Why yes I AM ready for this to become my entire personality

Repost with an iconic fictional band (if you feel like it)

I think this is also a clue to the epistemic crisis — not just in terms of people denying reality, as many people have pointed out, but in terms of how they view authority and expertise. If you're taught to basically "fake it til you make it" wrt reading, then it must be MUCH easier to assume that—

this @bookshop.bsky.social story caused great confusion in our meeting yesterday, because nobody parsed "ostriches" correctly at first and believed it was a story about either hostages or Austrians. foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/11/c...

patreon changing its interface to center a feed of content from shows and creators we don't follow is such obnoxious bullshit, and just one more example of why so much of the internet is unremittingly awful these days. everything is tik-tok-ified, even platforms that aren't social media.

at this point the performance by centrist dems of political norms that no longer exist somehow feels worse than anything. just gaslighting us all while sending the message to the fascists that their playbook of making millions of Americans suffer is effective. They will do this again and again. god.

Ilgaksu, a fanfiction writer some of my friends really really love, is dealing with rare illnesses with costly private medical fees. If you can help, or just spread the word, please do. gofund.me/eba0202f8

It’s not mental illness to be anxious when people are fucking with your healthcare. It’s not wrong to be depressed when powerful people choose evil and suffering. Feeling things about a crisis does not mean you are broken, even if the crisis is perpetual!

MY TIME HAS COME

this piece makes it very obvious that framing opposition to zionism as antisemitic is itself antisemitic. The writers conflate Jewish identity itself with a single ideology and presuppose that all Jewish people are reflexively aligned with that ideology. It's a collectivist, dehumanizing rhetoric.

alternately: give us your most fun and/or mindblowing crossover fanfic recs!

BTW for anyone looking for an underappreciated Halloween slasher, The Initiation is enjoyably full-80s bonkers, with a pretty cool long sequence filmed on location in a giant abandoned mall. and hey it's on YT youtu.be/vSJDsCNW1wM?...

10 Horror Movies to get to know me The Unknown (1927) The Old Dark House (1932) The Innocents (1961) Jaws (1975) Possession (1981) The Initiation (1984) Audition (1999) Martyrs (2007) I Saw the Devil (2010) Nope (2022)

Since August, at least 3 other people I know have read these books and they all agree with me that they are delightful, and i'm very chuffed! READ MISS CASSIDY, IT'S SO GOOD! bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

A new Harvard study shows that 2025 protests are likely the most geographically widespread in US history.

Anger is the main weapon of the culture war and always has been. The far right didn't wake up one day circa 2014 and start hating trans people. They looked around after Obergefell and realized they'd lost the culture war against same-sex marriage and needed a new cultural front. So they decided to—

My heart goes out to these victims. Jesus this man is a remorseless serial rapist with an established pattern of extreme violence. To go from facing 80 years in prison to... counseling. This judge has the trauma and very likely the blood of future victims on her hands. www.news9.com/story/68ef08...

sooo… where should I consider applying to for my MA?

No one is saying that you can't have a redemption arc as a guy with a nazi tattoo on your chest.* We are saying: there are hundreds of other people who are qualified to run for public office as democrats who do not have nazi tattoos on their chests, which makes them *more* qualified than you.

Anyone looking to do more writing and reviewing of SFF, Nerds of a Feather is calling for blog contributors! bsky.app/profile/chlo...

Define "Perfect Ending"?

When I saw First Reformed in the theatre it very much read as intended, i.e. as a spiraling descent into extremism, but these days I'm more and more just like, on second thought, wrapping yourself in barbed wire and turning into the unabomber seems like a perfectly reasonable response to all of this

I stopped by ICYMI @slate.com to talk about Theo Von and the ins and outs of podcast bros! www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSWS...

Subscribe to Katelyn, whose work this year has been so necessary and insightful and strong

I'd go back to Tumblr before I'd go back to Mastodon. Hell, I never really left Tumblr, but I'd retire to a swamp cave and tell my stories to an admiring bog before I'd go back to Mastodon.

This admin also doesn't actually even know or give a shit about our national symbology. If you went up to Trump right now and said to him "give me your tired, your poor," etc, odds are 100% that he'd have zero clue what that was or what it means to America. He's never cared about "American values."

Win against what? Banger pop hits? The racist dehumanization here is wild both because it's so blatant and because it's so myopic. She knows nothing about Bad Bunny beyond his skin color or she'd never be trying to drag him into the culture war, because even in MAGA country Bad Bunny > Trump.

