#Community development on Substack

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Introduction to Level 4 of Udemy Course From Zero to Substack Hero

Section 21: Mastery and Beyond on Substack Source link to the image For those who missed, I shared the scripts of 20 sections covering levels 1, 2, and 3 of this exciting course. Today, I will provide a quick intro to Level 4 of From Zero to Substack Hero, which will be available on Udemy soon, but I have already uploaded the videos to my publication on Substack for members. Level 4 of our…

[official-trainwrecks]

This week's Friday post is a little different! I'll be doing character development diaries sporadically throughout the seasons (Victoria's later this season, Sebastian's next season). These posts will attempt to cover almost 20 years of character history, from their creation to their modern day interpretations. Look closely enough and you'll see core elements still alive and well in the Trainwrecks universe.

Did you know Duke used to be an assassin? Did you also know that one of his biggest inspirations was Patrick Verona from 10 Things I Hate About You? Read all that and more in today's bonus post!

[bynataliezubi]

Make the content. Write the blog post. Record the song. Write the book. Share your work. Even if just a few people see it, even if nobody sees it. It’s worth it to create. It feels good to put it out there. It’s so freeing to share what you love to do with the world. Do it, I believe in you!

I'm doing it, sharing my writing on Substack and content on Instagram and Tiktok so check it out!

[ghelgheli]

i would actually like to hear more of your thoughts on whipping girl, whenever you feel ready enough to talk about it. i've only ever heard positive recommendations for it. i was thinking of reading it. i've read one or two introductory 101 texts on transmisogyny as well as some medium/substack posts, and always looking to read more as a tme person. ty!

thanks for asking! I'm gonna try to be concise because I'm stuck on my phone for the month, but here are my thoughts on whipping girl:

serano is at her strongest in the book in three areas: manifestations of transmisogyny in media (e.g. how trans caricatures pervade movies), the history of medical institutions developing a pathology of transsexuality (like the diagnostics of blanchard et al. or how trans people seeking healthcare were and continue to be forced into acting out prescribed expressions and manufacturing memories), and the construction of her own transition narrative (telling the reader what it was like for her to grow up desiring femininity in a way that confused her, the experience of crossdressing, the effects of hrt for her)

whenever she's just sticking to this, I think she effectively communicates a lot that the unaware reader could benefit from—even many trans women/transfems/tma people who are otherwise in tune with the history of medicalized transsexualism and our popular depictions could probably benefit from her own personal narrative, by nature of how variegated our experiences can be.

unfortunately I think the book fails at its primary—stated—goal, which is to theorize about transmisogyny. in the big picture this is a bifurcated failure:

on one branch of her argument, she remains committed to there being something biologically essential/innate about gender. this manifests thru multiple claims: that we have "innate inclinations" toward masculinity/femininity and "subconscious sex" rather than what I believe, which is that the latter are constructed categories imposed on different matrices of behaviour/expression/desire in different cultural contexts; that there is "definitely a biological component to gender" (close paraphrase) after a discussion of how she believes E and T tend to affect people (thus equivocating gender with dominant hormones!); that we have such a thing as "physical sex" which is the composition of our culturally decided "sex characteristics" (don't ask me how the dividing line is drawn) even as she says we should stop using "biological sex" as a term; that there is "no harm" in agreeing that "sex" is largely bimodal with some exceptions; that social constructionism is necessarily erasure of transsexual experiences in early childhood... altogether she is unwilling to relinquish arguments about the partial "innateness" of femininity/masculinity and gender. this is at tension with her admission on several occasions that these are neither culturally/geographically nor temporally stable concepts! but that doesn't seem to be a line she can follow thru on.

on another, intertwining branch, she engages in what I think is a deep and widespread mistake in the theorizing of transmisogyny: reducing it (mechanistically) to what she calls effemimania* or essentially anti-femininity. it is her stated thesis at the start that masculinity is universally preferred to femininity. she doesn't offer a definition of either term until one of the final chapters, where she defines them as the behaviours and expressions associated with a particular gender. but I think this reduction just misunderstands transmisogyny. it is even in tension with an observation she makes early on, that trans women are often punished for their perceived masculinity! but again, this is a thought she seems unable or unwilling to follow thru with.

my problem with the thesis is that masculinity and femininity do not float free of gender—it is not possible to speak of their valuation in the abstract. anyone who grew up as a masculine cis girl and never "grew out" of that "phase" can attest to the violence wrought upon expressions of masculinity from women. and this applies doubly so to the subjects of transmisogyny! not only are we punished for any perceived bleed-through of masculinity from our supposed "underlying male selves", those of us who are willingly masculine and thriving as mascs are punished for our failure to conform to the rules of the normative womanhood that is imposed on us (just as we are punished for any willing femininity as "false" and predatory upon cis womanhood—observe that transmisogyny is reactive degendering in every case!).

on both branches serano makes only perfunctory remarks about the intersections with race, class, and colonialism. "sex" as such was made to only be accessible to the "civilized", most of all the white european! for a racialized person and particularly a Black person navigating gender the waters are just not the same; the signifiers of sex neither available in the same way, nor granted the same medical legitimacy. what is the "physical sex" of someone who is de-sexed altogether? how can gender have a "biologically innate" component when its expressions between the bourgeoisie and the working class are at total odds with one another? this all goes for the masculine/feminine distinctions as well. what sense is there in the claim that we have innately masculine/feminine inclinations when globally (and transmisogyny has been made global!) what is feminine and masculine can be very nearly mirrored? nor is "masculinity is always considered superior to femininity" innocent of obviating race. transmisogynoir adds yet further degendering thru the coercive masculinization of someone as a Black woman—masculinization as punishment, again!

and as a final point, the account fails to be materialist. there is no attempt to place transmisogyny in its role as an instrument of political economy or, as jules gill-peterson might say, as a tool of statecraft. it is just a psychological response to the way the world is, as far as serano has anything to say about it. but how did the world become that way, and why?? serano's solution, the abolition of what she calls gender entitlement, is naive to the fact that gender entitlement is necessary to the maintenance of the capitalist state, which is structured thru patriarchy and built on colonialism. it is not possible to reskin this into something innocuous!

this is why I cannot recommend whipping girl as a work about transmisogyny except at the most shallow level. it could be a helpful critical read, but imo, it is just wrong about transmisogyny.

