasts sat down upon a rather large and filthy hill in a country called Fairyland. The hill was filthy because a great battle had been fought there. Bronze and wicker and glass armor lay everywhere strewn about. Swords and axes and scissors and needles and a million thousand arrows turned that hill into a pincushion. Each arrow was fletched in feathers that once belonged to immortal birds so wise that if you asked them to tell you the meaning of life, they would have an answer, and it would be short, and easy to understand, and as true as tea. The three creatures sat carefully on their haunches inside a prickly prison of blades and bows and bucklers.

One was a tall man all in green, armored in a battered green breastplate and a battered green helmet and a green carriage-driver’s cloak and hardy green boots. One was an enormous Leopard with a curling green saddle on her back. The man smoked a long green pipe, and wherever he went a fresh green wind followed. This was not surprising, for he was the Green Wind, and his cat was the Leopard of Little Breezes. Together they brought storms and sighs to all the six corners of the world. The third creature looked something like a dragon. But he could not be a dragon, surely not, for he had no forepaws. His body curved back against his powerful hind legs like a capital S. He was the color of the very last embers of the fire, and his belly was the color of old peaches. He was graceful and gallant and gregarious and grim. His huge claws were very black, their eyes were very orange, their horns were fierce and sharp, they had long whiskers hanging from long snouts, and enormous wings like bats, if bats were far bigger than houses, extremely bony, and not in the least blind.

If you have not guessed it already, this dear and daring beast was a Wyvern. A Wyverary, if we are to be taxonomically accurate, for though his mother was a proper Wyvern, his father was a library. That only sounds strange if both of your parents were precisely the same sort of animal, which hardly ever happens, when you really think about it. He had been named for the family business, for a library has ever so many encylcopedias, and the beast was called A-Through-L. He knew just everything about everything, so long as it began with the letters A through L.

They were all very young, really, too young for all they had seen, but too old not to have seen it. They had only just met today, having fought on the same side, and after today, they would not meet again for a very, very long time. But they had become fast friends, for that is what three people who have survived something dreadful together always do.

The Wyvern looked down from their pincushion hill of swords and arrows into a long, deep valley. It had been very pretty down there once. Lots of blue stones and violet flowers and rabbits and foxes and minks who realized long ago that they all had soft ears and moist noses and hated hunters, and so, rather than fight each other, formed a collective for the Betterment of Us Who Gets Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Our Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy, and lived in reasonable happiness. None of that was down there any longer.  No flowers, no stones, no softness. A great battle had been fought in the Valley of Soft Ears. The last battle of the war, in fact. A stranger had come, an outsider, a mysterious girl with untold riches and untold fury. She had sent her armies screaming through the meadows and forests to seize Fairyland for herself.

It had been a ferocious fight, all against all. One side sent Witches and Magicians and Unicorns and Manticores and Gnomes, whoever would stand, whatever would serve, until, in the end, the last warriors had no more to hurl at one another but their shoes, and then they hurled those, too. The other side Pookas and Dragons and their own Witches and their own Manticores, but most of all they sent Redcaps, in wave after wave, some riding great beasts of the air, some charging on great beasts of the earth, stout and furious creatures who kept their hats red with the blood of those they hated. Stray flashes of spent magic still burbled and rumbled through the valley. Dragons, Wyverns, Sphinxes, Griffins and Harpies, the Flying Ace Corps, wheeled in long, exhausted circles, looking for stragglers to carry off.  Below, the fallen lay where they had lost their last struggles against the army of Redcaps, and even the clouds had begun to weep.

“We lost,” said A-Through-L. His strong voice went all funny in his throat.

“Looks that way, Ell,” said the Green Wind. He did not sound very concerned. “May I call you Ell?”

Ell nodded and sniffed in the cold autumn wind. “The Marquess is going to rule over all of us forever and ever, and she is…she is…terrible.”

“Suppose so.” The Green Wind blew smoke out of both his purple nostrils. The Leopard purred and said nothing. Cats are not terribly talkative.

“But how could we lose, Mr. Green? It’s not possible. All the Sirens and the Witches said we’d win as easy as supper and twice as quick. They said no one so wicked and cruel and so awfully angry could ever rule Fairyland. They said that sort of thing only happens in other worlds that are not so full of magic and wonder as ours. All the prophecies agreed on it.”

“I think I see a Witch in that cage by the big oak tree,” the Green Wind noted, pointing with his pipe. “Being menaced by a lion.”

It was true—down deep in the Valley of Soft Ears, a gargantuan blue lion roared into a silver birdcage, where a young man all in black cowered with his arms curled protectively over his cauldron. Witches brew up the future in their cauldrons, you see. They take up a wooden Spoon and boil a soup out of everything you did today and everything you did yesterday and all the days before, and everything anyone you ever met did, too, and that is how you get a prophecy. This is very much like what statisticians and journalists do in our world, only with less tasty onions and mutton and incantations. Neither of the Wyverns could hear anything over the din of the battle’s end, but I am a Narrator, and my powers of hearing are extremely keen, for I must listen through every closed door, every secret meeting, every whisper in every corner of a tale. I shall tell you what the lion roared. It roared: you will make a new future in your stupid bowl, and it will say all the things we want it to say and none of the things we do not! The new future will say that everything good in Fairyland is down to us and everything that goes sideways is down to our enemies. It will say that we are the best people, with the best plans, and the best words, and the best rulers in the history of bestnesses. Make it say the old King and Queen are liars and villains but the Marquess is a truth-teller and a champion who has released the world from sorrow forever. Make it say she is the only one who can fix Fairyland and make it great.

