We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Yeah, I dream of zombies all the time too. (I remember a lot of my dreams, and a lot of them are not about zombies.) I started remembering a lot of zombie dreams before a recent rennaisance of my interest in zombie films/stories, so it isn't entirely the result of too much exposure.
But anyway, it's not just you.
And here I was thinking that I was unique. Do you think that my frequency of zombie dreams are so obviously connected to my love of the film subgenre? I always thought dreams were more…obscure or abstract.
I have never had a dream about zombies but I had one about what I can only describe as a succubus and and incubus, but it was not about saving damsels or anything of that nature.
I was riding in the passenger side of my mother's minivan as my father slept in the back seat and my mother drove. We crested a hill and there was a truck carrying a huge camper behind it. A very, VERY attractive blond was trying to flag us down. I am talking about that sort of fake Hollywood teen show attractive that only appears with 6 hours of make-up and an airbrush.
Standing a little behind her as we started to pass her on the left was a young man who obviously put a lot of effort into lifting weights and working on a day-glow tan. My mother starts to pull over, but I sense something wrong, almost as if there is murder in his eyes. I tell her, "Drive, just go." My mother starts to accelerate away and the girl starts to scream at us and the man rips off the "STOP" part of a stop sign and just launches it at us. That's right, he RIPPED APART A ROAD SIGN AND THREW IT.
By this time we are a good 300 yards away but the sign is gaining. I tell my mother to swerve to the left and I see the thing fly towards the concrete like a meteor to the Earth. It makes an ungodly sound as it rips apart the cement of the road.
Then I woke up…
Richard: Quite an evocative description. That dream must have really stuck with you!