nothing here but horrible costs

issue 198 - 13th November, 2022

CJW: Hey and welcome to another edition of nothing here. Let’s get straight to it, but first a word for our sponsors (possibly you) - if you like what we do and are able to support us, you’ve got a couple of options:

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The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer, apocalypse witch, goth aunt.

• Corey J. White (CJW) - Author, podcaster, sin-eater.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin

Climate Change & The Environment

DCH: How to Live in a Catastrophe - Elizabeth Weil New York Magazine

According to Günther Anders, underground hero of existential philosophers and A-plus catastrophic thinker, we are so lost we don’t even know the year. This isn’t Year 2022 of the Common Era, or shouldn’t be. We’re in Year 77 of the Calamity.

Anders, who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for New York and then moved to Hollywood, was sort of a modern intellectual Forrest Gump. He was Martin Heidegger’s student and Walter Benjamin’s second cousin. His father invented the term intelligence quotient. His first wife was Hannah Arendt. He believed that after we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, the terms of humanity’s tenancy here on Earth fundamentally changed. Pre-Calamity, we knew (1) all humans are mortal and (2) humans can kill one another. But then a new fact emerged: (3) Humans could annihilate the entire species. Up until that point, our imaginations had outstripped our ability to manifest them. We’d think of a utopia, or a technical hellscape, or a superhero — oh, too bad! We can’t actually make that. Then the dynamic flipped: We couldn’t even really imagine the power and inevitable endgame of what we had already created. To keep ourselves oriented on not destroying the world, Anders believed we needed to reset time. “We live in the Year 13 of the Calamity,” he wrote in 1958. “I was born in the Year 43 before. Father, whom I buried in 1938, died in the Year 7 before.”

A longer view of the polycrisis than most take, doomscrolling, mental health, and more on display in this piece.

CJW: A really great (and long) piece, including conversations with Andreas Malm (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and Timothy Morton (Hyperobjects).

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CJW: Global pledges to remove greenhouse gas emissions to reach net zero unrealistic, report finds - Jess Davis at ABC News (via MKY)

Kate Dooley from the University of Melbourne was the lead researcher on the Land Gap Report and said there was too much emphasis on carbon removal in plans to get to net zero emissions.

“We say that it needs to be 80 to 95 per cent emission reductions by 2050. This is global scale, and then the last 5 to 15 per cent could be sequestered [removed from the atmosphere] into land,” Dr Dooley said.

“What the focus on net zero has done is it’s shifted the focus away from that sort of 95 per cent emission reduction onto the very small amount of removals.”

We can’t just plant trees and keep going with business as usual.

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• A Bike Ride Through A Melting World - Julian Sayarar at Noema - CJW: A great piece on… well, time, really.

• Vehicles of Extraction - Paris Marx at SftP Magazine (via Sentiers)

• Plastic Recycling Is a Disaster and a ‘Myth,’ Report Says - Edward Ongweso Jr VICE

• Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View - David Wallace Wells, The New York Times

• Europe warming twice as fast as rest of the world, new report reveals - Tereza Pultarova, Space.com & Global CO2 emissions are on track to rise again, scientists say - France24 (via Foreign Exchanges)

• The ugly story of how corporate America convinced us to spend so much on water (Vox)

• Tax oil firms to pay for climate damage, island nations say - Al Jazeera & After Decades of Resistance, Rich Countries Offer Direct Climate Aid - David Gelles, The New York Times

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: How Western media manufactures consent for new cold war on China - Carlos Martinez at Multipolarista

Without conducting extensive investigations on the ground, it is obviously not possible to verify the Chinese authorities’ claims about how the vocational education centres run. What we can say with certainty is that the accusations about genocide, cultural genocide, religious oppression and concentration camps are not backed by anything approximating sufficient proof. Meanwhile the most prominent accusers all, without exception, have a known axe to grind against China.

None of the foregoing is meant to deny that there are any problems in Xinjiang; that Uyghur people are never mistreated or ethnically profiled by the police; or that there has never been any coercion involved in the deradicalisation program. But these problems – which are well-understood in China and which the government is actively addressing – are in no way unique to China. Certainly any discrimination against Uyghurs pales in comparison with, for example, the treatment of African-Americans and indigenous peoples in the United States, or the treatment of Dalits, Adivasis and numerous other minorities in India.

