nothing here but the ghosted and the ghoster
issue 308 - 18th January, 2026
CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. We’re happy to have you. As ever, if you would like to support us, those links are:
Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email to someone you think might enjoy it.
The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, axolotl.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
CJW: Double Take - Jeff Vandermeer at Orion Magazine
The positive effects of my real trail cam videos far outweigh anything that comes from believing in an unreal forest creature. People seeing the daily lives of the raccoons in my backyard, and glimpsing their personalities, have written to me about a light going off in their minds. The footage has inspired them to avoid trapping or relocating their wild neighbors—and to provide water sources and plant life to help them.
They did this because of Raccoon Mother, who used to herd her babies into the birdbath and stand upright, acting as sentinel while they played and drank. Because of the old raccoon, Grandma, who grudgingly took in an orphan and who the neighbors had been seeing for more than a decade. Because of Balls, who had the biggest balls of any raccoon I’d ever seen and who, after being hit by a car, doggedly dragged himself around the neighborhood by his front paws until his semi-paralyzed hindquarters healed, in one of the most tenacious (and bearlike) displays of fortitude I’ve ever witnessed.
A couple years ago, a raccoon researcher told me that, until recently, we didn’t know much about the habits of suburban raccoons. They were a mysterious animal whose intelligence we’re only now beginning to understand because they weren’t deemed sufficiently important. Isn’t it marvelous that even “trash pandas” hide mysteries; that real animals, not shadows conjured up by our minds, have such complexity and nuance?
On the conspiracy-minded obsession with cryptids as opposed to interest and wonder in the animals we share the planet with.
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CJW: greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) - Mo Quirk
There are certainly things to learn from the Greenland shark: about sustainability, both personal and ecological, and about what it takes to survive. Survival something I return to again and again. To survive the cold deep, you must slow and wait. To survive being human takes something altogether different: warmth and brightness, burning out into the universe, allowing ourselves to age and decay in the light.
Another great read from Dr Mo, on the Greenland Shark, living, and dying.
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Just the headlines:
Earth's last 3 years were its hottest on record - Carolyn Gramling
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: The Media’s Role in Manufacturing Consent in US-Venezuela Relations - David Tyler
Mainstream reporting of Venezuela is the story of how consent gets manufactured in 2025. Forget naff Soviet style propaganda. Instead, train your eyes on a bee dance of selective coverage, ideological framing and strategic amnesia.
Venezuela wins a golden globe for best propaganda show of the 21st century: convincing most of us that United States economic warfare does not exist.
A really interesting piece on Venezuela over the past few years, US meddling, and the media's complicity (especially here in Australia, as it's an Australian publication).
This is also very important:
The propaganda model deployed against Venezuela, demonisation, economic warfare disguised as humanitarian concern, manufactured democratic pretexts for intervention, is being retrofitted for China. The patterns are identical; only the scale differs.
I really hope average people will realise soon that the Western elites want us to sleep walk into war with China. Just close our eyes and follow the beat of their white supremacist war drum.
And this:
When a Venezuelan child dies because hospitals cannot get dialysis equipment, that is not “socialist failure.” That is economic strangulation by the world’s dominant power. US officials admit that sanctions should cause enough suffering to trigger political change.
Yet media coverage presents Venezuela’s crisis as self inflicted, the inevitable result of Chavista economic policies and corruption. Sanctions are mentioned, if at all, as afterthoughts; minor irritants rather than a central driver of collapse.
Tech & Design
LZ - People are paying for code-based "drugs" for ChatGPT
If you thought AI hallucinations were bad, this Swedish company is now selling prompt packs that supposedly will make ChatGPT act as if it were under the effect of certain drugs: ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca, and weed. Some people are calling this a scam, and I’m unsure if anyone should take it seriously, especially at $44 per pack. According to the post, “Pharmaicy presents the project as an experiment rather than a novelty, arguing that altered states have long been linked to creative thinking and that AI can be explored in a similar way through language based rules.” Sus, but what if that could help unlock other ideas that “normal” reasoning wouldn’t? We shall see...
Society & The Culture
CJW: Experts Warn U.S. in Early Stages of Genocide Against Trans Americans - Walker Bragman
Theriault said he is concerned about “the kinds of legal shifts that are happening and the kind of blatant hatred being expressed by [Trump] and his followers and government leaders—and at the way they’re acting on it.”
“I think we’re already at the point for trans folks, for immigrants, where the damage is being done,” Theriault said. “So it’s not so much ‘will genocide happen?’ as ‘we got to stop it from happening.’”
Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, founder and executive director of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, said she believes the U.S. is now in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.”
She said Republicans are using trans people to generate fear—particularly surrounding children, family, and their ideal concept of masculinity—which is priming their base for genocide.
I just really, really hope you are paying attention. Too many cis folk really aren’t. When we talk about being genocided, we aren’t using hyperbole to bring attention to trans issues, we’re using accurate terminology.
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CJW: Why being ghosted is inevitable and being a ghoster is too - Dominc Pettman at Psyche
Margaret Thatcher reportedly said: ‘There is no such thing as society’ – a statement that essentially inaugurated an age in which ‘the people’ would be ghosted by something so obvious and taken-for-granted that its persistence was never even considered: society itself. And yet that surreal situation is what we are living through today. The rapid ‘transformation of intimacy’ – as the sociologist Anthony Giddens put it in the 1990s – that followed the arc of the 20th century meant that small-scale relationships, especially in the form of the heterosexual couple, were increasingly tasked with taking on all those modes of support that we would normally associate with a small town. One’s partner was essentially retrained to be lover, friend, counsellor, colleague, cook, housekeeper, personal assistant, chauffeur, cheerleader, patron, nurse, shrink and everything else besides. Those aspects of life that were once considered to ‘take a village’ now take an absurdly burdened individual. No wonder one’s ‘life partner’ so rarely lasts for life, the resulting wrinkle being that people become more and more dependent on fewer and fewer souls, leading to more and more pressure, which in turn creates the ideal conditions for seeking to break free. It’s a shrinking, vicious cycle.
