This isn’t as much fun as it used to be. It’s not to say that I’m not enjoying it and am giving up on this site. Fuck no, not at all. I still love doing this. Hell maybe I love it even more than I did a year ago. What’s changed is the drive behind it. It’s become more clinical, more professional-ish, more of delivering the news and less of entertaining the audience here. I’m getting older, more experienced, things surprise me less and less, my technique for parsing out info from upstream is more honed (except for the first article of the day, that one is usually shit), and I’ve been staying ahead of the other site (and the other other site) on most of the storylines that matter the most to me.
However, I don’t think it’s just me taking the job more seriously. Or even that the total volume of the news feels like it’s been stuck at a 10 since last May or so (it has, even after the midterms). Something else shifted in the overall vibe far beyond just me personally. It’s hard to nail down but there’s this feeling I get like all the color has been drained from the picture somehow.
When we started in June 2020, the country was in far rougher shape. We had a raging pandemic, racial unrest, brutal economic turmoil, an unhinged and incompetent president lashing out as he sank in the polls. Then he lost and attempted a coup that got people killed, then in 2021 there was new QAnon batshittery by the hour, a new president struggling to right the ship while it felt like the MAGA cult were seizing the initiative, new COVID variants spreading, inflation surging.
Copy-paste era National Zero had better headlines.
America’s doing better now. Inflation is calming, the economy’s doing better, gas stoves and Xboxes are the newest outrages. Joe Biden is currently on track to get reelected. Seeing it from the other side of the 2022 midterms the threat of Trump returning to power is far, far smaller than it had been beforehand. Foreign threats from Russia and China are definitely an issue, but are they any worse now than they were 10 years ago? Ron DeSantis is a potential threat, but he hasn’t even launched his campaign yet. He could very easily flame out and hand the GOP nomination to Trump.
Things are okay. Not great, but okay relative to the abyss of the national psyche in 2020 and 2021 (Trump’s defeat a very big outlier to that stretch of shittiness). For whatever reason with that National Zero is less wacky and more staid. Gone are the random tweets from fast food companies, insane products found on right wing news websites, detailed reports of the latest QAnon fantasies. It can’t be just that I (mostly) compose all the articles now instead of copying and pasting them like I did for the first year and a half. Something else is different. Something deeper.
When I was 13 or 14 I loved WWF wrestling. Watched every episode of Monday Night RAW and Thursday night Smackdown. The Rock, Kurt Angle, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Undertaker, Mankind, Triple H Kane – loved all those guys. Yes, I knew it was all staged. But after maybe a year or so I started losing interest and never went back. I’d seen everything I needed to see.
But enough about wrestling getting stale and repetitive. Let’s talk about it in right wing politics and how that might be what’s lowering the entertainment-outrage value of our content. There’s only so many times we can print that a MAGA dipshit said COVID vaccines are like the Holocaust, or that Joe Biden is a cyborg, or complain about a non-existent ban on gas stoves before it gets boring. Of course we can and still do find some new and novel dumbassery, like that dipshit on Friday worrying that the ChiCom spy balloon was launched from Wuhan. Even that was like blood from a stone compared to the earlier days of National Zero, when chaos reigned and the reactionary batfuckery produced an endless wellspring of content for us to aggregate for our readers.
Is the right wing jumping the shark? Yeah, probably. Did the Hill killing comments cut me off from a lot of material from your average schmuck MAGA troll? That’s a factor. Am I putting in a more sincere effort to summarize the news than I am making it funny? Absolutely. Is a genuinely higher volume of real news to cover reducing the space for extraneous, silly bullshit, political or otherwise? That’s happening too. But overriding it all is that, for now at least, we’ve made it through all the darker seasons, and there’s less of a need to act like the clown in a cancer ward.