[drdemonprince]

We sometimes treat avoiding Annoying Queer People as if it’s essential to the LGBTQ community’s self-preservation. We agonize over event descriptions and identity-based admittance policies, wondering how to discourage all the Annoying (and often, it’s implied, fake) Queers from attending without restricting any actual queers. (This always fails, because it turns out that actual queer people are humans, and therefore pretty annoying. And being annoying, by the way, is not a crime.) In order to fortify ourselves against Annoying Queers, we mock all their signifiers and regard them as massive social red flags: straight husbands, bolo ties, sexual inexperience, ukuleles, rainbow pins from Target, misconceptions about what hormones do, and Picrew avatars all somehow get treated with equal venom, no matter where they are coming from and why. The problem is, none of these traits tell us anything about how safe a person actually is to be around. Only observing their patterns of behavior can do that. By demonizing “cringey” and irritating attributes as the signs of a deep character flaw, we ignore the fact they tend to cluster among the closeted, questioning, or newly-out for a reason. When a socially isolated queer person in the suburbs feels that nobody sees them as they are, they might cover themselves in rainbow swag from the local big-box store to an ‘annoying’ degree. When a closeted lesbian teen hasn’t had the chance to form genuine relationships with LGBTQ people, all her reference points might come from shows like Our Flag Means Death and Heartstopper which yeah, might seem fangirlish and irritating to a more seasoned adult. When a profoundly repressed trans divorcee still believes the misinformation about hormones they’ve been fed by the press, they might repeat some downright offensive myths about pelvic floor damage or body hair being disgusting. This too, is incredibly exhausting to help someone process again and again. I don’t think any of us literally believe that the more irritating a person is, the more of a pressing political threat they are. But we behave as if we do. We devote huge amounts of time to complaining about the types of queer people that irritate us, and develop complex taxonomies for describing why they are so annoying and why defeating that annoyingness matters. This person is a tenderqueer, that one is a tucute, and in their style of dress and annoying mannerisms we can tell that they represent all that we hate most about ourselves and how we are seen. It’s easy for us to wind up directing more attention toward the queer people that annoy us than we do to our shared enemies. It’s not a good use of our time. It’s not good for our shared futures. And it’s all rooted in internalized shame.

I wrote about biphobia, acephobia, transphobia, and the troubling respectability politics of hating the "Annoying Queer Person." The full essay is free to read (or have narrated to you!) on my Substack.

[hms-no-fun]

you were on cohost? i guess too late now, how was it for you?

cohost had its fair share of problems and i could often find the community there a bit too tumblr-core fingerwaggy if you know what i mean. but the site's dead now so it's kind of a moot point. what i find myself reflecting on most these days are the positives.

first, no numbers. i think their no numbers policy was probably a bit over-aggressive, but it quelled some of the rat race popularity contest aspect of social media that often makes it so tedious. i liked their tag tracking system, their robust content warning options, and the absence of infinite scroll. what i miss most about cohost is that their text editor supported CSS, which led to people programming elaborate text effects and puzzles and games in-site that harkened back to the days of flash animations. there was something in this combination of elements that drew out a rebellious creativity in users.

cohost came at a time when social media was across the board feeling terrible (and it's only gotten worse hahaha), particularly as someone who makes shit that relies on you clicking links that take you away from the website or app. algorithms hate this and punish it. users also just seem kind of lazy and disinterested in using the internet so much as letting the internet happen to them passively. but when a post of mine went viral on cohost, people engaged with it. it wasn't just likes and shares, it was comments and additions. it felt like a place that (at its best) encouraged actual conversation and the development of new ideas among like-minded peers. when my posts did well and i included a donation link, people gave me money. it felt genuinely like a website that COULD support professional blog work in a way that was more customizable even than substack yet still RSS friendly, and the Following tab which let you easily see posts of specific users was a REVELATION, like a mini RSS reader within the website itself.

but the enterprise was unsustainable for various reasons (not all of them outside the dev crew's control) and the haters got what they wanted. now our big social media alternative is bluesky, a website that dares to ask the question "what if there was another twitter?" the answer is that it fucking sucks. i hate microblogs so much dude, why on EARTH are we still acting like these disambiguited 300-character-limit posts are the most preferable means of social communication online??? why would you set out to make a better twitter and then deliberately choose to replicate literally every aspect of the user experience that encouraged low-information high-drama conflict fabrication? WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A VERSION OF TWITTER WHERE YOU CAN EASILY LOOK UP THE ACCOUNT OF EVERYONE WHO HAS YOU BLOCKED AND IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A FEATURE NOT A BUG???????? i just don't get it. i don't even get the optimism of the early adopters. i've seen people decry the post-election decay of the platform like "of course the cishets come in to ruin a community that was defined by trans & queer people" i'm sorry HELLO???????? from literally day zero bluesky was aiming to be a hands-off centrist IPO-friendly tech startup, there was never anything structurally embedded within the platform itself to keep this kind of decay from happening, you just happened to be on there when there were dramatically fewer users most of whom were curious tech enthusiasts. seriously, how have we not learned this lesson yet? you can't define a digital culture by the vibes of random user behavior! unless you have LAWS and GUIDELINES whereby you fucking BAN people for being shitheads, unless you enforce an actual code of conduct and punish bigoted speech and design a system that encourages constructive conversation, you are always always ALWAYS going to wind up at unhinged facebook boomer slop!

