We Only Do the Good Shit
Warren Ellis, writing in his newsletter Orbital Operations, commented on what he wants to talk about.
Here’s a thing that came up in an email conversation the other week, that I don’t think I’ve ever made explicit to you: herein, I only talk about the things I like.
This was an important decision for me, made some years ago. It is great fun to annihilate something in a storm of arch Menckenesque hail, and I’ve done it in the past. But I came to the place where I questioned its utility here. If I’m spending time and space on something that is bad, then that is time and space not be used to boost the awareness of something good. And that is a poor trade-off, these days.
This is the basic equation, even ignoring the reflex of “I might think it’s bad but you might think it’s good” and “anywhere between one and ten thousand people laboured to bring this thing into the world and they did not intend to make something bad” and all the other shades of grey that generally get lost in the mix.
I’ll only ever tell you about things I think are good. Because, really, that’s all we should be spending our time on, and all we should be raising up into the conversation. Save your badness hot takes for Twitter or some other place where people prefer misery to joy. Start another petition about how the end of AVENGERS: ENDGAME made you sad and so should not be allowed.
Here, we only do the good shit. Okay? Okay.
Makes a lot of sense to me.