In the army, I had a female friend who lived in the barracks. Back in those days male soldiers weren’t supposed to go into the women’s barracks section but she invited me and I went. No one paid a bit of attention anyway. She was a friend only — not like we were going to get up to any hanky-panky in her living quarters.

On the outside she was a tough-ass paratrooper chick who beat out most men on physical fitness tests and ran just absurd times on the two-mile run; but once I got inside her room, I had to laugh because it was a bunch of frilly princess stuff and sparkles and fairy lights everywhere. “Amy,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting this. Ariel? Snow White?”

“This stuff got me through a bad childhood. It’s a refuge for me. But don’t tell anyone.”

And I didn’t, until now, when no one could possibly identify her. She was a pretty damn cool woman.

The year is 2051. Being attracted to a natural-born human is illegal; one may be attracted to semi-sentient AIs or pleasure robots. No one is allowed out in public unless accompanied by a robot minder.

Travel five miles beyond your designated and assigned home (a windowless 75m² pod) is verboten without special and difficult-to-get permits. Everyone has enough to eat — that is, if you like bug slurry. And you better like bug slurry, because that’s all there is.

The old and sick just disappear after a while. No one is sure what happens to them. Sometimes the bug slurry has a different color, causing people to wonder.

The liberals declare it “utopia.”

If you just like, completely 100% abandoned a modern skyscraper, stopped doing any maintenance or upkeep on it whatsoever, disconnected the power and utilities, how many years would it last before it just like collapsed on its own?

— Tyler Glaiel (@TylerGlaiel) October 14, 2022

This depends on a whole lot of factors, but it mainly hinges on how wet it is where the skyscraper is located and if it uses rebar. Once the windows started breaking due to lack of maintenance and moisture really gets in, those which use rebar would start collapsing within 30-50 years. All-steel constructions (no rebar) built very conservatively like the Empire State Building might last 200+ years before collapsing.

However, if in a dry area where there is much less moisture with a neutral climate such as Los Angeles, even rebar skyscrapers might last 200+ years before they fell over.

So post-apocalypse there’d never be any truly ancient skyscrapers remaining. Most would be gone within 50 years, and within 300 years all of them would no matter where they are located. Without constant maintenance — like most things — even skyscrapers are quite evanescent.

Me when I realized The Midnight Club was going to do a frame story inside a frame story:

Talk about pouring yourself into a performance. Emily Armstrong must be exhausted after even one song like that. Damn.

When I think about people shaming and condemning Sydney Sweeney because she has a relatively-normal body…man, I just can’t. I want to toss them into a black hole. But they’d make the black hole too big.

Yes, cheap shot. But they deserve it.

I wondered aloud back in January how we might support those too fearful to return to normal without empowering them to police everyone else's lives; people flipped out at me for asking but it still seems like it might be a question worth reckoning with https://t.co/TRsUECkAMD

— Kat Rosenfield (@katrosenfield) October 14, 2022

The Covidians are gradually losing the battle now. I remember when Kat tweeted this and she was relentlessly attacked — but to me it sounds like the right way to do things.

Another study: Despite a 4x increase in the number of cases, referrals to Long Covid clinic fell by 79% in the vaccine era—if you do the math, it means a ~96% reduction on a per case basis.

Strength of study: real life cohort.
Weakness: single data point.https://t.co/gwP5SgRxaE pic.twitter.com/FZBu15kzdc

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) October 13, 2022

Hey, also remember when the Zero Covid people and Covidians were claiming vaccination did nothing against Long Covid? I do! That was also everywhere. Turns out that the actual numbers are close to what I said would be the case, which is that vaccination pretty much eliminates Long Covid risk.

I’m right so often it hurts. But I still love it.

(Also, ugh, remember those terrible articles, with claims like "no immunity from Omicron", "people will be routinely getting infected twice a month", "imprinting proven", etc. etc.

IT WAS ALREADY EASY TO TELL IT WAS CLEARLY WRONG WHEN PUBLISHED, but its predictions also failed.)

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) October 13, 2022

Yeah, I remember those. A lot of the Covidians were claiming we’d get infected dozens of times a year and that our entire society would collapse due to widespread disability from Long Covid. This was common on Twitter and elsewhere. It was farcically absurd, of course, but the Covid Zero people and Covidians took it completely seriously and expected the rest of us to as well.

It will be interesting after the pandemic recedes a little more to examine the psychology of such beliefs and how they develop. What was going on there was different from hypochondriasis as it was an attempt to shame others and to elicit fear in them to cause those others to behave as the Covidians believed was correct. In this their behavior bears more resemblance to religion than anything else. The Covidians see themselves as a besieged but morally-correct outgroup holding the line against the sinners of larger society who want somewhat normal lives.

Sound like anyone else you know (evangelicals)?