An essay on 'ghosting', which could have been a trite treatise on digital etiquette but covers the shifting usages of the term and the ways society has shifted over time. The above is something I think about a lot in regards to both the atomisation of society generally and the question of monogamy vs polyamory in romantic relationships.
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“A post, a podcast, a screenshot, a meme, a whistle, a bullet — in all things, only the medium is the message.” - Killing in the name of… nothing - Sarah Jeong at The Verge - CJW: The best part of this piece is probably the way it destroys Ezra Klein, but on the whole it's interesting too.
Health, Cooking, and Related
CJW: Long COVID advocacy is incomplete without sex workers - Khalil (Kae) Dennis at The Sick Times
Long COVID advocacy is inadequate without sex workers, who have a long legacy of catalyzing consent education and facilitating disease prevention. Mask blocs and Long COVID advocacy groups should engage with established networks of information sharing, resource distribution, and safety systems created by sex workers.
These networks are already more connected to Long COVID than advocates may realize, as sex work has become more commonplace among long-haulers experiencing widespread unemployment in the last five years. The sex work economy saw a major influx of both online adult content creators and escort services early in the pandemic, amid rising inflation and diminishing COVID-19 safety nets. Unacknowledged are the queer and trans people, many left underemployed by Long COVID, who began erotic labor due to inaccessible, openly antagonistic workplaces. As sex workers, they are constitutionally unprotected laborers.
[...]
For years, sex workers warned us as their banking access and online accounts faced restrictions and altogether deletion. But Long COVID advocates don’t acknowledge the throughline. Their disinterest illustrates that sex workers are important only when victimized, demonized, or, as Savage added, “romanticized.” Everything except humanized.
Sex workers are so often on the front lines of internet censorship, shadowbanning, debanking, etc, and have been fighting against this bullshit for years. So this piece points out both the overlap between the community of Long COVID sufferers and the sex work community, and the ways the latter’s experience can be of use to the former if and when they choose to pay attention.
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No Good Options - Ashley Schofield at Stop Caring - CJW: On depression and the game Depression Quest. A powerful read if the topic is relevant.
Movies + TV
MJW: Predator Badlands
I watched Predator Badlands recently, and it popped into my mind when thinking of what to add to the newsletter. But when I tried to think critically about the film, or indeed really remember much about it at all, nothing came to me. Is this post-stoner blankness? Brain fuzz? Maybe. But it’s also because nothing about it was really memorable. Looking it up for some reminders, I recalled liking Elle Fanning’s Thia, relentlessly cheerful and curious. But I didn’t find the protagonist, Dek, or any of the other characters likeable, or even particularly interesting. The premise (kill creature to impress daddy) wasn’t compelling. This was a real shift from Trachetenberg’s other date with the Predator franchise, Prey, which I thought was original and kinda awesome. It was just okay. I find myself saying that a lot about media I consume lately. How was it? Okay. Not terrible, not great. It was okay. I wouldn’t go so far to say that Badlands felt like second screen stuff, which is a category a lot of what I watch lately falls into, but it was… just okay.
Videos
LZ - Esoterica
I've been binge-watching this channel focused on esoterism, history of magic, alchemy, occultism, and kabbalah. It took a while for me to get into the rhythm of Sledge's oratory, especially now that I'm kinda rusty when it comes to academic talk. But once you get into it, it's clear how impressive his knowledge is – and how witty his humor is at times, with references I wouldn't think he would use given the archetype that I see him representing, so to speak. It was with him that I learned that John Dee also dabbled in semiotics, which makes it even more exciting to me since I have a Master's in this field, and we also share the same birthday (July 13th, but I have the add-on that it was a Friday). Nevertheless, I recommend both the playlist on alchemy and hermetic philosophy for a first check.
Music
LZ - Basht - Wild Horses
This randomly started to play when I was listening to a radio for another song on Spotify, and, wow, I'm addicted to this track. The band seems to be quite recent, so there's not much available yet, but this song is a banger and I guess people who like Interpol and Radiohead may appreciate it.
The Self-Promotion
CJW: Mother’s Hip - Lightspeed Magazine and Eviction Notice - Grimdark Magazine #45
This month, Maddison Stoff and I have two collaborations out - Mother’s Hip at Lightspeed Magazine (and also cross-posted to Gizmodo, which I didn’t know was going to happen but which is very cool), and Eviction Notice in Grimdark Magazine’s special Cyberpunk Issue.
Mother’s Hip is a story about trans motherhood, and is very important to us. If you want to know more about the story before or after you read it, we also did an interview with Phoebe Barton all about it.
Eviction Notice is in a slightly different mode - we had to write something that was grimdark and cyberpunk, but we also didn’t want it to be dreary. So it’s hyperpop-infused like our Interzone story, but also brutal and messed up at the same time. It was fun figuring out how to walk that line.
Anyway, I would love it if you checked out Mother’s Hip, and if you’re tempted by Grimdark #45, it’s their first time doing a physical issue.
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MJW: Adventures In Whoreland - Tryst Blog
I’ve got a newish thing up as Mia at the Tryst Blog. It’s called Adventures in Whoreland and I did the art for it too.
The Memes
![twitter screenshot of a post from @Shen_the_Bird. wikipedia: please. please just give me one dollar i'm begging you give me anything. me: [trying to look up the hamburglar's full name] shut the fuck up](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/cf7be6dd-2349-42d9-8f68-fa4032d72c38.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
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