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'No one ever leaves a star. That's what makes one a star.'

Starting around 2016, when the world started going to shit, I woke up one day to discover that I simply could not read a book, except for work. This is about how I found my way back to reading for my own pleasure.

I know I am not the only person who experienced this, yet I have struggled for years to find any kind of logical explanation for it, or actionable advice to address it. Starting around 2016, when the world started going to shit, I woke up one day to discover that I simply could not read a book. Or a magazine. Or a short story. Or more than a news item, blog post, or some intellectual empty…

Teen girl in the Wild West shoots lots of guns

Preislamic iraqi prince falls in love with a conman’s daughter because he likes shiny objects, this leads to a major political figure being drowned at a party.

Shakespeare, but with a lot of secret gay pining songs thrown in.

Vanilla kids accidentally crash a BDSM party

The entire works of the Grimm Brothers, happening at the same time.

Lovestruck idiots on a boat

Conman thinks he can scam a librarian. Failing that, he attempts to teach Iowans music.

six dead teenagers have to have a sob story contest with each other over who most deserves to get revived. they bicker with the fortune telling machine (who is also dying, courtesy of a rat) thats going to bring the winner back to life as they do this. the tone fluctuates so insanely between comedic and normal you’re sure to get whiplash

a very understimulated and bored 11 year old girl essentially gets adopted by the immortals living in the forest that is basically her backyard, and has to decide whether she wants to live forever to stay with them or not. also the antagonist is a hammy old man in a bright yellow suit who manages to go from funny to seriously dangerous and threatening

Some kid takes drugs so he can be cool. It’s a supercomputer that teaches him to get laid but he still doesn’t.

Gambling but the stakes are your religion and your crush

Sissi but not the cheesy movies

A vampire hunter and his apprentice who fuck up and everyone ends up being a vampire

A high school boy invents a friendship with a kid who committed suicide to bang said kid’s sister

Fraternity guys during the Second World War

He's one of those angry, weird, gatekeeping nerds who gets angry when a gross girl wants to touch his Magic cards, then complains that no girls will talk to him.

He's all the weird things we've worked so hard to push out of the larger community of nerds that we all love.

I don't care what these guys think, so I'm not responding to them. But this issue comes up from time to time, and thought this presentedan opportunity to clarify what I view as the big difference between a gatekeeper and a caretaker.

For too long, weird, antisocial gatekeepers did their best to make women (and anyone who wasn't a cishet white dude) feel unwelcome in gatherings of sci-fi, fantasy, gaming, and other "nerd" spaces, while they complained that they never got the attention from women they felt they deserved. Those dudes were always outnumbered by the rest of us, but they were the loudest and always got the most attention.

But one day, the majority of us sort of collectively realized that nobody ever agreed that these boys were in charge of us and our relationship with the things we loved. We told them that they didn't get to gatekeep anymore. It took years, but we slowly changed the culture to be more inclusive, more diverse, and less toxic. And holy shit did I not realize the extent and depth of the toxicity until it wasn't there, protected as I was by my demographic privilege. Jesus Christ was it toxic.

For years, these boys (most of them are still boys, well into their adult lives) have been big big mad that the majority of us, who never agreed with them, finally stood up and established a boundary. We said that all are welcome, unless you're a dick. These boys and JD Vance aren't able to cross that boundary, because it's at odds with who they fundamentally are in their core. They are bullies who like the same things a lot of nerds like. We are not the same. Our weird is amazing and fun, while their weird is ... weird. Offputting. Strange.

We aren't going back to a time when women felt unsafe and unwelcome at cons, because self-proclaimed "nerds" like JD Vance, who are just toxic bros who missed the entire point of The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and Star Wars, now have to respect clear and posted anti-harassment policies that carry real consequences.