the death of cohost and the utterly predictable decay of bluesky are a big part of the reason why i've been posting so much more on tumblr. this is like the last bastion of anything even remotely resembling the old web, with its support of longposts and tagging and how easy it is to find random hobbyists doing cool shit you never knew existed before. like, yeah, you have to search that shit out and tailor your feed to not drive you crazy, but that's what i like about it!!! i am an adult with agency who understands that life is complicated and as such i expect to have to put some work into making my experience with a website positive! but in the hellworld of the iphone everything is walled garden apps for aggregating content where the content and its creators are structurally established as infinitely replaceable and uniquely worthless punching bags to be used and cast aside. everyone's given up on moderation and real jobs don't exist anymore especially if you happen to work in the "creative economy" IE are a writer or critic or artist or hobbyist of literally any kind. we've given up on expecting anything from the rich moneyboys who own and profit immensely off of the platforms whose value we literally create!!! especially now with the rise of "AI" grifters, whose work has ratcheted good old fashioned casual sexism and racism and homophobia up to levels not seen in such mainstream spaces since the early 2000s.

i like tumblr because i don't have to use a third party app to get & answer asks at length, and because it is a visual artist friendly platform where i won't be looked at funny for reblogging furry postmodernism or transgender homestuck OCs. it is a site that utterly lacks respectability and that's what makes it even remotely usuable. unfortunately it also sucks! partly it sucks because this place was ground zero for the rise of puritanical feminist-passing conservatism in leftist spaces, so it's like a hyperbolic time chamber for brain-melting life or death discourse about the most inconsequential bullshit you could ever imagine. but it also sucks because it's owned by a profit-motivated moneyboy who has consistently encouraged a culture of virulent transphobia and frequently bans trans women who call this out. so like, yeah, this place is cool compared to everywhere else, but it is exactly like everywhere else in that is also on a ticking clock to its own inevitable demise. the owners of this website will destroy everything that makes it interesting and will EAGERLY delete the nearly twenty years (!!!!!!) of posts it's accumulated the instant it will profit them to do so. this will be immensely unpopular and everyone will agree it's a tragedy and it won't matter. the culture and content of a social media platform is epiphenomenal to its rote economic valuation. i mean, obviously it isn't, zero of these massive tech companies would be what they are if so many people weren't so eager to give their time and labor away for free (and yes, writing a dumb dick joke on tumblr IS a form of labor in the same way that doing a captcha is labor, just because it's a miniscule contribution in an economy of scale doesn't mean you didn't contribute!), but once a tech company reaches a certain threshold its valuation ceases to be tethered to anything that actually exists in reality.

all of which is why i remember cohost with a heavy heart. yeah, it was imperfect. it was also independently owned, made with the explicit goal of creating a form of social media that actually tries not to give you a lifelong anxiety disorder so it can sell you homeopathic anti-anxiety sawdust suppositories. for the brief window of time when it was extant, i was genuinely hopeful for the future of being a creative on the internet. part of why i spend so much time on godfeels, a fucking homestuck fanfiction with no hope of turning a profit or establishing mainstream legitimacy, is that my readers actually ENGAGE with the material. what brought me back to using this website consistently was precisely the glut of godfeels-related questions i got, and the exciting conversations that resulted from my answers. meanwhile i put so many hours into my videos and even when they do well numerically, i barely see any actual engagement with the material. and that is a deliberate design choice on the part of youtube! that is the platform functioning as intended!! it sucks!!!

what the memory of cohost has instilled in me is a neverending distaste for the lazy unambitious also-rans that define the modern internet. i remember the possibility space of the early web and long for the expressiveness that even the most minor of utilities offered. we sacrificed that freedom for a convenience which was always the pretense for eventually charging us rent. i am thinking a lot these days about what a publicly funded government administrated social media utility would look like. what federal open source standards could look in an environment where the kinds of activities a digital ecosystem can encourage are strictly regulated against exploitation, bigotry, scams, and literal gambling. what if there was a unionized federal workforce devoted to the administration of internet moderation, which every website above a certain user threshold must legally take advantage of? i like to imagine a world where youtube isn't just nationalized but balkanized, where you have nested networks of youtubes administrated for different purposes by different agencies and organizations that operate on different paradigms of privacy and algorithmic interaction. imagine that your state, county, and/or city has its own branch of youtube meant to specifically highlight local work, while also remaining connected to a broader national network (oops i just reinvented federation lmao). imagine a world where server capacity is a publicly owned utility apportioned according to need and developed in collaboration with the communities of their construction rather than as a deliberate exploitation of them. our horizons for these kinds of things are just so, so small, our ability to imagine completely captured by capitalist realism, our willingness to demand services from our government simply obliterated by decades of cynical pro-austerity propaganda. i imagine proposing some of this stuff and people reacting like "well that's unrealistic" "that'll never happen" "they'd just use it for evil" and i am just SO! FUCKING! TIRED!!!!

like wow you're soooooo cool for being effectively two steps left of reagan, i bet you think prison abolition and free public housing are an impossible pipedream too huh? and exactly what has that attitude gotten you? what've you gained by being such a down to earth realist whose demands are limited by the scope of what seems immediately possible? has anything gotten better? have any of the things you thought were good stayed good? is your career more stable, your political position more safe, your desire to live and thrive greatly expanded? or do you spend every day in a cascading panopticon of stress and collapse, overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the sheer magnitude of what it's cost us to abandon the future? you HAVE to dream. you HAVE to make unrealistic demands. the fucking conservatives have been making unrealistic demands forever and look, they're getting everything they want even though EVERYONE hates them for it! please i'm begging you to see and understand that what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's realistic, are literally irrelevant. these things only feel impossible because we choose to believe The Adults (and if you're younger than like 45, trust me, to the ruling class you are a child) whose bank accounts reflect just how profitable it is to convince us that they're impossible. all those billions of dollars these fuckers have didn't come from nowhere, it was stolen from all of us. there is no reason that money can't and shouldn't be seized and recirculated back into the economy, no reason it can't be used to fund a society that is actually social, where technological development is driven not by what's most likely to drive up profits next quarter but by what people need from technology in their daily lives.

uh so yeah basically that's my opinion of cohost lmao

[emrowene]

Webserials and Why You Should Read Them

Welcome to a short primer on webserials! The concept behind them is pretty simple: webserials, also called webnovels or webfiction, are serialized online novels. If you read long fanfics OR webcomics, you're probably already familiar with the concept. Authors release new chapters on a fixed basis, usually one chapter a week (but sometimes more, sometimes less).

