so, yeah, these ARE war times 🧨

On the feelings and expressions of modern warfare and why age has become increasingly fuzzy online.

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Xi, Putin and Modi Signal Unity
Xi, Putin, Kim: the optics of a new world order
Kim Jong Un arrives for parade
Xi Jinping hails ‘unstoppable’ China at parade
North Korean leader's daughter makes debut

It feels like the ”Trump health talk” and his general antics eclipsed this, which is very concerning as a real axis of evil solidifies. What’s worse, it feels like mo leader right now is far right and evil, meaning: this is a time of the less bad (Trump??) battling the more bad (Putin??).

Ursula von der Leyen’s plane hit Russian interference
US to cut funds for European countries bordering Russia

To the immediate above: I’m worrying, darling! We’re getting very close to some tense moments that go beyond the hehe haha “Trump did a dumb thing!” This is maybe why France alluded to preparing for casualties in 2026.

Trump says US strike on vessel in Caribbean
‘They’re using us as pawns’

Then there was this, which is a distraction from…what? This feels less an attack on Venezuela and more an extension of anti-immigrant and xenophobic behavior. But what do we know! Donald “FBI Informant” Trump knows best!

Florida will eliminate all vaccine mandates
1 in 4 Americans trust RFK Jr. with medical advice

The Florida item equated vaccinations to “slavery,” which is all (Senate grilled) RFK’s doing (aided by Jenny McCarthy). As someone said best on TikTok, “Anti-vaxxers are spoiled brats who forgot how privileged they really are.” This trends with parts of Africa sliding backwards as far as disease because of the USAid vaccine cuts. Florida’s behavior also upholds the “state recession” idea.

Blue states that sued kept most CDC grants
HI, WI join blue-state opposition to EV attacks
Blue states eye rival health rules to defy RFK Jr.
"We are slowly witnessing a soft secession"
“Governors in blue states are quietly”

To the opposite of the above, “soft secession” keeps going around, along with the idea that blue states need to stop subsidizing red states. We’ll touch on this in the below essay, but I think this is what modern American “warfare” looks like, happening within documents instead of with weapons on the streets (unless you are ICE). To clarify: it is secession not succession, as I keep seeing.

Job openings hit 10-month low
Unemployed workers outnumber available jobs

Makes your head spin, even if I’ve been hearing chatter about friends landing interviews. (Maybe that says something about a potential AI unplugging? Unsure!!) This is why so many dumbasses are lining up for ICE job fairs, which isn’t to excuse them but I “understand” the desperation, even if pivoting to gestapo is not the answer (but is the answer Trump, et al, wants).

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Riots in Indonesia saw the public pushing against the country’s leadership, thousands rallying against “a housing allowance for MPs that was nearly 10 times the minimum wage in Jakarta” as public health and education eroded. Police violence resulted in the death of a delivery driver, drawing out further protests and deaths as fighting against the country’s elites escalated to looting their homes, exposing their riches. “The public is indeed very angry and upset with the behavior of the elite — hedonistic, frequently showing off on social media, and insensitive to the suffering of ordinary people, most of whom are struggling,” University of Indonesia professor Aditya Perdana told Bloomberg this week.

People in the Philippines have similarly been relentlessly grilling the children of politicians, exposing their riches and excess, pointing out what they have while so many have so little. It’s a war against nepo babies, all after revelations were revealed that the parents of said rich kids lied and profited during flood recovery measures earlier this year. “When it floods, it’s not the wealthy engineers or politicians or senators or congressmen or contractors living in mansions with dozens of SUVs who suffer,” representative Elajiah San Fernando told the AP. “When flood control fails, the ordinary Filipino gets to be hurt first.” Enough is enough, these posts and protests project. “I would be mad too if I was funding these fucking nepo babies’ life — and they’re buying ugly things,” Filipino-American creator Bretman Rock said of the situation.

Earlier in the summer, many in Malaysia protested the rising costs of living. This was in response to their prime minister announcing cash aid to solve the problem — but many didn’t feel this was enough. The week before, Argentina’s president Javier Milei rode down the streets of Buenos Aires, smiling and waving despite an ongoing scandal: his sister allegedly siphoned off money intended to help those with disabilities for herself. Protestors and spectators threw rocks, pelting the president and said sister, forcing them to flee. People have doubts about his successes in the upcoming midterms, not to mention the markets being on edge. This week, protestors in Ghana’s capital of Accra urged for the cancellation of debt across the continent as their high debts prevent access to essential services. “In 23 African countries, debt servicing is outpacing money spent on health and education,” RFI reported. “Why should the risk premium for African countries be so different from Europe, America, and other parts of the world?” Ghana Minister of Finance Cassiel Ato Forson asked at a rally. “DEBT IS SLAVERY,” a protest sign warned.

