the prodigal writer returns after a long absence (and abstinence) from the pen, with the most profound apologies, though also... it's kinda been A Time, and i'm trying to be kinder to myself about ~being productive~, so let's just say hi again, and have a catch up! buckle up as this may get long!!
(first off, a note on returning to substack: i left amid their heel-digging on platforming right wing anti-trans publications, which i couldn’t stomach, and moved to twitter-owned revue, which was a little feature-light but a decent alternative. they are now shuttered due to the general musk-related mess twitter is in at the moment, and none of the other free alternatives work for me, so i am begrudgingly returning here, for now. if and when i’m in a better financial spot, i’ll move to one of the paid options that are available. more thoughts on the twitter mess further down in this newsletter, but yeah, that’s where we’re at right now. grumble, mumble, hiss.)
so many things have happened since i last sent one of these out, almost a year ago (!), that i don't know where to begin.
so let's do a bullet point news quickie, and get the big ticket items out of the way.
i got engaged! 🥰 we’re now starting to plan our little wedding on mamma mia island (skopelos) in greece for next year 💐
i finally caught the Plague last spring, 4 months after getting my booster shot. i had to miss a friend’s wedding (sorry, Bex!), and a couple of weeks of work, but luckily the worst of it was the fatigue, and that too passed after a while.
there has been lots of travelling, which i've been so grateful to be able to do again! i’ve been home to greece three times this year, and to the states twice, and to scotland a couple of times as well—and also, randomly, to iceland!1 it has really been the highlight of the year for me, the moments i have felt most like myself.
i moved house again, this time to north london. central was useful for a time but proved too noisy for us; we’re now in a quiet, patisserie-filled neighbourhood—which is as delicious (and dangerous for my sweet tooth) as it sounds.
i returned to in-person conventions, with eastercon in the uk and worldcon in chicago (more on that in future issues). the tl;dr of it is: i guess i’m a business meeting person now??2
i (and my team at strange horizons) lost two hugo awards! but we did it in style, especially the second time:
on a more day-to-day level, i’m trying to get ADHD and mental health support after what has been an incredibly trying year, dealing with endless work-related frustrations3, coming out of a general creative drought and catching up with backlogs of all kinds, and naturally starting work on a new project (because of course i am).
now that i’m back, i’ll try to make these more regular as i originally intended, fill you in on some of the life updates above every so often, and give you my thoughts on various artforms, media, books, as well as news on my writing and audio progress. so welcome back to honest to blog! or just welcome if you're new :) i look forward to chatting with you all, whether by email or comments on the web version, about anything and everything herein.
ode to an online platform lost
i’ve been working on this newsletter draft for a few weeks now actually, and in this time twitter has imploded almost completely.
others in the sff space have done great write-ups on the situation as it’s been unravelling (here’s some by annalee newitz, andrew liptak, jason sandford, and brandon o’brien), and i won’t try to immitate them; however, as a millenial who’s seen various online homes die in my time, i wanted to write a bit about my history with the birdsite and the sense of loss and simultaneous relief that i am feeling right now.
i resisted twitter for years, at first.
i was a livejournal kid, a tumblr kid, and facebook was still new and exciting for keeping up with my international school friends now scattered across the world. i didn’t see the point in this new micro-micro posting site, and thought it was a total fad—in hindsight: ha!—but my friend group at the time was embracing it, and a lot of their interaction was happening there rather than on facebook or lj or wherever else, so begrudgingly i made an account in 2009, and proceeded to embarassingly document the tediousness of university life, sprinkled with whatever fandoms i was into at the time (a lot of asian tv series, anime, and police procedurals).
for a while it was a micro-version of my facebook feed, but as i started engaging in the communities and fields i belong in as a writer, film critic, and podcaster, i eventually got pretty into it. what i enjoyed the most was the humour that developed naturally through the limitations of the platform, the brevity of wit required to make a tweet or a short thread funny (though i never got very good at that myself). as features became available, like adding gifs or images and videos, or when quote-tweets became a thing, or the character limit increased—so did the culture. there was a distinct vibe to twitter shitposting that was truly unparalleled. it was different to tumblr, or facebook, or instagram. on a good day, it was the source of many a giggle or a guffaw, with extra points to those tweets and accounts that referenced more niche or specific areas of interest of mine.
