Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 1/10/25
El Blizzardo Diablo edition
The appearance of snow in the morning sky signaled the hurried shutting down of the schools this week at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, rendering the roads undrivable for a good two, two-and-a-half hours. We hope you all were safely ensconced and safe from harm. Administration took the opportunity to whip up a batch of chili in the Dutch oven that was just a touch too spicy, but when paired with the cornbread that was lightly kissed with honey, it all balanced out perfectly. As snow days go, I’ve had much worse.
We have lots of food lined up for the next few days, all of which is designed to fill the bunker with enticing smells and warmth. Hopefully, you’re getting your own food hugs in the winter hellscape.
New Year, New Attitude
I feel like we’re all bracing ourselves to be assaulted and bombarded with the realities of life this year, and I’m already noticing many of my friends drawing arbitrary lines in the sand, saying, “Come over here and I’ll punch you/block you/report you as needed.” Good. Do whatever you need to do if it will save some of your dwindling sanity as it runs out of your head like sand through an hourglass. “Days of Our Lives,” indeed.
I’ve also noticed in several spaces, where people who aren’t me, are barking angrily at various platforms, websites, and digital spaces, calling out these bad decisions and leaving said online space as a result. Again, I say Good.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a quick rundown:
Etsy is now prioritizing drop shipping bottom feeders instead of individual artisans and makers and small businesses, which was their original mission statement. People have noticed and are leaving. Now when you order something from Etsy, you’re more likely to get the same crap you can order on Wish or Temu, conveniently marked up for the privilege of propping up a “small business.”
YouTubers are being told they will have their channels, um, un-emphasized? De-featured? YouTube won’t be showing new videos from creators whose channels have plateaued. Instead, they’d like it if people made new channels instead. Content creators are on the fence about this, but many of the YouTubers you know and like are moving over to Nebula (owned by creators and filmmakers, not Techbros) to post their stuff instead.
You already know about Xitter, with people fleeing it in droves for Blue Sky, which has aggressive blocking tools and doesn’t use ads for revenue.
Now Facebook is seeing an exodus, as the Zuck has decided not to fact-check posts anymore. This isn’t an out of the blue issue, as we all know Facebook has been trying to suck as hard as it possibly can since 2014, and I’m pleased to report, they are doing it!
Let’s not leave out Google, who is propped up entirely by ads at this stage. There is no real search engine at Google. Now it’s a browser that helps pair your searches with pages that have paid Google money to shove under your nose in a best guess effort to connect you, you human cash machine, with whatever Ronco-adjacent bullshit they have decided you need to buy, regardless of whether or not you were even shopping in the first place.
Of course, AI and all of its various algorithms, machine learning, and the like, is also getting a sustained pushback from all corners, as well. This is crucial because if the general population is noticing these daily pressures and intrusions, then maybe we can do something about it.
No one is championing this, except for the people on YouTube who are using Chat GPT to generate a script and a digital AI generated voice, and slapping a video online that tells you how YOU can make big money on the Internet by setting up an Etsy store or a YouTube channel and selling cheap Chinese crap that is drop shipped to consumers, just like Temu, Wish, Alibaba, Amazon, and all the other digital junk peddlers—can we call them eJawas? Probably not.
Do any of you remember the late-night infomercials with the brothers who were little people and teaching people how to flip real estate by buying their How To course? It’s like the Internet has weaponized those people. Billy Mays. Vince from Sham-Wow. Pitch-men selling digital snake oil. Same is it ever was. I love that we are starting to talk about this. I am over the moon that folks are hearing these horror stories and deciding not to participate anymore. I know I’m not the only person who is sick and tired of being pitched to by carnival barkers, twelve hours a day, every day, from every direction.
What a miserable way to go through life, looking at people as if they were a bag of money you have to figure out how to empty. The serial killer H.H. Holmes did that very thing; he courted rich women from good families, took out insurance policies on them with him as the beneficiary, and then dispatched them with deathtraps he built into his “murder castle.” He would then sell all of their possessions, including their jewelry, melt the gold fillings down in their teeth, and then he’d dissolve their dead flesh in acid and quicklime, and sell their cleaned skeleton to a company that supplied cadavers to medical students. Oh, and he collected on the insurance, too.
When one woman confessed that she was not next in line to inherit her family money, Holmes spent a year arranging “accidents” to befall her various brothers until she was the next in line, and then he killed her as above and collected her inheritance. Nice guy, right? He used the Chicago World’s Fair to cover up his murders. People showed up to the Expo, looking for something better, and they ended up in a vat of acid.
I am not suggesting that the chuckleheads in call centers in places on the other side of the world are akin to a fin de siècle serial killer. I am suggesting that sociopaths are gonna sociopath. And that behavior, that reductive scanning of people to see what you can get for yourself, will make you a sociopath if you aren’t already are one.
How is that any different than the various con-men, scammers, bottom-feeders, and ‘players’ who spend a lot of time and effort trying to wrest money from people who are just trying to get by? Considering that we’ve had all of this external pressure for years to get online, sign up, go cashless, go digital, be portable, listen to what you want when you want, and in general plug ourselves into The Matrix, and for what? No one is eating that “service charge” for credit cards anymore, are they? Pay with cards, it’s more expensive. Every transaction has begrudging security to allow us to do things like pay a bill. You need an app to date. We pay a microtransaction fee for everything. Prime is no longer a savings, nor a convenience. It’s just a label, a reward for bringing yourself willingly under the heel of Bezos. Because he’s taking 10 to 20% of every one of your sales, he’s allowing you the privilege of being listed up front, so he can make more money off of your little widgets.
