La Vie As Giet Jaune Under The Specter of Article 13

In Paris, masked and hooded protesters picked up and hurled crowd barriers and other projectiles in running battles with police-- Les Miserables, redux

The failure of my Toshiba laptop in 17 did not directly affect my relationship with Writer’s Market. I was simply forced to miss my billing renewal date because of my hope for rescue from an over-valued computer technician. The Writer’s Market website never coded particularly well. Their emails reminding me of auto-renewal were sporadic, and the renew never took place, perhaps due to the fact that I purchased 24 month installments with quotidian regularity. I had to manually renew the use of their directory services, sometimes under the advisement of customer service through F+W’s 800 number, only to discover, late fall 17, that the website stopped accepting credit cards. Through necessity, setbacks mandated other options. I have let sleeping dogs lie, moving on, and Duotrope has better mastered the art of automated updates for creative writers--  psychologically I still live in the ecumenical adhesion to the newsprint directories that Writer’s Market and Dustbooks represented, and in fact have long contemplated a revisionist obituary for one time playwright Len Fulton, the demi-god of the independent presses which I have ever so reluctantly started to eschew. I did not mind coming up through them, like a rag time impresario, but I’ve begun to see, again reluctantly, that literary journals, bloviated as they are through their college department budgets, are as extraneous as decentralized independent living centers. My friend Robert Thomas is still committed to them, because like me, this is how he grew up, what he and I both were taught about publishing and generating content, and neither he nor I need directories to canvas and update information as much as we used to, but I spent a significant amount of time this morning galivanting through Newsweek pages looking for updated guidelines for freelancers, and this dinosaur brand is also somewhat diaphanous on the matter. Duotrope doesn’t list the publication due to said inconsistencies. Automation has definitively changed the landscape, but that doesn’t mean code itself isn’t a chimera. Twitter is increasingly embedding with traditional media outlets, but at its core, like Facebook, it is inherently unstable, wreaks havoc on human physiology. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stay adhered to it on a daily basis, and it is absolutely not helping me retain my grip on journalistic pretensions, even as a counterculture figure. Examples of that are Charlie Kirk, whom I culled off of Nick Gillespie. I followed Kirk for a while, and still read his tweets with recurring frequency, but find his ideological stridency tiring, even parroting. Facts are by and large contingent, but the retaliatory way in which Kirk uses those facts to defend the right at all costs is debatable. Candace Owens fares better in my esteem, but I cannot follow her lead. Old sows like myself aren’t telegenic. I cannot do podcasts, and if I even attempted it YouTube would have my head on a platter. If Writer’s Market is foundering, its corporate owners might take a page from Fee, which folded The Freeman, and cede the field to digital innovation.

Once upon a time, I was ready to defend Twitter against Milo. Not anymore. If Minnesota wanted to elect Omar to the House, then Minnesotans can reap what they in turn sow, but the same applies to Laura Loomer. Her fervor makes David Frum look relatively paltry. However, herein truly lie the seeds of our doom. If genocide is a form of political extremism brought about by reactionaries fueled by severe economic stresses, Loomer's post-Twitter insignia is a cosmetic mockery behind which looms Orwellian defeat.