Hi all,
Today, brief and mostly good things, because you deserve it.
If you can give money to these important fundraisers, please do!
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.
Also reminds me of this cartoon I made in 2020, which feels like approximately 100 years ago. Time, right.
I forgot to do a year in review because, as eloquently aforementioned, “time, right.” So, below some of my favorites from last year.
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!
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.”
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:
Lots of love,
Shelby + Clem
I recommend the podcast The End of the World with Josh Clark. He reviews real possibilities of the apocalypse, science format mostly but easy to understand for the layperson (me). There’s Steven Spielberg! Love it