We aren't going back to a time when someone had to pass an arbitrary trivia test, delivered by a self-appointed gatekeeper like JD Vance, to participate in any aspect of fan culture, because that demand is now met with the dismissive eyerolls it always deserved. Our cons, our game stores, our comic shops, and all of our spaces are safe and welcome to all because we work together to protect them from entitled weirdos like JD Vance.

All are welcome, just don't be a dick.

That's how it is now. That is massive progress. It is a fantastic thing, and we are going to protect our county from JD Vance and people like him, the same way we protect nerd culture from JD Vance and people like him. That was the point of the article I linked to with my original quote that inspired this ask:

For Vance and others, it’s not their interests in comic books or sci-fi that sets them apart now. What’s weird is their refusal to share that win with anyone who doesn’t fit the outdated stereotype of who and what a nerd is.

I'm not a gatekeeping hypocrite, as some boy declared, because I work to keep toxic boys -- who derive a sense of power and importance from bullying -- away from a community I care about. I'm, uh, ... you know ... being a caretaker.

There are a lot of us caretakers, now that I think about it. The vast majority of us, I imagine. So I am but one of the caretakers in this garden, keeping the weeds out, and protecting the plants from pests, so the garden can thrive. I'm proud as hell, and so grateful, to be part of that.

Screenshotted article here:

To give some additional insight into how insane this is, no matter WHAT party is behind it:

Since 1937, the federal government has led a bipartisan and RIGOROUS effort to eradicate cancer. President Roosevelt takes action to establish the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and this is STILL center of US cancer research. This is the large bucket all the research funding is put in to distribute amongst research + trials.

The NCI has this to say about their establishment in 1937 (emphasis by me):

August 5, 1937—The National Cancer Institute (NCI) was established through the National Cancer Act of 1937, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its passage represented the culmination of nearly three decades of efforts to formalize the U.S. government’s place in cancer research. The act represents the first time that Congress provided funding to address a non-communicable disease. The act created NCI as an independent research institute within the Public Health Service. NCI became the federal government’s principal agency for conducting research and training on the cause, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer.

NCI was tasked with assisting and promoting cancer research at other public and private institutions, particularly by providing funding opportunities to support promising cancer research. The act established the National Advisory Cancer Council, now known as the National Cancer Advisory Board, which recommended approval of first award for fellowships in cancer research shortly thereafter.

For nearly 90 years, there has been dedicated and earnest federal funding towards cancer research. During this span of time, the leukemia that killed my great grandmother in 8 months at 38 years old can now be treated and SURVIVED. Cancer is not a death sentence PURELY because doctors have spent nearly a century not resting until answers are found. This is not political, this is humanitarian. Our breakthroughs in America are shared internationally and our international peers share back with us. This funding should be beyond reproach as it goes to one of our greatest successes in the international medical community.

The NCI site has this excellent graphic laying out major points in their history:

Click this link to see the actual amount of significant historical markers of the NCI: Important Events in NCI History

seriously, click it and see how long it takes to scroll to the end of the history section. You will notice most presidents have tried to make a positive impact somewhere in the NCI, regardless of party. Cancer is not an option for political pissing matches.

Okay, so what is the Cancer Moonshot?

Moonshot is an initiative originally added to the NCI in 2016 that was a BURST of funding, research, and patient trials. This is a thriving research environment as lush as the amazonian rainforest. As VP, Biden led the way clearing a space for the Moonshot - - deeply motivated by the loss of his son to brain cancer. It is clear he has been determined to secure the Moonshot's place in the NCI permanently in the interest of public health.

Here's the NCI's event marker for Moonshot:

January 12, 2016—During his 2016 State of the Union Address, President Obama called on Vice President Biden to lead a new, national “Moonshot” initiative to eliminate cancer as we know it. The goal is to double the rate of progress against cancer, achieving in five years what otherwise would have taken ten. The White House announced a $1 billion initiative to jumpstart this work.

Not only was there a surge in research, but there was a massive acceleration in our understanding of early detection in many cancers. Meaning we started catching it smaller, less invasive, and easier to eradicate (becoming CANCER FREE!!!!!! 🎉). If you wondered why you were hearing so many updates to when to get screened, this is largely the explanation. We started saving more lives!

