Sloth Takes A Free Ride

Among other news

Hi all,

Today, brief and mostly good things, because you deserve it. 

If you can give money to these important fundraisers, please do!

• Help Playground Coffee Shop Stay Afloat

• Bronx Apartment Fire Fundraisers

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I’m interested in writing about Long Covid, so if you feel comfortable and/or want to share your experience with me please drop me an email. Thanks in advance to All Kinds Accessibility for sending me extremely helpful background information, and sharing this article about managing daily activities after having Covid.

I also wanted to share this article Biden's COVID Response Is the Problem—Stop Blaming Individuals Instead by Abdullah Shihipar. It’s a much more thorough and comprehensive look at what I tried to get at in my last newsletter, below if you missed it.

Confessions of a Former Pandemic Shamer

Also reminds me of this cartoon I made in 2020, which feels like approximately 100 years ago. Time, right.

ID: a cartoon face with long hair says “pls govt give us money to stay at home” and below there are very realistic looking flames. under the good flames are a bunch of speech bubbles depicting what the government is doing instead — satirical and not real but also extremely real.

I forgot to do a year in review because, as eloquently aforementioned, “time, right.” So, below some of my favorites from last year.

Do You Want Celebs to Have Good Takes?

Please, My Wool, There Is Just Enough

My Dog Fell Into A Bog

Medieval Marginalia Pt. 2

Reading / watching: 

I am truthfully doing more of this (see below) than anything so I’m a bit limited recommendation wise. Send me things? Thank you!

ID: a cartoon face says “Sorry I didn’t text back I’m” and below is a checklist of reasonable things to do instead, like taking pics of butthole, in a shame hole, or busy being the human embodiment of the garden state soundtrack.

My official comment on the Wheel of Time television adaptation for the time being is below. It is very small but there is an important edit here, which is that this does read “three hundred times.”

ID: a laurel leaf award that reads “only says ‘well in the books,’ three times per book adapted media.” there is a small edit that says “hundred” between three and times. it is extremely small.

I may write about this more in depth for the Subs Only newsletter, but I’ve been thinking a lot about End of The World Media as it functions now, or generally how depictions of potential apocalypse as filmed during collapse fold in on themselves. How surreal to think of Station Eleven, a great (I think) television show based on the book by Emily St. John Mandel, being made now. A show about performing Shakespeare—king of Plays Within Plays—after the end of the world, an end precipitated by global pandemic, the show itself being filmed and created within a global pandemic, actors playing actors, sickness being omnipresent. Anyways I’ve been thinking about that in contrast to something like Don’t Look Up, another piece of End of The World Media, this time the end caused by an asteroid. I thought it was extremely weird and grating, maybe more on that.

On that note, about a week into first lockdown I took a walk around my block and found the book Severance by Ling Ma on the street, which in retrospect makes a lot of sense, but also was comically fortuitous to find. Of all the too on the nose depictions of apocalypse, I still find this the most convincing and honest, in large part because of its mundanity. It’s also deeply funny, which I think is appropriate to the absurdity of continuing to perform the same mechanized routines while the world outside has ceased to exist entirely.

Videos for you

Been really into dog agility, wall to wall raccoons is a classic, let us all be sloths taking a free ride in this new year.

Photo of my dog:

ID: a photo of my dog Clementine in the sunshine. Her nose is covered with dirt because she had just buried a bone.

Lots of love,
Shelby + Clem