This is a long read, but worth it if you, like me, a) bought into the “Uyghur eradication” propaganda that came out of many Western media outlets, and b) are interested in considering what a multipolar world might look like. You might initially reject what’s laid out, but read on.

And this, below, is something I was thinking about myself in regards to last issue’s story on the US undermining China’s access to chips and such. Sure, superconductors aren’t required for green energy, but if the goal is dealing damage to the Chinese economy, that could also damage our chance for a green energy transition. But none of us actually think the US state cares about climate change, do we?

If the US and its allies were serious about pursuing carbon neutrality and preventing an ecological catastrophe, they would be working closely with China to develop supply chains and transmission capacity for renewable energy. China’s investment in solar and wind power technology has already led to a dramatic reduction of prices around the world. Instead, they are imposing blanket sanctions on China and attempting to cut Xinjiang out of clean energy supply chains. This indicates rather clearly that the imperialist ruling classes are prioritising their anti-China propaganda war over preventing climate breakdown. It seems the slogan “better dead than red” lives on in the 21st century.

Related-ish: New evidence firmly revives Wuhan lab origin theory - Katherine Eban and Jeff Kao at Asia Times (via MKY)

After reading the above, it’s hard to read this as anything other than US state propaganda - an analyst at RAND Corporation is just really good at reading between the lines of CCP communications, and he’s pretty sure the virus came out of a Wuhan lab…

Don’t forget that the US National Institutes of Health helped fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus research, a fact that the US state has been trying to bury and which isn’t mentioned in this piece.

DCH: Many things can simultaneously be true. I’m dubious of the “communist whisperer” angle of the whole lab leak re-emphasis but can also accept the Uyghur genocide for what it is without intentionally or unintentionally downplaying it by “mister gotcha”-ing it against other international atrocities.

I’m also not so convinced Xi/China are all that motivated to fight climate change either. Or that Xi will be able to prioritise it given how badly he’s Trussed up China’s economy recently.

But is the Western media misunderstanding and misreporting on Chinese power? For sure. And is China using and abusing its Uyghur populace? Absolutely for fucking sure.

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• Secret War - Katherine Yon Ebright at Brennan Center for Justice (via Foreign Exchanges)

• How the far right borrowed its online moves from gamers - Ina Fried, Axios

• New Report Sheds Light on America’s Secret Wars - Nick Turse The Intercept

• America’s 9/11 Wars Created the Foot Soldiers of Far-Right Violence at Home - Peter Maass The Intercept

• The Age of Megathreats - Nouriel Roubini in Project Syndicate

• Elon Musk Is Not a Renegade Outsider – He’s a Massive Pentagon Contractor - mintpressnews.com

Science & Space

CJW: What Humans Can Learn From The Language Of Honeybees - Karen Bakker at Noema

Perhaps Seeley’s most startling finding was that, in choosing a new home, honeybees exhibit sophisticated forms of democratic decision-making, including collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, consensus building, quorum and a complex stop signal enabling cross-inhibition, which prevents an impasse being reached. A bee swarm, in other words, is a remarkably effective democratic decision-making body in motion, which bears resemblance to some processes in the human brain and human society. Seeley went so far as to claim that the collective interactions of individual bees were strikingly similar to the interactions between our individual neurons when collectively arriving at a decision.

I’m deeply interested in animal cognition, intelligence, sentience, and related properties. I don’t know if it will ever inform my writing, but I tend to think that sooner or later we’re going to realise just how amazing and intelligent the other animals we share this planet with are, and we’ll look back on industrial farming, habitat destruction, etc etc as the barbaric crimes they so obviously are.

That said, enjoy this piece on bee communication, human-animal collaboration, and (unfortunately but unsurprisingly) bees as a military tool. Bees are fucking cool. They even get sad 😭 Me too, bees, me too.

