As the holiday season looms ahead, we’re doing our best to keep our feet on the ground and our heads held high. Join us for a little news catchup and some good, occasionally unclean fun.
For her weekly newsletter, Anne Helen Petersen writes, “You still need to have the conversation” about coronavirus safety during the season of More Uncomfortable Than Ever Before indoor holiday gatherings:
Maybe this tool — which shows the likelihood of encountering someone with COVID at a gathering of 10 people, county by county — will help. Maybe you can evoke the sacrifices of parents or grandparents in World War II, because some people are just really, really persuaded by anything that has to do with World War II.
Maybe you can promise a big gathering next year, or hours this year on the day-of playing Among Us or just watching a movie together. You can use the health of your own children or your cousin or your grandparents as a cudgel. Just remember that the most affective appeal to an individualist is always going to be from the people they care about in their immediate sphere. A state-wide lockdown might not change their behavior. An emailed article certainly won’t. But you might.
Speaking of emailed articles, if you must peruse national coronavirus news, here are some helpful ones: some studies are indicating that immunity to the virus may last years. Meanwhile, here is the current U.S. plan to distribute vaccines once available (possibly beginning in January).
Whether or not you are safely indulging in a large harvest feast-type meal this week, we highly recommend a read through “Taste, Memory,” a wonderfully bittersweet short comic about nostalgia and food by Sivan Piatigorsky-Roth.
If you are perhaps hungry instead for good old-fashioned smut, consider throwing your money at yet another hugely successful Kickstarter by Iron Circus Comics, Smut Peddler Presents: Sordid Past, a collection of erotic historical romance comics!! Three words, y’all: Ye. Olde. Tiddy.
If you are planning to indulge in some movie streams this week, don’t add Hillbilly Elegy to your list, which is reportedly completely awful. You could instead ponder why streaming movies, overall, completely sucks.
In the perennial post-election landscape, if you are looking for the people to thank for flipping Arizona blue, it’s the Navajo Nation, in addition to Arizona Latines. If you can spare some cash, we highly recommend donating to mutual aid and relief funds for Navajo and Hopi nations, who are among the many Native groups who have been hit extremely, disproportionately hard by the pandemic. And after that? Indulge in some imagination of what the future might look like if we gave land back to the Native groups who cared for it centuries before settlers.
To conclude, a smol timeline cleanse from our favorite anti-fascist Muppet-like individual who’s not afraid to indulge in a little bit of woo, Gritty, and his pals.