Hard to be the sexy version of something when its in the 50s
Hard to be the sexy version of something when it's in the 50s Abbie Parr / Getty Images Stringer

Good job on the costumes, everyone. It can be hard to dress up and look sexy in a city where the weather turns cold and wet in time for late October, but these photos by Alex Garland paint a lovely portrait of revelers doing their best over the weekend. Of the costumes that are clearly references to some specific piece of media, I can identify approximately 40%, which aligns with what I suspected about my own cultural relevance. Anyway, now that that’s all done, you may begin your local winter-holiday mood-setting IMMEDIATELY.

You voted, right? Tomorrow’s the deadline. Don’t wait. Do it now. Copy our work.

World leaders promise to start leading at some point in the next 50 years. Various G20 leaders are making vague gestures in support of taking action on climate change without actually committing to very much. This weekend they couldn’t even agree on whether “mid-century” means 2050, so of course they couldn’t agree to ending coal-burning plants. In one of the most obnoxious moments of the meeting, leaders tossed coins into the Trevi Fountain for luck at a photo-op. Good God. If you’re looking for some further reading on the subject, allow me to suggest Andreas Malm’s How to Blow up a Pipeline.

Just once, I’d like to do one of these news roundups without covering a shooting. This weekend two people were shot in the ID; both are in stable condition. And a man was shot and killed in Magnolia on Saturday. That’s Seattle’s second deadly shooting in less than a week. Around the country, there were 11 mass shootings over the weekend with ten people shot to death and fifty injured.

The New York Times just noticed how close Seattle is to electing a Trump-aligned Republican as city attorney. From thousands of miles away, New Yorkers are shaking their heads in wonderment that we might soon be stuck with Ann Davison, who filmed a video in support of a Trump supporter who stormed the Capitol on Jan 6. One point not mentioned in the article is how dumb it is that we hold elections for such important offices in low-turnout off-years.

More vaccines for the hinterlands. West Seattle just opened a new vaccination station at the Neighborhood House Community Center, administering 50 injections on its first day. Another new vaccination center will open in South Seattle in November. (Sidenote: I got a COVID test at the Harborview clinic last week after I was close to someone who tested positive and it was a very easy experience, 10/10 would recommend! UW really has the process down to a science, which I guess makes sense since science is literally what it is.)

Facebook/Meta is not the future 
 I can’t stop thinking about the grotesque imaginings of the metaverse unleashed last week by Facebook or Meta or IHOB or whatever it is they’re calling themselves for now. The glorified Kinect concept video was described as “the most delusional thing I’ve ever seen from any company or person in my entire life” by one tech journalist. The new name also means “dead” in Hebrew.

...but Roblox might be, if they can just keep the lights on. (The platform is back up and running after a weekend-long outage.) Rather than being a single game like Minecraft, Roblox is more like a massive online toystore-world with different games to play. There are also tools to make games, and naturally opportunities for users to exploit each other. They have an enormous user base of very young people — kids, really — and they’ve provided a proto-metaverse experience for years. My expectation is that in five to ten years, those of us flexible enough to migrate platforms will be hanging out in Roblox worlds wondering what ever happened to that guy Mark, oh, what’s this name, Zonkerborg?

What’s wrong? Seattle is the most anxious city in the country, according to a survey of 57,000 people by an offshoot of the U.S. Census Bureau. There’s no indication in the data as to why, but white people are more anxious than people of color, and young people are more anxious than old people. Is it maybe because people in Seattle are simply more informed about the world?

Need a little more Halloween? In case you didn’t get enough this weekend, or if you’re some kind of freak who celebrates spookiness year round, I’ve got a new video about how Elvira became a gay icon — long before she revealed she’s dating a woman.

John Waters gives the gift of piss. The only person in the world who is called “provocateur” as a complement and not as code for “asshole,” John Waters has pledged to donate his art collection to a Baltimore museum on the condition that they establish a non-gendered restroom in his name. Outstanding stuff. You can see John in his new Christmas show, touring to Seattle this winter. Watch for my interview with him dropping on Slog a bit later today.

Trump’s still a racist, in case you were wondering. This weekend he crawled out from under his rock to do a racist chopping gesture at an Atlanta Baseball Players game. The chopping gesture evokes the 1830 genocide of the Muscogee (Creek) tribe by the US government. Again, this is the guy whose party Ann Davidson chose to join in 2020, and this is the guy who will have a direct line into Seattle's law department if voters choose her.

Brooklyn’s first supertall skyscraper just put its hat on. The Brooklyn Tower is now standing at its full height of 1,066 feet, with 93 stories of residences — including 400 apartments, 30% of them designated as affordable housing. This is the kind of project Seattle should dedicate itself to, but instead we’re wasting space by designating every bunker and shack a historic landmark.

Will Kal and Josh go to The White Party? Kal Penn, who you probably know from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, pulled an Elvira this weekend and revealed in a new memoir that he’s engaged to a guy named Josh. There are apparently lots of other details about his life in the book, too, but it’s going to be hard to think about anything other than gay. He’s gay. Gay! Gay gay gay.