so i've finished recently glossy: ambition, beauty, and the inside story of emily weiss's glossier which was a pretty quick read and not so much of a hit piece as i'd expected.

we do wonder, why did people think having an app made you a tech company? (and glossier didn't even have an app.)

also finished city of women, about working women in antebellum new york.

and yellowface, which i'm still sorting through thoughts on but did generally enjoy as i like petty goodreads drama.

i didn't like the ghost swerve in the final act, though i think mostly because it was so confined to the final act?

yeah it would have been nice if it had threaded the needle more throughout in regards to that

I finished that book around the time the cait corrain stuff dropped and it was surreal

i can imagine

it's also like… hmmm, i read a lot of history, and that's a genre/profession built around the idea of a barrier between the present and the past.

and the thing is, i agree with that. i think there's no way to do an #ownvoices book about chinese laborers in ww1, because they're dead! and being a chinese person in the present day who grew up in the us doesn't give you a mystical understanding of their plight, or even a special right to write about it.

(i'm not sure the latter exists at all; all writers steal.)

i believe that academia and the publishing industry should be more diverse but that's because that's for the benefit of people living today, it can't really repair past wrongs.

this sucks, of course. and is only tangental to the plot of yellowface where the protagonist's publisher encourages her to change her name so it sounds more asian, lmao.

Yeah the weird thing about Kuang’s work is that I like it but I never love it, and it’s often because of thrown in things like that

I started Babel last year, I liked the concept for the first little bit, but I set it aside after a certain point

It started to feel didactic and like it was specifically wrapping up suffering in its didacticism, and I tend to bail from stuff like that. Not because it's wrong or bad, but because if I'm just like, I already agree with you, I get it....

I feel like the intended audience is people who do not yet get it or agree with her

anyway, she's valid, I wish her success, but I'm probably never going to finish that book.

my issue with babel (which didn't really keep me from enjoying the book) is that it was clearly written with 21st century ideas about racism and that took me away from the 19th century attitudes about racism the characters should have. which is kind of like what detectivefiction is saying, like, highlighting suffering to show suffering is bad.

Yeah

I just finished The Poppy War which dabbles in similar ideas but with a more problematic protagonist, which should get me? But I feel like I’m being told she’s this way instead of seeing it

another oyler pan

i haven't read this book but i did read the cruise essay about her throuple and brutal book reviews entertain me.

also about goodreads come to think of it.

the part about wikipedia research-- i'm dying.

cackle

right?

live by the mean review, die by the mean review lol.

is this seriously the state of our discourse?

(no, it's just the cut.)

I feel like most popular musicians have stans now? it seems weird that people keep singling out taylor swift

lol the cut

it makes sense in that she is the most popular musician but!! it's really just specific women bad friends to each other, with very little to do with taylor swift.

it is possible to be friends with people who don't like things you like. (it's also possible to have a lukewarm opinion on taylor swift.)

but hmmm i wonder if there's a fandom out there i'd break up a friendship over

someone unfollowed me on plurk once because i wanted to see the black widow movie…

I unfriended someone on facebook for calling sansa stark annoying

I think that is a pretty good litmus test for if you would have been mean to me in middle school tho

I block people I don't know regularly on social media because they expressed a bad opinion in a rude way but that is just me decreasing the signal to noise ratio in my feed (these are people in groups, not friends or friends of friends)

I feel bad for the girl who had a bad childhood experience with taylor swift, that's like not being able to enjoy beyonce bc everyone at school was really annoying about destiny's child

In any case, I am good friends with a minimum of two Swifties and I'm just like... she's fine? I have nothing to argue about but also no deep interest. The mechanism of the friend breakup in the article seems to be similar to "they got mad about a subtweet."

And I can see why the Swiftie friend could have felt like the writer friend was being passive-aggressive, although you'd also hope that in a longtime friendship, they'd be giving each other the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, I think perhaps the "writer friend" might not even have been a writer. Still, "what is it about x?" when your closest friend is deeply engaged in x is maybe a bit awkward.