You can find webserials in several places: on big platforms like tapas and royalroad, on individual authors' websites or patreons, or on newsletter platforms like substack.

So now we know what webserials are, but why should we support them?

Because webserials are fun. Because webserial authors are sharing amazing works online for free! Because the publishing industry is disproportionately hard to get into for queer and marginalized folks, and those are the people writing webserials.

To climb a little higher onto my soapbox, I believe webserials are the future of accessible and diverse publishing. There's been more and more discussion about the problems with traditional publishing: how publishers are turning it into a "fast fashion" industry, spitting out books while overall book quality decreases. Regardless of whether you believe that, it's true that the industry prioritizes "marketability" over anything else. Experimental books, passion projects, books that have a lot of heart but no pithy "tropes" -- they stand little chance in the world of traditional publishing, and self-publishing is incredibly inaccessible for most of us. It's expensive, but more than that, it takes an incredible amount of time and effort. It's a business, and at the end of the day, some of just want to share the stories we love with people we hope will love them too. And that's the beauty of webserials!

One complaint I've seen about webserials is that "you never know what the quality will be like" - and I've seen this from people who regularly read fanfiction! Like fanfiction writers, we have our beta readers, we have our editors, we pour our hearts into developing our stories. So give us a try!!

Some recs and places to get started under the cut:

My webserials:

Fractured Magic - A queer epic fantasy series about a broken hero’s hunt for redemption and an elven prince’s quest to rescue his kidnapped king. The two estranged friends are racing against time - and dead gods - to achieve their goals. Will they make up and work together before it’s too late? (This story is currently ongoing)

The Case Files of Sheridan Bell - An old-school detective mystery set in Tamarley, a fantastical city with magical murders and doors to other worlds. Basically (queer, autistic) Sherlock Holmes but with more faeries. The first mystery is complete; the second will be published soon!

Some other webserials I follow/followed from start to finish:

What Manner of Man by @stjohnstarling - a queer gothic romance novel about a priest and a vampire.

The Warthog Report by @warthogreporter- this substack contains a selection of nonfiction writing, misc. fiction writings, and Battles Beneath The Stars, a serialized story about a tournament in a fantasy world, styled like a fighting game script/walkthrough.

Kiss it Better by DogshitJay - A (definitely 18+) queer adult romance about the messy endings and messier beginnings of love.

Warrior of Hearts by Beau Van Dalen - a queer slice of life romance following an online friendship that blossoms into something more. (Beau has lots of other great webserials as well!)

More places to look:

Tapas (Community novels page)

Royalroad (mostly known for its litrpg scene, but you can find other novels and genres here as well!)

The ao3 "Original Works" tag!

[togglesbloggle]

The worst part of losing Tumblr, of course, will be the many broken connections with all of you guys. 'Tumblr mutual' is a peculiar and lovely kind of friendship that can't be replicated elsewhere, and the quality of audience I've found here has been really excellent in a way that I don't expect to find again.

But I've always been a creature of fragmented identities, and so the second worst part of losing Tumblr will be the fact that the "Toggle"-sona might not last very long without it.

It's one of those strange advantages that comes from hanging out on one of the last great pseudonymous sites on the internet, you know? Being Toggle means something pretty specific for me- nothing unfamiliar if you've been following me for a while. It's structured as a syncretic mix of LessWrong-isms and empirical sciences, with connective tissues of epistemology and active curiosity. Toggle turns out to be a headspace that I deeply enjoy, and developing it has allowed me to move through the world in unique and special ways.

But it's an identity that hasn't grown as energetically as other parts of my life, at least not in the years since I left grad school. I don't meet new people through this face as often any more, or extend my social graph strongly in this direction, even though it's been an exciting and dramatic period in my life otherwise. And so Toggle is going to heal more slowly when injured, and take longer to recover from dramatic shocks.

Tumblr isn't the only place where I can express myself under this identity (it's got its own discord account and email address, among other things), but the long-form writing style is disproportionately important. "Writing is thinking" and all that; the particular Toggle-way of seeing the world requires space to work out and polish ideas. Without this jumble of essays and longposting, it starts to feel like there's a vital organ or two missing, and it's an open question whether Toggle has the vitality in it to recover from that.

It's theoretically possible to switch my writing over to Substack or something, though I'm fairly doubtful that this kind of writing could survive as a blog as opposed to a micro-blog, if only because this really is more of a sketchbook than a mature product as such. And if I stumble in to the right job, one in either physical sciences or in rationalist/EA spaces, then it would probably kick the identity back in to high gear. Toggle isn't entirely doomed, but it probably needs a stroke of good luck, a change in circumstance to align my incentives behind it, or both.

In the meantime, I'm anticipating Tumblr's closure by thinking about ways to be a little more proactive about porting the best parts of Toggle in to other parts of my life- upwards to the light of wallet names and face-to-face networks, and outwards to other constructed identities and other diasporic online communities. Even so, it's going to be a terrible loss.

[ofmdrecaps]

12/17-18/2024 Daily OFMD Recap

TLDR; Happy birthday Jes Tom!; Galaxy Con Columbus OFMD Panel; Rhys Darby; Taika Waititi; Con O'Neill; Nathan Foad; Vico Ortiz; Samba Schutte; Ruibo Qian; Alex Sherman; Anapela Polata'ivao; Adam Stein; Articles; Fan Spotlight: OFMD Buys Boats; OFMD Advent Calendar; Love Notes;

== Happy Belated Birthday Jes Tom! ==

One of our wonderful writers, Jes Tom, had a birthday on 12/18/2024! Happy belated birthday dear!!