And to this the Witch said: But none of that is true! Fairyland isn’t broken! The Marquess lies and steals and cheats and snatches folk up for her own use and hates a great many more people than is healthy for a growing girl. Our old King was marvelous! The Queen just wasn’t very good at parties, that’s all. The worst thing she did was accidentally burn up a book of spells one time.

The lion snarled: if you say it, if you boil it up in your bowl, it will become true. Everyone believes Witches. You will be rewarded with gold and jewels.

And when the Witch still refused, the lion thrust a paw through the bars of the cage and swiped away the young man’s wooden Spoon, the great emblem of a Witch’s power. Then we do not need you, laughed the lion. We control the Spoon! Everyone will believe us now!

“But we tried so hard,” whispered the red Wyvern on the hill.

“Why should that make any difference?” answered the Green Wind, who was somewhat older and therefore somewhat more accustomed to things not going his way.

Ell frowned and stared at the churned-up dirt of the ruined hill. He scrunched up his orange eyes so as not to cry.

“Well, because….because it’s a bad story! Stories aren’t supposed to end like this. They’re just not! Things are supposed to get better. Things are supposed to make sense.”

The man all in green lifted one emerald eyebrow. “Oh? Did you never find a story in all of your Papa’s bookshelves in which a wicked dark lord rose up and put a crown on his own head? In which the cruel tyrant covered the land in night and ravaged the countryside, destroying and devouring and devastating the lives of people both gentle and kind? Did you never find one single tale in the corner of your noble father’s stacks where folk banded together and rose up against this terrible King, standing back to back and crying out: we do not look to be ruled?”

“Well, of course I did, Mr. Green! But in all those stories, at the end of all those stories, the dark lord was cast down into infinite nothingness or burnt to a crisp or at the very least sent to bed without supper, and everyone cheered and danced and had a party afterward. But the end of this story is that we lost and she gets to do whatever she wants to us forever. How shall we ever have parties again? How shall we cheer? How shall we dance? I don’t think the Marquess likes dancing. I think she only likes cheering if people are cheering her name and I think she only likes parties if they’re her own birthday and she gets all the presents.”

“Perhaps this is not the end of the story, then,” the Green Wind said kindly, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. It was important to say it to the brokenhearted, to the young, to everyone, even if he didn’t believe his own words. Especially if he didn’t believe it. If no one didn’t say it, it couldn’t even start being true.

“It feels like the end,” said A-Through-L with a strangled cry.

“It always does, when you lose.” The Green Wind took off his green helmet and laid it on the grass between two arrows. “But haven’t we had tyrants and fools and hobgoblins on the throne before? Haven’t we had rather a lot of hobgoblins? Aren’t hobgoblins rather more the rule than the exception?”

“Yes…”

“And haven’t we always patched up their mischief and gotten back to more or less living how we want to live and loving who we want love and making what we want to make and being who we want to be?”

“Yes…”

“Perhaps Fairyland is stronger than her goblins, my ravishing reptile. Perhaps, if you take a long enough view, we are all stronger than our goblins.”

“But this is different! Oh, I feel it in my bones! She is menacing the Witches and hunting down the Stregas who heal our wounds and she told the foxes and rabbits and minks that they deserved to be Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Their Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy and I have heard…I have heard she even wants to outlaw the study of Queer Physicks. How will we have magic without the queerest of all the sciences? Oh, I know all about Different, Mr. Green, for it begins with D. And this feels different.”

“It always does, when you lose.” The Green Wind stroked the Leopard of Little Breezes’ spotted head. Far below, a Griffin cried out in pain and ran terrified from the ruined battlefield, the ruined valley which once held so many soft ears. “But perhaps you are right. I have heard worse still, Ell. I have heard the Marquess longs to build a wall between Fairyland and the human world, so that no human children may ever come here and have adventures again. Though I may have some small thing to say about that, myself. The Marquess is certainly deplorable, and she lusts after deplorable things.”

“But if she is so deplorable, why did all those noble Dragons and Griffins and Gnomes and Centaurs and Glashtyn and Pixies fight for her? She has an army of dreadful, sneering Redcaps who love her desperately and want nothing more than to stain their caps even redder with the blood of her enemies. I suppose I understand the Redcaps. It’s their nature to hurt things. But the others? There must be something wonderful about her if they love her desperately. You cannot love anything desperately that does not have some tiny wonder buried inside it.”

The Green Wind stared into the darkening sky for a long time. “There is a dreadful sort of spell that certain people can cast, Ell. It is a very ancient and powerful spell, but difficult to pull off. All the circumstances must be just right. If you fall under the spell, you hear a story every night when you fall asleep and every morning when you wake up and you hear it twice at lunchtime. It is a story about yourself, a story that sounds so good and true that you fall in love with it. You want to hear it again and again. You snuggle up to it for warmth. You set a place for it at the dinner table. The story tells you that the world is an easy and simple place, and you—yes, you!—are the very center of it. You are a hero, the hero, and nothing beastly that has ever happened to you is your fault. Very soon you will be loved and treasured and celebrated the way you ought to be, the way you always should have been. Very soon indeed…if only those wretched…oh, let us say Satyrs. If only those wretched Satyrs were not taking all the good bits of everything for themselves and keeping your cupboards empty.”