"Name a famous 28-year-old" legit the most famous person in China but no one would believe me

look obviously i didn't know this when i wrote it, but if you're feeling some kind of way about this place and its moderation decisions -- here's a post just for you! newsletter.sachajudd.com/archive/noth...

1) Never read the goodreads page for your book 2) Never read fanfic for your own characters 3) Never read social media commentary about your own articles (unless someone genuinely asks you for clarification or additional info you can add to your reporting!) 4) Never google/look up your own name 5) 👇

In 2020, I wrote a long email to Yglesias after he signed the Harper's Letter, and after Emily, Katelyn and I spent a week being harassed by Singal stans. He had emailed me apologizing for any offense he'd caused, while also resisting the perception that the letter was driven by transphobia.

If you are a UK author, you may also wish to notify the Society of Authors through this form, since they are trying to gauge how many UK authors are affected. societyofauthors.org/2025/10/02/a...

I get very nervous whenever people talk about how things will be fine because Trump is not a "competent" authoritarian. I would prefer political leaders not to assume this, but rather to firmly, urgently repudiate authoritarianism and reaffirm the Constitution before anyone competent comes along.

when I first started working at Vox in 2016, I was unprepared for how much "liberal" was still an active word in their political discussions, because i'd spent like a decade at that point in contexts where everyone was assumed progressive, not dirty centrist, and it suddenly felt very 90s in here

"We receive a high volume of applications...unable to respond to every applicant individually, blah blah blah" same job app: "Decided not to apply? We’d appreciate knowing why via this form..." pardon? you want an extra, individualized response? out of the high volume of apps i'm filling out? 🫠

wild that when women write fanfic and make fanart for love, they get shamed and stigmatized and told they're not real creators for playing in other people's IP sandboxes, but when rich men just shit all over copyright for profit, they're ~visionaries~ who get to fully reshape society! Hmm! Hmm.

listen Josh Hallmark just dropped the info that Israel Keyes was into trans sex workers into the middle of this year we're having, and I think 2025 just needs to calm down and think about what it's done

British media outlets could just try not platforming the head witch that's a thing they could do

This is a losing media game. Even if your grievance with liberalism is valid, when it leads you to dehumanize people, practice bigotry, and abandon the social contract, that's no longer a valid political position. It's hate, and it will never embrace the pundits trying so hard to "sit with" it.

someone should really pay me to write about the raging Alchemized discourse, bc it's not going away, people are VERY invested, and if you're interested in this convo, the perspective of a fandom journalist and nonbinary ex-HP fan who's written about monetized fic debates for years would be useful. 👀

Just stared at the word "two" for so long I convinced myself it can't possibly be a real word and i must be living in a simulation

I decided it would be a good idea to compile all my reporting on this topic in one place, so that other people wanting to get a glimpse into this mindset / mentality have a good starting point. You can find that list here. www.linkedin.com/pulse/intern...

Yes! I recorded the article too which was a lot of fun (in between my cat trying to sabotage the project)

"Then questions arose" FWIW some of us were asking these very obvious questions about the book's veracity *at the time* of its release, not 9 months later: www.vox.com/culture/4072...

Just a quick addition to @bookshop.bsky.social’s excellent point below: we saw this with extreme right groups in the 80s & 90s & 00s. They’d pull in different ideas from different places, mash them together, & incorporate them. The term Mark Hamm borrowed to describe it was bricolage. 1/

People like @iwriteok.bsky.social and @swordsjew.bsky.social have written more granularly about how Neo-Nazis did target individuals in the early days of the internet. Access to groups on early internet forums and the mobilization/recruitment tactics acquired during the Gamergate era scaled that up-

The difference is that now the media have been pressured into entertaining the narrative that leftist and trans violence is on the rise, which means every potential opportunity for those bullet messages to be read as leftist and pro-trans must be taken. bullshit begets more bullshit.

"If no one expected KPDH to take over the latter half of 2025, does that mean it’s a game-changer for K-pop as a whole, or a fluke that has nothing to do with the broader K-pop fandom?" In our latest, @bookshop.bsky.social explores the wild success of Kpop Demon Hunters—and what it means for K-pop:

I've written about this a half-dozen times since 2015, because it continues to be relevant that the alt-right originally weaponized irony and memes in order to 1) spread extremism without consequence and 2) cultivate all these semi-ironic violent extremist edgelords foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/15/c...