CONFIRMED: vacations are bad 🚷

Mapping disasters and tourism, and examining what the future of "being human" will look like.

COVID hospitalizations accelerate
A late summer wave
I know four people with Covid in Los Angeles, plus a handful of mutuals in other cities mentioning they have it. Be careful out there!!

12 Tweets Helped Get Trump Indicted
Does Trump’s Georgia Indictment Matter?
“a witch hunt”
“He wrote “RIGGERS””
I don’t typically care about Trump indictments, but the Georgia case seems different. And? We’ll get a mugshot!! We won, even if nothing else happens here!!

Trump Rules Iowa State Fair
Most interesting thing about GOP candidates in Iowa is that Vivek Ramaswamy’s rapping made him more appealing than Ron DeSantis – and landed him polling in second place. Which leads us to…

DeSantis Allies Reveal Debate Strategy
“DeSantis’ leaked debate strategy”
This is delicious news, which reveals how Vivek’s stressing out Ron. What an incredible loser!!

Far-Right Wins Argentina’s Primary
Look, the right are picking up wins everywhere. This one is in Argentina’s presidential primary is interesting given 1.) he wants to adopt the American dollar, while 2.) ending public health care and 3.) probably destroying the environment. Not great!

"I shot that b**** dead”
”teacher shot by 6yr”
I’ve been vaguely following this story since the beginning of the year, about a 6 year old in Virginia who shot his teacher. The specifics of the situation were revealed recently and…it’s one of the more grim glimpses into American violence that I’ve ever seen? It’s incredibly dark.

Zuckerberg ‘to Move On’ From ‘Cage Fight’
Rare w for Zuck. Really impressive that Elon makes Zuck look cool.

Hilary rapidly grows to Category 4
A wild, rare occurrence that dominated the weekend: a hurricane (or tropical storm) hit Southern California. If we recall, this happened in a less intense version last year, with a monsoon-style storm hitting the area. (And, not for nothing, a warmer world with warmer waters means more hurricanes.)

Judge rules in favor of youths
Remember the kids who sued Montana, because of the state’s lack of climate protections? THE KIDS WON. As I mentioned last week, regarding the court case of older women suing governments for climate inaction, this is certainly a trend of the future. TBD on if it yields anything.

The situation in Maui is an unfathomable tragedy, piled upon a mass of losses too big to process. Fires in Canada, fires in Greece, tornadoes in the Midwest, a tropical storm in the West, earthquakes in Turkey, extreme heat worldwide: this year, like all the years of this decade and the decade before, are glutted by devastation, which we habituate and normalize as the lows continue to creep toward downward. How much more do we have to witness to understand why this is happening?

Outside of the earthquakes in Turkey, we know the theme connecting these: the shifting of the climate and the general crisis of the environment. This is obvious! It’s muscle memory at this point, which we see and feel as we melt, waiting for the floods and fires to hit us next. What complicates (and fuels) the Maui incident - along with Greece and Canada too – is a man-made problem exacerbating dire situations: vacationing.

Leisure and one’s pursuit of a good time has quickly turned into an act of colonization, away-from-home gentrification in the name of your good time that makes life for locals a challenge. This feeling has been building all summer in many ways: there are people behaving badly – tourists carving names into ancient sites, tourists climbing into fountains for a drink, tourist sleeping at monuments and forcing them to close – which evolves into thoughtless, selfish behavior like trying to get a reservation at a restaurant the burned down a day before or debating (and demanding) refunds for trips to fire-ravaged destinations. This behavior captures the modern “I am on vacation and I deserve to be royalty!” feeling that is absolutely passé no matter how or where you travel. This question of if travel is good has been posed all summer, as people complain about not having the best time and vacationers annoying vacationers. Beyond climate, tourism and travel inflate local prices and force out residents who cannot afford the same luxuries of vacationers. This has led to a rise in tourism bans, from Bali to Amsterdam to Monterey to Key West to the biggest European countries, along with wars against brands like Airbnb and Lime. Yes, you, the traveler, may debate if traveling to Maui right now is bad or not for you – but the locals are saying stay away. Who’s right and who is wrong? The tourists are wrong. Obviously!

