I hope you mofos didn't have any expectations going into the final Absolute strip, because we're gonna subvert all that shit. Scripts? Flipped. You simply aren't ready - flat-footed, naive - unless you thought it was gonna be another silly dumb one. Those people are still locked in. The others, ravaged by our potent psychological content, are lost - they're careening around the place like Beyblades.

Are you familiar with Conformity Gate? It's a conspiracy theory about there being a secret, final episode of Stranger Things that comes out today. The stated finale is like their Zapruder Film and they've flensed it for every possible bit of grist. Well, I guess we don't really know know if it isn't true; Netflix said there isn't one, but if there was one, that's exactly what they would say!!!

I happened to have a cross-section of young people from the block in the living room last night, and they seem to think it's grief playing out because the finale was so bad. They got done watching it upstairs and I heard them screaming, and then they came down and put their coats on because they had to take a walk. So we're talking about an episode so disappointing that it inspires physical exercise. I thought the show was bad enough seasons ago to stop watching it, so I don't really have a dark horse in this eldritch race - I just find the CGate, a kind of reflex, genuinely scary.

The best outcome here is that they put things in the show to hint at one of their spinoff shows. Because there are many videos by forty years olds going point by point on visual aspects, certain lines, and if it's not pursuant to anything what it essentially means is that Through The Power of Apophenia we can manufacture virulent electronic diseases out of… absolutely nothing.

Then it just enters the centrifuge of social media, becoming concentrated, now supercharged with AI horseshit but also an incredible volume of just regular lying - faked screenshots, "it's been confirmed," "i can't believe it's real," I've probably seen fifty or sixty videos that are just naked writhings for engagement. Engagement rewarded devoid of context is essentially just masturbation at scale, with all the resources of a society. Imagine if this process were run on or about things that were actually important! Crazy, right?! To call such a thing a "weapon of war" would be underselling it.

(CW)TB out.