Yesterday the unthinkable happened and Archive of Our Own was taken offline by a security incident that may take weeks to resolve.

It was only a few months ago that I wrote about the internet’s “load-bearing shelves”, and how, in an age where internet security is becoming increasingly fraught, our older, volunteer-run infrastructure doesn’t really stand a chance. So it was pretty horrifying to have my literal favourite place on the internet suffer this exact fate.

I talk about AO3 in almost every keynote — because it’s this shining example of something truly community-made. And it’s hard to overstate what an impact it has had. It currently hosts over 18m fanworks (I think, I can’t check). Fortunately the current update from the team says “no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe.” (THANK GOD).

One of my favourite newsletters is Rusty’s Today in Tabs. It’s the perfect mix of internet things I’m already across and things I haven’t encountered and sometimes wish had never been brought to my attention (e.g. ball hog discourse). Yesterday, Rusty posted this correction:

I too had seen the story circulate very quickly on Bluesky that Ukraine’s destruction of a data centre had had a dramatic effect on Russian bot traffic. It was the sort of story engineered to go viral, being both anti-Putin and also anti- X The Everything App. Wouldn’t it feel delicious if all the fake traffic dried up?

I've talked here before about how much I love rabbitholes, and one that I have been periodically diving into for years now is climbing Everest. Or more specifically, people dying on Everest, and why anyone would attempt a goal that has a fatality rate. Like if you came to a thrill-seeking tourist attraction, bungee jumping maybe, and the sign said "over three hundred people have died doing this" you'd probably think twice. And worse, over two hundred of their bodies are still on the mountain. So, idk idk. It's always fascinated me. Probably because we grew up with Hillary being a national hero in Aotearoa. And now we get to watch Tom Hiddleston be a hot Hillary.

And I think the other thing that’s always blown my mind about it is that Everest isn’t a technically difficult climb. What makes it hard isn’t that you need to be an exceptional climber, it’s that it happens at such an altitude your body is actively trying to kill you. The “death zone” (above 8000m) has insufficient oxygen to sustain human life. And starved of oxygen, you start to make really poor decisions. Your brain literally starts to malfunction. Which leads to climbers misreading routes, or weather, not turning back when they need to, thinking sitting down will help, falling, and dying.

I was thinking about that this week because I watched Jon Krakauer speak at 92Y earlier this year to mark the 30th anniversary of what, at the time was the deadliest day on the mountain’s history, and which formed the basis of his book Into Thin Air.

What was the last new thing you found yourself becoming a fan of? I was thinking about this at a dinner the other night, when I was sitting next to someone who said that she’d never really been a fan of anything. But of course, when I scratched at that (because I think we’re all fans of something, we just don’t realise it), she revealed that she’d recently become obsessed with the show Off Campus.

That was a great reason to trace my own discovery path in my head. I’m not a booktokker (I dip my toes in when something becomes an unavoidable monolith like ACOTAR) and I avoided the sports romance boom on principle as a hockey rpf devotee of the mid 2010s. So Off Campus wasn’t on my radar until the tv adaptation sprung up with eerily good timing on socials in the wake of Heated Rivalry as “the next hot hockey show you should watch”. I watched it. It was fine. Belmont Cameli, even sharing a celebrity groomer you are no Hudson Williams. Sorry to that man.

So much of finding a new thing to love is a bit like this. Remember when Luce took me to see Audrey Hobert and I was blown away by the show and by her young fans? She’s now opening for Charli XCX across Europe next year. And a whole new wave of people will discover her, and those fans will have been first.

I’m writing this from my bestie Nic’s house where I’m spending the weekend with my girlfriends. We live crazy busy lives and we learned a few years ago that if we don’t regularly put a weekend catchup in the calendar we can go faaaar too long without seeing each other.

I was thinking about that this week as I read Derek Thompson’s piece You are no longer invited to dinner. In it he goes deep into the death of hosting in America, and we we don’t have people over to our houses as much.

It’s true that before my friends started having kids, dinner at someone’s house was how we hung out. You invited people over to have dinner and watch an appointment tv show. Or an Oscars party. I regularly had a Sunday roast lunch at my place. Even (and I know this will make Luce shudder) dinner and a board game.

There’s an episode of Parks and Rec where Ron and Chris have a burger cook-off. Chris has banned red meat from the commissary as part of a health initiative, and steak-loving Ron challenges him to put one of his fancy turkey burgers up against Ron’s classic beef mince on a bun.