“Why would the Satyrs steal from me?” breathed Ell, wide-eyed. “What have I ever done to them? Are all these frightful battles their doing? Let’s go and talk very sternly to them, at once! Anything, if only I might feel safe and warm and hopeful again!”

The Green Wind laughed sourly. He shook his head. Starlight reflected in his eyes. “No, my woebegone Wyvern. You don’t understand. The Satyrs have done nothing to you. They live in the forest and eat mulberries and moonbeams and dance at their Sabbats. What has that to do with your sorrows? It’s only the story.  You see what a good story it is! Why, it’s the story everyone and their auntie wants to hear! It’s the best story, the softest and coziest story every told! You began to believe it at once, and you have never had a quarrel with a Satyr in all your life. But the story is no good without a villain. It can’t feel true without a villain. Otherwise, everything would already be as it ought to be, yes? Someone has to be at fault. And if you are the hero, it stands to reason that folk who do not look like you or talk like you or like to eat the same things you like to eat must be the villains. After all, the world is easy and simple, is it not? And once people hear this story, once this spell is cast…they get lost inside of it. They cannot see anything but the story, and if anything comes along that might tear the tiniest hole in the story, they will hate it like a fanged toad, for the story has become more important than even themselves. That is what the Marquess did, only she used the foxes and rabbits and minks instead of Satyrs to finish her spell. And all those Redcaps and all those Dragons would rather die for her than let any harm come to the story that sings them to bed at night. Because the world is not easy or simple, and it is very, very hard to get to sleep when the dark is so deep and the cold is so sharp.”

The Wyverary twisted his claws together. “Maybe it won’t be so bad, then. If it’s only a story. If she only wants frightened people to sleep well and sleep soft. Maybe she doesn’t really mean any of it, and once she has her crown, she will be kind and good. People do all kinds of fearsome things for the sake of crowns. I’ve never understood it. Crowns itch.”

They looked down into the gruesome battlefield, now pale with mist and full of the sounds of weeping. A throng of Redcaps were stalking the wreckage, looking for anyone with wings. Whenever they found some poor half-dead Harpy or Ifrit, they pulled a long bronze chain out of a great rough sack and fastened down their wings, one to the other, with an extremely serious looking lock. Ell’s wings prickled with gooseflesh. The Green Wind said nothing. The Leopard of Little Breezes yawned, showing her teeth.

“I suppose you’re right,” Ell sighed. “It is rather silly to think the best of someone whose done all this to us already. I hadn’t much hope. But…” A-Through-L’s eyes grew very big in the dark, two enormous pumpkin-lanterns floating in the shadows. “But…oh, I know it’s a ghastly thing to say, but perhaps I might be safe, at least? You and I and your Leopard? We are not foxes or rabbits or minks, after all.”

“The spell grows and grows as people fall under its power. And to grow, it must always have new food. I cannot promise that the story will not start whispering in certain ears that Wyverns are lazy criminals who ruin the radiant city of Pandemonium with their dirty nests and fiery breath and loud crowing.”

“I’m not a criminal! I’ve never even been to Pandemonium!”

“It’s the story, my dulcet dragonkin. The story doesn’t care what is true. It only cares what feels true. And you are big and frightening to people who are neither reptilian nor capable of flight. Who knows? Perhaps the Marquess will even find a way to banish the Winds and we will be exiled, too.”

“Oh, I am so afraid! I am so sad I can hardly stand staying inside my skin! What are we going to do, Green? How are we meant to live? Is the Marquess’s story so strong that it can just stomp all over my story forever? They’re going to chain my wings and if I can’t fly, what am I? Who am I?”

The Leopard of Little Breezes lifted her spotted black-and-gold head and rested it on the Wyvern’s great red toe.

“Do you remember the first magic you ever learned, Beast?” The Leopard’s voice was soft and rumbly and rough as a mother cat’s tongue.

Ell did not think he knew any particular magic even now, except for the magic of being who he was. Yes, who he was was a very large, very red, fire-breathing lizard who could fly, which was a bit magical, but nothing out of the ordinary.

“The first magic anyone learns is saying No,” purred the Leopard of Little Breezes. “It’s how you know a baby is starting to turn into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their magic at everything to see what it’ll stick to. And if they say No loud enough, and often enough, and to the right person, strange things will happen. The nasty supper is taken away. The light is left on at night instead of turned out. The toy comes out of the shop window. It is such old magic, such basic magic, that most folk don’t even know it’s magic anymore.” The Leopard of Little Breezes rubbed her paw over her ear. “You can say No to that story. You can say No to the spell, to the Marquess, to the lions, to all of it. And if you say it loud enough, and often enough, strange things will begin to happen.”

“But that’s easy. I can say No all day long!”

The Leopard growled. “It’s very much harder to say No to a tyrant than to say No to a plate of beans or a dark bedroom. Harder still to do it while your wings are tied down and blistered. And you cannot stop saying it, even if it would feel so marvelous, so easy, so much less work to just be silent and hope it all comes out right somehow.”

Ell’s eyes filled with turquoise tears. “It does sound hard. So terribly hard. I don’t want to live through this sort of story. I want to live through one of the nice tales, the ones that take place between hobgoblins, the ones where you don’t have to spend every day blistering and saying No to horrors. Why couldn’t we just not have horrors at all? Then no one would have to say No.”

Oh, my dear, darling Wyverary. So do we all. But so few of us get to. Not even a silly narrator like me. The only comfort there can be is that very few sagas of bravery and wonder occur in the space between hobgoblins. Perhaps, my most beloved lizard, one will even happen to you. But that is not much comfort, I know.

