Things Are Terrible But Not All The Things!
A Nice Times roundup.
It’s been one of those centuries, hasn’t it? We figure you could probably use a mood booster, because crom knows when we wrote this on Tuesday before the holiday, whatever it was, we needed one. So for this post, only nice things that help you recharge your mental batteries a bit. Here’s one!
Not even much schadenfreude, though we suppose sometimes “nice” is a relative thing, like when some of your visiting relatives finally headed home. Yes, we can see many of you nodding right now.
Or sometimes it’s just unmitigated small happinesses, like how just before we wrote this paragraph the cat was meowing like he’d never been fed and I found him in the bedroom standing in a patch of November sun where he’d obviously just been snoozing. When I picked him up the warmth coming from his little cat body confirmed he’d had a lovely solar-powered nap, and I marveled again that if we’re lucky, we get to have such wonderful little creatures in our lives, and how great is that? Sorry, I didn’t get a pic, but here he is in another photo being a comfy lummox.
Two of our favorite resources for correctives to (waves arms ) all this are, for mostly bite-sized morsels of nice, Bluesky’s “Things Are Terrible But…” feed, and the “Uplifting News” subreddit, both of which are exactly what their names suggest, without being sappy glurge, either.
The Bluesky feed is mostly about little personal moments of respite from These Days, even some that aren’t cute animals (though there’s no shortage of those, either). F’rinstances!
(Gotta click through to see video of the little doggo in his custom-made bee-proof suit.)
The “Uplifting News” subreddit is, as the name suggests, more oriented toward news stories about good, kind, and not-depressing items, like this Variety story about how John Oliver’s season-finale auction of weird shit acquired for his Last Week Tonight program on HBO raised $1.5 million for public broadcasting. That included a new record for auction of a painting by the late PBS powerhouse (and pocket squirrel enthusiast) Bob Ross, which brought in two-thirds of the public-media-bound bounty with a final price of $1,044,000.
Lotsa neato environmental news in the subreddit, too, such as this Canary Media story about Boston’s new low-carbon steam-heat upgrades that will keep lots of buildings warm with very low emissions, and this LA Times story noting that, thanks to California’s astonishing growth in battery storage and clean energy, the state hasn’t seen any rolling blackouts since 2020, and hasn’t even had to ask the public to cut their electricity use (a “flex alert”) to ease grid strain since 2022.
Also too, if you’re looking specifically for environmental Nice Times, there’s the EcoUplift subreddit, which recently pointed out that Norway has reached its goal of 100% all-electric new car sales this year, and is now looking for ways to build incentives to get people still using gas and diesel vehicles to make the switch. And how about this study that determined that wind power has saved the UK £104 billion on total energy bills since 2010, fuck you Donald Trump and your “wind ruins countries” nonsense.
And some of the news is just nice and goofy, like the fact that people in Mexico are so smitten with the country’s 2021 commemorative 50-peso axolotl bank note — worth a bit less than $3 USD — that they’re hoarding the things, and can you blame them?
So hey, where do you go to recharge your mental batteries, huh? Our examples are mostly online here, but that’s such a terrible unimaginative limitation.
Sometimes we just go looking for Thornton, to be honest. While we were writing this, he headed back to that sunny spot on the bed, although it’s shifted a bit.
Oh. He’s so warm.
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For some excellent wit, it is 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐞 from your Aunt Aoife, The Estivating Hibernian.
"Harriet Tubman was right when she said, “The only way out is through.” When the idiocy is too dense, I like to imagine myself on the other side of all this reactionary bullshit, with good stories (cautionary tales?) to tell my sisters’ kids and their kids."
https://open.substack.com/pub/theestivatinghibernian/p/postcards-to-that-asshole-18?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
Watching a couple guys struggle to change a tire across the street at the gas station and got an eyeful of ass crack, pull your pants up dude, that has to make your butt cheeks cold. I thought that was mostly a plumber thing. But they were successful finally.