A film school grad, Andrew Rea, was watching the episode and thinking, what would they taste like? So he made both burgers, filmed it for youtube, and launched long-running series Binging with Babish (aside: I only learned while writing this that the channel was named after Oliver Babish, White House counsel on The West Wing. I love a fandom crossover) He’s made the ratatouille from Ratatouille and the Krabby Patty from Sponge Bob. And he does it with a freakish level of detail:

Instead of playing up his personality in a bid to win subscribers, Rea devotes his time and energy to creating content with a high attention to detail and painstaking historical accuracy — both of which require a significant amount of research.

To recreate the strudel from "Inglourious Basterds," for example, the vlogger turned to old Austrian recipes. Rea told INSIDER: "I thought to myself, 'How would they make this in France?' I asked myself, 'Did they have butter?' The answer was no. This movie took place during World War II, and butter was hard to come by."

Today I woke up to a horrible headline about a possible serial killer in Johannesburg. I’ve talked alot before about how The X-Files was my first fandom, and obviously mostly that show was mostly about the aliens, but Fox Mulder’s troubled past involved him being an FBI profiler who was such a genius at hunting serial killers they called him “Spooky”.

In the ‘90s, the concept of a “profiler” — someone who could disappear into the mind of a serial killer based just on looking at their victims and crime scenes — became a pop culture phenomenon. The Silence of the Lambs swept the Oscars in 1992. John Douglas (the actual FBI profiler Jack Crawford was modelled on) published Mindhunter in 1995. When Chris Carter wanted a second show, he made Millennium, which was just the profiler part of The X-Files with the aliens removed. NBC countered with Profiler. The serial killer of this era was a dark genius and the FBI agent was his worthy adversary.

Then it was like serial killers were every show, and in order to outdo one another, writers rooms were just sitting around casually dreaming up more and more unhinged ways to brutalise women on screen. The Killing, True Detective, The Fall, were all prestige versions of this. And at the same time every episode of procedurals like CSI, and SVU needed fresh bodies, usually female and artfully arranged. I hated it and I stopped watching.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Callard’s theory of the uni-context: the idea that we’re all existing in one big room now, and that one of the consequences of that is that we focus on negativity because it’s a universal experience that everyone understands. We see that everywhere with technology platforms. Enragement leads to engagement, and so our diet online is increasingly geared toward content we hate, rather than things we love.

I was thinking about that this week as I read Kate Lindsay’s piece You are what you hate read. She says:

Hate reading is one of the fundamental pillars of the internet. Social media introduced us to a wealth of uniquely horrible (or just mildly annoying) people we’d never otherwise come across, and it can be hard to look away. The 2010s term “bitch eating crackers” described people who were triggering even when doing something as simple as, well, eating crackers. Snarkers in online forums will often use “BEC” to refer to bloggers and influencers, who irk them for, admittedly, no real reason (“She’s my BEC”).

This month the second season of Heated Rivalry has started filming in Toronto and the actors playing our favourite gay hockeys are out and about each looking like they swallowed other, smaller actors over the summer.

And because the frenzy around these two shows no signs of dying down, any pic is seized upon and pored over and clipped and dissected by fans. And once again it’s thrown up a debate in fan spaces about both pap photos and photos taken by bystanders when the stars didn’t know they were on camera.

I’m not going to get into the ethics of paparazzi photos. If we haven’t learned anything from the death of Diana, or from watching what happened to Britney Spears, then I don’t think we’re going to.

Sorry this is a day late, I’m old and the jetlag knocks me around now a lot more than it used to.

I landed early on Friday morning and went straight to the Going Global music summit in Auckland, and one of the best interviews I listened to was with country music sensation Kaylee Bell. You might have seen her opening for Ed Sheeran on his Mathematics tour. Or singing on The Voice Australia.

Or, like me, you might have tuned her out a little because you do that with country music. Bell talked about that on stage. What it was like growing up in a family that loved and listened to country, but in a town and a nation that didn’t. And in fact actively dismissed it.

I’ve had two pieces that came across my radar via Kottke saved in my to-read pile for a while now, and getting to them at the lake this week unlocked something in my brain.

The first is this nostalgic look at the video rental store. I think about video stores as being places I would go to get an armful of stupid action movies to watch when I was sick, or to wander the aisles with friends arguing over who’d seen what to try an agree on a movie night watch.

