This story resonates with me tremendously as a Jew. It captures the ambivalent, ecstatic trauma of becoming part of the thing that is America in a way that perfectly matches my lived experience.
NIGHTLIGHT (A Black Horror Fiction Podcast) # 422: “Mitochondrial Assimilation” by Khalifaziz
They also have an interview with the author, Khalifaziz, that’s well worth your time.
… yes, they are cheesy showboats—no doubt—but they are cheesy showboats performing what is likely the ONLY FUNCTION most folks ACTUALLY want out of the Fourth Estate: to warn them about shit that might harm them on a regular day-to-day basis.
A huge portion of “news” focuses on opinion and “analysis” (which is just another kind of opinion) and “commentary” (a third name for opinion). All of these are technically forms of fiction: a person takes a nugget of reality and weaves whatever the hell they want around it. (DISCLOSURE: I was an op-ed writer for years. I’ve looked hard and long at how these particular sausages are made. It has lead to me being pretty goddamned disgusted by the prospect of eating any.)
Meanwhile, the easily maligned local TV investigative reporter? Say what you like about the smarm and histrionic gotcha!ness, but those bastards are speaking facts: they smell something fishy, go and get pics, take samples to a lab, and report the results. God Bless ’em
I mean, it’s weird that no one talks about the obvious visual similarities between the beginning of hot dog ad (top image) and the final image from Bergman’s Seventh Seal (bottom image), right?
Are we to understand that the Armour hotdog ad takes placed in some purgatorial afterlife, where we are all condemned to revert to a childlike state of un-knowing and follow a sinister hot dog man, terrified and singing? ’cause that’s a dark, dark Easter Egg, folks.
Here’s the entire VINTAGE 1967 ARMOUR HOT DOGS COMMERCIAL – KIDS MARCHING & SINGING:
And here’s the end of Bergman’s 1957 film, Seventh Seal:
This comic is from 1930 and about the smallpox vaccine, but it is also 100% from this past year and about Right Now. (The second guy is labelled “Faddist,” which Snopes explains is “a largely archaic word that describes people who turn to alternative or niche health trends, especially diets, in a way that neglects or contradicts mainstream scientific advice.” i.e., anyone taking horse dewormer or insisting on hydroxychloroquine while rejecting the vaccine.)
Just a brief reflection on First Days at school. I wrote this back in 2017, when my youngest began kindergarten. I posted it now, because after 406 with no in-person school, it’s taken me a month to process that her first day of the school year came and went without dire consequences.
This old essay begins like so:
Tuesday was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten. At 4:20, when her bus finally arrived, she didn’t get off.
The driver checked, first calling out from the front, then shushing all of the kids and calling out again, then finally going seat to seat down the length of the big yellow bus.
My daughter wasn’t there.
Don’t worry—this is an “all’s well that ends” situation…
from First Days (or “To Hell with Mitch Albom and his Bullshit Flat-Earth Nostalgia”)
It goes on from there. And, no, I have no clue why I chose to defame Mitch Albom in the title of this pieces. I never mention him in the entire essay. He must have just pissed me off that day. Dude does that.
This is a real illustration for a real patent really filed by (and granted to) Eddie Van Halen—yes, that Eddie Van Halen of the band Van Halen, may his memory be for a blessing.
(FUN FACT: The above video has not “aged poorly”; it was exactly as offensive in 1984 as it is today. Also, still hella catchy.)
I’ve added a new interactive fiction, “Shoot First!“, to my Patron’s Only Digital Vault. For as little as $3 patrons get immediate access to all the goodies in the Vault, including an analog horror film, audio books, new fiction and music, interactive goodies, etc.
Check it out on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DavidErikNelson
. . . I’ve gotta say, John Oliver is an absolute blessing.🦆😂
In order to rein in the ads and “Promoted” posts in your Twitter feed, you need to uncheck all of your “Interests” in the Ads preferences section of your Settings. This list is usually in the hundreds, if not thousands—and each item must be manually unchecked. ☹️
This script helps enormously: Automatically Unchecking Twitter Interests. I found changing the timer from “100” to “3000” was the sweet spot where it was working through these checkboxes in decent time, but not triggering a whole bunch of 500 errors or hanging up.
