Aja Romano

We live in extremely cruel times, and helping ensure a trans kid's survival and safety is a vital form of resistance. Please donate to help Eli and best boy Ianto if you can.

is it an "echo chamber," or is it just a community reinforcing social norms while refusing to fling open the Overton window, you antisocial extremist weirdos

Paris handing Logan his balls, yes i do just have this sitting around on my laptop

this had better end with a Paris vs Succession finale so i can be like PARIS VS LOGAN REDUX 🤗

my beloved Paris Geller and her Misandrist Sweater facing off against my beloved Jess Bradford and her Manos The Hands of Misandry Sweater, a personal attack on me, personally

this match-up is biphobic 😭

that last paragraph sounds like someone absolutely desperate to make her words a reality, convinced if she just yells "REPORTERS AREN'T WRITERS" loudly enough, she can magically make journos stop writing and reporting and hand our jobs over to the terrible toy that makes shit up

(this is glib sarcasm but i seriously think this is one of the worst sins of modern digital editing and a borderline cruel thing to do to your listening audience)

i just think that if you're an audio/video editor and you deliberately overlay songs that are in two entirely different, non-relative, discordant key signatures on top of one another, you probably deserve to spend at least a little bit of time in hell

yeah this makes a lot of sense (and is a variant of commentary on obvious themes that migratory slash fandom has displayed for decades) but god "drawing parallels between Kylux and Arthur/Eames" makes me bristle to my core since A/E does not involve romanticizing a pair of genocidal fascists 🫠😶

I don't think I've ever seen this but as a longtime Arthur from Inception lover I AM interested 👀

We should understand "Alpine Divorce" in conjunction with men being known to abandon women on roadsides, during partner dives (eg Tina Watson), and when partners are extremely sick. Often (like the case below) this is all premeditated rather than spontaneous. (journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...)

Reminder:

Call for Papers: The Third International Asian Stardom, Celebrity and Fandom Conference

#FanStudies

live-china-uon.cloud.contensis.com/en/humanitie...

people don't list the alternatives every time they make this plea because the alternatives are very well known at this point: Ghost, Buttondown, Beehiv, all sustaining people who have migrated with most of their audiences away from Substack.

tonight I am thinking about all the disingenuous editorial room debates across NY/digital media over the idea that what's been happening to trans people in the US over the last decade constitutes a genocide. I hope all of those editors choke on their semantics.

my impression of her is that she's been increasingly lowkey and quietly left-leaning or at least moderate in recent years. The last time i saw her doing anything publicly she was performing a concert to fundraise for global PEPFAR support after Trump's foreign aid cuts.

oh it's also here on our actual website with the bonus 10th episode lol oops what is content management kaleidotropepodcast.com/episodes/

now i am listening to the trailer for the first time since before the pandemic and making kristen-bell-with-sloth faces bc it's so ridiculous and fun lol

Kaleidotrope Podcast show header. Art by Joy Yang.

I am the last person to learn that apparently Kaleidotrope is no longer streaming on any of the podcast platforms it's supposed to be streaming on 🤦 no clue why. But until we figure that out, anyone wanting to listen can still find it on YouTube! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

It's very different. Fanfic can be kinky, subversive, transgressive, and in some countries it's actually illegal. It's still rare to find people connecting their fic to their IRL identity. Publishing's push to capitalize on fic has skewed this recently, but most fans would never be comfortable w/it.

Everything Carly writes here is correct. There's a reason I and a number of others have basically given up on trying to place fandom coverage in mainstream pubs. And I'm hopeful that we get at least a decent level of subscriber support for @fansplaining.bsky.social to try to help remedy this! BUT—

to me this isn't an issue as long as you get consent

if you link directly to the fanfic the author's name is right there.

this is also something longtime internet culture journalists like myself know and understand, and we have well-established practices for how to write about subcultures without outing people!

(the irony that I'm having this conversation about hockey fandom is not lost on me, but to reiterate I have never and never ever *would* out fans without their explicit consent.)

as a journalist covering fandom, it's unlikely you'd even have a pressing reason to insist on breaking pseudonymity.

Journalists need to be aware that this stuff is largely written under pseudonyms *for a reason* and that if you inadvertently out a fan by publicizing their fan work or identity without their permission, they could face real-world stigma and consequences!

I was outed as a fan and fired for it!

I think a lot of things can be true at once re: fandom and the fourth wall. The basic reality is that there *is* no fourth wall and arguably hasn't been since 2011, 50 Shades era. But that doesn't mean fan privacy goes out the window, or that it's fine citing fic or fans in articles w/o permission.

Imagine having the absolute lack of conscience required to act performatively troubled about the metric ton of scientific research that confirms the *staggeringly high* rate of trans suicide/ideation that magically drops when you empower people to transition. Imagine making THIS your battlefield.

What all of these pieces have in common is a form of “just asking questions.” On its face, “just asking questions” might seem like the fundamental role of a journalist. It often is — journalists may walk us through explorations of important issues by getting us to ask questions alongside them. But context is crucial; some questions might seem innocent, but what ends up happening is far more problematic and leads to undermining, derailing, or even distorting our understanding of the subject.

Trans rights are human rights. Journalists are failing both. How the anti-trans movement took over legacy media.

I see it's time to bring this back: Trans people deserve better journalism.
www.vox.com/culture/2365...

co-signing this. Also, no journalist *needs* to be on Substack either. There are other platforms. The readers who matter will migrate with you. Leaving complicit platforms because they are complicit, and making the reason clear, is a relatively very low-effort yet highly visible form of resistance.

Scientific Editor Do you have proven materials research expertise related to materials and light interactions? Are you an experienced Editor with a passion for Science? About our Team Cell Press publishes over 50 scien...

We're hiring for our new Cell Press journal, Matter & Light!

Get in touch if you have any questions!

💡⚡☀️

relx.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/ElsevierJobs...

We’re hiring!

More details about the position here: www.lrb.co.uk/jobs