Well, dear reader, we've made it through the nightmare gauntlet of 2025. Congratulations! Now comes the fun part, whatever that might be. It may not even be fun!
A fellow member of the National Writers Union shared this essay on possibility and uncertainty yesterday. (The author is also an NWU member, which is gravy.) It is well worth your time to read it, and bookmark it to come back and read again later when things seem predestined and mired in false inevitability.
I'm going to try to write more here, not out of some New Year's resolution guilt, but because the ongoing decay of the Internet is staggeringly terrifying. Maintaining this blog (even if it's hosted by Google, which I'm surprised hasn't simply nuked Blogger by now), and my ratty, cobwebbed personal website seem like small things, but it's important to maintain what little control we have in an era of increasing consolidation of the Internet experience. To that end, these pieces by Henry Desroches and Paris Marx are useful starting points to thinking about where we need to go if we want the Internet we once dreamed of to survive in some recognizable form.
I don't feel great about 2026 (like Oceanator says, nothing's ever fine), but I don't feel nearly as overwhelmed as I did by the prospect of 2025, which turned out to be absolutely fucking worse than I expected. Lots of eople are still easily misled, horribly biased, and inclined towards the worst kinds of mental and moral laziness, but many are not, as we saw this past year. The good things about humanity will continue to shine through, and we may even end the year in a better place than we started it. Who knows? Not me. We all get to flip our way through the book of time and space, and who knows which path or ending we'll get.
It's time to eat some soba. Até breve, y'all.
DAS