Source: Jes Tom's Bsky

= Cast & Crew Birthdays =

I've been trying to collect cast and crew birthdays that I could find - Birthday Calendar and there's a few more coming up soon!

Dec 28th - David Fane

Dec 30th - Nathan Foad

Jan 1 - Ruibo Qian!

If you happen to know more that aren't on the calendar yet, please feel free to reach out to me! I've been trying to add them as I find them but I'm sure I'm missing many! <3 (I'm happy to credit you of course too!)

== Galaxy Con Columbus ==

Good news! The OFMD panel is now available on Youtube!

Source: Galaxy Con Youtube

= Rhys Darby =

A new Bad Jelly Trailer is out!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Badjelly (@badjellytv)

Source: BadJellyTV

A little quote from Rhys about Bad Jelly!

Source: SphereAnimation

There was an article about Rhys in BMA Magazine with this lovely spread!

Source: BMA Magazine

= Taika Waititi =

Hey! Wonderful news! Taika is going to be Honored with the Norman Lear Achievement at the 2025 Producers Guild Awards. "The Norman Lear Award recognizes a producer or producing team for their extraordinary body of work in television. It has been awarded to individuals whose leadership and creativity have made profound contributions to the television industry" - Producer'sGuild.org Article here

Source: Producers Guild Instagram

= Con O'Neill =

There's a new SAS Rogue Heros Trailer!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Theo Barklem-Biggs (@barklembiggs)

Source: Instagram

= Nathan Foad =

Nathan is sending some love to one of our crew members-- apparently they made this lovely scarf for Nathan's Mom! Who was this!? Let me know! I'd love to credit you!

Source: Nathan Foad's Instagram Stories

= Vico Ortiz =

Vico is working on a new project! Today in Gay is going to be available Monday Through Friday with a daily dose of queer news -- and good queer news! It'll be hosted by several queer icons, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Nay Bever, Vico Ortiz and Bex Taylor-Klaus. "Lauren Klein joined as Executive Producer, Editor, and Composer. Hannah Nobrega is our behind-the-scenes Researcher and Jax Ko, our Co-Producer and Creative Director, has done all of our visual design. Kalie Chebib is our Social Media Manager and our Supervising Producer is Maritza Navarro. Linh Nguyen keeps us all running as our Executive Assistant! We are all proud members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and we’re all here to make your day a little more gay. "

Today In Gay Is Your New Go-To Daily News Podcast Article!

Today in Gay Substack

Source: Vico's Bsky

= Samba Schutte =

Samba received some lovely gifts from our dear crewmate @amuseoffyre! He sent lots of love their way on his Instagram Stories!

More work by Samba -- Parallel Episode 3 is out on Amazon and there's a new Trailer!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Seasick Studios (@seasickstudios_)

Source: Samba's Instagram

= Ruibo Qian =

Just a quick shot of our Pirate Queen <3

Source: Ruibo's Instagram stories

= Alex Sherman =

Alex Sherman is still raising funds for the Experience Camp he has volunteered for in the past! It helps kids who have lost family members get a fun week away to help to process their feelings, and have a great time. Check out the donation page here if you're interested / able to help out!

Source: Alex Shermans Instagram

= Anapela Polata'ivao =

Our Auntie, Anapela Polata'ivao was selected for Story Camp Aotearoa 2025! "Story Camp is a residential feature film development lab that fosters craft, voice and vision with a programme designed to meet the development needs of each writer and project. Over the week, the participating writers and their collaborators workshop their feature film projects with exceptional local and international advisors. Congratulations to the filmmakers whose feature film projects will be developed through Story Camp Aotearoa 2025 ✍ The Factory Anapela Polataivao and Vela Manusaute - Co-Writers"

Source: Script to Screen

= Adam Stein =

Our producer and actor, Adam Stein, was spotlighted by Management LA this past week!

"Adam is currently a Consulting Producer on Apple TV+’s THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME. Previous to that, he was an Executive Producer on Max’s TOKYO VICE and OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH. Other recent shows include SEE (Apple TV+, Co-Executive Producer), DESIGNATED SURVIVOR (Netflix, Consulting Producer), THE EXORCIST (Fox, Co-Executive Producer) and UNDER THE DOME (CBS, Supervising Producer). He got his start in television on FX’s DAMAGES, and began his career as a writer doing features for GQ magazine. He has written pilots for Amazon, ABC, AMC Studios, FX and others. Currently, he’s playing Lucky in a production of Waiting for Godot at the @geffenplayhouse through December 21!"

Source: Adam Stein's Instagram

== Articles ==

Many thanks to our friends over at @adoptourcrew for keeping us up to date with every article under the sun featuring our show!

Source: Adopt Our Crew Instagram

== Fan Spotlight ==

= OFMD Buys Boats =

The Tiny Crew Big Raffle team is posting the final numbers for donations to the various non-profits by cast member over the next several days!

Lindsey Cantrell - Inner City Arts - US $865.80, £312.88, €15, CAD$12.45

Megan Vertelle - Sheldrick Wildlife Trust - US $901.95, £105, €215, CAD$20

Such wonderful work crew! Well done!

Source: OFMD Buys Boats Instagram

= OFMD Advent Calendar =

ANNNNND OFMD Advent Calendar is still going strong! Thank you so much to @tillychmo (as well as the fun door images!) for hosting this wonderful even! You can follow along on bluesky on @ofmdadventcalendar.bsky.social!

The 12th door features some very sweet artwork by the fab @intheblanketfort! aka @intheblanketfort.bsky.social!

The 13th Door features beautiful work by @kuuttamo.bsky.social!

The 14th Door features an ADORABLE lego surprise by @politestmenace.bsky.social!

The 15th Door features a super cool OFMD Holiday RPG by @alimasin! aka @alimasin.bsky.social!