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DCH The Genealogy of Chinese Cybernetics - Dylan Levi King at Palladium

He had first been exposed to Norbert Wiener’s theories of cybernetics in his aerospace work. It was how missiles were guided: a controller receives information about velocity and pitch, sends information to servomechanisms to make changes, and then receives updated information in a feedback loop. Engineering Cybernetics, a book Qian wrote during his detention and published in 1954, theorized control of complex, interrelated systems. He conceived of his engineering cybernetics—or systems engineering, as it came to be known—as not merely an application of cybernetics to engineering but as an engineering science that subsumed control theory altogether.

A fascinating long read on Qian Xuesen, his service to FDR, Truman, Mao, and Deng Xiaoping, his intersections with Werner Von Braun, Jack Parsons, and his prescient views of systems thinking in future warfare.

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• NASA asteroid crash a watershed moment for humanity - Urban Lehner at Asia Times (via MKY)

• They made a material that doesn’t exist on Earth. That’s only the start of the story. - Paddy Hirsch NPR

Tech & Design

DCH: Can Mark Zuckerberg Go Broke? The Heisenberg Report

A good read on the very real possibility of Zuck going broke. His mistakes over the last year have led to two historic value destruction events that have absolutely shredded its market cap. This has obliterated a whole Warren Buffet amount of Zuck’s personal wealth. He’s lost like $256 million per day for 13 months running.

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CJW: Sludgefeast - Drew Austin

Working with AI, a single individual could soon conceivably make 1,000 full-length movies in a single weekend—each one only requiring as much effort as the brief prompt that generates it. The relationship between content production and consumption has long since inverted, with human attention as the primary bottleneck; as the content continues to accumulate, its purpose will evolve. Instead of an output—something to inform or entertain humans—content will increasingly be an input for our massive global culture machine, with AI distilling the existing archive into yet more content in an accelerating cycle. Whether this will generate better content remains to be seen, but there will undeniably be more…and more, and more.

It’s like the paperclip maximizer, but for content of variable (but mostly low) quality. Less harmful than Skynet? Maybe?

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DCH: Truth Cops: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation - Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang at The Intercept

DHS eventually scrapped the Disinformation Governance Board in August. While free speech advocates cheered the dissolution of the board, other government efforts to root out disinformation have not only continued but expanded to encompass additional DHS sub-agencies like Customs and Border Protection, which “determines whether information about the component spread through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter is accurate.” Other agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Science and Technology Directorate (whose responsibilities include “determining whether social media accounts were bots or humans and how the mayhem caused by bots affects behavior”), and the Secret Service have also expanded their purview to include disinformation, according to the inspector general report.

I think we can all agree that misinfo/disinfo/malinfo are rampant across all types of media. I think we can all also agree that it drives the revenues of social media companies especially. But we should all be equally suspicious and terrified that deeply racist organisations like ICE and CPB are getting involved in its policing.

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DCH: How Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation Around the World - Craig Silverman, ProPublica

In 2019, the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit that analyzes websites for false and misleading content, estimated that disinformation websites earned $250 million per year in revenue, of which Google was responsible for 40% and the rest came from other ad tech companies. NewsGuard, which employs human reviewers to evaluate and rate websites based on a set of criteria including accuracy, estimated in 2021 the annual ad revenue earned by sites spreading false or misleading claims is $2.6 billion. The report did not say how much of that Google might be responsible for.

Lest we forget it’s not just companies like Twitter and TikTok and Facebook that are raking in cash thanks to disinfo.

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DCH: Theses on the Techlash - ZML, Librarian Shipwreck (via Sentiers)

The “techlash” lets the tech companies strike a defensive pose, but it also allows them to redouble their offense. In the face of an “anti-tech” backlash, the tech companies get to act as though they are still committed to building a better future, even for the people who are now critical of them. Instead of accepting genuine accountability, showing true remorse, and taking the sorts of steps that might be necessary to prevent causing future harms, the “techlash” protects the companies from having to really change—for the “techlash” makes it so that the companies are not the guilty perpetrators that need to change, but the aggrieved victims who have done nothing wrong. They are not only the heroic companies building the world of tomorrow, they are also the unfairly misunderstood geniuses who are hated by the very ones they are trying to save—as the author with whom we began this section noted, the “technicians and technologists” need a “supplement of honor and virtue. They also need to be pitied and loved.”