I really want to figure out a way that a significant portion of us—tens of millions, I’m talking—opts out of Social Media for a day. No Facebook, no Xitter, and none of the rest of it. No online purchases, either. No eBay, no Etsy, no Temu, et.al. No services, like DoorDash or GrubHub. Nothing non-essential. I would LOVE to see how one day off affected that endless river of money running in one direction, uphill, to the various TechBros and other publicly traded companies. I’d also like to do it to prove that we will all be just fine if we take a day off from giving a shit what the Outrage Machine is telling us to be worked up about this news cycle.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Note: Welcome to 2025 and the inevitable tire fire that is online streaming services, pay to watch movies, franchise sequels we didn’t ask for, and genre movies that insult our intelligence. It’s going to be a great year!
Missing You (Netflix)
Mystery novelist Harlan Coben’s latest thriller is a British-based mystery about a woman ghosted by her fiancée a decade ago, now randomly matched to him on dating app, and blows up her career and her life to get answers.
I should tell you that I love Harlan Coben’s series character, Myron Bolitar, a sports agent with an Olympic Gold Medal in American Smart-Assery, and how he gets pulled into various mysteries while doing due diligence on his various clients. They are great off-beat stories with a genuinely funny point of view character, which is hard to pull off when you’re talking about stuff like murder and other felonies.
It was that love of Coben’s Bolitar character that made me initially punch “play” on one of the fifteen or seventeen Coben-adapted and produced mystery thrillers that Netflix has been serving up for years now. In the back of my mind, I was hoping that the movies would be Bolitar stories. They were not.
Much in the same way that you can divide the Roger Zelazny fans of the world into two categories, the people who love his Amber stories and are lukewarm on everything else, and the people who love everything else and are indifferent to the Amber stories, I think you can divide Harlan Coben fans into two similar camps: the Myron Bolitar fans (me) and the serious mystery thriller fans (presumably the Netflix viewing audiences of the world). I know this about myself, and I’m okay with it. I certainly don’t think any less of you.
What got me with Missing You, which is the same thing that got me with all of the other Harlan Coben Netflix miniseries, is that they all start out great, with an intriguing premise, good pacing, and since most (all?) of them are British, they have that Masterpiece Theater style of storytelling similar to Prime Suspect and all of the other British police procedurals of yore.
I’m going to write the next paragraph with spoilers, because I’m going to talk about the set pieces and the conceits in the Harlan Coben Netflix mini-series, all of which turn on a similar theme: everyone the main character knows is lying to them. You can stop right here if you want to watch Missing You or any of the other fine mini-series on Netflix. Otherwise, keep plowing along. I’ve got a point to make.
I think someone at the BBC looked around the board room and said, “Do we have any Agatha Christie books we haven’t turned into TV mysteries?” and someone said, “No, but we DO have this American bloke, Harlan Coben, who writes these stories that track like an Agatha Christie mystery but don’t involve drawing room confessions.” And they said, “Brilliant! Adapt them all! Well, not that Bolitar stuff; he’s too cheeky for us, I fear.” KIDDING! I KID THE BRITS.
Not really. This stuff is very well put together, featuring great actors found in better British TV, and the pacing is wonderful—the mystery hook is set in the first episode. The second episode lays out all of the plot threads. Third episode? The villain! And lots of questions answered, as the main character says, to everyone she knows, “So you lied to me.” Ep four, people get hurt, the stakes are raised, and Ep five, it all comes together at the end. And that’s where these movies tend to fall apart.
When I can watch a mini-series, and in the fourth episode, say out loud, “So, if everyone had just talked to each other when the bad stuff first happened, this entire story would not have played out?” then that, to me, is a bad mystery. “I lied to protect you!” is a phrase that needs to be retired, because it’s such bullshit. There’s an essay on the nature of lying that I would love to write, but for now, suffice to say, that the ending of Missing You was deeply unsatisfying for me.
I didn’t think the original crime—the murder—was believable in the slightest. The flashback wherein we watch what happened is very nearly preachy, not something I wish to navigate before a brutal slaying. Oh, and once the truth comes out? What’s our main character’s reaction? The woman who scuttled her career as a police detective, blew up most of her friendships (until she needed them again for something) and finally got not only answers, but closure? I won’t spoil THAT, but I nearly kicked the TV.
I don’t expect life lessons from art, not usually. I do expect a modicum of reality, and while there is an intriguing premise to Missing You, what’s really missing is anything approaching a believable motivation. Only the B story—the one with the proper villain, and not the extenuating circumstances of a double life—wrapped up with any kind of satisfaction. Watch it if you must. I’m holding out for Myron Bolitar.
A word to those who are using Amazon Kindle to publish their work: if you allow them to set up your paperback, go now and click the "edit" button on the pricing and fulfillment page of your catalog manager's title page. Hidden from view are check boxes that default to allowing Amazon to include the cost of Europe's VAT in your cover price.
A year or so ago, a small group tried to set up an online cooperative to sell retail. Unfortunately, their planning stage appears to have been lacking any idea of how the site itself was going to market its existence, and it crashed. I would suggest that such ventures, however, may be the way for small fry to go, especially now the conservatives have killed net neutrality again. One can't help thinking that already long-enough-to-be-annoying list of sponsored Google responses is about to take up the entire first page of search results.
Thank you for passing on Nebula.