“But then, of course, there is the other side of the apple. There is Yes Magic,” the Green Wind said gently.

“I like the sound of that better, even if it begins with Y,” nodded the Wyverary.

The Leopard of Little Breezes looked up at the Wyvern with enormous black eyes. She spoke in a very soft, very serious voice, the voice any cat uses when the time for yarn and nip is past and there is only the cold night coming.

“Every time you say Yes to anything, to anyone, you change the shape of your world. You agree to supper with a stranger, and now you have a friend. You say that you would certainly like to take a journey to the ocean, and now the ocean is in your heart forever. The Redcaps said Yes to the Marquess, and the world is very much changed. But we…we must say Yes to each other. We must say Yes to the needful, to the suffering, to the lonely, to those the Marquess punishes for saying No to her. We must band together, back to back, and say Yes to everyone who lost today, for we are all family now, and our loss is our new last name. If we must hide, we will hide. If we must flee, we will flee. If we must fight all of this all over again, we will do it and complain the whole time. We must say Yes to the story where, after a long battle, the dark lord is cast down into infinite nothingness or burnt to a crisp or at the very least sent to bed without supper, and everyone cheers and dances and has a party afterward. But most of all, we must say Yes to the truth and the speaking of it. We must say No to silence. And perhaps, one day, a long time from now, something new and extraordinary will happen and the Marquess will defeated, and she will blow away on the wind, no heavier than a memory.”

A-Through-L looked down into the Valley of Soft Ears. He could see the Marquess there, strutting through the ruined earth with a crown on her head and a smile on her lips, knighting her gloating generals and showering them with jewels and titles and kisses. He could see her men fastening bronze chains round anything that flew. He could see the trees drooping down in sorrow, their leaves just barely tinged with red, with autumn, with the coming of September.

“I understand what you mean,” Ell said finally. His whiskers whipped in the sour wind. He straightened his back and his scarlet tail. “You mean defiance. I know all about Defiance. It begins with D.”

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I know it's my job to be one of the people who Says Something About It.

I know it's my job to be one of the people who says something comforting, or at least insightful, or at a minimum cathartic. I'll try soon. I promise.

But I just don't have anything right now. I can't even look at the analysis, or the internet at all. Not yet. I don't even know how to describe what I feel. I would have to actually cheer up to climb my way through to plain old nihilism right now.

And when the post-mortems are all said and done and the numbers are crunched, that's what I think happened here. I'm not sure what Democrats could have done differently. In 2016 this country was fucking around thrill-seeking and wrecked the family car. I think now we're just openly self-harming and seeking the void.

But what the fuck do I know. I hope the media's happy. They got what they wanted and can pretend to be concerned while calling themselves heroes of democracy.

It all hits over and over, different angles of how dark this truly is. I didn' t have a child in 2016. I don't even know how to look at them now. I am so afraid. I feel so helpless and empty.

I don't know what's going to happen next. Neither do you. Neither does anyone, especially those who tell you they do. I know most of us are stuck dealing with whatever it turns out to be. Most of us don't have anywhere realistic to go, and there's no escaping America's reach, anyway.

So the only way out is through. This is the challenge of our lifetimes. How to resist and how to live. It fucking sucks. I have no answers. Not today. But I keep thinking about the old zen proverb.

Master, what do I do before enlightenment?

Chop wood, carry water.

Master, what do I do after enlightenment?

Chop wood, carry water.

So I suppose that's all I have in the way of comfort. So far. For myself or you.

What do we do before disaster?

Chop wood, carry water.

What do we do after disaster?

Chop wood, carry water.

We have to try. We can't give up. We have to take care of each other as best we can. We can't let ourselves be silenced. We have to circle up, backs to backs, and protect one another, especially those who are most vulnerable to this oncoming future. We have to find a way to hold on to whatever is nailed down well enough in America that they cannot steal it, whatever structures and bulwarks can take our weight. There will be some.

But for now, in these last three months of the era, we chop wood and we carry water. We hold our children and our loved ones. We try. Because there isn't anything else we can do.

We still have each other. We are going to have to make that enough.

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It’s almost over. One way or the other.

I think I’ve aged ten years since the first primary. Twenty since 2020.

A century since 2016.

And I do feel cautiously optimistic about tomorrow. Cautiously. Because I have SOME VERY REAL PTSD ABOUT 2016. When we were so sure. When, even with everything going on, we thought there was no way America would elect that guy. That we were on the verge of the first female President. When we were excited to see the oh-so-cocky MAGA camp meltdown in defeat. I painted my nails red, white, and blue. I wore suffragette white to vote, and a jewelry-version of RBG’s dissent collar.

And I will never forget watching everything slowly fall apart at the Democratic Party’s official event

And I’m…not real thrilled to see this same sort of sentiment floating around the day before this election.

Yeah, that Selzer poll was crazy surprising and injected hopium into everybody all at once like that scene in Pulp Fiction. Yeah, the early voting demographics and numbers look pretty good. Yeah, the vibe you and I feel, in our bubbles online and in real life, is that this is maybe probably gonna happen. Yeah, it should happen because voting against micro

I DO NOT TRUST THAT SHIT.

You know what I trust?

