Kittens, I suspect even my mild case of COVID hit me harder than I thought it did. One month on and a persistent feeling of exhaustion remains, and I’m trying to figure out it it’s just the usual January blues, the pandemic lockdown blues, or the widely touted longer term effects of the disease which has officially killed over 100,000 people in the UK.

Chicken and egg, eh? Am I broken…or is the world just kinda like this now?

I have no conclusions. Scholars remain divided.

Anyway, in spite of…everything…there are moments of joy to celebrate. Hannah’s THIRD book was announced, and X got engaged! Truly friendships are the balm of the soul, I’m so delighted for my girl squad I could just bust. Here’s your usual mix of Deep and Dumb from the internet to get you through the last weekend of the first month of this sure-to-be-cursed year.

We are still finding out more about the Capitol raid and ProPublica has a great (if somewhat distressing) compliation piece on the POV from Parler before it lost its hosting options. Sidenote, the whole attempt by the GOP to just pretend that January 6th never happened is sort of making me lose my mind.

“And as America has exported QAnon conspiracy theories across the Atlantic, European conspiracy theories and disinformation are also making their way to the United States.”

I think people aren’t nearly concerned enough with the Fermi paradox overall, but that’s just me. If the universe is empty but for us…why? And if it’s not…where is everybody?

Everything Is Broken. “If…the idea of mass brokenness seems both excruciatingly correct and also paralyzing, come sit with me. Being on a ship nearly 4 million square miles in area along with 330 million other people and realizing the entire hull is pockmarked with holes is terrifying. But being afraid to face this reality won’t make it less true. And this is the reality.”

100,000 people are dead in the UK and still these people…

“If you want it in a sentence, I guess it goes something like this: The GameStop saga is a ludicrous stock mania born of pandemic boredom and FOMO, piggybacking off of a clever Reddit revenge plot, which targeted hedge funds, who made a reckless bet on a struggling retailer—and it’s going to end with lots of people losing incredible amounts of money.” It was a wild week on Wall Street, fam.

Facts may not care about your feelings, but your partisan view does not care about facts. That’s bad and scary for all of us.

Trauma-bonded nostalgia for the 90s and how the 30-year cycle of reboots displays itself in pop culture and politics. Also summarized generational anxiety in its current form more succinctly than anything else I’ve come across: “…and young people don’t feel trapped by the future, because nobody believes in the future anymore.” But also a plea to give up on nostalgia and try brave and terrifying alternative possibilities instead.

My freshman year roommate at university and I had a theory, that The Emperor’s New Groove is the most quotable movie of all time and that there is a quote for practically every occasion. I have yet to be proved wrong.

The gamers are at it again.

Natalie strikes again. This video is nominally about TERF doublespeak, but as per usual, is also a parable for so many more issues related to bigotry and what underpins it. It’s also a timely examination as to how all kinds of groups use specific language techniques to have the conversations they WANT to have (“Why should I be forced to think trans identities are valid?”) instead of the conversation that actually IS happening (“Do people deserve respect, legal autonomy and human rights?”).