I can’t remember the last time online sentiment was that next year would be better than the last.
I have no idea how people must have felt, back in the days where there was optimism for the future.
Every year I just feel we’re all just bracing ourselves for how bad it’s gonna be.
What a strange world we live in.
2010-12 I’d reckon.
Before your dad had a smartphone.
Before all social media had switched from chronological to algorithmic serving of content.
Before the fraudulent-data-driven “pivot to video” that killed all the websites that aren’t part of the cycle of screenshots from one of four websites reposted on the other three.
Some things are genuinely worse but social media makes everything doom and gloom.
One of the most important skills to have online these days is to interact while staying detached from the drama.
I can participate online but the minute I close the app I fully detach from it. It’s not real, social media and news is not the real world. It’s a micro view of all the worst parts about life.
It’s important to be informed, but also understand that you are seeing 1% of the picture and listening to people that are probably morons in real life telling you with confidence how things are.
Kind of a poetic image of what unregulated capitalism does to the free.
It’s even better if you know what bald eagles sound like.
Which is not like the scaws you hear in movies. It is an irritating screech similar to a seagull with a bullhorn speaker. I think the movies are hawks, and they make pretty cool sounds, clearly.
Movies use red-tailed hawk screams.
Also, I think a lot of people don’t realize bald eagles love dumpsters. Honestly the main thing the bird has going for it is that it looks badass, but we could have picked better national birds.
They also generally use the kind of frogs you might record in, say, Griffith Park in Los Angeles if you want to record a frog sound. Which is why I, originally from Indiana, never heard a frog like they usually sound in movies until I went to Griffith Park after a rainstorm.
Frogs in Indiana (or at least the two parts of Indiana where I grew up and where I am living now) either cheep in a way similar to crickets or make a sound almost like the sound a rubber band makes if you pull it tight and then pluck it.
It only looks badass from the side. Looking straight on, it looks nervous and confused.
And roadkill! Last winter they spent months on this deer in a field near the road.
Needs fire.
Starting the year with a bang, huh?
Fucking poetry
It actually looks better burned out.
Woah, someone posted the outside picture above, and it was so perfect that I figured it was photoshopped. Now I’m not sure after seeing your picture.
sparks terrorism investigation
Can we not just have regular crime or accidents anymore? Must everything be terrorism? That singular label is how the government is circumventing the constitution.
The loss of meaning feels like a real problem. It feels like the last ten years has had a lot of rapid turnover with our post-truth world.
People want to use extreme language to describe extreme events, make people emotional. But when every event is labeled that way, it loses meaning, even if it is true:
- calling people Hitler
- racism
- genocide
- antisemitism
- health care
- truth
- patriotism
We have had actual racism, actual genocide, actual antisemitism. But if every event becomes these things, what do the words even mean?
You answered your own question.
I suppose I did, but like, can I be wrong in my cynicism for once? Can we just not?
It’s pretty sus and way too perfect, but the explosion actually happened.
I hope you weren’t actually staying at that asshole’s hotel.
Can we salvage the eagle meat? People have kids to feed.
Obviously a police guard goes way too far, but that could easily have been a healthcare disaster. Getting meat and cheese out of a dumpster?
Yes, fuck this year. We’re basically all in jail.
Way too hopeful.
The eagle is still alive, this would be representative of 2015 at best.
Mood
Stepped on a nail