Do you see it? I see it. If you don’t, here’s what someone on TikTok said: “Watching Indonesians burn Jakarta to the ground literally makes me think the rest of the world think American citizens are pussies.” (Caveat: I would posit cities like Los Angeles are proof of similar stepping up.)

This is less about American “inaction” but more that we are all fighting very similar problems: Europeans just like Americans are faced with the same issues of inequalities that Indonesians and Malaysians and Filipinos and Argentines and Ghanaians face, to the point of protests and violence raising the voice of people to be heard. Local governments call for painting dissent differently, but I’d posit that this is what modern warfare is starting to look like. Yes, in Russia and Ukraine, Gaza and Israel, “real” modern warfare is happening as unmanned drones kill children with the push of a button — but “war times” are here in the sense that we are all fighting, both with each other and with the powers that be, some more organized than others, some more successful than others. How else does this need to be spelled out? Does the “Department of Defense” transforming into the “Department of War” not say this? Is “Chipocalypse Now” not an expression of a soft civil war? Is the nightmare blunt rotation of Putin and Modi and Xi and Jong-Un at a military parade not a threat?

There is a modern fantasy that war is defined as someone with a gun marching upon you and entering your house (Which, um, is happening.) but there’s also something to be said about modern cold wars, that the love language of modern warfare sees conflict expressed through paperwork and forms, the first line of battle as real lines of battle are drawn: trade wars as real wars, soft secessions, Labor Day protests against billionaires, AI and tariffs creating an unemployment landscape so wide that it caves into armed forces labor and government police. Thus is the intersection of wanting to fight and raging within the machine, where people are dismantling companies from within, being the wrench that fucks with the gears. Diplomacy Man to the rescue, it seems! “Defiance on a collective scale is much harder to mitigate and therefore offers rich potential,” artist Sam Lavigne wrote this summer for Pioneer Works. “The danger to the boss comes not only from the threat of reduced profit, but also (and perhaps most importantly) from the ways that sabotage can lay bare the fundamental mechanics of capitalism and exploitation itself.” This means making the ICE interview pranks real, as a resounding chorus of the now is getting hired by ICE and doing a bad job. “Resist the fascist regime without putting themselves into danger and actually cause a lot of damage,” a somewhat viral TikTok from July went, explaining how office work was used as warfare in the Simple Sabotage Field Manual from 1944. “Be as incompetent as humanly possible to really slow things down.” You can buy a gun and look cute but you can also weaponize incompetence and fart the whole time too. These paperwork wars are happening in tandem with blocking arrests in local neighborhood, all saying: what is happening in other countries is happening everywhere, as the less-off collectively realize they are indeed less-off — but it takes unlatching from the teat of Amazon, et al, to realize this. Self-soothing by playacting you’re rich is a willing embracing of technologic, economic, and ideologic oppression: it is the problem for you and the people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Argentina, Ghana, etc.

There’s a lot happening, multiple conversations at once, tiers of warfare moving ahead in slow motion and fast forward, starting today but also hundreds of years ago: there is no history book for the present to explain the battles you are in — but there are images and proof that you can choose to see or not, viewed worldwide as same-same but different. What other signals do we need to hear? A billionaire speaking on 1930s autocracy? Or Mitch McConnell? The revolution is being televised right now. Are you tuning in? Or tuning out?

Is ‘The Wizard of Oz’ the Future of Cinema?

This review is a bit too sympathetic to the Wizard of Oz at the Sphere, which is more “product” than film. And the inclusion of Zaslav as a Munchkin? Gross, sycophantic, and a sign of the end.

‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’: Longest Standing Ovation

This is incredible, but only so laudable given Hollywood originating performativity, particularly around Palestine. A little late to be standing up and applauding yourself for standing up and applauding, huh? And to the point of the essay above: what are we supposed to do with rich people who seek to align themselves with the most desperate while doing nothing with their power? A question, as we sharpen the guillotines.

