It’s not just murder. Manslaughter is down to 69 percent clearance from 90 percent forty years ago. Clearances in assault and rape cases have dropped to 47 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Nonviolent property crimes like burglary (which involves illegally entering a property), theft (which involves taking property from another person), and motor vehicle theft are getting solved at a microscopic 14 percent, 15 percent, and 12 percent, respectively. According to “Crime and the Mythology of Police,” a recent article published in the Washington University Law Review by University of Utah law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman, “on a good year, police solve less than a quarter of reported cases.” And we haven’t seen good years lately.

My tumblr posts are little flowers that my bumblebee followers can choose to smash or pass or whatever. My contributions herr amount to growing my own little tulip field that other can come and look at if they choose.

There’s six guys who live in this flat and all they do all day is play WoW and watch movies. Waking up at 2pm every day and there’s always just someone asleep on the bed near all the multimonitor computer setups. There’s always music playing and it feels like a recovery day every day, padding around blearily in pyjamas or underwear. Old hoodies from defunct school teams. They’ve got this system where they’re selling their excess computing power to companies and hosting all this warez, and they’re stealing the internet from the business next door anyway and getting welfare on top of all that. They’re self sufficient and never go outdoors except to buy more fast food, and even then only in the dark. But then one of them wakes up dead some heavy afternoon. He’s just dead and they don’t know why but maybe the floor covered in fast food wrappings is a clue. They don’t want to tell the cops because of the purgatory den they live in and the illegality that supports it, and as far as they know he never had any actual parents. So it’s trouble. It’s taking a long trip out to the forest and thinking about how stars are so far away for the first time in a long time. It’s sweating in the cold air and digging a hole all night with your brand new shovels to leave him alone in. And it’s a long few days cracking all his passwords to keep his identity and associated payments persisting. Until the rhythm of waking up every day at 2pm to play WoW for nine hours and half watch a movie on your other monitor takes over again. It’s the same as it ever was except now there’s a room no one ever goes in.

I just think some people in fandom are so insistent that consuming/creating the “wrong” media makes someone a bad person, because they so desperately want to consume their way into being a good person, without doing anything else that takes actual effort Ultimately, fandom is in many ways a consumerist pastime. You are a fan of something because you consumed a product. That’s not bad, per se. It just… is. But a lot of y’all haven’t unpacked the way capitalism has influenced - warped, even - your perception of the world This means conflating consuming with thought and action and identity. A ‘you are what you eat’ mentality but in regards to what movies you like or music you listen to or shows your make fanart for. And I think some of y’all want to be good and moral and just… but simultaneously want to indulge in the meanest, pettiest parts of yourselves, and those two things just don’t mesh… Unless you can equate consumption with action. If consumption is action, then you don’t have to lift a finger to be a good person. You watched the “right” show after all. Better yet, you don’t have to consider how another person acts to deem them a bad person. They liked the wrong tv show, so clearly, they’re immoral. And i think perhaps some of y’all are deeply insecure because you *don’t* do a lot outside of fandom. You’ve tied too much identity to consumption. And instead of changing that, you dig in harder, find more and more ways to fence off “good” consumption and “bad” consumption.

Trend brain, as I call it, encourages us to simplify everything online into something either buyable, understandable, or moral (and therefore worthy of consumption). We may tire of trend talk, but there is a devout certainty to the speed at which they’re cycled through. There are more choices than ever today, but seemingly less authority as to what constitutes a trend’s lasting legitimacy. Consumers are left to grasp at these dwindling markers of cool: fleeting fads to help us understand capital-C culture and ultimately, what’s on the horizon. How did we get here? And perhaps more importantly, will the trend churn ever stop? The problem, so to speak, isn’t cottagecore, night luxe, or the concept of micro-aesthetics. It’s the fact that modern consumers are bombarded with a neverending stream of inconsequential trends to take note of — marketing vessels for products that fit into a paradigm devoid of meaning. This doesn’t just concern the fashion world: The effects of trend-induced brain rot have trickled into online discourse. The topics and figures deemed most important on the internet are based on where they fall along this spectrum of trendiness, depending on the scale of attention they command.