What Wendy's Doing:
Reading Through the Epstein Files, Puking Into My Puke Bag, And Realizing That Robin Leach Choked a Teenager To Death
Table of Contents
❄️ Weather Check ❄️
New York: 22°F, partly sunny, wind chill slicing to 10°F — the kind of cold that makes your teeth ache and your regrets sharper.
Kansas City: 24°F, sunny despite itself, last night's 2°F still clinging to your bones like a bad memory.
Atlanta: Winter storm warning, 1-4 inches of snow incoming — Georgia ain't built for this shit and neither are we.
San Francisco: 53°F, coastal flood advisory, the bay swelling like grief against the shoreline.
Detroit: 19°F, cloudy and cold as a landlord's heart, wind making 14°F feel like personal betrayal.
The Daily Gathering
Grounded wisdom for curious souls
True Love
Good morning, beloved community. It's Saturday, January 31, 2026. Today: a $75 million propaganda film bombs harder than democracy, the dirt beneath your feet holds the key to survival, a man who tried to murder two women for kissing gets 20 years, and the life hack that'll change your fucking week.
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Editor's note: The last day of January. We made it through the month. Barely.
Melania's $75 Million Vanity Project Gets a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes
She’s Grouchy
That Bitch: The red carpet at the newly renamed Trump-Kennedy Center smelled like desperation and Chanel No. 5 on Wednesday night. Brett Ratner — yes, that Brett Ratner, the one MeToo was supposed to bury — directed a documentary so hollow that critics are calling it worse than Cats. The air in theaters this weekend tastes like stale propaganda and wasted Amazon money.
The damage:
6% critics score, 99% audience score — the gap tells you everything about the information silos we're drowning in
$75 million spent ($40 million acquisition, $35 million marketing) for a film that sold out at exactly two theaters nationwide despite opening in 2,000
Two-thirds of the New York-based crew refused screen credit — one told Rolling Stone they hope it "flops"
Response: The Guardian's Catherine Shoard called it "exhaustingly boring and chillingly vain," noting the First Lady "has no friends" and maintains "an entirely airless existence." Variety's Owen Gleiberman said it "should have been called 'Day of the Living Tradwife.'" The Independent's Nick Hilton described Melania as "a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness." Meanwhile, the film is tracking toward an $8 million opening weekend because nothing matters and the void consumes all. Watch literally anything else. Rotten Tomatoes
We Can't Fix the Climate If We Keep Ignoring Soil
Gif by abbeyluck on Giphy
The sensory: Dig your fingers into healthy soil — really push them in — and feel the cool, dark crumble of something alive. That's not dirt. That's a universe. There's more carbon stored in Earth's topsoil than in the atmosphere and all plant and animal life combined. And COP30 just walked right past it like it wasn't there.
The science:
45% more carbon in topsoil than previously measured, making soil Earth's second-largest carbon sink after oceans
27% of carbon emissions needed to keep warming below 2°C could be sequestered by healthy soils
Soil hosts more than half of all life on Earth and filters drinking water for over half the global population
COP30 pledged $9 billion for soil restoration — sounds big until you realize the US alone spends $36.8 billion annually on fertilizers
Action: There's no legally binding treaty protecting soils — unlike the Paris Agreement for atmosphere or UNCLOS for oceans. Smallholder farmers produce 30% of the world's food but receive less than 1% of climate finance. The goal should be restoring soil organic matter to 3% globally. Start composting. Support regenerative agriculture. Demand your representatives treat dirt like the life-protecting organism it actually is. Earth.org
Colorado Man Gets 20 Years for Trying to Murder Women He Thought Were Lesbians
Human opening: February 19, 2023. Two women standing on a street corner in Aurora, Colorado. One moment they're just existing — maybe holding hands, maybe not, it doesn't fucking matter — and then a 47-year-old man named Vitalie Oprea sees them, makes a U-turn into oncoming traffic, and drives his car onto the sidewalk, across a grassy area, trying to run them down.