I trust Democrats’ deep, passionate, and powerful longing to not vote. I don’t understand it, but it’s as reliable as sunrise and the tide and white male comics complaining that their warmed-over take my wife, please jokes are being silenced to millions of views and dollars. Democrats FUCKING LOVE not voting. At the drop of the smallest and most irrelevant novelty hat, Dems seem to start celebrating, throw up our hands and joyfully not the fuck vote because…blue state so it doesn’t matter (yes it does, downballot dingus)/I got stuff to do and it’s a done deal (it isn’t, and we will all have a lot more shit to do if Elon Musk gets to Twitter our economy while RFK leaves the rotting carcass of public health in a park for fun and Trump sells the entire country to Putin for $599 and a kiss)/electoralism doesn’t work (oh my god hold my earrings)/my not voting sends a message to the establishment (they have no way of knowing why you didn’t vote, it could have been because Chipotle had a BOGO deal that day, your message is just a blank, subjectless email sent to no one)if Trump gets in it will accelerate us toward the revolution and people will rise up (he was already in power and there was no glorious leftist revolution, just the breakdown of society and suffering, also a revolution would not turn out with gentle loving progressives in charge)/the candidate isn’t perfect and will win anyway so I can stay pure (they won’t necessarily win anyway and not doing the bare minimum of saying please not fascism though is literally the opposite of political purity) or whatever reason seems fun that day.

It’s absolutely galling. And I’m so afraid we’re about to coast on vibes into another brick wall of assholes who get visibly excited talking about daddy punishing America for being such a bad girl. (And by the way, I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO, guys) running our entire lives directly into the core of the fucking earth.

I’m hoping, too. But it’s very easy to forget how much of this country doesn’t pay attention at all, how much of this country hates women and POC and have no reason to be shy about that anymore, how much of this country went through their most formative years before the Civil Rights Act, Roe, or women being allowed their own bank accounts, how much of this country was so traumatized by COVID they have just aggressively memory-holed the entire thing plus everything else we went through from 16-20, and how much of this country literally just doesn’t give a shit, wants to watch the world (just not their cute lil house) burn, and profoundly enjoys watching others suffer.

And that part of the country? Never miss an election. They turn out every time to vote for pain and anger and fear and repression of others. They fucking love voting, because they fully understand it’s how they can get their way whether there’s more of them or not, while the rest of us seem to have a real tough time with that lesson.

I live on a small island. I moved here on November 1st, 2008. A few days later, we elected Obama in a landslide, and it was one of the most special nights of my life. Everyone crammed into the local bar, watching it happen. We’d voted in Ohio before moving so that it would count more, and when Ohio went blue, you’d have thought my ex and I had done it just the two of us. We didn’t pay for a single drink that night. The joy in the air was so intense and wonderful.

All those people, so happy, feeling like we’d accomplished something real. That the world was about to change.

AND THEN TWO YEARS LATER NOBODY FUCKING SHOWED UP AND THE WORST REPUBLICANS MOVED ON INTO CONGRESS. And we were all surprised! I’m not exempt from this at all, either. I was young and dumb as a broken fencepost and I didn’t vote in the midterms. Have I learned my lesson? Yes. Has everyone else? I MEAN MAYBE BUT WHAT ARE THE CHANCES. Democrats just hate voting regularly. If all registered Dems voted, even Texas would be blue. But we don’t. We just refuse. Someone else will do the work, right? Someone else will make it okay. Someone else will fix it so we don’t have to pay attention.

And then we’re all shocked when SCOTUS is made up of out of three decent people, two out-of-touch old men, a seething frathouse rapist, a corporate lich, Serena Joy, and Clayton fucking Bigsby.

You can’t be shocked. We have to turn out, and at best, we seem to be able to manage it about once every other Presidential cycle. People keep whining that Democrats have been calling Republicans fascists for too many cycles, but we’ve been doing that because it’s literally just the same people over and over again. Reagan’s administration was half Nixon men, the first Bush’s was half Nixon and Reagan men, the second Bush’s was whoever was still breathing out of that ring of hell, Trump’s was half bonkers right-wing grifters and half whoever was left standing by the 2010s out of Roger Stone’s ancient shrieking goblin tribe of well-dressed national vampires. Who had mostly also been around since Nixon, plotting revenge. It’s been the same gang of Pennywise understudies slurping out of the public trough while starving the rest of us since my parents were kids, and yes, they are fascists. They just think it’s not fascism when they do it. It’s just the way things oughtta be, don’t you know?

THAT IS LITERALLY WHAT ALL FASCISTS THINK BUT FINE WHATEVER.

The point is, my heart is full of hope but my guts are full of dread. Not because of them, because of us. Because we have failed to protect ourselves and our neighbor so many times by giving up our voice and choosing not to vote. Because so many of us still want to vote for Jill Stein even though I’ve never met one single person who genuinely loves her and wants her in (funny how her not being perfect is fine with protest voters but the candidate with an actual chance not being perfect is intolerable), only those who want to use their vote to punish someone else. Because when optimism abounds, Democrats stay home.

Yes, it can be hard to get time off of work. It is also hard for Republicans to get time off, and early or mail-in voting is available in all but three states, only one of which is even close to a swing state (New Hampshire, because New Hampshire just HAS to do their own thing). Yes, voter suppression is everywhere, so yes, we have to try a little harder in some places. But we have to try. Please try. No, voting for Kamala isn’t going to end capitalism or fix Gaza or even make your groceries cheaper tomorrow, but what it does is make those things even remotely possible in the future.

