This week I’ve been thinking about helpers — the ones who keep our digital worlds running, immersive, and alive.

A while ago, Adam sent me a link to this thread about the MMORPG Elite Dangerous (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game — but in my head I just say it mmm-porg and move on). Elite Dangerous is a space exploration and combat game, where you command your ship around a 1:1 scale version of the Milky Way, and I don’t know if you know this, but space is massive. So in this game it’s entirely possible (particularly as a newbie) to plan poorly, run out of fuel, and then your ship is just marooned until you die.

But players in the game have, for years now, relied on the Fuel Rats — a player-run emergency rescue squad, founded on a whim and now over a hundred and sixty thousand missions deep. When you run out of fuel in deep space — far from any station, drifting helplessly through the void — you don’t rage-quit, you call the Rats. A dispatcher logs your location. A Rat (or two) jumps across the stars to refuel you. They take nothing in return, except the satisfaction of one more pilot saved.

There’s something mythic about it — like calling on a secret society that only reveals itself when you’re in real trouble. And yet it’s entirely mundane, too. Just volunteers, sitting at their PCs in bedrooms and kitchens around the world, coordinating in Discord and spreadsheets and IRC, keeping the universe stitched together.

This week I was intrigued to read this piece about the opening of Low Cinema in Ridgewood, NY.

A lot of movie theaters used to exist in Ridgewood, there were a handful of big premier theaters like the RKO Madison, which was 1000s of seats, a movie-palace-style theater, which is now a Liberty discount department store on Myrtle Avenue. But then there were a handful of second- and third-run theaters who would get the prints later, once they had already circulated through the bigger first-run theaters, and that's something that started to go away a little bit after home video, and especially with streaming. Those theaters could take more risks and not be so precious about what they were showing, and that's also part of the legacy that we want to revive.

Low Cinema is a repertory cinema — a term I had to google while reading the article. It means a cinema that’s not showing first-run films (new releases) but instead older, or artier, or just cheaper movies. Low Cinema wants to see these revival houses everywhere. It got me thinking about what it means to go to the movies these days.

I was obsessed with Disneyland long before I ever got to go to the Magic Kingdom, mostly because it was so completely out of reach. We definitely did not have enough money for international travel when I was a child, and I was 19 before I first went to Anaheim on a wet day when pretty much all the rides were closed. I loved it.

When Alex finished her oral defence of her PhD at Oxford, we went to Paris to celebrate — seeing Madonna in concert and hitting up Euro Disney the next day (a trip that mystified the dons of her Senior Common Room). Last year, we managed to recreate the magic at Hong Kong Disney:

I wouldn’t describe myself as a Disney Adult — I’ve only been to the parks on these three trips — but I’m completely fascinated by the people who are and the reactions they engender in others.

Last week in Sydney I recorded an episode of Josh Szeps' Uncomfortable Conversations pod. We talked about the good internet, fandom and communities, argued over whether Substack has a nazi problem and whether AI is really transformative. It was a great chat, even if his commenters on some platforms didn’t exactly warm to me. Check it out on YouTube, spotify, or your pod place.

The fanvid, the fourth wall, and why we still don’t get it

One of the things that sparked me to finally knuckle down and write my book proposal last year was this series of tweets from a Succession stan account at the end of 2022:

It’s been an awesome week in Sydney at Sunrise. I loved the opportunity to talk about The Good Internet and how we might get it back, by building, teaching, reclaiming our feeds and attention, and exploring outside the walls. You can see the slides and text here, and I’ll add the video when it’s available.

Also, get yourself friends so awesome they fly to another country to cheer you on and BRING SURPRISE MERCH:

Welcome new readers from Fansplaining! For everyone else, my long (long) article on The RPF Question dropped yesterday. I loved having the space to go deep on this, because the thorny issue of rpf has been around since the dawn of fandom, but our attitudes toward it have shifted and changed over the decades, and so much of that (I think) has to do with the eroding boundaries around fandom. Everything lacks context when it all happens on main. I’d love to hear from you about this article — or just share with me your fave rpf stories (or horror stories).