I think, not being mean when your friend likes something you really hate, is an important life skill we all need to work on

also, conversely, not campaigning too hard to make everyone like what you like

YEAH. Anyway, I think I agree that this is mostly just specific women being bad friends to each other. It is really not hard to exist as a non-Swiftie with Swiftie friends. You just be willing to give the songs they like a listen and everyone has the emotional intelligence not to draw a line in the sand about something dumb.

it is just an annoying part of being an adult

I do think a lot of people need to be less weird about artists they like, in general

also you get older and hopefully most people don't seek as much validation from others

Like, when you're 12, "we're both obsessed with Batman" is validating, but when you're 35, "liking Batman" is hopefully not your only criteria for friends and intimates.

(A super huge amount of drama that I see related to fandoms in general has to do with people wanting validation from various sources. And, I mean, it's cool to want to find your people! That's good! but accepting that other people like other things and it's not usually a mark on their character is also good.)

hopefully being a part of fandom means you can learn to be friends with people who like different things, and be tactful about it. because most of the time your fandom friends aren't going to have every single fandom in common

they're not gonna have every single fandom in common and they're not gonna necessarily like the same aspects of the fandom(s) you have in common that you do.

I think part of the problem is these people are not used to fandom??

yes.

the people writing these articles and having these conversations? absolutely not.

hence they have not learned how to make peace with the things your friends don't like, lol.

well, I think the bad friends are like, half of them don't know what fandom is and the other half have never learned the social conventions for being in a fandom

but I do see this behavior all the time in fandom. sometimes it's people who are in their first fandom at, like, age 35. but sometimes it's people who grew up on tumblr.

(and in that case they're definitely the people who wrote polemic essays and had big DNI lists and stuff.)

and yeah I think part of the problem with new fandom esp on the apps is that people aren't really like learning from the example of older fans??

they aren't seeing the geek social fallacies or joining moderated communities that have clear rules for how to act

they definitely aren't. too much access to creators on social media has really exacerbated some terrible behavior. If it was 1990 they'd have to go to the effort to send a nasty letter, which would probably never be read and might arrive a year after the production of the thing they were mad about. But that is further away from the

Milieu of the article, I guess.

Bandoms have also always been a little different from media fandoms -- idk if that's a factor.

and yes, very low exposure to things that were community norms like 15 years ago.

claiming you have a more expensive taste in music because you love taylor swift is incredibly funny tho. like i watched that girl on CMT when she still had the baptist girl perm, she's not that fancy

it is a weird thing to say about one of the most accessible artists out there currently

idk what expensive taste in music is?? opera??

it def drives home the point of this being just specific women being bad friends, rather than like something endemic to swifties

i have to assume opera is expensive music. or maybe like the horrible background music they have at a lot of runway shows

also laughing at the idea fiona apple is a "pick me" artist

personally i only like fiona apple because of internalized misogyny

like i'm even less familiar with fiona apple than taylor swift, other than i'm pretty sure neil gaiman and a lot of millenials were super into her, but calling her a pick me felt like a wild swing

have we lost the concept of manic pixie dream girls??

bold of you to assume that kind of man wants to hear a woman's voice

I would hazard a guess and say it's bc she's not generally considered pop at this time

and also that girl probably hasn't listened to her music

it's because pick me has become a term that means "women i don't like"

and also the women i don't like are insufficiently feminist, so it's okay i don't like them.

Neil Gaiman is friends with Tori Amos -- idk about Fiona Apple. I am bringing this up because that's exactly what the Fiona Apple anecdote made me think of! "I wonder if that person knows who Tori Amos is or thinks she's also a pick me."

famously, there is only one specific type of Sensitive Sad Boy who likes Tori Amos; otherwise most men don't, unless they're Mick Foley.

lmao yes me too

'I'm too raw for straight men'

I also think that woman leveraging the "pick me" accusation never had the experience of men hassling her for liking Fiona Apple musically, because that used to be a thing. Guys liked the "Criminal" video because she was in her underwear: that was it.