It is a very robust and multi-faceted piece of our public health system that I am not qualified to speak on in every capacity, so I will leave you with a link to its info page. If you ever feel hopeless about cancer, I recommend looking here to find out how we've most recently began kicking its ass. There are some exciting international trials beginning that involve immunotherapy + vaccine-based care 🎉🎉🎉

I know this is a lot to read, but if you don't want to read my words, then PLEASE consider reading the NCI's words. There are very few organizations that have such impactful insights into life-saving efforts.

When I worked on Big Bang Theory, each episode involved a few days of rehearsal before we did camera blocking and the actual taping in front of the audience. Most actors go to our dressing rooms during breaks to relax, learn lines, grab a nap, and so on. But when I worked there, if I wasn’t in a scene, I’d stay on the stage and watch the other actors work. It was like getting to sit in on an…

(Tv/comics)

Marvel. Or DC?

I have liked them both and disliked them both, at different points in my life, for a variety of reasons. At the moment, I'm not paying attention to them at all.

When I was a kid, I was all about Xmen and Fantastic Four from Marvel and, Batman and Justice League (Marv Wolfman's run in the late 80s) from DC. Never really cared for Superman. The 1967 Spider-Man was awesome as a cartoon, but I rarely read the comic book.

In the 70s, I was only allowed one comic per week, usually picked out from whatever was left on that spinning rack at the drugstore. So more often than not, I ended up with something like House of Secrets or House of Mystery or one of those horror anthologies that didn't need me to read the issues before or after, like the serialized superhero comics did. I got a lot of replay value from those books.

In the 80s, I had my own money and the ability to drive myself to comic conventions, and that's when I fell in love with Sandman, Watchmen, pretty much the entire Prestige Format that became Vertigo. I recall feeling like Marvel was for kids, then, and DC was serious. I was only 16, so take that for what it's worth.

But speaking of being 16, I'm gonna focus on Batman for a sec. I loved Batman 89, and I think all the efforts to make a Batman movie ever since have fallen short in ways I couldn't predict back then. It's gotten better with age and by comparison, for me. Michael Keaton is my favorite Batman, the way Christian Bale is my favorite modern Bruce Wayne (they both pale next to Pure. West. if anyone asks me).

The OG Batman series is maybe my favorite series of all time not called Star Trek or The Prisoner, and the 1966 movie is my favorite of all the Batman movies. Of course I love the animated series, and I get to be Blue Beetle in Brave and the Bold, so that's pretty awesome and its whole own thing.

Turning to the current moment, with rare exception, all the MCU and DCU movies do nothing for me. I thought I must have been missing something, so tried really hard to give them a chance to knock me out. I watched as many of the MCU movies as I could stand, and I just felt exhausted and bored by all of it, by the time I got to ... I can't even remember. Something with maybe Thanos and Ant-Man? I felt like it was a big, complicated mess of fan service and meetings that could have been e-mails, resulting in in a stew full of interesting ingredients that have all blended together into a flavorless paste. I do enjoy all the James Gunn movies, though, even if Chris Pratt is the worst Chris, because James always centers the characters and their conflicts, then uses the action and stunts to support the story.

I feel like a lot of this sounds harsh, but even Star Wars, my favorite movie when I was a kid, has grown into something I don't recognize or care about. I'm old. I know what I like and what I don't like. I'm not patient like I once was, and it's clear I'm not the person those studios want in the theatre, anyway. I could make that joke about how it's the children who are wrong, but I accept that I am not in the demo, and I am genuinely happy for everyone who loves the spectacle and the experience of seeing those films with an enthusiastic audience. I just won't be there with you, but you can find me in the parking lot, yelling at a cloud.

—

The rationale for the decision yesterday has literally no basis whatsoever in the US constitution.

