(With apologies to Modest Mouse, who I stole that phrase from. I never liked their records, but they had some great titles.)
I always assumed our eventual climate-change-related deaths would be due to heat and/or fire, but this week a new possibility presented itself: melting glaciers that create titanic flash floods.
On the plus side, that’s a pretty fast way to go, and some people say drowning can be peaceful… though nothing about that fucking tidal wave looks peaceful.
Some TV pundit opined that maybe this would The Thing that finally got people to take their heads out of their asses and start taking The Problem seriously. But you and I know better, don’t we?
If you can ignore the fact that thousands of people died, it’s some spectacular footage. Between the fires and the floods, the coming cataclysm is going to generate some amazing visuals.
This is how the world ends: Not with a bang or a whimper, but with a whoosh.
I was searching for Velvet Underground instrumentals just now, and one of the top results was this:
If you click through you get to this:
The actual audio isn’t music at all, but some gibberish about affiliate marketing. I regret having accidentally increased its view total, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.
At least as AI nonsense goes, this has the asset of being obvious. As one of the commenters noted:
Nothing about this video or its existence is natural or organic in any conceivable way, and it is evidence of humanity’s ability to create monstrosities of which we no longer have any control over, and which no single person can wholly comprehend. The force that brought this video into existence is more terrifying than anything that our imaginations could ever conjure up.
You could sense it today: a little change in the slant of the sun, a little hint of nip in the evening air. Summer is on the wane,
It’s a bittersweet time. In truth this next part of the year — late summer slipping into autumn — is my favorite. But it’s hard not to feel a bit of a loss as the days get shorter and the inexorable march continues.
The weeks to come are the ones we want to spend basking in the sun — or if you prefer, writhing on a rock like a lizard in leather pants. Morrison got it.