A bit slow and pedantic but nonetheless a good read on how the techlash insidiously allows technophiles at Big Tech to centre the conversation, once again, on themselves and not the hundreds of millions harmed by their greed and excess and incompetence.

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MJW: Elon Musk’s Reckless Plan to Make Sex Pay on Twitter - Olivia Snow at Wired

How Musk decides to treat sex workers will, as usual, offer a glimpse into how he plans to expand policies to encompass other users. We are, after all, marginalized and disposable, an ideal test population for new policies and technologies. The weeks and months ahead will test our ability to protect ourselves and one another from abuse. To us, these battles over our livelihoods and safety are nothing new. To Musk, however, this is a fresh hell likely to drag him into quagmires with workers, regulators, and the public.

I feel like posting anything about twitter right now will just be old news by the time you read it, but this one by Olivia Snow is worth looking at.

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MJW: Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks by Chris Stokel-Walker at The MIT Technology Review

As the company tries to return to some semblance of normalcy, more of their time will be spent addressing Musk’s (often taxing) whims for new products and features, rather than keeping what’s already there running. This is particularly problematic, says Krueger, for a site like Twitter, which can have unforeseen spikes in user traffic and interest. Krueger contrasts Twitter with online retail sites, where companies can prepare for big traffic events like Black Friday with some predictability. “When it comes to Twitter, they have the possibility of having a Black Friday on any given day at any time of the day,” he says. “At any given day, some news event can happen that can have significant impact on the conversation.” Responding to that is harder to do when you lay off up to 80% of your SREs—a figure Krueger says has been bandied about within the industry but which MIT Technology Review has been unable to confirm. The Twitter engineer agreed that the percentage sounded “plausible.”

I’ve been mostly off twitter for two or so years for my mental health. But in recent days I’ve returned to it because it’s suddenly so much better. It’s hilarious! But it looks like we’re going to lose it for numerous reasons, one being the tech stuff in the article. It would be funnier if it wasn’t a death blow for creatives (and authors and small presses in particular.)

Related:

• Welcome to hell, Elon - Nilay Patel The Verge

• Elon Musk’s Twitter Faces Exodus of Advertisers and Executives - Tiffany Hsu Kate Conger, Ryan Mac The New York Times

• Elon Musk Wants Us to Think He’s at War With the Elites - Edward Ongweso Jr at Vice

• No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating. - Dave Troy

• Please like me (The Onion)

• Elon Musk is putting Twitter at risk of billions in fines, warns company lawyer - Alex Heath The Verge

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LZ: A conversation between AIs, but make them Werner Herzog and Slavoj Zizek

Great stuff here if you like absurdity and technology. At least I found it more interesting than the debate between Zizek and Peterson. And you can actually hear their voices saying the generated sentences. Very uncanny valley, very sci-fi, very philosophical, very cool.

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• Radical New World of Generative Advertising - Ryan Khurana (via The Terminal) - CJW: Interesting speculation, but fuck me the last thing the internet needs is more tools for advertising.

• Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model - Andy Baio at Waxy (via Sentiers) - CJW: A really great piece if you’re following generative art.

• Ring Cameras Are Going to Get More People Killed - Edward Ongweso Jr VICE

• Elephants in the Room - Scott Galloway (DCH: good rundown about how Meta’s woes are all down to Apple and TikTok)

• Social Media Is Dead - Edward Ongweso Jr, Vice

• Moderation Is Different From Censorship - Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten

Society & The Culture

CJW: When Your Neighbor Turns You In - Thor Benson at Wired

More on America’s democratic decline. Looking at US domestic politics is a big part of why I’m interested in seeing how a multipolar geopolitical order might shake out.

The US looks like it’s collapsing into authoritarianism (probably of the right-wing variety, but never discount the Democrats’ ability to fuck over the people for the sake of the donor class), and that’s not exactly the sort of regime I want to see as the major global superpower with an immense military, tasking itself with policing the world as resources dwindle and climate change wreaks further damage.

