like granted in Task we're talking about 1 line & also neither trend is universal but. idk maybe they were just sloppy when they made Mare but i doubt it, they made a choice to leave in that it took place in 2020, they could've fixed that so easily but they didn't

i feel like it's only recently, after the socio-political concensus landed as hard as possible on "covid wasn't a big deal & will result in no real changes" that i now see writers trying to engage w/ & remember what it was like & has been like in reality

in 2020 & for a while after i def remember a tendency to just not deal w/ it in fiction, like if we all agreed to tell stories abt the world before covid we could force covid to not be a big deal & pretend it wouldn't change things

if you read Ingelsby's statements that Task & Mare take place "in the same world" as literal i guess this is a continuity ding but really it just makes me think of what realism means in 2021 vs 2025

like to imagine people were talking to him about whale fucking all the time. he didn't even bring it up, it just came up organically in conversations w/ multiple people

the dude has to have a stylist/makeup artist who hates him personally right, looking like that on TV is not incompetence it's malice

like there are p much only 3 explicit confirmations of the year:
-an onscreen screen w/ dates in 2020 listed
-zabel says he's at a 15-year reunion for the class of '05
-an event in 2017 is described as "3 years ago"

none of those would've been hard to fix to change the setting to 2019

like you can kinda blink & miss it but the show unambiguously takes place in 2020, starting in january & ending in like september i think. stooting started before covid but finished after a covid-induced pause so they could've just changed it to 2019, but they did not

listen i'll believe the line is "revved up like a deuce," that's fine, i will not believe the following line is "another runner in the night" there's no way that word isn't "rumor"

“Me Too went too far because [shit that absolutely fucking did not happen]” is a recurring goddamned theme in our culture.

"shark person riding on two flying sharks" is the best comic book visual idea i have seen in years, wow

have you seen The One I Love (2014)? might be a weird pull but some of Carol's interactions w/ the other non-joined in Pluribus episode 2 gave me The One I Love vibes (which is a good thing for me)

(sorry i know it's stale but nobody said it yet)

minerals

also, like, i read "All I Care About Is You." that one is, in fact, my favorite joe hill story. i know the guy has range, he strikes me more as someone who returns to wells intentionally than someone who is in danger of running out of ideas