The Democrats have been begging people to vote for 18 months now. I’m begging. Please don’t sell us to that creature and his rogues’ gallery. Please let us just try to get a little better every year, to fix more problems, to end more injustices, as best we can, within the law, as best we know how, within contemporary mores, as best we are able, given that America doesn’t actually rule the world. And if you aren’t voting because you think America is an evil empire—hold onto your fucking hats if MAGA wins.

Nothing is perfect. Everything sucks to a greater or lesser degree, most of the time. But that doesn’t mean we get to just nihilistically lie down and let these weirdos tell us who we are or how we can be allowed to exist. They don’t get to do that.

Everything hinges on tomorrow. Go. Vote. Speak. Say no to the last nine years of having to hear that man absorb and curdle every single part of daily life into his own stew of narcissism and sadism. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the rest of us, who want to determine our own lives and have a political party in power who can be persuaded to act for the people. Who, most of the time, try to all on their own.

Or do it for the next generation who cannot speak for themselves yet, but deserve to grow up to be whatever they can be, and not punished for not conforming to Gilead’s latest decree.

I don’t care who you do it for. I hope you do it for yourself. Just vote.

And if Kamala wins, if we escape this particular bad timeline, you have to keep voting. It isn’t ever over, because this push-me-pull-you between conservative control and liberal freedom has been going on for centuries. It does not end. Don’t you dare leave her hanging out to dry in the midterms. There is no permanent victory. And yeah, victory tomorrow doesn’t fix much right away. That work is hard and unlovely and takes so many years and so much arguing, so much compromise. But the needle does move. Toward something more open, something brighter. The first step is just not literally electing a supervillain.

There is and can never be any final repudiation of conservatism. You have to show up every time, forever, or there is no progress, on any cause you or I care about. And some progress is always better than losing progress.

It’s just one action a year. If my generation can finally learn to do that, maybe there is a future ahead that has room for all of us, and not just a few rich men full of hatred who think love, mercy, peace, kindness, and diversity are mortal sins.

Don’t get cocky. We can lose so easily tomorrow. Fill in the little bubble next to: I and my loved ones would rather not descend into a ravenous maelstrom of suffering today.

We don’t ever get to tune out again. Let’s get this done and start arguing over how to fix things rather than arguing over our right to continue existing with people who never wanted us to in the first place.

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I don’t know, man.

I just don’t know.

Was I surprised Donald “Art of the Happy Meal” Trump decided to round off an election bid that has been echoing through the last four years like a long, wet, deafening Dadaist fart in the fascist fucking wind machine by utterly mat-assing the dismount via one big ol’ Madison Square Garden Nazi struggle session full of ids let off the chain, smug gloating over their unstoppable supervillain plans, and absolutely crusted racist, sexist, and homophobic mouth-vuvuzelaing with a side of murderous rhetoric?

Come on. Not even a little bit. Last week he sad he wanted to be a whale psychiatrist super bad, you guys. It’s his passion. Can you even imagine how excited the staffer who got to book THE American Nazi venue for THE new American Nazis? (After making double sure it wasn’t Madison Square Garden & Lawn Care Emporium?) Oh, I bet he could hardly wait to send the dork army out to infest the media cycle telling everyone how stupid they are for making that very simple connection anyone would make, and that the Trump campaign 100% wants everyone to make.

This fucking clown-van full of wannabe Pennywises cannot hide their hideous flag-swaddled erections whenever they feel like they’re getting close to being able to kill everyone they don’t like and laugh about it on TV to thunderous applause. (That last part is key, though. Wholesale slaughter is just no fun if no one tells you you’re an awesome big strong handsome boy for doing it and throws you a big party to celebrate your achievement!) They giggle like schoolboys every time they say something naughty, coquettishly twirl their hair and wag their fingers at us, daring themselves to go a little further every time, then gasping at the audacity of normal fucking humans to…you know…take them at their word.

Was I surprised everyone got BIG MAD about a comedian calling Puerto Rico an island of garbage in the middle of a set that had far more vile and revolting racist-ass jokes lined up with which to bukkake that hungry audience Gallagher-style, opening for people who not only had worse and uglier shit to say, but people who are actually, publicly, loudly planning to liquefy our future and sell it back to us in leaky plastic bin-bags for millions a pop?

And that the media cycle hasn’t instantly buried that for them? (Don’t worry, they’re working on it. Very busy at the moment pretending Biden called all Trump supporters garbage, which he didn’t, and also it really wouldn’t be the same if he had, he called their comments on Latinos garbage, but no reason not to try to pull a Mortal Kombat fatality on democracy at the 11th hour, right, Fourth Estate? Honestly it’s so predictable and I’m so exhausted pitching myself into the cold and unforgiving sea is starting to sound pretty all right.)

And that this, this, of all the Tales from Beyond Cthulhu bonkers blood-drenched psychotically cruel 6000 pounds of hate and darkness in a 2.5 pound bag screeching murdershit Trump and his frathouse of D-list demons who failed to launch out of hell have pumped into this nation and the minds of all of us, this is what is making Latinos question whether to vote for him?

YEAH I’M PRETTY SURPRISED.

AND I WROTE AN ENTIRE BOOK ABOUT AN ISLAND OF GARBAGE FLOATING IN THE SEA.

WELCOME TO GARBAGETOWN INDEED.