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CJW: Human exceptionalism imposes horrible costs on other animals - Barbara J. King at Psyche

It’s only a myth, though, that other-than-human animals inevitably live moment to moment. Many mammals and birds remember and learn from past experiences, and anticipate with joy or fear what may be coming next. […] a whole variety of animals express grief when someone they cared about and remember dies, including elephants, orcas, monkeys, giraffes, Canada geese, ferrets, cats and dogs. Fish, chickens, goats, cows and pigs solve problems in their lives and interact socially in ways that defy the possibility of being trapped in the present. And only when we humans recognise how vulnerable other animals are to the harms we cause them – because they remember the past, and wish to live in the present and future without trauma – will we act with full compassion for animals and make their lives better.

Last issue I shared something on veganism in relation to climate change and also mentioned human supremacy in another section. This piece is a good follow-up to those 2 thoughts.

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• Gouranga - Edward Smith at Unwinnable

• What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture - Derek Thompson at The Atlantic (via The Terminal)

• Reality Is Just a Game Now - Jon Askonas, The New Atlantis

• How Reality Got ‘Storified’ and What We Can Do About It - Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times

Health, Cooking, and Related

CJW: The end of ‘just eat less’? Science doesn’t see being fat as a ‘choice’ - Liam Mannix at The Age (via MKY)

If our diet is protein-poor, we’re motivated to eat more food in general to get enough protein. And it just so happens that ultra-processed foods – junk foods – tend to be very low in protein because protein is much more expensive to make than fat and carbohydrate. And we’re eating more and more of them.

One US study of 9042 people found as people added more ultra-processed foods to their diet, the total amount of protein they ate did not change but the amount of energy they consumed increased massively.

Would you be surprised to learn that it’s capitalism behind obesity?

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• Climate change’s impact on mental health is overlooked and misunderstood – here’s what can be done - The Conversation

• Will We Get Omicron’d Again? - Katherine J. Wu The Atlantic

• Half a million UK workers drop out of workforce, citing long-term illness - Suban Abdulla Reuters

Labor & Economics

DCH: Of Course Instant Groceries Don’t Work - Amanda Mull The Atlantic

Venture capitalists do not have much to offer these very normal people. The notion that true convenience is staying at home with everything you need brought to you, instead of living in a neighborhood where the things you need are available nearby in the course of your day, is, in my mind, a huge tell as to why investors refuse to stop losing money on these companies. It’s a consistent blind spot of the industry, and one that betrays the limited imagination with which wealthy investors envision the lives of regular Americans—if they really bother to envision our lives at all. To many billionaires, isolation away from the hoi polloi must sound luxurious and desirable—or, at least, that belief is commonly reflected in the lives they lead, the businesses they fund, and the policies they champion. But as many Americans realized during the worst days of the early pandemic, when demand for grocery delivery soared, that kind of isolation isn’t all that fantastic of a lifestyle choice. Mostly, it’s just kind of lonely.

Really smart piece on the ongoing pursuit and perpetual failures of grocery delivery startups. The closing emphasis on the value of the neighbourhood is refreshing. What doesn’t get touched on is another motivation for this, especially with more modern versions that rely on gig workers, is creating a lack of community further drives a wedge between people who live in communities and the workers that provide services to them.

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DCH: We’re Haunted by the Economy of the 1970s - Evangeline Gallagher The New Republic

Nostophobes urge lawmakers to learn from the 1970s—an admirable objective—but recommend all the wrong lessons. Fear of the 1970s grounds the demand for 1970s-style solutions to the world’s economic malaise. Remarkably, that fear is working. The Federal Reserve now appears determined to sacrifice employment on the altar of price stability, mimicking its own actions of more than 40 years ago: Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s speech at Jackson Hole in late August explicitly endorsed the 1970s as an object lesson for shaping economic policy today. Earlier, in May, Powell had said the Fed would continue raising interest rates in order to “get wages down.” This is both cruel, since it’s likely to push the economy deliberately into recession, and nonsensical, since rising wages aren’t the cause of inflation: The weakness of labor today means that, on the path to a 1970s-style “wage-price spiral,” we’re barely a single rotation up the fusilli. Coherence is usually the first victim of any historical analogy, and in this case the American worker seems likely to become victim number two. Fear of the 1970s has so thoroughly colonized the contemporary political imagination that we’re now set for a revival of the ­Volcker years.