Paramount mandates 5-day return to office

Greetings, from the epicenter of Hollywood’s right wing lurch!

Rachel Scott: Creative Director of Proenza Schouler

After the Anna Wintour nepoburger, we at least got some good news: Proenza Schouler hired Rachel Scott as the founders are on to Loewe. V inspired! Elevating a Black woman for once!!!!!

Prolonged toilet sitting increase hemorrhoid risk

This recent study was all over this week — but I thought we all “knew this”? In any event — and this is TMI — but an extension of my “No phone in bed!” resolution was to also not-to-scroll on the toilet. I’ve kept both up and can report that my sleeping is better and any hemorrhoidal activity has dissipated. Bum blessings to us all!

“How are we gonna fall in love with the world”
“That is going to light a million fuses”

This Robin Wall Kimerer video is getting a lot of attention for reminding us about the importance of nature, of valuing the living, and of deeply human activities that we’ve become disconnected from. Robin is an icon!! I read Gathering Moss last year and I felt like my skin was growing furry all summer.

“Queen of Quincy”

The best documentary you’ll watch this week is about a queer Massachusetts Filipino immigrant who had to abandon his drag queen career to care for his niece and nephew 🥲 (Here’s the video Maria Christina False Eyelashes originated from.)

There’s a trend that hits TikTok every summer, one that starts and ends specifically in the suburban used car dealerships of America: people being asked what year they graduated from high school. Even the Backstreet Boys did it in 2025! Each video is a strange walk backwards in fast forward, experiencing people who look very well into their fifties claiming — Ridiculously! — that they graduated in 2006 or 2010, creating a tension that smudges the lens with that we view the recent past. “As a millennial…this video made me feel great about how I’m holding up,” someone commented, to which 55K people agreed with a comment like. While not intended to be a humiliation ritual, it very much is while revealing who gets to age and who doesn’t age, calling into question everything from the “Gen Z looks old” trend to the “Millennials are aging backwards” trend, two items that feel true in the context of coastal persons and media figures who prioritize skincare regimens and being “camera ready” over being in the sun, trying to sell a car.

But what this all really gets at is that, to participate in culture online, to be someone who watches and even casually posts, you are relinquishing your age to the unknown. Unless you are Baddiewinkle (RIP, angel!!), age gets blurry and conceptual, not only because of age dysmorphic filters and film technologies that shave years off one’s image but because something as simple as slang can be adopted and owned over text, making it easier to code-switch “as younger.” A great example that keeps happening — which is not a bad thing, but more a game-recognizing-game thing — is booking “Gen Z” guests for 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 only to find that a person is in their thirties, closer to my age than not-my-age. This was something Kristin Simon of

Best Trends Forever

and I chatted about before her episode, as I was convinced she was a very mature 28 year old, which is a common feeling I’ve had with many a person whose relationship I took from URL to IRL: everyone was older than I thought, despite my digging into LinkedIns and tagged Instagram photos, despite following their conversational patterns and throwing a dart at where they fell age-wise. Another example of such age dysmorphia happened recently when beauty creator Erin Parsons’ had a viral video recreating a makeup look she wore in the late 1990s, thus inspiring everyone in the comments to go “😳YOU’RE IN YOUR MID-FORTIES😳,” which ties into a post from a few years ago about her beauty studio, where people were shocked at the size: “I’ve been working since I was 13 😬,” she replied. And obviously we can’t talk about this phenomena without the best modern age-passer: Club Chalamet, whose faceless fandom antics suggested a teen or twentysomething when the reality is she’s a woman in her fifties, a truth that has inspired endless ageist commentary that she repeatedly speaks up and out against. This is all a law of the internet though: from kids in the 1990s aging themselves up to creeps aging themselves down so they can roam the hallways of AIM, from the recent Roblox scandal being based in kids interacting with adult contents accidentally/on purpose to YouTube “ensuring” that kids are kids despite kids finding work arounds, a truism of digital exchanges is that we are all “the same age” even if many of us are lying about said age.

But, as Erin Parsons and Club Chalamet get at, there is a power in owning your age online and off as there is a legitimacy built by standing upon your years despite a global society obsessed with anti-aging.