Honestly, maybe I just don’t actually understand politics that well. Maybe I should scuttle this whole political essay thing entirely. I don’t get it. What? Why this? Because this isn’t even the worst thing Trump himself has said about Puerto Rico. My friends, he has hated you from the minute someone managed to get it through his hot buttered brain scramble that Puerto Rico wasn’t a fantastical land invented to flesh out the worldbuilding in West Side Story like Middle fucking Earth. This illiterate cousin’s uncle, who turns up every year to an intensely awkward Harkonnen Thanksgiving table cranked out of his diaper on ornithopter wiper-fluid has never said the words Puerto Rico without sounding like he just wiped something off his shoe.

It’s so hard to keep track of what I’m actually allowed to be angry about versus what I am commanded to instantly forget and not make a big deal of because FOONIE JOAKES.

I know remembering recent events is not exactly on trend these days, but…I mean…remember when he withheld aid because he though the mayor of San Juan was too mean to him? And threw paper towels at people after a hurricane? And repeatedly, repeatedly, as in, every single time the subject comes up, phrases his sentences in such a way that it’s completely clear that he either doesn’t know PR is part of America, doesn’t consider it to be despite reality, or thinks it should immediately stop? A guy who can’t put sentences together any better than he can put his shitty Spirit Halloween makeup on, but somehow, on the subject of this one place, is fully capable of cleverly crafting implicit rhetoric without slipping up and accidentally knowing the basic factual geography of the nation he wants to rule?

NOW we’re mad?

I don’t even want to get into whether it was funny, because that’s not even the point of conservatives saying it was a joke. I can’t express how disappointed I am in Jon Stewart for siding with his comedian-soul rather than his decency-soul and getting wrapped up in that part of the (barf) “discourse.”

Look: it wasn’t funny, it was stupid, tired, pointless, and even the set up revolves tightly around bringing up something important, that normal people care about, to a group of people the speaker knows don’t give one lonely windswept fuck, and only even understand the reference in the first place because it’s hysterical to them when normal people care about things other than themselves. It’s not even a joke, because that’s just what conservative edgelords actually think about Puerto Rico and the environment.

Have you ever seen one of this ding-dongs actually try to tell a joke? First, there’s only one punchline: I’m amazing, you’re a piece of human filth, and you deserve suffering while I deserve to watch. They almost always fall directly onto their faces and then blame liberals for not laughing. Dennis Miller, one of the funniest people ever, sent himself off to the hinterlands because even he couldn’t make conservative thoughts funny and relatable.

They also never say it was a joke when their attempts to comprehend comedy, an art form about catharsis, shared experience, speaking truth to power, and upending expectations to make people look at life in a different way, thus entirely antithetical to conservative ideals and goals, fail to get a callback. That would mean acknowledging their joke didn’t land and they’re the bestest at everything.

No, conservatives only bleat it was a joke when they’ve just said exactly what they mean and think, with a straight goddamned face, direct to camera, and a dim, flickering notion that they might get in trouble for it this time crosses their rage-dessicated brainpan.

(Ha ha they won’t.)

A joke relies on an unexpected reversal of expectations or upending of the audience’s everyday assumptions somewhere between the set-up and the punchline. But this specific audience never expected or assumed a set-up about a floating island of garbage in the sea was going to actually be about how we fucking created a floating island of garbage in the sea with all our consumerist hog-snorfling and short-sighted maritime policy. They assumed and expected it was gonna turn into some kind of insult at the expense of some group of people, because that’s their fetish, and no one turned up to Madison Square Fucking Garden on Discount Nazi Night to NOT get their fetishes seen to. They got what they expected, they just didn’t know which group of people, and were maybe mildly surprised it wasn’t Haitians, probably. That makes it a shit joke; the equivalent of yelling WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD in someone’s face and then blarfing back WE ALL FUCKING HATE CHICKENS AM I RIGHT FRIEND before they can say anything back, then expecting a Mark Twain Prize for it.

But hey, for once, I guess, we’re only sort of blaming the comic who said it, and mostly, correctly, pointing out that it’s all on the guy whose name is so grossly and obnoxiously in giant letters on everything. And it’s really no better to not vet what speakers plan to say at the biggest event of your campaign, in a place where SUPER-SPECIFIC PEOPLE HAVE SUPER NOTABLY SAID SOME SUPER-SPECIFIC TOP-TIER EVIL SHIT RIGHT BEFORE DOING EVERY LAST BIT OF IT?

Wait, what’s that? Oh, Hinchcliffe’s (which seriously sounds like Andy Kaufman’s new alter ego) set was absolutely vetted, because he planned to call Kamala Harris a cunt, and some poor intern squeaked out hey maybe not? Americans get pretty weird about that word? But A++ to taking a shit on Puerto Rico, bro! The part where you made everyone think you were gonna say something about the very real and very bad news great Pacific garbage patch but instead you switched it up and made a flaccid racist joke about your own country? Fuckin’ hilarious, bro.

I mean, first of all, at this point, why not call her the “c-word,” as the media is helpfully using despite being happy to print any other profanity these days, so that the right can pretend it stands for “communist” while, again, giggling and blushing and winking like a kid with a crush, and that crush is emphatically not on us. They might as well. The media would’ve laundered it for them with a smile and a backrub. They all think it. We all know it. If whatever gremlin-handlers are left doing actual campaign work were smart enough to balk at that, I’m not sure why “Latinos love having babies, they don’t care, they just come inside” was A-OK fun for the…well. Whole fuckin’ family, I guess. Maybe I just lived in Scotland too long, where cunt is a friendly greeting AND a floor cleaner, so I don’t care about that word anymore, but I can’t really see a comedian getting up there and being a misogynist prick moving anyone’s needle much. It’s kind of their brand.