== Love Notes ==

Hey there lovelies! Well getting two out in one day didn't work out, so I will try to make sure I'm catching up with 2 days at time as much as I can over the next few days! I have a very important question to ask you-- and that is, have you laughed today? Did you know laughter can reduce anxiety, and stress, stimulate your lungs, heart and muscles? It's actually pretty damn awesome how much a good old fashioned guffaw can make us feel better. Is there something you know for a fact will make you laugh? (For me it's silly cat videos, or Stede boarding the tiny fisherman's boat in the pilot of the hit series OFMD). Maybe it's stand up comedy-- or puns, or dark humor. Whatever it is that tickles your funny bone, I would request that today you go and just partake in some giggles. They can be small, or big, but do something that makes you laugh <3 Below are some things that have given me some giggles in the past. I hope if nothing else they give you a smile. Sending so many hugs lovelies. I'm thinking of you <3

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A post shared by Яхты Визы Паспорта Бодрум Стамбул (@alsubodrum)

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A post shared by Hippo (@hippo_lover_life_)

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[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Conservation Works blog on Substack:

Michael Soulé, the founder of conservation biology, used to say that one of the most important pieces of advice he got as a young scientist was “when in doubt, count.” Monitoring — counting or otherwise measuring organisms in the same place over time — is the foundation of conservation biology, and in many ways it’s the foundation of conservation, too. Unless someone counts how many lizards, salmon, ferns, or species of butterflies live in a certain place, and repeats the count at regular intervals, that group of organisms can decline or even die out unnoticed. Before an organism can be conserved, it has to be counted.

But what’s the point of counting organisms that seem doomed to extinction? That’s the question tropical biologist Peter Edmunds addresses in a recent BioScience essay titled “Why keep monitoring coral reefs?”

For nearly four decades, Edmunds has been monitoring coral reefs at two locations in the U.S. Virgin Islands, using annual photographs to measure changes in the relative extent of coral and algae. He started the project in 1987, less than a year before the first known Caribbean-wide coral bleaching event; since then, coral extent at one of his sites has shrunk by 92 percent and at the other by 52 percent. Both reefs used to be dominated by boulder star coral, a large, stony species that provides structure to Caribbean reefs and protects the region’s coastlines from erosion. Now, they are dominated by fast-growing “weedy” corals and algae. Given that climate change continues to drive up water temperatures and increase the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, writes Edmunds, “the prospects for community recovery are bleak.”

Yet he argues that monitoring matters, and will continue to matter. The series of photographs Edmunds and his colleagues have accumulated, for instance, suggests that acute disturbances such as hurricanes and major bleaching events cause less damage over time than the everyday stress of rising water temperatures. Moreover, as he writes drily, “the past is an imperfect predictor of the future, ensuring that old data can never fully take the place of new information.” Even a grievously altered system such as the Virgin Islands reefs will continue to change in different ways for different reasons, and understanding those changes will be essential to protecting the life that persists — both at sea and on land.

I was reminded of Edmunds’ argument earlier this month, when I attended the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Biennial Scientific Conference, held this year in Big Sky, Montana. One of the speakers was Tom Olliff, an ecologist who, like Edmunds, has dedicated himself to one ecosystem: he spent 32 years living and working in Yellowstone National Park, eventually directing its Science and Resource Management Division.

Olliff noted the remarkable changes in and around Yellowstone during the course of his career, including the reintroduction of wolves, the recovery of grizzly bears, the boom in visitor numbers, and the excruciating and still-growing development pressure on private lands. He called on his listeners, who included many colleagues and friends, to undertake “audacious acts of conservation,” projects that take a long time to realize and may face determined opposition.

Olliff named some headline-grabbing audacious acts, like wolf reintroduction and dam removal. But he ended his talk with a quieter example. In his current position as a regional research manager for the National Park Service, he has been working with wildlife biologist Don Swann on the long-term monitoring of saguaro cacti in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico. Though adult saguaros are still common, young saguaros are struggling to survive as temperatures rise. How long should scientists plan to monitor the population? Four decades from now, a report on the saguaro population might be as grim as Edmunds’ assessment of the Virgin Islands reefs.

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Substack Mastery Book: Chapter 16

Sustaining Your Newsletters for Long-Term Success & Evolving with Your Audience & Community Around Your Work in 8 Steps This chapter is different from the previous ones. It was meant for an extensive conclusion with key takeaways, but after requests from most beta readers, I decided to publish its summary earlier. Many loved the practical tips in the previous 15 chapters, which they will find in…

[warlockcctv]

Watching the garbage fire that is the recent MTG developments has really taken the wind out of my sails for Magic. I got in barely over a year ago, fell in love instantly and got super into the proxy community.

My intro to Magic like a lot of people was Rystic Studies. Honestly probably still the most high quality non gameplay videos of Magic out there. Rystic Studies and I have always had very aligned takes and opinions on Magic and recently he posted on Substack and the true weight of the state of Magic hit me. For years people have been saying that Magic is becoming something else, that the game we knew is going away and for the first time I wonder if maybe they were right. Even if just a little.

The gameplay may not be changing but the treatment is, more then ever Magic is a money sink. The integrity is gone. I think the part from the post that stood out to me the most was this line on Pokémon:

“Pokémon, by the way, surpassed Mickey Mouse and became the most valuable media franchise in the history of the world without compromising an ounce of its identity. There are no Space Marines to be found with yellow borders.”

I know this isn’t the end of Magic, not really, and me and my friends can play with the cards we want but that doesn’t mean something hasn’t changed, that something isn’t rotten.

Anyway go read Rystic Studies’s post it’s really well written as always.

