This unsubtle season is full of heavy-handed metaphors and narrative overreach and sentiment that steers wildly between the campy and the guileless. So let's get wild with it. Gather up all the schmaltz and cook with it and feed each other. Gather 'round the fire. Fortify each other. Get big.

🔥🕯️🕯️

Sure, we need the clever and subtle too, the underground and understated. Desperately we do! But we also need that SUBTEXT IS FOR COWARDS sensibility for the best of what we are. Goodness that's obvious, earnest, unadulterated, way past wise. One of my goals this winter is to be less smart about it.

This is an unsubtle season in an unsubtle year. It's an unsubtle time. But amidst an era of cruelty that's blatant and broad, destruction and deprivation that revels in its vulgar enormity, we have this unsubtle season to share broad, blatant, vulgar, enormous courage. Kindness. Hope. Why not?

actual Wallace & Gromit creacher right here

AI scromit

Anyway, the fascism we Actually Got is one that co-evolved with the tactics and economy of algorithms, attention, influencers, social media, anon trolling, etc. A successful counter or resistance to that fascism is going to look like a resistance to that attention economy, not a continuation of it.

remember, friends, just say no to cortisol ghouls!

It gets dark so early, this far north. And it's been a hell of a year. But here we are. Thank you for holding on, friends.

May we last as long as we need to. May we be enough. May we pull together, and not be pulled apart.

Somehow, may we bind up what is broken so it can heal.

Chag sameach.

🔥🕯️

on god jd here looks like one of my coworkers who abuses his kids