Josh Marshall is correct, but I don’t think it matters. This corrupt, activist, fascist SCOTUS does not care. The majority has decided that the Constitution, 250 years of precedent, popular opinion, and the foundational ideas that have made America what it is since 1787 are what they say they are.

I live in a country of three hundred and forty million people.

In this country, six unelected christian nationalists, five of whom were placed on the court by presidents who lost the popular vote, who are opposed by SEVENTY PERCENT of the population, are making up laws out of whole cloth because their power is unchecked. A country that allows this to impose their regressive authoritarianism on that entire population is not a free country. It is not a Democracy.

America has not been attacked like this since 9/11. Six unelected people forcing their christian nationalist agenda on a population of three hundred and forty million is not a Democracy. It is tyranny.

Everyone is missing the central message of yesterday’s ruling: SCOTUS is going to install Trump as dictator for life, by any means necessary. Somehow, after he loses the popular vote again, and after he’s even lost the Electoral College again, these six Fascists will invent a reason to overturn the will of the electorate, again. Every single one of their rulings this term have been part of their coup. Now, just line them all up and connect the dots.

Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.

This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.

A “pack” of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.

Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.

One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.

Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.

Getting a “pack” of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.

Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.

Only experienced silverbacks or the boldest young Dads dare venture into a craft store for long without his mate or offspring to keep roving Craft Ladies at bay and guide him in this strange ecosystem. If a Dad enters with his mate and is separated from her, he will often scuttle for the seeming familiarity of Woodcrafts, Models, or Paints (the latter not to be confused with Fine Arts, unquestioned territory of art students), but he eyes Scrapbooking and Jewelry with trepidation and will usually venture into those exotic areas only in the company of females of his pack.

Lumberjacks are rarely spotted entering craft stores of their own volition, for while they do not fear it as Dads do, they know it is an environment unsuited for megafauna such as themselves.

Hardware store Lesbians generally adapt more easily to craft stores, although they may enlist another Lesbian of a subspecies more adapted to that environment to guide them until they find their niche. Lesbians have even been known to seek the aid of a Craft Lady, a native fauna that share similarities with Lesbians but are usually smaller and nimbler to suit their chosen habitat. Dads who witness this are often awed by the Lesbians’ temerity, for although larger, Dads are generally wary of the cunning and dexterous Craft Ladies and may mistake their enthusiastic pack greetings as predatory swarming.

Craft Ladies, secure in their ecological niche, have no fear of interlopers and take the presence of non-native beings in stride, although they may become territorial about scarcer resources.

I.

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven't disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it's wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you're going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you'll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google "80s hotel room" anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)

To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It's true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.

But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn't work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator's job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.

We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not "core" enough.

As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their "you, sir, have won the internet" vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn't have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that's the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.

But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I've decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.

II.

I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I'd be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it's pretty rare, unless you're staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day's Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.

At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world's first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I've become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of "okay time to do a quick look through." But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I'd been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It's just old. It's dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I'm writing about datedness, I'm writing in general using a previous era's examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.

Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don't necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called "liminal" spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you're the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, "It'll do." We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.

However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven't been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn't dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They're too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say "it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic)." You wouldn't be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.

One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what's here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of "molding" that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.

In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don't like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It's deeply annoying.)

Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser's economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the "here is my service" type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way "design" can. It can only be discovered by accident.

When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don't think I'll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father's time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It's a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.

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Unleashed, you say?

They were just fighting to get free and Sony could no longer restrain these photographic beasts.

"YOU ARE UNLEASHED" proclaimed Sony. "YOU ARE FREE TO BEGIN YOUR REIGN OF TERROR ON THE DENTISTS WHO CAN AFFORD YOU!"

It's been about 4 years now and they still haven't finished Johnny 5.

I know they have to run a business, and the pandemic really slowed them down, but I think this is the longest case of delayed gratification I've ever experienced.

Their last update was 11 months ago and they were "almost finished."