[bynataliezubi]

life’s challenges and blessings come in waves—sometimes gentle, sometimes crashing, but always moving. lately, i’ve been thinking about how change is the only constant, and how finding balance and nurturing our well-being is an ongoing journey. i’ve moved more times than i can count, navigated family chaos, and weathered emotional storms that left me feeling like i was barely keeping my head above water. but i’ve also learned that we can ride these waves instead of letting them pull us under.

if you’ve ever felt like life is a rollercoaster—one minute you’re up, the next you’re tumbling—this one’s for you. i share my own story of adapting to change, facing uncertainty, and learning to breathe mindfully through it all. i talk about the importance of validating your feelings, resting when you need to, and remembering that your worth isn’t tied to how fast you bounce back. it’s about embracing both the darkness and the light, and realizing you’re not broken—you’re just human.

in the full post, i dive into practical coping strategies for when the waves get rough: from journaling and dancing it out, to grounding yourself in nature and reaching out for support. i share my favorite reminders for self-care and why it’s not selfish to put yourself first. life is messy, beautiful, and always in motion, but you’re more resilient than you think.

if you need a little pep talk or just want to feel less alone in the chaos, read the full post on substack. i’d love for you to join the conversation, share your own stories, and connect with others riding the same waves.

read the full post at bynataliezubi.substack.com

#lifeadvice #mentalhealth #wellness #selfcare #personalgrowth #mindfulness #emotionalresilience #changemanagement #journaling #copingstrategies

[liftingtheirspirits]

I spent years of my life processing my pain and experiences the wrong way. I’ll spend the rest of my life writing about the way out.

Hi, I’m JR and I write Lifting Their Spirits

33, Workforce Development Director, guitar junky, obsessed with writing, psych, dark-art/dark academia vibes.

Trigger warning.

The first time I wrote other than to learn, I sat down in my room and wrote down my most recent encounter; getting the shit kicked out of me by my birth mother. I folded it up and tucked it away in a little blue suitcase (my Irish twin sister had one to match).

From that moment on, I was a writer… I just didn’t know that’s what I was.

In 2011 I made my first Reddit account and started posting in communities I liked with an account bio that said “I like to say meaningful things” and over the years had many hundreds of conversations, lifting fellow men/women/they/them just by meeting them where they were at. Often, it wasn’t even a lift, it was just being someone there with you to sit and to listen.

In that same year I began my career in medicine, moving through an array of therapeutic areas, gleaning immense insight into the lives and suffering of thousands of people.

Around 2013 I made social media accounts and began to volunteer and connect with my little community in rural Northeast US. I’d often write long form posts about patient encounters, working with the homeless, lessons I learned along the way and the compassion I was cultivating in myself and my little world.

In 2020 I narrowly escaped death for the fourth time, which sparked a massive spiral of self doubt, insecurity, isolation, and sadness. This was made worse by that thing in 2020, and the insecurity of becoming a parent after a lifetime of insisting that I did not, I WOULD not, be like my birth parents.

Just a few months ago, November 2024, my therapist recognized that I’ve been showing signs of healing (8 C’s of Self Leadership for those interested or informed) and that I was beginning to bloom back into my old self.

Wiser; a bit more physically decrepit, but ME.

And what a lovely time to be so - I have hundreds of little writings, ideas, lessons, parenting pillars, songs, poems, and fucking heartbreaking stories collected in a conglomerate of places that I simply could not share because of where I was in my mind.

Creating this page is me, living up to the man a friend believes me to be.

David, I don’t know if you believe in this kind of thing, but when we met, I needed you.

If you read this far, please, know that every single thing that I write on this blog comes from a place once horrifically broken, and sharing is my effort to mend…

…Me.

And hopefully share things that are deep and meaningful for you too.

I’m here for the broken shit. The quotes about heartache. The poems about loss. Touching the profoundly good. Reconnection. Grounding. Hopelessness. Finding ourselves. Getting lost in the music.

Today, I RETURN.

If you’d like to read more, consider giving this article a look, where I discuss similar landmarks in greater depth on my Substack.

Take good care of yourself, and we’ll talk again soon.

JR

[drdemonprince]

I think we all know on some level that age is a pretty blunt instrument for measuring maturity and capability. We all develop at different rates and in different ways, especially when you take into account environmental factors as well as disability. I said my first words at six months old and didn’t get comfortable walking until I was two. Both of those are developmentally ‘abnormal,’ but in completely opposite directions. Intellectually, I was able to spar with most adults before I was old enough to drive a car, but at age 36 I still cannot handle cooking dinner or doing my taxes. (I also really shouldn’t be trusted behind the wheel of an automobile, if I’m being real).

Research suggests that many Autistic people develop social and emotional skills at a slower pace than most non-Autistics; in our 40s, 50s, and beyond we are still learning a lot of valuable lessons about how to better relate to people, and show less difficulty in our relationships as time goes on. I didn’t learn how to make friends or name my emotions until my 30s — was I not an adult until then? What skills must a person have to qualify as really, fully an adult?

This points to a major problem in how our current systems look at intellectually disabled people — their abilities and needs are often summarized using the confusing metaphor of “mental age.” A person with Down Syndrome who cannot read or use the toilet might be labelled as “mentally three-years-old,” for instance — but what does it mean to be mentally three? Which kind of imagined three-year-old is setting that standard? Which skills are important to determine someone’s mental “age”? If a person can write fluently using an adaptive communication device but can’t tell when they need a shower, what mental age do we give them — and which rights?

Why does ability level determine the rights that a person has, anyway?

In our current society, people considered “children” receive certain resources that nobody else gets, like free schooling and special state-provided health insurance, and if they do not have a guardian they are assigned one. A legal adult gets to make all legal, medical, and educational decisions for the child, and makes sure they remain housed and fed.

There are many adults who could use this kind of support. But relying upon others for such support means you don’t get the rights of a legal adult, according to the Support-Freedom Dichotomy. If an intellectually disabled person can’t understand complicated legal and financial documents, for instance, they’re likely to be placed under a conservatorship and lose the freedom to buy the things they like or live how they want to live. They do have preferences and insight into their own lives, but because they need help carrying those preferences out, they don’t get to make them.