But this piece positions them as a kind of “third place”, a concept first articulated by Oldenberg and Christensen in 1989. Third places are the spaces we hang out in that aren’t work or home. A local bar, or a European piazza, or dog park. Places where there are regulars, and where you chat. There’s been tons written about the gradual erosion of third places (particularly for teens, who don’t have the malls, roller rinks or arcades or previous generations to hang out in) and the impact that has on our health, sense of self, loneliness etc etc. We’ve talked about this before here, when we discussed the six things people are looking for when they gather, and what an online neighbourhood would actually need to function like a physical one.

This week I read this great essay from Maxine Kaplan about the early-00s show Felicity. I watched the show obsessively in the beginning, as part of that slate of WB dramas. Keri Russell’s Felicity bins med school and follows a guy she has a crush on to NYC and college heartbreak and love triangles and roommate shenanigans ensue. I once saw Scott Foley at an airport while the show was running and thought I’d peaked in celebrity encounters.

Anyway, what the essay is discusses (and what I’d completely forgotten) was JJ Abrams’ decision to go fully unhinged for the final episodes of the last series. Felicity’s wiccan roommate Meghan casts a spell so that Felicity can go back in time and make a different decision about her love life, and the rest of the season plays that out, completely seriously.

There’s no plausible deniability that this is a one-off formal experiment, or a dream. The season arc changes: Elena’s wedding is cancelled early! Megan and Sean never get married, and in fact, break up! Entire supporting character B plots, different from when we watched the first time, occur in these episodes without any involvement with or appearance from Felicity herself. She can’t have just been hallucinating new events, she’s not there to hallucinate them. Suddenly, magic—time magic, no less!—simply existed in the hyper-realistic world of Felicity.

One of my first conspiracy theories was the JFK assassination. I spent an unreasonable amount of pre-internet time reading the Warren Commission report and various disreputable secondhand books. One of my favourite unhinged theories was the two-casket argument, outlined in 1981. The idea is that as the First Lady accompanied her husbands’ body to Bethesda in an ornate bronze casket, some people think the body had already arrived.

As Technician Jerol F. Custer passed near Mrs. Kennedy in the lobby, he was carrying X-ray films of her husband’s body that had already been taken in the hospital’s morgue. Looking down the lobby from a second-floor balcony, Chief Hospital Corpsman Dennis DavidKnew the bronze casket was empty; about 15 minutes earlier, he had watched a black, unmarked hearse arrive through a gate at the back of the hospital and ordered some sailors to help men in civilian clothes carry a plain gray casket into the morgue.

So it’s catnip to me that Kaitlyn Tiffany’s new book The Housewife’s Underground is about the women who made the assassination an enduring mystery.

As you all know, I spend a lot of my life consuming fanfiction on Archive of Our Own, the volunteer-run archive that now hosts over 18 million transformative works.

Last week in an admin post AO3 re-explained why it will never have a mobile app. It's a question they get constantly, particularly from younger generations who read everything on their phones, and find the idea that it’s just a website sort of insanely quaint. Any time it pops up as a discussion topic you see fans retread the same ground. The archive is run by volunteers. It’s a big enough burden without adding an app to the mix. There’s no need for one you can just add the site to your home screen, etc etc.

But reading the post this week, a more obvious and important reason jumped out at me. Both the Apple App Store and Google Play store have rules against "objectionable" or sexual content. To ship an app, AO3 would have to gut the thing that makes it AO3 — its policy of maximum inclusiveness. As I talked about in The Good Internet, the Archive was built on the promise that fandom's horniest, weirdest, most transgressive corners would have somewhere to live. So it stays on the open web on purpose.

If you’re a bit obssessive about films or the movie industry, you will probably have heard of The Numbers. It’s a hand-researched box office database that the industry, journalists, academics and even Guinness World Records treat as a definitive source of truth.

I came across a really fascinating story this week about its background and what’s been happening to it since March, from Stephen Follows, which you should read. The guts of it is that The Numbers suddenly vanished from the internet without warning or explanation. When it limped back a week later it was a skeleton: the historical charts and individual movie pages were gone and there was just a generic "we're rebuilding" message where thirty years of data used to be. The internet responded the way the internet responds with fury and conspiracy theories, including one Reddit take that the whole thing was a deliberate rug pull to push people onto paid products.