We’re hitting a breaking point of what leisure travel can and should be, which has turned years and years and years of debating flying-for-fun into meaningless goo: leisure travel is bad, no matter how many (useless) carbon offsets you pursue or how much you try to “act like a local.” Traveling very far – especially to remote areas outside of your world – is very bad for the planet. This is being debated fiercely as people plug their ears and pretend these facts aren’t connected. Travel isn’t a right! It’s a very modern concept that we don’t need to do. Yes, we should engage and experience different cultures. We should travel, from time to time, every few years for special occasions. But multiple times a year? Always by plane? To sensitive regions? To play-act royalty that manipulates local economies? You are engaging in imperialist, colonial drag no matter where you go.

I could go on and on and on. Travel today, in this form and frequency, exposes not only how we’re disrespecting the planet but how we’re disrespecting each other. Frequent flying and “seeing the world” are now cringe. Explore your world and your surroundings. Read the room! It’s on fire.

The Hurricane Blonde
Looking for a late summer read? My friend

Halley Sutton

‘s new book is out!! It’s an LA neo-noir ~thrill ride~ that…debuted at number 89 USA Today bestseller list!! YAY HALLEY!!!

‘The Blind Side’ Was a Lie
This week in DRAMA, the basis of The Blind Side is being questioned by the sources themselves.

'Asian glow' is a severe warning.
Very interesting story about how the “Asian glow” from drinking is actually a sign of having a genetic mutation that could cause cancer. This manifests as the body not being able to break down alcohol.

Marimekko Brings Open-For-All Runway
Did you know Marimekko is making clothes now? And it’s super unisex? Obsessed. It’s very me, not that I need any new clothes on this dying planet.

Ranking the best fuck ass bobs
“the phrase FAB”
After Kim Kardashian debuted an awful bob, there was great discourse about what is and isn’t a “fuck ass bob” (FAB). The TikTok is a master's thesis. Give it a Pulitzer!

An honest depiction of elder sex
Artist Marilyn Minter gives a really great look behind a series of images she did about older persons getting sexy. It’s very good!

How Hollywood made a drag queen classic
Julie Newmar turned 90 (!!) this week and you should celebrate by reading this oral history of To Wong Foo from 2020. It’s fascinating, from how Robin Williams helped make the movie happen to how Patrick Swayze’s mother didn’t approve of his taking the role. It also highlights the point of drag: to celebrate women and further empower them.

Planet of the Bass [Official Video]
Look. You have to know this full video dropped but, as a 1990s Fired Up! wannabe, it’s not great. The song was made for the chorus and it shows. The lyrics, in total, are very improv 101 zaniness, very friend you went to high school with who was gonna go on SNL. Weird Al, please make a better version! (As a salve, listen to this Fired Up! playlist I made.)

Sign Libra - Le Chat [Official Video]
There is no artist who is more “me” than Sign Libra – and she has a new album coming soon. Called “Le Chat,” it’s feels like I’m on mushrooms, dancing by the ocean, wearing these sunglasses. Actually? It’s the spiritual soundtrack to the merengue scene from My Blue Heavens (and I’m Bill Irwin).

“The egg that became me was in my mother when she was in the womb, which means I spent a few months inside my grandmother's body.”

A friend recently said something like this to me, which was one of the wildest things I had heard in a while. I had to ask her to repeat it twice to fully understand: I was an egg in my mother, when she was inside my grandmother, before she was born? Yes, because women are born with all their eggs, all the possible people they can create and carry. This is a very freshman-getting-baked subject, that has been recurring online with posts like this from Dr. Jacquelyn Gill and posts like this popping up on Reddit. It truly is a mind-bending thing to think about!!

This feeling persists though, as related feelings – “when im just sitting then i remember that my face is a combination of thousands of people who loved each other faces,” “I’m super horny / me paying taxes” – pop up every few months to remind us that, yes, our being alive is wild. It’s strange! It’s beautiful. It is weird. And it will get weirder too, as we’re entering a moment that (I believe) will define our lifetime: what does it mean when we step into this already strange process of procreation, to hold off or rearrange the making of people? This is already happening in a few ways.