Something something doomed to repeat it.

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• Ever More Land and Labor - Sven Beckert and Ulbe Bosma at Aeon

• The Oligarch’s Oligarch - George Monbiot

• After Neoliberalism: All Economics Is Local - Rana Foroohar in Foreign Affairs

• The Messy Unwinding of the New World Order—in Charts - Jon Hilsenrath, Anthony DeBarros and Kara Dapena, WSJ

• Inflation was always the endgame - TS Lombard

• Behind FTX’s fall, battling billionaires and a failed bid to save crypto - Angus Berwick and Tom Wilson at Reuters (DCH: a good explainer on the most recent bout of Mutual self-assured crypto-destruction.)

Movies + TV

CJW: Reservation Dogs

I finished watching Season 2 of Reservoir Dogs the other week but forgot to write it up. It’s easily one of the best half hour shows on television, and a perfect balance of slice-of-life drama and (usually dark) comedy.

The show follows a group of friends living on a reservation in Oklahoma, struggling in different ways in the aftermath of their friend’s suicide, and embracing petty criminality in an effort to raise the money needed to leave the rez and head to California. That’s the simplest way to describe the starting point of the show, but the real focus is the characters and their relationships, rather than any real plot - the way I’ve described it before is that the plot is there, but it’s happening in the background, with the characters taking prominence. It works incredibly well, and a big part of that comes down to the cast - especially the young main actors. I hope (generally racist as fuck) Hollywood is paying attention, because they all deserve to go on to even greater things.

In some ways the show almost functions as an anthology, with the main characters (and some of the side characters) each getting an episode dedicated to their story/struggles/perspective. For me, personally, in both seasons the Cheese episodes are my favourite. He’s a great character - generous and considerate, doing his best at being kind because Daniel’s suicide made him realise that sometimes people desperately need kindness.

Now that I think about it I might have mentioned RD after finishing Season 1, so if you ignored me last time, pay attention now. The show is too good to miss.

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LZ: Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities

I just LOVE IT. It’s the absolute cheesy gothic horror fiction, most of them adaptation of existing works by Lovecraft and others. What made me so happy is that all episodes have a creepy opening with Del Toro speaking in riddles and fiddling with a big cabinet full of drawers and things. Another great reason to watch is that every episode is directed by a different person, and you’ll find some of the greatest contemporary horror/sci-fi names there like Vincenzo Natali (The Peripheral), Panos Cosmatos (Mandy), Jennifer Kent (Babadook), Ana Lily Amirpour (A girl walks home alone at night), and actors like Essie Davis, Ben Barnes, Kate Micucci and Rupert Grint. It has the same sense of variety that Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, with the difference that the stories are really written by different people. Some may think the episodes are too long (about one hour), but if you take them more like short movies, separately, then it’s not too bad. Not a show to binge watch, but a show to love and taste graciously.

DCH: I’m only halfway through but so far The Autopsy and The Outside are especially excellent.

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LZ: The White Reindeer (1952)

A Finnish folk horror in black and white where this peasant girl living in the Finnish Lapland asks a witch to turn her into the most desired thing to the local hunters, thus becoming a white reindeer – apparently, a sacred or rare animal. It’s interesting, different from your regular folk horror movies, but it’s also short so it’s good stuff to use as a resource for study of folklore and cinema.

Four Flies On Gray Velvet (1971)

Can we just say how absolutely gorgeous 70s fashion is??? I could only pay attention to their hair and outfits, mostly Mimsy Farmer’s, who styles a short hairstyle and androgynous looks that made me want to cut my hair. This is a Dario Argento movie, so it’s pure giallo glory with that weird mix of Italian and English stuff. Nevertheless, if you like psychedelic rock, that could be your next flick.

The Self-Promotion

LZ: Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Outside is a scary nod to eating and body image disorders

I loved Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, but this episode really made an impression on me. Perhaps because I’m recovering from ED, yes, but because its open, ambiguous ending is horrifying at the same amount that it could be irresponsible if not well understood. Here is my essay about that.

The Memes

(this is fake, but still funny)