look underfoot

There are still many, many people telling the fascist fuckwits to eat shit. There are still long green spring evenings and slow golden summer afternoons and winter nights and autumn leaves. There are still coffee shops and weird little bookstores and small businesses on sidewalks lined with flowered trees. There are still sunrises and sunsets and blue skies and ocean shores and mountains. Oh yes, there are still mountains, which I have an especial fondness for. High up there in thin air, you can see forever.

There are still Gay People In Your Phone and texts and in-jokes. There are your blorbos. There is still fic and fanart. There are still books and music and games and art. There is a lot of art. Even with the AI beast trying to gobble and commercialize everything, there's still art! There are still people who think using your own brain to do things is important! There are still universities and publishing houses and other places where it's our job to think about things that matter!

There is still work that feels fulfilling to do. There are still constant little moments of quiet and beauty and rest. There are still jaw-dropping pictures of nebulae and galaxies and the great immensity of space, as we continue to learn things we never knew before. And amid all those stars, there is still a tiny, beautiful, and vulnerable blue planet which we only get to live on for a very short time, and there are still kids who are counting on us to make sure they get to inherit it in some kind of recognizable form. There is still the weird fact that when you give someone a hug and sit with them for a while and tell them over and over that it will be okay, it actually feels like it might be okay. I think that all means something.

Doomerism is really easy right now. I get it. I honestly 100% do. But I also don't see any point whatsoever in throwing up our hands and letting said fascist fuckwits gleefully terrify us into submission and make us live in fear and act like they're the Actual Meaning of the World (they are not). They suck so incredibly hard, but they're also so small and so stupid and so ultimately insignificant. They will not define this particular moment if we don't let them, and if we stick around to make sure they don't. Fuck 'em. I believe in you.

(the two images below are linked in the above Marisa Kabas skeet)

And in the latest NYT/Siena poll:

Everybody who's been showing up to protest, everybody who's been shouting at town halls, everybody who has been calling, writing, and emailing their reps: this is what you have helped to do.

When they try to pull this shit and we stand up and scream at the top of our lungs "not today, Satan," it works. It may not work immediately and it may work slower than we'd like, but it does work. When we push back hard on their bullshit, they falter.

Things are still scary, yes. I'm not saying we're out of the woods. But there are battles we are winning.

Original illustrations are available in my shop! Free local pickup with the code WINDSOR if you're in the area <3

The skeleton reaches into its robe. From abyssal depths it produces a heavy book bound in sheets of lead and night. It is the kind of book that gets stolen by a rugged adventurer from a temple with more spike-traps than the average house of worship contains. It is the kind of book to which the word “tome” might properly be applied. Frost forms on its pages from the lingering chill of the void. 

The skeleton coughs once and holds the book out to the man sitting on the bed.

I want that for us. I so want that for us. I want to be the generation that has seen fucking everything and is like a MRSA bug and unfazed and when that Cheeto finally dies, I want us to. Plant the gardens and clean the seas because we can and we want to and we remember some joy, some time of trust even when it got broken and we can say to the 20 somethings "let us show you what we can build, how it can feel."

So we tried to make sure someone called her every day, so she would have some kind of interaction, and one time my spouse asked how she was doing, and her attitude was basically, “Yeah, this happens sometimes.”

Because that was her life. She did live through the depression, she did lose three siblings to the last pandemic. She did live through WWII, and sent a son off to Vietnam, and made a family and a household and a career while knowing one slip of a button might wipe out all life on earth. And she lived through it; she survived.

And so 2020 wasn’t the end of the world, for her. It was just another thing. Because life is made up of sunshine and rainbows and puppy dogs, AND ALSO fascists and violence and rancid millionaires living high while people starve. And when you are in the middle of the shit times, you acknowledge that they’re shit, and also that they are not exclusively shit, because they still include spring days and new flowers and people taking care of each other.

So, my dad's colleague was on a trip with their friends, who were a couple. Now, the wife of this couple was a huge U2 fan, and the highlight of this trip was going to a U2 concert. Later that night, after the concert, they went to a restaurant, and who do they see there at another table? Bono. The wife wants so badly to go and ask for an autograph, but in a typical Finnish fashion, she doesn't want to be a bother because surely Bono just wants to enjoy his night and not be surrounded by fans all the time, so she doesn't go.

Then, she notices that someone from Bono's table gets up and goes to the men's restroom, so she also gets up and goes to wait outside the men's room, until the guy comes out. She then stops him and goes excuse me, I saw that you were at the same table as Bono, would it be in any way possible that you could ask for an autograph from him for me? (because apparently it is much less mortifying to bother someone else you don't know than to bother the guy directly, I guess).

The man apparently kinda stands there for a moment, just looking at her, before he asks, sounding just a tad bit confused, if he heard her right. You want me to go and ask Bono for an autograph for you?

Yes, she says. She's being very polite about it. If you would be so kind. That would be great.

The man says yes, sure, I'll see what I can do about it.

They then part ways and go back to their own tables and continue the night, and some time later, they notice that Bono and the rest of the people who had been at that table have left.

Oh well, the wife thinks. No can do, maybe he just forgot or something or just didn't want to do it. It's okay.

They finish up their meal and ask for the bill. The waiter tells them that their meal has already been paid for, and then tells that they were left with two notes.

The waiter gives them the notes. They are both autographs. One of them says Bono.

They are a fading minority that won an election through voter suppression and outright lies - they didn't convince anyone they're actually right. Nobody wants the world they want to build. (Which is not possible to build; they've removed too many of the support structures over the years.)

We are fighting to reduce the damage they'll do as they fade, not fighting to win the culture war.

We won the culture war. Now we're working to keep them from burning the fields on their way out. It takes a different approach from "win hearts and minds" activism.

I see a lot of folks upset that NG will financially benefit from residual and other compensation surrounding his involvement in the adaptation of Sandman and Good Omens (and he will.) But the answer isn’t “rage at the fans who are so emotionally attached to his blorbos because they grieve differently, and then somehow NG will be financially punished.” That’s lower-class/middle-class thinking. NG is too rich and financially diversified to really be hurt by little boycott or a couple of show cancellations (though said cancellations can cause life-changing poverty to the little guys who signed contracts and turned down other opportunities before all of this came out. And boy does NG love women in poverty 🤮)

So if you want to substantially reduce the wealth of someone at NGs financial level—you need to do it with professional services fees.

Details below the cut:

(The Twitter thread is probably easier to read and easier to look at the images, but I wanted to make sure it got preserved. Images are the tweets.)