The obvious form of this are test tube babies and the larger IVF landscape. In my own life, I know roughly four or five children of parents who employed this route for having children. This ranges from manipulated out-of-body birth (A surrogate carrying a child that is not the surrogate’s egg.) to manipulated in-the-body birth (Having a child from an egg that is not the carrier’s own.), which mix and match the process of surrogacy to create children who are and are not the product of their parents’ “parts.”

Now that these children of modern medicine are becoming adults (The technology became accessible in the 1980s and 1990s.), they are sharing their experiences – and they deepen this rabbit hole of “Wait. You’re made of what?” Take creator Michel Janse who recently went viral for sharing her experience as an IVF embryo. “I am an IVF baby and so is my sister,” she explains, while putting on makeup (in a now-deleted video). “My sister is three years younger than me but technically we were from the same batch…We were extracted at the exact same time, fertilized at the exact same time, and were created to be embryos at the exact same time.” She goes on to say that, essentially, because of egg freezing, she and her sister are twins separated by years. Making this more interesting (Or complicated? Or the future-is-now?) is that the eggs her parents had fertilized are still frozen and viable. As Michel explains, she’s thought about having the eggs implanted so she could give birth to…her twin? While freezing eggs is a very common practice, the big-brained version of this is having children who were “created” decades before they were actually born. This is some Star Trek ass shit!

It doesn’t stop there: a few years ago, when I was working and writing for ATTN:, I wrote a story about the ethical implications of having sex with robots. It was a silly story, but it brought me to a question that I still think about and that we will start to have answered in our lifetime: when we can artificially replicate human sex acts and reproductive matter like sperm and eggs, are we irrevocably altering what it means to be human? Creating people from scratch genetic materials, independent of human processes, is called synthetic embryos or artificial offspring and are exactly that: people made without people. This too had a mini viral moment as the process is becoming real. It also gets at what has been said: being born is so strange, as the circumstances are so otherworldly when we stop to zoom out and think about it. The future is now.

While these conversations are scattered now, happening between families and groups of friends who employ these technologies, these items – IVF, freezing eggs, synthetic embryos – are playing larger roles in our world, growing to major subjects within our lifetime. Consider the “I didn’t ask to be born.” memes and existing without consent: how complicated will these subjects get by the time Michel births her twin-daughter? Can she, like the teens in Montana, sue the powers that be for altering their lives? We’ll find out.

“I’m 45”
“I’m 45”
“dust bowl woman”
“dust bowl woman”
“me rising”
“me after”
“photo of my grandparents”
Some image memes this week: there was the billionaire parody (based on a Post story); a funny picture of actor Skyler Gisondo holding a dog; and a picture of Selena Gomez gazing. (Also, regarding the billionaire, we are TIRED of hearing about him.)

“obsession with masculine aesthetics”
“an x collab”
The new “updated” Twitter logo is so embarrassing.

"can i say something without people getting mad"
There’s a new thicc supreme that people are lusting over: the lady Mets mascot.

“not real tile”
“mm mmm”
“can’t relate”
“not for you”
This is certainly always how TikTok works, but there feels to be an increasing number of “I DONT GIVE A SHIT!!” or “NOT FOR YOU!!” reaction videos. A sign of our times, as we discussed with aliens.

“work smarter”
“there’s a snake”
“AI would be”
“as a young girl”
Related to the above: reaction videos, agreeing to the wildest shit. Funny how Grimes is in both formats!

"dancer is on crutches"
“HER-MEES”
“Most EXPENSIVE”
“corporate millennial”
Bama Rush is back and it’s too much (especially the riches).

"I’m releasing a new album!"
The best take on Sufjan’s new album.

"feels like be an adult and to watch heartstopper"
The perfect anti-press to get me to never watch Heartstopper. I need queer people to be filthy again!!

“best sticker”
Do they have a “We’re getting laid off.” sticker too?

“lost your minds”
Children are reinventing phrenology! Just wait until they hear about the Smithsonian racial brain collection.

“not Clickhole”
Harrison Ford, with one of the most insane celebrity quotes of our times.

“MAKE MOVIES AUTHENTIC”
let romcom chicks RIP IT fr

“what character Babs would play”
Please listen to this Barbara Streisand song that sounds like a Mario Kart song.

And, finally, the thing that brought me the most joy this week.

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