I really don't think they know who fiona apple is, and are maybe conflating all these women with pj harvey

(I was never into Fiona Apple specifically but like... I came of age in a time when it wasn't really OK to like most female alt musical artists. Bjork had a lot of male fans. PJ Harvey, also. Liking The Cranberries was desperately uncool. Liking Sinead O'Connor was weird.)

tidal was like my teenage angst album. similar to tswift for many people i would think.

i got into it because my mom bought it tho and not because it was cool, i was completely divorced from what was cool musically at that time.

yeah I think it's whatever was big when you were the age that was ripe for a teen angst album

I think they just have an idea of a woman singer/songwriter that men like, and it's essentially pj harvey

Yeah pretty much

but they probably don't listen to that many other artists??

I'm trying to think of others. Kate Bush, but they don't like her as much and not in the same way.

Kate Bush isn't usually liked as much by Rockist types but also doesn't quite have the same Sensitive Sad Boy male fans that Tori Amos used to.

joan jett and janis joplin? but I feel like a lot of times men don't really seek out women singers even if they like them........

maybe sonic youth counts?

Kim is considered really cool still afaik

(Kim is really cool! But I mean among that kind of male music fan.)

she is!! I just dk if they are thinking about her when they download sonic youth

I feel like she is an afterthought to the idea of sonic youth

yeah, that is plausible

kind of like how blonde redhead wouldn't necessarily be seen as "a female artist" just because one band member is female and sings on a lot of their tracks.

Transcending the girl cooties (😡)

Sheryl Crow. Sheryl Crow is the artist that person was looking for or thinking of.

Lots of popular success but almost everyone I've known who was actually a fan was a man.

really?? I feel like moms like her

anyway a fun thing about huge pop concerts like the eras tour is watching people's dads and boyfriends get super into it

just discovering the joy of pop music in real time

"I came because I had to but now I'm having a good time."

the cut is at it again lol

this time it's an essay about hostility toward dogs and while it's clear one of the reasons is "people resent dogs as avatars of gentrification in my neighborhood"

it's also like, they interview the dog owners and they say things like "someone yelled at me for letting my dog pee in their flowerpot" or "i was harassed for letting my dog off-leash outside of designated hours"

if this is the worst thing you're dealing with as a woman outside in new york city,

chloe sevigny is right about the athleisure

(i fully acknowledge anti-dog people can be unhinged as well! it's just funny the author picked 'person who lets dog off leash in park' as the sympathetic interview.)

yes it's clear from the article the real problem is raising rents and anxieties surrounding that, though i would believe there is a boom of like, not particularly well socialized lockdown era puppies.

this made me remember why I left new york, people cannot be normal about anything

there are a ton of dogs in my apartment building and i don't really understand how because the apartments seem very small for some of the very big dogs i see, but the dogs are fine and i never hear them.

(unlike the 10pm trumpet player across the hall.)

This feels like a long way to say “I don’t manage my dog in public”

comparing the guy who dog bit a kid with the parents of the kid the dog bit is, a choice,

some big dogs don't need or want a ton of exercise, but it's not that common. sometimes people just spend a lot of time walking them.

There is a large... I don't know what he is, he looks like some kind of spaniel and black lab hybrid, size of a large black lab... that lives next door to me, and I've heard him bark once in 18 months.

Ok, now that I've read the article, like... look. Especially if you live in a city, you have to assume that every time your dog is outside, they're going to have to be leashed. You can't assume that you'll find an off-leash space or, if you do, that it'll be safe for your dog.

a lot of people do not train their dogs especially well, either because they don't have the time/knowledge/patience or because the dog has some deeper behavioral issue, or both. You can't depend on every dog you encounter in public being well-socialized.

(I loved my dog, but she never was, no matter how hard we tried. Part of this was my mom's fault: she's kind of a space cadet and doesn't have a good enough memory or a calm enough temperament to be consistent about training. But part of it was that Arwen was just incredibly hard-wired to be timid and barky. She improved a lot with work but was never ideal.)

and everyone here is correct: there was a lot of bad dog owner behavior being reported in that article. Peeing on the planter, allowing your dogs off leash during leash hours, the lady letting the dachshunds walk on extra long leashes, not cleaning up after the dogs.

yes, i assume the dogs are being taken care of and they're happy in their space because i don't hear unhappy dog complaints.

finished for the soul of france: culture wars in the age of dreyfus

the third republic was wild… also i'm not sure if reading about past culture wars is soothing exactly, but it does give some perspective on the current culture war. (even if that perspective is "this has happened before and will happen again")