Hi, ducklings and darklings alike! Your weird but favorite internet millennial aunt has broken through her rainy-day-with-tea-and-books haze to bring you your weekly batch of reading. Enjoy and add the stories or random clickhole finds that gripped you this week in the comments.

I have several online friends and they are delights to my soul. A few have even translated to real life, but even at a distance, I enjoy our interactions immensely.

“Verbal diarrhea is just one symptom of late-stage pandemic social awkwardness.” Damn, what was my excuse before?!

Yes, but how many of the guests were murdered? I understand this to be a very important British country tradition.

“In that respect, Jack Dorsey’s departure from Twitter and embrace of crypto resembles Mark Zuckerberg’s rebrand of Facebook in favor of the metaverse. Big Tech’s founders have jettisoned the escape pod from their bloated, boring second incarnations of the internet and set off for a new frontier. Their ambitions would be admirable if not for the harms that their platforms have already wrought.”

Oof. Just @ me next time, why don’t you…

“Populists and the Masculinity Crisis: Physician, Heal Thyself” – a title which speaks for itself.

Oof. Did he do this interview in character or have I been giving him way too much credit for his acting?

The year in fads. Woof. I forgot about sea shanties.

This is bad loss to online culture criticism. Her voice was powerful, clever, funny, and important and the reason for her “cancellation” is profoundly stupid and largely in bad faith. She spoke for herself on the experience, how we all got to this point, and what was being weaponized to deliberately harm her.

How does this kind of harassments and culture warfare work? As it happens, Innuendo Studios delivered a presentation months ago on how internet harassment works, mostly by the alt-right, and what the current cultural discourse playbook often boils down to. But the reality is that mobs are mobs, and radicalism is radicalism. The left can do this too. And in the case of Lindsay Ellis, that’s exactly what happened. But the end result either way is that the bad guys all too often win because we are playing different games.

And fundamentally, this is why I have no fear of radical leftism ever taking over anything and am profoundly afraid of radical rightism succeeding. I trust the left to fail by circular firing squad, and the right has shown a disturbing willingness to line up and pull triggers so long as they can all agree who they are pointing at. As long it’s not them.

Goddamnit, kids, can we not?

A palette cleanser to any news about Bad Men, is Our Internet Boyfriend Being Great.

PLEASE STOP.

On the other hand, this is beauty news we can absolutely get behind.