Hollywood is abandoning Covid precautions everywhere but black tie events.
According to the dominant narrative of film and TV over the past three years, Covid-19 never happened and is still not happening, despite a global death toll of nearly seven million within three years (and counting, plus tens of millions disabled). It's as if Covid has had no effect on the world whatsoever. [...]
Zone A is all performers and background actors and all employees who are present; there is no distancing or masking, and the zone is described as "a bubble encasing closely vetted vulnerable people." Vaccinated Zone A workers must test three times a week, including a required PCR test, with additional testing if scenes require intimate contact or "exertion."
Zone B are crew who work on set but don't get close to unmasked members of Zone A; masking is required and specific to N95's and above, and Zone B must also test three times a week with one being a lab PCR. Zones C and D are not allowed contact with Zone A. [...]
Zone A goes out of its way -- to its own detriment, as we're witnessing -- to avoid modeling Covid-safe behaviors, providing no explanation or context [...] Hollywood was contorting itself behind the scenes to prevent and avoid Covid in productions as well as award events. Yet simultaneously it became evident that Hollywood was very conspicuously erasing one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century from all dominant film, TV, and pop culture narratives. [...]
Actors, film and TV makers, and content creators have been perpetuating a fantasy for nearly three years that there is no pandemic. No "present day" shows or films acknowledge the real present day. By pretending in real life there is no pandemic in films and TV, no public health crisis affecting every corner of everyone's lives, no massive global event disabling our friends, putting our grandparents in coffins, and making our babies sick, we are being denied our ongoing collective experience.
We're being gaslit and mocked by the very people we're looking to for some relief in all of this. We're being robbed of our collective grief.
But hey, Tilda Swinton seems fine.
Dear Lazyweb, some time in the last few months, searching in Mail.app has gotten ridiculously slow. Type something into the search field, wait 25+ seconds for the list to update. It used to be instantaneous. Any ideas for un-fucking it?
Today is the 40th anniversary of Blue Monday, the canonical synthpop song: the Platinum-Iridium reference 12" single, stored in a vault in Manchester,* against which all other 12" singles are measured.
