Good morning everyone,

I hope, as always, that you are safe and well. Do you want to read some stuff that will cheer you up? Me too. Let's go.

We start with Kayla at Autostraddle, who is absolutely committing to recreating the environments she enjoys in her own home. I also like – there are a whole series of these, all great – the red thread that they are all called some variation on "Jane's". I recommend that you try this for yourself in your home. I was recently missing being in bars that are done up in a vaguely Moroccan style and before I knew it I was on aliexpress looking at gauze and thinking, FEZ JANE'S:

After turning our apartment into a tea parlor, a fancy restaurant, a spa, and a beach, it was only a matter of time before my girlfriend and I decided to make a fake gay club. Before, we kept making and changing plans to go out dancing at one of the queer spots in Vegas. Now we’re extra-regretting that it never happened. So we turned the apartment into Club Jane’s (our fake beachside bar was called Sailor Jane’s, and I don’t know who Jane is, but apparently she’s a very busy lesbian entrepreneur in the realm of our quarantine fantasies) and we had so much fun getting sweaty and silly that it’s now a weekly tradition.

https://www.autostraddle.com/happy-hour-at-home-welcome-to-the-gay-club/

Rosa Lyster is another very funny writer – she wrote one of my absolute favourite things on the internet, The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek – and here she is with I, too, am declining to write the next ‘King Lear’ as a protest against capitalism. I love this. So will you. Now is as good a time as any to let you know that there's better stuff in this even than I have included in the pullquote:

Just unbelievable stuff out there, startling glimpses into the inner worlds of people who apparently believe that the main reason Shakespeare wrote King Lear was because he felt an obligation to be “productive” during a period of quarantine, and also that although they themselves were clearly capable of churning out something of a similar quality, given the right conditions, they would not be embarking on that journey, because to do so would be to succumb to capitalism’s overweening demands. Standing unbowed even as capitalism’s hot, meaty breath is huffing in your face, even as its bloodied claws swipe at your midsection, not writing King Lear. Head held high, tremulously belting out “The Internationale” to the accompaniment of battered tin flutes, refusing to take the sucker’s path, which is to write King Lear.

https://theoutline.com/post/8855/shakespeare-king-lear-quarantine

Finally, Janelle Shane's aiweirdness so often comes through, and indeed it does here with a delightful illustrated post on AI generated court cases. FIVE HUNDRED AND TWELVE OTTERS:

https://aiweirdness.com/post/612669075940900864/court-cases-that-sound-like-the-weirdest-fights

  Love,

Alex.