Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/08/julie-nolke-explains-the-pandemic-to-her-past-self-part-3.html
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I feel we’ll be getting these weekly for awhile…
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“Oh. Oh! Hey, um, when are you from?”
“Three days from now.”
“Oh shit.”
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Unfortunately, these just make me cry now.
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Yeah, happened to me earlier this year too - replaced “It can’t get any worse” with “It can always get worse”.
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I’ve always said that this would be an ongoing series. (It’s unfortunate that I was right.) I’m sure the frequency with which these come out will only increase, especially after the election…
Edit: I look forward to a final episode, in which her future self’s appearance causes terror at the thought of things being worse, only for her future self to reveal that actually, everything’s fine. I’m trying to convince myself that any such episode will ever happen, however…
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I laughed out lout at the first one, but yeah, by the end of part 2 I was literally crying (literally in the literal sense) a bit. And even more by the end of the last one.
These are brilliant though.
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Yep. Me too. Agreed–they’re brilliant. But they make me so sad.
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4 minutes for 4 months in 2020… ya missed a bit 
It was really funny the first time. Second time, less so. But at this point, making fun of our younger, slightly more naive selves has worn thin.
Having been raised by someone who absolutely, unironically believed the apocolypse was coming in her lifetime, It’s not a stretch at all, for me to imagine things getting far, far worse.
And my answer to this likelihood is the same as it is to the situation right now: cultivate resilience. Waste no unnecessary emotional energy on mourning the tradeoffs of survival vs living. Survive now, live when the sun comes out.
I’ve been inundated most of my life with constant reminders of the debt being racked up against future generations. The inconveniences, crippling illnesses and outright deaths being suffered now, barely amount to an interest payment on that total debt.
By the third visit, future Julie should understand that she’s not helping.
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Why would anyone ever say that in the first place, though?
It should go without saying, especially this year:
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Me too, but the thing is, all these things that were said were going to happen in my youth – didn’t. I grew up hearing that we were facing a “population bomb” that was going to lead to worldwide famine before 2000 , that we were going to run out of oil any day now, that there was going to be nuclear war between the US and USSR. These things just didn’t happen. I don’t know your age, but I think it is especially the younger folks who buy into all the doom and gloom because they haven’t heard the boy crying wolf on all the other apocolypses that were supposed to happen and so take the doomsayers at face value.
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Really NOT looking forward to the January one.
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I’m trying to comprehend the unbelievable hopelessness of this brutal worldview, and the only non-snarky response I have is that I’m sorry you’ve grown up in such a way that an additional seven and a half million or so dead, many of them avoidably; the erasure of a third or so of the world economy over the course of a couple of months with all the daily terror that brings for families here and abroad; and the nonzero possibility of the slide of the western world into Orwellian, 1984-style authoritarianism due to the combination of Big Data and a U.S. government that no longer even espouses the ideals of freedom all seems like no biggie.
For the rest of us, though, this is all pretty grim, and we’ll continue taking our laughs where we can get them, thanks.
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My Step-Father’s Mother, apparently, was terrified at the thought of 1 Billion Chinese literally running across the planet armed with guns and destroying democracy’s. Someone convinced her it was a real threat and she lived with it till she passed away.
I don’t know where you got that idea. Compared to that, this (a million dead, wildfires,glacier collapse, starfish wasting disease, insect collapse,etc etc… is “no bigee”.
It’s kind of like when they finally discovered the ozone hole. The data had been coming in for several years, but their computer algorithms were simply not designed to correctly interpret this anomolous data, so it was edited out, basically. If people are unequipped to notice how bad things can get, they’re not likely to pay attention as it gets worse.
Black Lives Matter is a good intro to this larger, more painful world. The shootings have been going on for many decades. Only thing different is the cell phone cameras, documenting for white people truths that black people already knew. What happens when the same (lack of) respect is paid to the systems that keep us alive?.. we are all finding out.
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Is she filming the reaction shots ahead of time when she completes each video? It’d be otherwise impossible to get the hair and makeup just as they were with the last video. I think she wrote the script so she could react to any number of terrible things coming up ahead, and film just a whole lot of them.
The BITCH! How dare she do her job?!?
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It’s brilliant.
I mean, some man believes that, so it must be true. /s
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