I remember vacationing at 26 being very mimosa-focused, and vacationing at 36 still involves booze ngl, but also I need to learn the name of every novel bird I encounter
mel thomas
@pagemelt.bsky.social
several possums in a trench coat and one of them learned how to read they/them https://pagemelt.zone/
There is obviously a whole body of scholarship pointing in this direction so forgive me for saying something so obvious but the media needs to treat tech executives like the leaders of hostile governments because that is exactly what they are
nearing the end of The Sopranos and reflecting on who i think is the most irredeemable, festeringly evil character on a show full of psychos
finally got around to watching and enjoyed greatly 👍 it reminded me of the nostalgia re: recentish tiktok trend of using john mayer's "clarity," but mostly "no such thing" to recall early 00s monoculture and shared optimism/assumption of a better future
mel thomas@pagemelt.bsky.social · 4mo agoI just put out a new video 🙂. it's about American visual culture—where it's been (derogatory) and where it's going (vaguely ominous). viewable by tRUE PATRIOTS ONLY rAAHH 🦅🇺🇸 youtu.be/45ynsws5zVk
romance novel horseshoe theory is when i, a lover of the genre, regress to the neophyte's default contrarian position of "well what even IS an HEA, huh???" when the vibe of the discourse is getting too smarmy
last night at dinner i asked seth "who do you think is the most decent man on The Sopranos?" and we just kinda stared at each other silently for several moments
whenever i post critically about romcoms people will be in my comments telling me—often in good faith—that it's supposed to be funny and silly and therefore i shouldn't think about it too hard, and ????? imagine saying that about a funny thing a man made. imagine saying that about mel brooks
gonna tell my kids this was A Clockwork Orange. gonna tell my kids this was Oppenheimer. gonna tell my kids this was Knowing (2009) starring Nicolas Cage
i don't know anything about anime but my husband is watching Dragon Ball Daima, which to the best of my understanding is a program that bravely asks the question "what if all your favorite Dragon Ball guys got turned into lil babies?"
in hindsight maybe it wasn't clear from this post that my criticism of the Sopranos fandom is coming from inside the house lol. i am thoroughly and deeply Sopranos-pilled, and in case there was any doubt: www.patreon.com/pagemelt/pos...
blaming the MCU on Christopher Moltisanti | pagemelt
Again with The Sopranos, yes, but also a Red, White & Royal Blue Mafia AU fanfic (lol?), A Love Most Fatal by Kath Richards, Heated Rivalry
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mel thomas@pagemelt.bsky.social · 2mo agoheated rivalry fans get a bad rap, but my god, what a generative space. 46k fics. meanwhile the sopranos fandom, active for almost 30 years, has 500 fics and a handful of AI-generated meme accounts called things like stugots_deez_nuts run by edgelords scared to death of loving anything earnestly
me: dang we spent a lot of money eating out last month. but no worries. we'll simply be more discerning about that going forward 😌 me one day later: let's go to to the cheesecake factory. yknow, for the bit
sorry i was weird and off-putting the last time we talked!! it’s just that that’s my truest, most fundamental nature
It’s mind-blowing that we have literal white nationalists in the White House carrying out unfathomably cruel, abusive, white nationalist policies, and the punditariat has spent the last two weeks debating if some people were too intemperate after a Black man was murdered by cops six years ago.
heated rivalry fans get a bad rap, but my god, what a generative space. 46k fics. meanwhile the sopranos fandom, active for almost 30 years, has 500 fics and a handful of AI-generated meme accounts called things like stugots_deez_nuts run by edgelords scared to death of loving anything earnestly
"AI is overhyped but it's good at searching for stuff." have you considered, lately, the relative nature of all things? how you considered the possibility that you are simply bad at searching for stuff
honestly i think choosing to attend a 4-year college and majoring in “influencer” is more aligned with the ideals of a traditional liberal arts education than majoring in business or marketing
there's the old school enshitification model enabled by software just existing within capitalism, and then there's the new turbo-charged model where software is designed to be as labyrinthine as possible, forcing people to use the baked-in AI assistant to figure out how to do the most basic tasks
oh you wrote a gay sports romance? should we have a press conference?? should we invite your gruff but unexpectedly supportive coach-slash-mentor
annoyed by the youths and their slang!! not for the typical reactionary reasons but because when I search for "gardening" tiktok now assumes I want to watch a 20-year-old review their first store-bought edible
My hot take about the “students cannot read whole novels / watch whole films / etc.” is that they can learn to do it. None of us are born with attention spans suited for long media. It is a learned skill and can be developed with practice.
my favorite thing about the sopranos is the sheer number of episodes (including pine barrens, the most beloved episode of the series) that would work beautifully as romcoms if you simply added one (1) smooch at the end
logged in to hubspot at work and it said, "good afternoon mel" and i don't like that. frankly the time of day i'm experiencing is none of their business
picked up madeline miller’s circe because samantha morton was my favorite part of nolan’s odyssey (and it wasn’t particularly close). about a quarter of the way through, and i gotta say….... this girl is kind of a drip! like sometimes when everybody bullies you, there’s a reason, yknow