that said, there were many, many bad days too, where twitter became a cause of aggravation and distress, for the world at large but also for me personally. if i could pinpoint a time things took a turn, it was around 2016 with the brexit referendum in the uk, and then tr*mp getting elected. algorithmic engagement meant that incendiary and inflammatory takes were rewarded, and getting mad at each other online became a daily staple. especially after 2020, this blew up like an overinflated soufflé, and before i realised it twitter had become an extremely toxic place that was actively harming my mental health. i can trace a lot of my recent anxiety breakdown to the way i connected with the world in the last 2-3 years: through the skewed, heightened perspectives of trying to make the most impact possible in 280 characters.
and yet, throughout this time, i managed to build a circle of twitter friends to commiserate with. whenever things got dark, i knew that my immediate contacts would be the voice of reason. we would lament the state of things together, some would write embattled pieces of fiction or nonfiction reflecting on the situation, we would console each other and move on until the next blowout. we did so together, and that was the best thing about my twitter experience.
well, that and the memes.
in the last couple of weeks, as mass layoffs and resignations leave twitter a husk of its former self, the hemorrhaging of users leaving the platform feels just like when livejournal users fled to tumblr upon the sale of lj to some russian tech company, or when fanartists and other tumblr users flocked to twitter when verizon/yahoo/whoever owned them at the time banned nsfw content (including ‘depictions of female nipples’). there is the same feeling of loss of that critical mass, as if all your friends decided to pack up and move to a different coffee shop, leaving you sitting there as the shop empties. it’s different to the general abandonment of facebook, which has happened organically over the years, or the slow shuttering of various websites and social networks that tried it, but never quite got there (rip, google+).
the toughest thing for me has been that for writers, particularly in genre, twitter has evolved into a bulletin board of sorts, and the best and easiest way to keep in touch with a community that is scattered across the globe. so many careers have been launched because of it. (i think that’s how i found my strange horizons gig, actually.)
even when the elon acquisition was merely a rumour, i was adamant about staying. it’s where all my friends and colleagues are! even as i watched my fiancé delete their account forever, even though the writing was already on the wall, i still wouldn’t consider leaving. but from the moment the purchase went through and all the shenanigans—which have been likened to the sinking of the titanic (often to hilarious effect)— escalated, i’ve decided i’ll be hedging my bets and dipping my foot in the promising pools outside the bird app, like a lifeboat of sorts.
so, where are people going?
the first (and i think the biggest) wave was to mastodon, the decentralised network of self-hosted social servers that largely functions like a hybrid of twitter and tumblr, except with community moderation and admins, and a three-way choice on how wide you can cast your net in terms of seeing posts from people you don’t follow. no algorithm, no ads, and if your server is moderated well, no nasty trolls in your feed, possibly ever.
i was invited to join an instance (as the servers are called) where lots of sff/h people have gathered, along with people who aren’t writers but enjoy speculative stuff anyway. time will tell, but if the last couple of weeks—and their robust content moderation policy—are any indication, it seems like a nice new home.
it’s not without its issues, of course—mastodon’s content warning etiquette has been the subject of debate from new arrivals not used to tagging things, particularly on general servers like mastodon.social, and a pervasive insensitivity towards bipoc (like asking people to tag their personal experiences of racism as ‘politics’ 🙄) is driving those marginalised groups away instead of welcoming them into the fold. as the platform grows, i hope the various instances as well as the larger network can address these concerns and build an inclusive, positive environment for all.
as for me, i like that my feed isn’t a crazy jumble anymore. i love the content warnings. i enjoy going on there and looking at photos of space, and people’s writing updates, and nerdy ‘toots’4 about various things (the #histodons tag has been a gift). i haven’t had my daily trending-topic-induced anxiety attack, because there’s no trends! the discourse is limited to how we can make mastodon a better place for all, instead of attacking random people every day for something they did or didn’t do or say, now or five or eight years ago. and somehow, i’ve bamboozled some pretty cool genre people to follow me already, which is awesome. i can’t wait to talk to them more.
if you find your way to any mastodon instance and want to hear from me, i’m on the ‘wandering shop’ as darthjuno. come find me and say hi.
