Vaccines are approved, but you probably wonât be getting one anytime soon: Healthcare workers and vulnerable elderly people will be among the first to receive the vaccine, starting today â but there are currently far fewer doses than needed, and not enough money to pay for them to be administered. (Mitch McConnell is holding the funding hostage, demanding that workers be blocked from suing employers for unsafe working conditions.) Vaccinations might be available to the general public by ⌠June, maybe??? Nobody knows, and Jenny Durkan says she doesnât even know how many doses Seattle will get. (Meanwhile, when I lamented this situation to a friend who lives in Canada, he casually mentioned that heâs scheduled to be vaccinated in April. Cool.) As we predicted, there will be apps that track who has the vaccine and who doesn't; and there are tons of concerns about privacy and exclusion based on class.
Trump lost another election lawsuit: The Georgia Supreme Court was the latest to be like âWhat? No,â rejecting a claim without evidence that there was some form of voter fraud in the state. Three separate ballot counts showed that Biden won Georgia by 12,670 votes. The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments this weekend, and they too were highly skeptical, accusing Trumpâs lawyers of racism. The Electoral College meets today to cast their votes.
Somebody got shot at a Trump rally in Olympia: I canât imagine a more unpleasant event to attend than a pro-Trump rally, and thatâs without the shootings. A Saturday rally saw Trump chumps clash with counter-protestors, and after a day of skirmishing around parking lots and the Capitol, police say one of the Proud Boys shot one of the anti-fascists. Kind of hard to make out whatâs going on from the footage.
Predictions about the future of Seattle from 1984 were not entirely incorrect: The Seattle Times dove into the archives of a 1984 magazine article that sought to predict what life would be like here in 2020. They did not, you will be shocked to hear, foresee a deadly pandemic; but they did imagine that Seattle would be a tech hub, that climate change would alter our lives, and that many well-educated people would be able to work from home (!). They also foresaw robotic dogs, a spaceport in Bremerton, and that Los Angeles would be a wasteland, which is kind of cheating since thatâs been the case for the last fifty years.
Ron Judd travels back to a 1984 Pacific NW magazine story that had predicted life in Seattle in 2020 to see just how right â or wrong â it was. The results are both cautionary and life-affirming. https://t.co/Xwc8vtGwoR
â Ron Judd Total Landscaping (@roncjudd) December 13, 2020
Beef Tea is no longer served: Since local journalists have been poking into newspaper archives, I thought Iâd join in. Here, from December 14, 1900, is a front-page ad from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that advertised a drugstore serving Oyster Cocktails and Beef Tea â basically just warm beef stock. While the drugstore in question is long gone, I wouldnât mind being able to pop into a corner store for a nice sip of beefy broth.
Just came across a 120-year-old ad for a Seattle drugstore that offered weary shoppers Oyster Cocktails and a nice piping hot cup of Beef Tea pic.twitter.com/TRqScF5XOc
â Matt Baume (@MattBaume) December 13, 2020
Google will combat COVID misinformation: The search engine will volunteer information about vaccination sites and public health in response to searches on the topic, in the hopes of combatting goofy anti-vax hoaxes. The company will also work with YouTubers to produce videos about public health. And while all this is very nice, Iâm not 100% confident in the algorithmâs ability to provide accurate information â this weekend I googled âtaxi theme song lyricsâ and got an infobox informing me that the song starts âI may have shit in my pants.â
A huge storm is about to hit the East Coast: Remind your East Coast relatives to prepare for bad weather â itâll start with rainy weather today, but then intense rain and snow will come on Wednesday, from Washington up to Maine. Cold temperatures mean that snow and ice will likely stick around to the end of the month. Alas, the countryâs transition to online classes means that even the stormiest weather will probably not result in school closures. Ugh 2020 is the worst.
Would you believe the misogynist who tried to police Dr. Jill Bidenâs title is ALSO a noted homophobe? Twitter blew up this weekend in response to a bizarrely condescending piece in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that Dr. Biden â who does, indeed, have a doctorate â should go by Mrs. Biden instead. The article itself is comically evil, the kind of thing that if you read in a novel youâd be like ânobodyâs soul is ACTUALLY this rancid.â But the writer, Mr. Joseph Epstein, has long been notorious in certain gay circles as the guy who wrote a horrid Harperâs article in the 1970s about how homosexuality is a curse.
âI am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.â
Wow. Responses to Joseph Epsteinâs essay are harsh.
â Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) December 13, 2020
Game developer CD Projekt Red will reform its absolutely bonkers bonus structure: Following a release of Cyberpunk 2077 marred by weird bugs and horror stories about crunch time, the company will no longer base bonuses around an arcane system of tokens. The company formerly had a BANANAS feudal system where managers would give their favorite employees little coins, which they could then be cashed in for bonuses if the game hit certain targets. Itâs difficult to imagine a policy more ripe for exploitation, and sure enough employees had no shortage of stories about being overworked and taken advantage of by managers in the hope of obtaining one of the shiny little coins.
Take this new workshop for queer voiceover artists: My friend JP Karliak, who voices characters from Looney Tunes and Boss Baby and the Trolls movies and Marvel cartoons just launched an amazing new project: Queer Vox, a three-part workshop for LGBTQ+ voiceover actors. The goal is to inject some much-needed diversity into the roster of out trans, non-binary, and genderqueer actors working in animation. JPâs a lovely person, workshops are pay-what-you can, and the application deadline is December 31.
Hi, friends! Super proud to introduce my newest project: Queer Vox. A three-session pay-what-you-can animation...
Posted by John Paul Karliak on Friday, December 11, 2020