I propose that rather than equating needing support with losing freedom, and instead of trying to define a simple category of people who does not get to be an “adult,” we ask specific questions about people’s needs, capabilities, preferences, and desires in a way that allows for everyone to get both the help and the autonomy they require.

I wrote about abolishing age as a meaningful way of categorizing what rights a person gets -- and what supports they are entitled to. You can read the full piece for free on my substack.

[blubberquark]

Are Game Blogs Uniquely Lost?

All this started with my looking for the old devlog of Storyteller. I know at some point it was linked from the blogroll on the Braid devlog. Then I tried to look at on old devlog of another game that is still available. The domain for Storyteller is still active. The devblog is gone.

I tried an old bookmark from an old PC (5 PCs ago, I think). It was a web site linked to pixel art and programming tutorials. Instead of linking to the pages directly, some links link led to a twitter threads by authors that collected their work posted on different sites. Some twitter threads are gone because the users were were suspended, or had deleted their accounts voluntarily. Others had deleted old tweets. There was no archive. I have often seen links accompanied by "Here's a thread where $AUTHOR lists all his writing on $TOPIC". I wonder if the sites are still there, and only the tweets are gone.

A lot of "games studies" around 2010 happened on blogs, not in journals. Games studies was online-first, HTML-first, with trackbacks, tags, RSS and comment sections. The work that was published in PDF form in journals and conference proceedings is still there. The blogs are gone. The comment sections are gone. Kill screen daily is gone.

I followed a link from critical-distance.com to a blog post. That blog is gone. The domain is for sale. In the Wayback Machine, I found the link. It pointed to the comment section of another blog. The other blog has removed its comment sections and excluded itself from the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if games stuff is uniquely lost. Many links to game reviews at big sites lead to "page not found", but when I search the game's name, I can find the review from back in 2004. The content is still there, the content management systems have been changed multiple times.

At least my favourite tumblr about game design has been saved in the Wayback Machine: Game Design Tips.

To make my point I could list more sites, more links, 404 but archived, or completely lost, but when I look at small sites, personal sites, blogs, or even forums, I wonder if this is just confirmation bias. There must be all this other content, all these other blogs and personal sites. I don't know about tutorials for knitting, travel blogs, stamp collecting, or recipe blogs. I usually save a print version of recipes to my Download folder.

Another big community is fan fiction. They are like modding, but for books, I think. I don't know if a lot of fan fiction is lost to bit rot and link rot either. What is on AO3 will probably endure, but a lot might have gone missing when communities fandom moved from livejournal to tumblr to twitter, or when blogs moved from Wordpress to Medium to Substack.

I have identified some risk factors:

Personal home pages made from static HTML can stay up for while if the owner meticulously catalogues and links to all their writing on other sites, and if the site covers a variety of interests and topics.

Personal blogs or content management systems are likely to lose content in a software upgrade or migration to a different host.

Writing is more likely to me lost when it's for-pay writing for a smaller for-profit outlet.

A cause for sudden "mass extinction" of content is the move between social networks, or the death of a whole platform. Links to MySpace, Google+, Diaspora, and LiveJournal give me mostly or entirely 404 pages.

In the gaming space, career changes or business closures often mean old content gets deleted. If an indie game is wildly successful, the intellectual property might ge acquired. If it flops, the domain will lapse. When development is finished, maybe the devlog is deleted. When somebody reviews games at first on Steam, then on a blog, and then for a big gaming mag, the Steam reviews might stay up, but the personal site is much more likely to get cleaned up. The same goes for blogging in general, and academia. The most stable kind of content is after hours hobbyist writing by somebody who has a stable and high-paying job outside of media, academia, or journalism.

The biggest risk factor for targeted deletion is controversy. Controversial, highly-discussed and disseminated posts are more likely to be deleted than purely informative ones, and their deletion is more likely to be noticed. If somebody starts a discussion, and then later there are hundreds of links all pointing back to the start, the deletion will hurt more and be more noticeable. The most at-risk posts are those that are supposed to be controversial within a small group, but go viral outside it, or the posts that are controversial within a small group, but then the author says something about politics that draws the attention of the Internet at large to their other writings.

The second biggest risk factor for deletion is probably usefulness combined with hosting costs. This could also be the streetlight effect at work, like in the paragraph above, but the more traffic something gets, the higher the hosting costs. Certain types of content are either hard to monetise, and cost a lot of money, or they can be monetised, so the free version is deliberately deleted.

The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to link between different sites, abandon a blogging platform or social network for the next thing, try to consolidate their writings by deleting their old stuff and setting up their own site, only to let the domain lapse. The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to mess with the HTML of their templates or try out different blogging software.

If content is spread between multiple sites, or if links link to social network posts that link to blog post with a comment that links to a reddit comment that links to a geocities page, any link could break. If content is consolidated in a forum, maybe Archive team could save all of it with some advance notice.

All this could mean that indie games/game design theory/pixel art resources are uniquely lost, and games studies/theory of games criticism/literary criticism applied to games are especially affected by link rot. The semi-professional, semi-hobbyist indie dev, the writer straddling the line between academic and reviewer, they seem the most affected. Artists who start out just doodling and posting their work, who then get hired to work on a game, their posts are deleted. GameFAQs stay online, Steam reviews stay online, but dev logs, forums and blog comment sections are lost.

Or maybe it's only confirmation bias. If I was into restoring old cars, or knitting, or collecting stamps, or any other thing I'd think that particular community is uniquely affected by link rot, and I'd have the bookmarks to prove it.

Figuring this out is important if we want to make predictions about the future of the small web, and about the viability of different efforts to get more people to contribute. We can't figure it out now, because we can't measure the ground truth of web sites that are already gone. Right now, the small web is mostly about the small web, not about stamp collecting or knitting. If we really manage to revitalise the small web, will it be like the small web of today except bigger, the web-1.0 of old, or will certain topics and communities be lost again?