👶🏻 🎉 The Good Nonsense #1: Our first birthday?
Does anyone else have the fresh new excitement wobbles? Just me? K.
WELCOME, friends and fellow good nonsense lovers! (Bad, or even slightly questionable nonsense is strictly banned. We have ENOUGH of that already, thankyousomuch, the 2020s 😑 )
This community (or club? what are we calling ourselves?) was originally going to launch last Friday, but I don’t know, celebrating the inauguration of a Special Silliness Group two days after an insurrection felt a little… off key?
So here we are a week later, and I am genuinely so excited to have you here. I’ve wished for an easier, better way to connect with readers of The Paradox Paper for a long time, and seeing your enthusiasm in the lead up to this new community has warmed my heart.
Quick side note: if you haven’t had the benefit (annoyance?) of seeing my face talk about this on Instagram all week, the GNC is a weekly round up of all the good things we can find on the interwebs. To add yours, or otherwise engage with the community, just click the gray comment button at the bottom (it’s the one that looks like a speech bubble) or the logo at the top. They’ll both take you to the online post where you can see what others are adding to the list!
The Rules
Here’s how it’ll go around here.
Rule #1: While discussion, teasing, disagreement, and sassy GIFs are all encouraged, shame and unkindness will not be tolerated in the GNC™️, otherwise it’s own name no longer applies. While we may sometimes abandon the nonsense, we will always stay true to the good.
Rule #2: Occasionally we may wander away from pure silliness and into more serious topics. When this happens, every question that abides by Rule #1 is allowed and no point is too simple or stupid or un-Christian to bring up.
That’s it! Two rules!
The Procedure
Every Friday I’ll kick us off with a little blurb (this is this week’s blurb and I do apologize for it’s distinct not-littleness) and then get right into sharing all the best nonsensical links, images, shows, and any other Internet Happies from my week. YOU will then respond by sharing YOUR good nonsense in the comments, and it’ll be like starting the weekend with a big hug of goofiness. (I’m not sure that a goofy hug actually sounds like a nice way to start a weekend, but you get it.)
In all seriousness, one of the things that I’m most looking forward to in this space is our ability to connect as a group. It’s more than just that I get to communicate with my readers more easily, it’s that you can get to know EACH OTHER! That is the best because you are all such kind, weird, hilarious people, and I need you to know that about each other.
[This reminds me of one time when friends of my parents who had a daughter my age moved to our town, and our Moms talked us up to each other so much that it got weird and we avoided each other like the plague until they eventually moved away.* You don’t have to be best buds with everyone else here. Don’t make it weird.
*Btw, that girl and I ended up at college together and it turns out we found each other mutually amazing and hilarious and she was a bridesmaid in my wedding. SO ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN.]
Okedoke. Let’s get to the nonsense.
🏛 First and foremost, I can think of nothing on the world wide web that has made me happier or taught me more in the last week than following Sharon McMahon on Instagram. Me and about 150k other folks discovered her last week, but in case you weren’t one of them, Sharon is a former high school government teacher who now devotes obscenely generous amounts of time to educating all of us on what the heck American government even is.
Every day she hosts a QnA, breaks down the major headlines, and does it all with nary a partisan word. And if that wasn’t enough, she is downright jolly while she does it. If the Capitol attack left you wishing there was something you could DO, Sharon has organized a campaign to write thank you notes to the janitorial staff who cleaned the Capitol building so that Congress could reconvene. I mean 😭 ♥️ Go follow her already.
⚖️ Twitter commentary on the “amen and awoman” situation did not disappoint.
🐸 😳 Sullivan The Frog that apparently became the Sin Eater for 2020 and will soon burst if the first two weeks of 2021 are any indication.
💅 This delightful nail duet…
🍭 I read this from The Washington Post (the only non-terrorism-related news article I consumed last week 😳) and it made me feel much better about how much candy I eat.
📚 Speaking of reading, I need to beef up my 2021 fiction TBR. My dilemma is that I want well-written page turners that will hold my attention and make me forget about the real world, but my emotions are like, “You sure about that, bro?”
I am not interested in anything related to addiction, mental illness, complicated sibling relationships, abuse, or intense family conflict. Survive-the-wilderness stories make me anxious and itchy. I will not stand for any harm coming to anybody’s child. Hard pass on all things horror and horror-adjacent. I want to laugh, and to feel things, but NOT TOO MANY THINGS, ya know?
2021 Reader Steph is very easy to please. Give me your best fiction recs in the comments.
Your turn! Can’t wait to see the good nonsense you find.
"So Yesterday" by Scott Westerfeld sounds like a great option for you! It's pretty great!
Has anybody read Children of Blood and Bone? Can my fragile psyche handle that this year?