the other big contender is hive, which is mobile only at the moment, with limited features on android, and is run by precisely two (2) people. that’s it, that’s the team. the app went viral in the last week, with more than a million people rushing to join it, and within that quite a sizeable chunk of the sff community by the looks of things. i have joined as well (as darthjuno of course), to park my username if nothing else, but can’t in good conscience recommend it right now: the main feed is riddled with nsfw photos of various people promoting their onlyfans (especially if you follow the lgbtq+ topic like i am), which i’m not a …fan of (ba-dum-tiss), and there is also a music autoplay feature on the iOS app which on the one hand harkens back to myspace times—there’s another dead online home flashback for all you 00s kids!—but on the other hand is ostensibly obnoxious and inconsiderate. us android users are plebs and don’t have this yet, which is fine by me… but in any case, they have some major kinks to iron out before it is viable in my eyes.
and then, it turns out tumblr is making a resurgence (you can find me there too, on my incredibly old blog), which is highly amusing in the face of what i talked about earlier, but they’ve since been bought by automattic, the company behind wordpress, so all the yahoo/verizon nonsense is gone—i think nipples are even allowed again!—so maybe tumblr is the answer? after all this time??
in the meantime, most of us maintain our twitter presence, laughing about the burning trash fire we’re in, and the memes are arguably made even funnier in light of twitter being on the brink of closure… but no matter how things shake out, they won’t be the same after the rift elon has created with his tantrums.
and to be honest, maybe it’s time. twitter has been referred to as a hellsite for years for a reason. we were all there and hated outselves for it. without getting all “back in my day” about it, i miss being online without incessantly fighting with strangers5; i've had that experience before, back when i was resisting twitter in the first place, and i'm hopeful we can make it happen again, consciously and with care this time. but for now, i’m feeling a little wistful about losing what the sides of twitter that were worthwhile, and hope i can stay connected with the people i met through the years.6
to close things off, some questions for you:
have you been an avid twitter user, at any point? how do you feel about its implosion?
are you migrating to mastodon, hive, discord, or somewhere else?
the metaverse, maybe?
let me know: leave a comment on this post, or reply to this email with your thoughts.
before you go: something to make you smile
defunctland just dropped a masterpiece of a video on finding who wrote the disney channel theme, which explores issues around artistry in a commercial world and is so, so worth watching, especially if you are also a creative of any kind trying to make a living:
i promise you it will put a smile on your face many times, and may even move you to tears a little bit. kevin perjurer is the best at what he does 🖖
until next time, stay safe and creative!
xK
even as a sagittarius, i don’t even think i’d realised how integral travelling was to my well-being until i was stuck on Plague Island for two years straight 😖
a big thank you to my high school debate and model UN coaches… turns out those skills have come to be useful after all! who knew!!
as it turns out, this is very much a universal, all-industry problem right now—i could go on and on about it but this is (mainly) a writing newsletter, so suffice to say that if you too are struggling with being underpaid/overworked/underappreciated at work and feel like your life is being sucked out of you, (a) join a union, negotiate for better conditions, and if needed, strike!! and (b) don’t be afraid to take whatever time you need off if the stress is getting to you. i basically took a month off in august because i was nearly losing it and it took me a minute to realise that no workplace or job deserves that much of me. take care of yourself first!! jobs can wait!! capitalism sucks!! etc ❤️
apparently, when mastodon was crowdfunding, british youtuber hbomberguy (whom i wholeheartedly recommend you check out at some point) gave them a chunk of money with the condition that they name their posts ‘toots’—partly a ‘tweet’ parody, partly just a funny lil word synonymous with farts. when i joined the wandering shop instance, the publish button said ‘toot!’ on it, which made me giggle. they have now unfortunately updated the UX with the newest mastodon interface, and it has reverted back to ‘publish’, to the chagrin of many, including myself. #BringTootBack2k22
though i’ll readily admit that there has always been infighting in online spaces, particularly in fandom: one look at fanlore will tell you all you need to know. we’re human and therefore imperfect, but we can certainly try to learn from our past as we start fresh.
even if that means i don’t get followed back again by famous people i admire, like mae martin and sam neil. though i hope we will speak again, some day!
birdsite exodus fallout
Twitter has been a constant in my life since 2014. It's how I eventually got to meet fellow games journos and even found work occasionally through it so seeing Muskrat tank it is very disheartening, even if I've always told people never to sign up for it themselves because it was a cesspool even before Muskrat got his hands on it. I've yet to even look at Mastodon or Hive as an alternative, but I've thankfully got a couple Discord servers to keep in touch with my peers so I think things'll be okay in the long run.