As I write this, I'm sitting in a coffee shop about halfway through January of 2025 trying desperately not to to wonder about what in the actual fuck is going on in the world right now for the sake of my mental health. It feels uncomfortably like when your glasses are just a little out of kilter and your vision is messed up in subtle, deeply annoying ways that you can't quite put your finger on. Warren Ellis recently put it thus: "I am once again Not Fully Awake, though possibly that is down to being repeatedly bludgeoned by the …

Late in October of 2007, a story hit the news wires about people getting raided by local SWAT teams because someone had called up the local 911 services and claimed that gang wars had broken out, heavily armed people on drugs had killed their families, and stuff like that. Some pretty bad things went down as a result, and as one would expect law enforcement doesn't take kindly to anyone monkeying around with their communications networks, especially when lots of heavily armed cops wearing body armor are called out as a result. A subsequent investigation revealed that a group of …