BUT MAYBE I DON’T KNOW SHIT ABOUT SHIT BECAUSE APPARENTLY THIS IS STICKING WHEN “YES I WILL TURN THE AMERICAN MILITARY AGAINST AMERICAN CITIZENS IF THEY DON’T AGREE WITH ME AND IF YOU THINK I MISSPOKE HERE IT COMES AGAIN, WITH GUSTO” DIDN’T.

Is this actually finally generating the kind of rage every single thing Trump has ever said since sailing down a golden escalator with Resting Mussolini Face should have? Is it actually making Latino voters notice that this toad-souled witch’s curse we’ve all suffered with for a decade specifically, violently, and really, really openly loathes Latinos in particular?

Maybe? There had been some new endorsements and a lot of think-pieces, but the shock and unexpected attention span with which the media is treating this seems all out of proportion given the rest of what happened at that exact rally and also since 2015. No part of the media landscape seems to be able to focus on the detailed horror, privation, fear, and mayhem Trump and Musk are promising to deliver for more than two seconds after the third Betterhelp.com commercial break. But this one they’re holding onto. Not the part where Elon “I Am Good At Many Business” Musk is Trump’s new running mate, not the part where these two billionaires have apparently agreed between them to Thelma & Louise the economy straight into the screaming void, leaving all of the Americas as an island of trash floating in the sea, and certainly not that both of them have acknowledged on the record that their plans will do exactly that and they’re looking forward to it omg so fun guys!

Obviously threatening to kill anyone who disagrees with a guy who can’t remember what he said an hour ago didn’t even make a fucking blip.

Is the media finally peering into next week and realizing how holistically they done fucked up?

Maybe? But why? Scrambling to distract from that whole festive arrangement of broligarchs suddenly caring so deeply and authentically about journalistic neutrality that they just can’t endorse a candidate this year. And only this year. For reasons. Really good, double plus neutral journalism reasons. They don’t even seem to care much about the rest of the technicolor Nazi floorshow on display that night. They opened by playing fucking Dixie, for god’s sake. It’s all out in the open.

I’m not trying to make light of what a nasty fuckdumb thing to say about an American territory that’s been treated unfathomably poorly by us for pretty much always. I understand how big the PR diaspora is. It could make a difference. Many things could that haven’t gotten this oxygen.

Quite literally, two days ago, Trump got his carcass up on TV and said he and the Republican Speaker of the House had a “little secret” plan to secure the election for him no matter what the voting shows, and then, a few hours later, that same Republican Speaker of the House also went on TV and agreed that it was a super cool secret plan and he wasn’t gonna tell because you don’t tell secrets and as far as I can tell no one gives a fuck beyond lol what lovable scamps!

Is that it? Better to blanket the news with feigned pearl-clutching over a douchebag comedian with an inevitably douchebag podcast saying exactly what Republicans happily admit they think about Puerto Rico any old day, when they can be bothered to think about it at all, and pretend it’s some kind of October surprise that Trump is a huge racist who likes racists and hangs out with racists and is basically a make-work programs for racists everywhere, than to deal seriously with one political party has become a gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames nodding along and agreeing that yes, indeed, they are a gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames GET IN THIS GIBBERING HELLJAW, AMERICA, while the very part of our society that’s supposed to be in charge of revealing the truth and pointing out when the government is getting too twitchy did virtually nothing to stop them?

That’s really all I’ve got. Because this country seems to still think it’s some kind of FUCKING JOKE that we’re all voting between a future with problems, but more or less normal problems normal people can try solving, and the gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames, and the skull of flames is doing pretty well in the polls once the media gets done saying they just don’t know Kamala well enough yet.

We have the opportunity to say no to that, to that terrible future where JD Vance gets to decide what happens to our bodies, Elon Musk gets to decide what happens to our money, RFK Jr and his purple Thanos face gets to decide what happens to our food and medicine, Stephen Miller gets to decide what happens to our neighbors, and Donald “Your Favorite Monster’s Favorite Monster” Trump gets to decide what happens to everyone else. AND WE MIGHT NOT. BECAUSE EW LADIES I GUESS.

I can’t comprehend why anyone is still laughing. Why anyone thinks life will just continue normally after Tuesday if these carrion-eaters get back into power. Yeah, conservatives think Puerto Rico is trash. They think we’re all trash. Just compost to feed their growth. I will never understand why it’s just so much fun to hate and harm other people than it is to just…be rich in an advanced technological society full of comfort, entertainment, and possibility where anything you want can be had in a moment. Or not be rich but still be pretty okay plus same, as most Trump supporters are.

But this is a bad world getting ready to shoot its shot, telling us it’s bad and will feel bad, and we’re still sitting around making jokes. The millisecond Biden said the word garbage, legacy media informed us all Trump was fine now and it’s basically the same. Normal, often shitty, but still functional, life, or a vast hellscape of pain? BASICALLY THE SAME.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next week. I wish I even had a guess. So many things seem to be happening that we can’t see but the media could, if they tried, yet won’t. Please vote. Please do the minimum to not let us become the new Reich. Please see through all this noise to a signal we can hold onto. Please don’t let these goblin men write the history of this century. They’re not even offering anything in exchange for our everything.

See, the thing about carrion-eaters is that something pretty big has to die in order for them to feast.

If we don’t literally lay down and die for them, they will starve, and we will go on.

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