If you’re in Sydney this week, I’d love to see you at Sunrise. And I can promise that one of the images in this email is in my keynote, and it’s not the lego.

conclave, assemble

By now you’ll be tired of every meme you’ve seen about the Pope’s passing and whether JD Vance had something to do with it. As ever, I’m more interested in the fandom. And by that I mean the death of a much more fictional pope.

You’re getting this a day early because Easter!

It will be unsurprising to you that, as the owner of a LEGO city, I like miniatures. I’m not at all interested in building a giant LEGO Death Star, but I am all in when it comes to the story arc of an entire town. And something about lighting up my city transformed it from mere plastic blocks to a tiny world full of life.

In this vein, I’ve already mentioned my fascination with diorama builders, and I was thinking about it again this week when I came across this story on Bluesky:

The other day I was walking up a hill and found myself humming The Princess Pat. For those of you who didn’t spend any time at brownies or summer camp, it’s a repeating song. “The Princess Pat (the Princess Pat), lived in a tree (lived in a tree), and sailed across (and sailed across), the seven seas (the seven seas).” As I walked and sang I wondered for the the first time what the princess pat was, that she could both live in a tree and sail across oceans, but given the song used the nonsense phrase “rick-a-bamboo” I wasn’t really expecting logic. Nevertheless, I googled.

Turns out this song, that I’d sung while tramping through the Hunua Ranges and to energise little kids before assembly at Camp Adair, was an army song from 1917 (!). The original lyrics to princess pat weren’t “lived in a tree”, they were “light infantry”.

That sent me down a rabbit hole of every camp song I could remember. Camp singing apparently has a long history of adopting both war songs and spirituals (Kumbaya, Peace Like a River), but also folk songs like Blowin’ in the Wind.

Last summer my ten year old godtwins were baking a lot of snacking cakes (the best cakes) and we needed to borrow demerara sugar from a nearish neighbour. I strapped my Apple Watch on one of them so I could find them, and I drew them a map. It occurred to me it had been a really, really long time since I last said to anyone “let me make you a map”.

I was thinking about this when I came across mapto.app — a new way to create custom maps. It’s billed as being useful for events:

But I immediately went to work making adorable neighbourhood maps — where to get the good coffee, the best view of the Harbour Bridge lights show, the pocket park with the seesaws that make music.

I came across this article about Odysseus, a Finnish sci-fi larp (via the Rec Center). Now, here is where I instantly need to confess something. I spend all my time hyping up fans and fandom. My whole ethos (and the name of this newsletter) is “what you love matters” — regardless of what the object of fannish attention is. But despite this I have to confess that I still hold this horrible, biased notion in my head that live action role-players (larpers) are … just weird nerds running around the woods with foam swords.

This is TERRIBLE. I hate admitting to this. I’ve swallowed exactly the same diet of propaganda that assumes all Kpop stans are hysterical teens and all comic book fans are basement-dwellers: the very propaganda I rail against.

In fact, the only reason I clicked on the article about Odysseus was because the larp was based on the Battlestar Galactica episode “33”, an absolutely phenomenal piece of television in which the increasingly exhausted crew must execute a faster-than-light jump every 33 minutes, for days, to escape the Cylons. But I’m not gonna lie, Odysseus sounds incredible:

Over two hundred volunteers worked on the larp…transform[ing] an elementary school into a sprawling spaceship complete with mess hall, bar, ops room, science and medical bays, jail, and hangar. The gameplay and story design was equally ambitious. Custom open source software was written to power Odysseus’ combat and engineering hyperdrive jumps, RFID-scanners, internal message board, and livestreaming drone videos for away missions. Every player character was unique, supported by over 300 NPCs, their activities as doctors, criminals, soldiers, fighter pilots, terrorists, and politicians meshed in intricate “clockwork” gameplay.

This week the “stranded astronauts” Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore returned to earth after an unscheduled nine months in space when Boeing’s Starliner (which they test piloted) was deemed unsafe to bring them back. I’ve been following their journey with interest, because as I repeatedly tell everyone who will listen Commander “Suni” Williams is my favourite astronaut. How do I have a favourite astronaut? So glad you asked.

Twenty-five years ago, the three crew members of Expedition 1 launched to the International Space Station atop a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan.

Here’s a cool fact you can share at the pub. That was the last time all of humanity was together on planet earth.

At the start of the pandemic, HBO dropped their adaptation of Emily St John Mandel’s book Station Eleven. If you didn’t watch it because the last thing you needed during covid was a lush miniseries about a global pandemic that wipes out 99% of the world’s population, you should go back and do it now. It’s an absolutely beautiful adaptation of a fantastic novel.

The story happens in multiple timelines, but in the post-apocalyptic world, it centres on a travelling troupe of actors performing Shakespeare, moving from town to town on a seasonal calendar.

It struck me that this was a repeating theme in things I’d been devouring recently. In Silo, the main character Juliette is named after the Shakespearean character:

This week I’ve been thinking (not for the first time) about the communities we choose to join. I’ve just finished reading Amanda Montell’s Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. No, I’m not always thinking about cults. Well, that’s a lie, part of my brain is always thinking about cults the way part of me is always thinking about people who die climbing Everest, but this book is specifically about the use of language: how high-demand groups redefine words to mean different things, in-group/out-group phrasing and so on.

When I wrote Everything Breaks at Scale, I spent a lot of time thinking about what draws people into conspiracy thinking and causes them to stay in those groups, even in the face of ostracisation from their friends and loved ones. So much of that is about our consistent longing for community, in the absence of traditional religious frameworks of the past. In her book, Montell references a 2015 report from some Harvard Divinity grad students called How We Gather.

Millennials are less religiously affiliated than ever before. Churches are just one of many institutional casualties of the internet age in which young people are both more globally connected and more locally isolated than ever before. Against this bleak backdrop, a hopeful landscape is emerging. Millennials are flocking to a host of new organizations that deepen community in ways that are powerful, surprising, and perhaps even religious.

Even though it’s a decade old now, it’s a fascinating read, surveying groups like Crossfit and Soulcycle, summer camps for adults, dining groups and so on. They draw six themes that people are looking for when they gather:

This week I finally got along to see Olafur Eliasson’s Your Curious Journey at Auckland Art Gallery|Toi o Tāmaki. Eliasson is an Icelandic-Danish artist who does installations that often reflect on the environment around us. I first fell in love with his work when he installed The Weather Project in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall the year I was studying for my masters in London.

In the artist statement for the Auckland exhibition, he says:

When you enter Your curious journey, you will have completed some sort of voyage to get there. It may be a trip from a street around the corner or across the globe. By journey, I also mean the process you have been through emotionally or intellectually to be prepared to view the work. This may be the sum of your experiences. It might reflect your education and upbringing, or it may be the result of a chance encounter. The artworks, too, have completed a journey to meet you. Each bears the marks of its creation and the challenges that led to the particular form in front of you. They carry within them a mixture of intentions, interpretations and contexts that can never be reduced to a single thing.

Being curious, to me, means being attuned to all of this and being open to listening. It is about paying attention to things we take for granted. Your curious journey is a journey in which you do not give up on your curiosity.

I’ve been thinking about this essay from sci-fi author Charles Stross: They don’t make readers like they used to.

It’s a great essay about how to try and write the future at a time when it all feels ~waves hands~ like this, but it’s also specifically about readers’ understanding of what fiction is, and whether that’s changing. You should read the whole thing, but the crux of his argument is that, in the past we passively consumed a limited range of pop-culture, and now there’s been a seismic cultural shift where the expectation is that fans will interact with, question and reinterpret everything.

Anyway: fans raised on interactive media rather than the static printed page or celluloid reel of film invariably argue in their own heads with the official story lines they're handed. And they sometimes write down their alternative takes on the stories--not just happy endings in place of tragedies, or attempts to fix what they perceive as broken plots or world building, but their own stories that try to make sense of the worlds of the imagination they've been presented with. Fans who write fanfic or play games from the original adversary's point of view in hope of getting a happy ending are not fans who accept the author's privileged position as narrator for granted.

Stross describes himself as “a living fossil” who expects to define the parameters of his fictional universes. In his words, he’s the final authority in his fictional worlds.

