A sunny Friday, it turns out. This pillow served as my foot rest whenever I was in bed or on the sofa.

As we approach the end of 2024 (wow, already?!) I’m pleased to do something I have been anticipating for months: host the December 2024 edition of the IndieWeb Carnival ( What is that?).

What a relief that I’m finally out of the cast. Putting my left foot on the floor felt so overwhelming that I cried. Looking forward to learning how to walk again.

Wouldn’t it be just the thing if my cast was allowed to come off once and for all today?

I’m surprised we made it through Disclaimer, though that’s not entirely true, because both Anja and I would have a hard time quitting anything that involves the acting of Cate Blanchett. Looking back, I feel our experience was exactly as intended (even though author’s intent may well be the most boring of analytical categories in the study of media.)

The show’s disclaimers, both diegetic and non-diegetic, kept me thinking they’re such pedestrian vehicles for spoiling. “Sometimes, meaning can only be conveyed through the shock of the unexpected”, I thought. Still, throughout the show, the disclaimers made me interpret and reinterpret and misinterpret “depictions of sexual, physical, and emotional violence” in ways I thought I had somehow transcended by now.

The series has left me feeling uncomfortably unsophisticated.

Disclaimer is one of those beautiful examples of a terror that can only be rightly experienced once, upon the first viewing, much like Irréversible and Antichrist. I keep thinking “well, I could’ve done with a bit more foreshadowing and character development around the twist”. In all honestly, though, I say this to myself only to alleviate the discomfort I feel as I imagine myself Sacha Baron Cohen in a hospital chair, guilty and bewildered, hearing perhaps the saddest of realities about myself.

Tired as I, too, am of the American elections, the American friends half-joking about moving to Amsterdam, my mind keeps gravitating around various questions. How do the stock exchange and political elections compare? What would happen if polling and reporting on the election were not allowed? What political philosophy could I read about the life of voting imitating the art of polling? With headlines such as “the county that got every president right”, do Americans feel the discomfort I feel about the idea that a vote can be right or wrong, that it’s a national guessing game? Are we going to be okay after this?