Stakes:
When the women fled into a pickup truck, Oprea rammed it with his vehicle, got out, kicked the passenger door, and tried to drag one woman out
His confession to police: "I drove at the women because I saw them kissing and they were lesbians and I wanted to kill them."
This week: 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempted first-degree murder with a bias-motivated hate crime enhancer
Movement: "These women did nothing to provoke this violence," said Deputy District Attorney Lauren Agee. "They were targeted, chased, and left fearing for their lives." The women survived. They're still here, still standing, still living their lives. That's the victory. But this case exists in a country where over 360 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have already been filed in the first month of 2026. Stay vigilant. Stay visible. Stay together. CBS Colorado
Life Survival: Community
"We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond." — Gwendolyn Brooks
This is the part where community becomes verb instead of noun. You're someone's harvest today — the thing they need to survive. And they're yours. That annoying neighbor, that difficult coworker, that family member who voted wrong: magnitude and bond. You don't have to like everyone to recognize that your survival is wrapped up in theirs. Carry that into the grocery store. Into the argument with your mother. Into the comment section. We need each other. That's not weakness. That's physics.
Community & Culture
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani told snowbound New Yorkers to binge Heated Rivalry — the gay hockey romance's library downloads surged 529%, and roughly 2,000 people applied for library cards that weekend. A politician recommending queer lit during a disaster briefing? This is how you govern. Metro Weekly
Tennessee GOP gubernatorial candidate Monty Fritts called for executing parents of trans kids — on a Christian Nationalist podcast, naturally. "Capital punishment for those who commit an assault on the sanctity of life," he said about puberty blockers. A 2024 Harvard study found cisgender minors are far more likely to undergo gender-affirming surgeries than trans youth, but facts don't matter when you're building a theocracy. PinkNews
Nature & Science
Earth's oceans absorbed 23 Zetta Joules of heat in 2025 — that's 37 years of global energy use, soaked into the sea in 12 months. Ocean warming has accelerated since the 1990s with no sign of slowing. The cover of the research features a sad shrimp and crab, because even scientists are screaming into the void now. ScienceDaily
Ancient oceans stayed oxygen-rich despite extreme warming — 16 million years ago, the Arabian Sea had more oxygen than today even though Earth was warmer. Regional factors like monsoons and circulation patterns matter more than we thought. Future ocean predictions just got more complicated and more hopeful. ScienceDaily
Life Hacks
Morning decision fatigue → Lay out tomorrow's clothes tonight, including underwear and socks. The feeling: waking up with one less negotiation between you and the day, your brain already lighter.
Endless phone scrolling → Charge your phone in another room overnight. Buy a $10 alarm clock. The feeling: the first and last moments of your day belong to you again, not the algorithm.
Cooking paralysis → Pick one "base" you'll make every Sunday: rice, roasted vegetables, or beans. Everything else becomes assembly. The feeling: Wednesday-you thanking Sunday-you like they're different people.
Food & Nourishment
Citrus is screaming right now → Blood oranges, Meyer lemons, grapefruit — supremes over yogurt with honey takes 4 minutes and tastes like you gave a damn about yourself.
Corporate orange juice bypass → One Meyer lemon tree in a sunny window produces 10-20 lemons annually. $30 investment, years of return. This is food sovereignty — one windowsill at a time.
Sad wilted greens transformation → Sauté any tired leafy green with garlic, olive oil, red pepper flakes, squeeze of lemon, 6 minutes, done. Boring to restaurant-quality. No excuses.
Life Survival: Deliberation
"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing." — Audre Lorde
Deliberate doesn't mean slow. Deliberate means chosen. Every single thing you do today — the way you speak, the things you read, the battles you pick — you can choose. Fear will show up anyway; it always does. But you don't have to let it drive. Audre Lorde wrote those words as a Black lesbian in America, as a cancer survivor, as someone who understood that existing visibly was itself an act of war. Be deliberate. Be afraid. Do it anyway.