First off, I’m thrilled to be speaking at Sunrise Australia in Sydney (30 April - 1 May). Earlybird tickets are now on sale. Here’s what I’m going to be talking about:

the american imperialism movies

I’ve been rewatching the first phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe this week, partly because there’s a new Captain America movie out, but mostly because a new trailer for Thunderbolts dropped, and Yelena Belova and Bucky Barnes are really the only MCU characters I still care about.

Let’s talk about the hot firefighter show.

If you don’t spend much of your day on tumblr, it’s possible that network drama 9-1-1 has passed you by. It’s a procedural about first responders in Los Angeles, inexplicably headed by A-List actors Angela Bassett and Peter Krause (get that bag, I guess).

9-1-1 is about as ridiculous as we’ve come to expect a network procedural to be, increasing the disaster level every season, while never killing off any of the main characters, making it one of those low-stakes, empty-calorie shows that you can watch any episode of.

In my favourite movie, Truth or Dare (In Bed with Madonna) there’s a scene in which Madonna is being treated by a doctor for her throat while on tour, and her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty is in the background. He can’t understand why she wants to do this, talking to her doctor about a serious medical issue, on camera. “Does no-one talk about this?” he asks. “The insanity of doing all this on a documentary?”

Madonna’s response: “Why should I stop here?”

I’ve been thinking about that scene this week in the context of a bunch of disconnected but deeply related stories about family vloggers. Tread carefully with this one, it’s a minefield of content warnings about child abuse.

First off, hello to the new subscribers here from Culture Vulture! It’s so nice to see you. For the rest of you, I wrote a piece for Luce’s great pop culture newsletter on my lifetime hatred-affair with high heels: Emma Thompson told me she’s never wearing heels again. Me neither.

Second, yes I was hit by a tornado last night, but I’m fine. I lost a tree and my BBQ cover, but my house is in one piece. Do not recommend.

roll your own

In the aftermath of the inauguration, it’s become even clearer that the owners of our online social infrastructure are all from the bad place.

what does a mandalorian look like?

In November, I was working with my friend Adam at the Supanova cons in Australia (think ComicCon or Armageddon). Convention culture hasn’t historically been part of my fandom experience, until Adam invited me to cosplay with him at New York ComicCon a couple of years back. But it meant that the day after the US election, when I would ordinarily have felt extremely depressed, I instead got to spend the whole day surrounded by thousands of fans who were so excited to meet their faves, to show off the incredible things they’d created, and to share in the uninhibited joy of being a fan.

One of the things that struck me as a very casual Star Wars fan was the incredible array of Mandalorian armour on display. Cosplayers weren’t just recreating Boba Fett’s or Din Djarin’s costumes — they were making their own amazing variations. I saw a Mountain Dew Mando, and these amazing Micky and Minnie Mandos:

I’d love to say happy new year, internet friends, but 2025 is getting off to a rocky start, between the war crimes and wildfires, maga nonsense and our own brand of political bs here in Aoteaoroa. But none of that is what prompted me to write to you, you can get enough of the doom and gloom literally everywhere else.

No, instead it was Zuck’s mask-off reveal that Meta’s products would circle the drain like everything else, unlocking a slur pack and chasing a more “masculine energy” for his company.

Anyway, you don’t need me to tell you that these platforms are rotten — I’ve been talking about it since Webstock in 2019. You can read great writing on this loads of places (Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification”, Ed Zitron calls it the “rot economy”).

When I asked you to give me your email address, it was just as twitter was starting to circle the drain. I promised you I wasn’t starting a newsletter, so much as finding a way to continue to share what I was thinking and reading and writing about once that platform no longer existed. It’s certainly true that twitter still (technically) exists, but it doesn’t work in any meaningful way anymore – no tweet achieves any kind of reach, and the bots and nazis make it a horrible place to visit even briefly. 

Honestly I’m still grieving that on some level. Yes, I can discover new things on TikTok and share my Eras Tour costume on Instagram and (shudder) network on LinkedIn. But nothing has replaced the learning and discovery and serendipity and fun. Where am I supposed to do my annual announcement that it’s marshmallow egg season?

Anyway, as promised – here are the things I’ve written lately that you might enjoy reading:

Public Passions/Private Spaces for The Pantograph Punch’s Carving Space issue – thinking about how we make thriving neighbourhoods online.