For the first time in nine years, I went back to regularly using my Twitter account at the end of January as the Freedom Convoy arrived here in Ottawa, so I could stay more on top of developments than I could just by reading or watching local news.
Since then I went from reading, to liking, to retweeting, to replying, to quote-tweeting, to posting on my own, to posting threads inspired by current events, which started mostly being about nuclear war, and which culminated in a 39-post thread about the Christian religious training on "nuclear ethics" that US Air Force nuclear missile officers were given, which was so long it made me think I should have published it as a blog entry instead. Shout out to Chirr App for making it pretty painless to make a thread that long, though. (Edit: I have now rewritten it as a blog entry.)
So now I'm starting a Medium blog for my non-fiction writing called The Golden Age of Apocalypse, which is named after a great Thundercat album. It'll focus on apocalyptic topics from nuclear war, to conceptions of the end times in organized religion and cults, to, stretching a bit, cultural developments that some believe apocalyptic. I even managed to snag the domain name apocalypse.gold!
At the moment, however, beyond looking at how they are perceived in various narratives that I'm exploring, I don't plan to focus on the climate crisis, disease, famine, disasters, or wars in general unless they have a potential nuclear component, since those areas are all very well covered in other media, and I think reading about them is enough interaction for me; I don't need to write about them too.
Speaking of which, the blog is clearly for seasoned doomscrollers only, but I think that's a lot of us after over two years of the pandemic. For me, I have found that I now have a lot of critical distance from general bad news, but thankfully I am still a human being as I am still deeply affected by stories of personal experiences, such as in Michelle MacNamara's victim-centric true crime book I'll Be Gone in the Dark, or, in a fictional context, Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name.
I should also mention that I will switch to posting only the highlights of each post as Twitter threads and linking to the blog posts there.
To play you out, here's the Sun Ra Arkestra and Yo La Tengo performing Sun Ra's song "Nuclear War" together. It's a motherfucker!