Ida Therén

brought this up in a chat we had a few weeks back, that credibility is so closely tied to one’s age — especially online, where your intellect and experience comes through as competency reflective of your expertise and lived experience, hence the trap many of us fall into by keeping quiet about graduation years. Going a step further, to age online or off now, like being not-thin now, is to take a greatly anticapitalist step forward: I will not buy whatever the fuck products to “stay young,” I will not be a child just to become more palatable. I will wear my wrinkles and wear my age, showing you exactly how much life I’ve lived. This is why Pamela Anderson keeps popping up in the news as she is defying what the public (male) gaze demands of women. Kristin Dunst has a similar effect, to which she goes to incredible lengths show she gives no shits. These are statements against the misogyny in the machine, that all women have to remain a beautiful sprite as to not enter the domain of the hag. See also: Alicia Key’s no-makeup-makeup and critiques of Nelly Furtado and Jennifer Love Hewitt’s bodies. “Anti-aging is the ultimate capitalist goal,”

Jessica DeFino

said two years ago. “There is nothing more terrifying to a society built on female purchasing power and unpaid labour than the notion that women might refuse to join the sell,”

Laurie Penny

wrote in 2011’s Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism. “I call it the toxic triad of authoritarian gender policy,” history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat said on the I’ve Had It podcast recently, noting the triad is always hyper-masculinity, homophobia, and misogyny. “You put women down and have policies that do that.”

This is exactly why current culture is a techno dystopia requiring your buying into a youth you will never actually have again. Kris Jenner’s deep plane face lift and Bryan Johnson’s youth industrial complex, Instagram face and K-face, Ozempic to have your 12 year old body and mind and the rising economy of DNA as status symbol, billionaires pivoting to extreme fitness and the MAHA movement’s ties to AI slop: it’s business, yes, but it’s also conservatism, to keep you “normal” so that you don’t age, become disabled, becoming “nothing” but weight to society. Stay young! Be fit! Contribute! Buy! Contribute! Buy!: if we won’t have children, then we will never retire and must look beautiful in the process. The politics of blonde and the Mar-a-Lago face best represent this overdone look that placates white male power, reinforcing supremacist ideologies and a gentrification of the self: you become a construction site of homogeny, whether your model is Melania Trump or Kim Kardashian. From the “forever 35” phenomena to the brutal lengths gay men go to avoid “twink death,” we continue to dehumanize ourselves, self-flagellating ourselves for being human and aging humanly, as tech tries to sell us out this state instead of confronting our fears of death. "People have a choice to accept death, deny it or fight it…I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it," evil billionaire fairy Peter Thiel said in 2023, cursing culture with a white angelicism that would make Hitler blush. “With scheduled drug taking and social media’s insistence on turning the body into content, we may be undermining the spontaneity and joy of pleasure itself,” Steven Phillips-Horst wrote recently on the state of gay sex. Life without life, you could say. Ageless but brainless.

“The cost of success is embarrassment,” a viral TikTok opined, a statement against Gen Z’s deep anti-cringe culture which is a fear of vulnerability, a fear of living, a fear of being seen as who you are. Don’t see the wrinkles, don’t see the fat, don’t see anything of me that is alive: become unagable, reverting to the primordial soup of your Sephora Childhood. The cop in your head blows the whistle again, demanding you apply your serums and book your botox. “What’s my age again?” you wonder. 39, actually.

“ugly Yoda”
“Adam Driver’s body”
“Gone but not forgotten”
“Beau Is Afraid”

I am a non-Letterboxer but even I knew about Ayo Edebiri elite reviews. Pour one out! (And don’t miss Ayo setting straight a very Italian interview question.)

“The day Taylor Swift”

The worst poem you will read about Taylor Swift, and I am sure there are a lot of bad ones out there.

“My voice to Obama’s voice”

Really don’t like how this guy becomes Obama. Makes me nauseous.

“make Nancy Pelosi in The Sims”

We should lock more politicians in shipping containers in The Sims.

“Miss Dudamel”

This is for all my Los Angeles angels.

“haven’t stopped thinking about this”

I, too, have been thinking about Abby Lee Miller’s cryptic (and real) comment to Jimmy Fallon all week.

“Did I accidentally draw you?”

He drew you not me and that’s okay.

“local craft store season 1”

I believe I shared Nicole Daniels’ incredible lady-at-craft-store character but I’m re-sharing as she dropped the full scene, which is a ten minute single shot of very awkward scene work that should win her an Emmy but won’t.

And, finally, how I feel at the end of most weeks.

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