The real story is pretty ugly. The site was being hammered by AI crawlers at industrial scale (by early this year only about 10% of its traffic was human) and buried in that flood, someone was probing a thirty-year-old codebase for back doors. When the servers collapsed, the security advice was don't ever turn the old machine back on.

But the detail in the story that hooked me was that The Numbers started as fan infrastructure.

I’ve spent a lot of time in this newsletter talking about how we build great tech, and how to prioritise intentional experiences over algorithms, and how we stop treating fans like wallets.

Today I get to put my blood, sweat, tears and money where my mouth is, and show you what we’ve made with Lume.

We’re now live on Apple (and Android will be right on its heels, as soon as we finish navigating the Herculean maze Google puts in front of developers). You can go to our website, browse the albums, and then immerse yourself in the world on the app. Real talk: if you buy on the web, more of your money goes right to the artists, but there’s a beautiful store in the app too.

This weekend Aotearoa celebrates Matariki. It’s now been five years since we instated the Māori new year as a national public holiday, the first time that’s happened in the whole world, which is pretty cool. We’re a looooong way from ‘solving racism’ down here in our little corner of the world, but this little step is something we can be proud of. Yesterday I got up super early and went to the Hautapu-Ā-Motu, the official national hautapu (a ceremony to welcome the start of the new year) at dawn.

One of the things I love about it is that it’s specifically meant to be an occasion for everyone. Chief advisor Mātauranga Matariki, Professor Rangi Mātāmua says he wants to make sure everyone who calls Aotearoa home can see themselves in the celebration of Matariki.

A couple of years ago, bestie Rob and I went to see Tom Hiddleston in the West End in Betrayal. Afterwards we went backstage to say hi, Rob insisting on embarrassing me by suggesting that Hiddleston watch my ten-minute guide to all the Avengers movies as if he hadn’t starred in them. When we left, security showed us out through the stage door, where we encountered a staggeringly long line of fans who were very disappointed that we weren’t who they were waiting for.

I was thinking about that when I read this Guardian story last year about fans queuing for the stage door to see Hiddleston (and others). The author talks to tourists who’ve bought tickets for multiple nights of a show just in case. One person in the queue left the play halfway through to make sure they got a good spot.

For me, the idea of standing on line in the cold for the possibility that a star will come out and sign my programme is pretty unappealing. Even worse than camping on line for barricade. But I love that we’re all different types of fans, and stage door is maybe one of the last truly free fan interactions left, in an era where everything costs more and more.

This week two things crossed my path that made me want to think and talk further about generative AI and fiction.

For a while now I’ve been clear in the divide I maintain in my head between using AI for software development (objective, testable, an obvious accelerant) and AI for creative endeavours (soulless, bland, generic).

Authors (and I include myself in this category) feel really strongly about the latter, for all the obvious reasons (economic and environmental collapse) and in part because we know that the genAI models were trained on our stolen work. And because it feels like people are cheating? This year, a non-fiction book about truth in the AI age was revealed to have false quotes all through it generated by AI (lol, the irony). The NYT published one of its famous Modern Love columns, and the author then conceded she’d used AI. Mia Ballard’s new novel was pulled by Hachette after accusations of AI use went viral online. I don’t know, as an unpublished author I’m probably just a bit bitter, but the idea that people who have these opportunities are churning out slop computerprose is so galling.

But at the same time, I feel like we’re now in an era where people are jumping to pile-on at the first em dash to cry “this is fake”. Sometimes writing might feel like it’s AI generated because AI models are trained on real human writing. And AI “detectors” are notoriously unreliable, producing both false positives and false negatives. Plus, if you jam someone else’s fiction into an AI “detector”, guess what? You’re giving the AI models their writing, without their consent, don’t do that.

Last week we talked about the child safety initiatives coming out of the UK. And when the subsequent (inevitable) social media ban was announced, I reshared the post I wrote last year about age-gating the internet. I like to be all “fair and balanced” (lol) around these parts, so I was interested to read this post responding to the “ten most common objections” to a social media ban.

Smartphones have sufficient other positive uses such that we’re not realistically going to get rid of them - any more than we did cars, despite the deaths they cause. But the case for social media is much weaker: regulation is needed, and a social media ban for under 16s (and a properly enforced phone ban in school) is a good place to start.

What jumped out to me was not so much the responses (you can form your own view on these) but the author’s suggestions for improved regulation of social media: