So much for that

Well, any hope I had for 2026 being less terrible than its predecessor has had its brains dashed out against the rocks of reality. ICE/CBP goons have already murdered two people in Minneapolis, and effectively laid siege to the city with the full backing of the Nazis running the federal government. There must be a necromancer among their ranks, because someone is keeping the rotting corpse of Donald Trump upright and mobile while dead-eyed ghouls like Stephen Miller call the shots, desperate to bring the country to the precipice of whatever white supremacist Götterdämerung they've been fantasizing about since the adolescence they've never grown out of. 2026 is already a cascade of warning signs that life in the United States will get much worse before it gets better.

However, as many smarter, more astute, and less cynical people than me have (I believe correctly) noted, and which the resistance to tyranny we've seen from regular folks in Minnesota and elsewhere continually shows, people aren't taking this shit lying down. All hope is not lost; it's just hard to find amidst all the chaos and terror.

I started this post shortly after Alex Pretti was killed, and never really got anywhere with it. I'm still not in the mood to write about this kind of shit, but I'll go ahead and publish it anyway. My next posts will probably be about 魯迅 Lu Xun, whose book 野草 Wild Grass I bought in Beijing in 2011 and only now really started reading, and/or the 四弘誓願 Four Great Vows (AKA Bodhisattva vows) of Buddhism.

Até breve, folks. 

 

A.D. MMXXVI: Choose Your Own Adventure

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