Greetings! There is good news in the fight against coronavirus, and that is that vaccine doses are happening right now. How the vaccinations roll out and the underlying infrastructure that will be needed to support them might be much less organized, but that's a thing to be patient with in the States. Other places with a more unified set of logistics may have an easier time getting vaccine to the places they want them to go.
(The Algorithm believes that what you really want to see after many of the images and videos of people receiving the vaccination are people who believe conspiracy theories about the vaccinations being either untested, cover for some other nefarious program, or otherwise not actually what it says it is. Most of those comments, of course, offer no evidence, because social media is about who shouts loudest, not who's actually right. So ware the comments, as usual.)
( More matters of The Virus )
( The Rest of Everything )
Last for tonight, The Staunch Book Prize, offering prizes to the best pieces that don't beat, stalk, murder, rape, or sexually exploit the women in their stories. Along with global good news stories for the year 2020, on the assumption that you welcome news of carbon emissions falling, countries becoming less autocratic, more women and girls being educated, diseases being shown the door, and infrastructure changing so that it will be less terrible to both people and planet in the future.
And a meditation on the idea of not even being in competition with yourself, much less anybody else, for anything you do, and how so much of what we do that we might be good (or terrible) at, we disclaim, because there's always some asshole out there who's going to sniff and declare that it's not objectively good. (And that sometimes that asshole is our past self.) Since we all spent this year learning How To Be At Home (a video poem), that we managed it as well as we did says enough about us.
All the same, if there are things you would like to do and challenge for the new year, there is a
cookbook_challenge with the idea of actually making the recipes that have been in your cookbooks or bookmarks and having a community to help and cheer you on, and there is both a journal to look back upon the year that was and the idea of setting a word for the year, rather than a resolution (or many resolutions) that may help you orient to something you would like. Or, perhaps, you could engage in trying to read at least one book by a BIPOC writer each month, with each month being on a different theme.
(The Algorithm believes that what you really want to see after many of the images and videos of people receiving the vaccination are people who believe conspiracy theories about the vaccinations being either untested, cover for some other nefarious program, or otherwise not actually what it says it is. Most of those comments, of course, offer no evidence, because social media is about who shouts loudest, not who's actually right. So ware the comments, as usual.)
( More matters of The Virus )
( The Rest of Everything )
Last for tonight, The Staunch Book Prize, offering prizes to the best pieces that don't beat, stalk, murder, rape, or sexually exploit the women in their stories. Along with global good news stories for the year 2020, on the assumption that you welcome news of carbon emissions falling, countries becoming less autocratic, more women and girls being educated, diseases being shown the door, and infrastructure changing so that it will be less terrible to both people and planet in the future.
And a meditation on the idea of not even being in competition with yourself, much less anybody else, for anything you do, and how so much of what we do that we might be good (or terrible) at, we disclaim, because there's always some asshole out there who's going to sniff and declare that it's not objectively good. (And that sometimes that asshole is our past self.) Since we all spent this year learning How To Be At Home (a video poem), that we managed it as well as we did says enough about us.
All the same, if there are things you would like to do and challenge for the new year, there is a
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