At the height of the Twilight fandom in the heady days of 2010, a new phenomenon started in the fanfic communities I was a part of, known as “pull to publish”. Up until that point, the boundaries between fanfic and traditionally published novels had been pretty sacrosanct — tied into a broader taboo around the legal status of fanfic and the foundational non-commercial ethos that kept everyone “safe” (i.e. if you weren’t making money off your lil stories, there was no grounds for IP holders to establish financial loss). But the 2010s made publishing books much cheaper, and a number of small vanity presses sprung up (often run by fans), offering to turn popular fan stories into “real” novels.

Twilight seemed ripe for this phenomenon because the stories fans were writing were overwhelmingly not about vampires. The most popular novel-length fics of the day recast Edward and Bella in mafia, sporting, or coffee shop romances. They were mountain climbers, or journalists, or tattoo artists. And so to file the serial numbers off and give the characters different names was a relatively straight-forward edit, and suddenly you had a conventional romance novel with a baked-in audience.

“Pulling to publish” referred to taking your fanfic down off fanficdotnet or AO3 and telling your readers they’d soon be able to buy a commercial copy of it. The most famous story pulled to publish was, of course, the juggernaut Fifty Shades of Grey. But while that project was ultimately the most successful, it was only one of several stories that made the leap at the time. Beautiful Bastard (based on Twilight fanfic The Office) became a NYT bestselling series published by Simon & Schuster. Gabriel’s Inferno (orginally a fanfic called The University of Edward Masen) was a two book series eventually adapted into a film.

While the publishing industry kept looking for its next Cassandra Clare (originally a Harry Potter fanfic crossover) or EL James, there were few follow-up hits. With the exception perhaps of the After series of novels based on a popular One Direction story, which have now turned into a critically-panned but financially successful series of movies.

One of the things I love about being micro-famous for talking about One Direction conspiracies is that so many people sent me links to the stories about Louis Tomlinson’s tweet this week. For those of you blissfully unaware, Louis is a former 1D member who has been plagued for a decade now by conspiracists who think he’s secretly married to Harry Styles. This is despite outright denials from the pair, Tomlinson repeatedly (and currently) dating women and fathering a child with one. In the past, he has said:

“What’s tough is, I realised this some years ago, there is nothing I can say. There is nothing I can do to dispel the believers of that conspiracy.”

He added: “It does irritate me a little bit, you know? But it is just kind of the nature of the job, I suppose.”

But this week he apparently lost his patience (again), tweeting:

The best thing I read this week was on, of all places, a motorsport website. How Gen Z women are powering the next wave of F1 fandom:

By the time the lights go out on race day, the action - for many Formula 1 fans - has already been underway for several hours. On Instagram, people are sharing photos of the drivers’ paddock entrance outfits, and on TikTok, edits of the qualifying highlights set to dramatic soundtracks are circulating. Fans are re-posting drivers’ social media selfies, breaking down reports from journalists in the paddock on YouTube and Twitch, or creating their own content from the grandstands. This isn’t just regular sports fandom - it’s a cultural movement. And at the heart of it are Gen Z women.

This article highlights a recent survey that shows three out of four new F1 fans this year are women, and half of those identify as Gen Z.

Obviously at the heart of this is the overwhelming success of Netflix’s Drive to Survive — a documentary series I held off watching for about three seasons because I thought cars racing around a track was slightly less interesting than paint drying. I was wrong, of course. The documentary series does something fascinating: turning the 20 drivers into gladiators and their opposing camps into kingdoms. You find yourself on the edge of your seat, even though the race you’re watching ended over a year ago — no mean feat. And the show introduced Formula One to a whole new generation of fans who might otherwise have never given the sport a second look.

I’m really excited to be heading back to Berlin to speak at Beyond Tellerrand in November. This is a gorgeous, carefully-curated single-track conference about the best of the web. If you’re in that part of the world, please come along.

culture gaps

This week I went to a public panel discussion on quantum physics — mostly to cheer on my bestie Andrew and newsletter reader Richard (hi Richard!), but also because quantum computing is one of those delicious topics that I know only the barest amount about and even that small amount makes my head hurt. Andrew and I flatted together when he was doing his phd, and he would gamely try and explain it to me using beer bottles and cigarette lighters, and I don’t really have any better grasp of it now than I did then.

Sitting at the back of a university lecture hall on a Tuesday night, I kept thinking about the gap that keeps these big ideas from most of us — gaps between academia and those of us who need an explanation simple enough to be illustrated with beer bottles, between what came to be known as “high” and “low” culture.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what being online looks like. The actual look of it. The aesthetic.

As I continue to think and write and talk about escaping walled gardens, I’ve begun to notice more and more the bricks in those walls. Or the kind of concrete, the colours of the barbed wire, whatever metaphor works in your head.

Take a look at this photo quickly and tell me what app this:

Mānawatia a Matariki.

Last weekend, I snagged tickets to take my nieces in London to see the new revival of Evita starring Rachel Zegler when I’m there in a few weeks. I’m a fiend for Andrew Lloyd Webber bangers, and I absolutely loved Zegler’s singing in A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Like many people, I recently finished the extremely-good second season of Andor. It’s one of those shows that you can confidently say is a must-watch even to people who aren’t Star Wars fans, particularly in the current political climate. I avoided it for a while because the thing about prequels is, sometimes you have to go into them knowing that bad things are going to happen to characters you love, but sometimes the storytelling makes it worth it (see also: the Hunger Games prequels).

When I finished, I bounced immediately on and re-watched Rogue One, and was struck by how carefully and largely seamlessly the Andor team had lined their show up to meet the beginning of a movie that had been filmed a full decade earlier. But even though they stitched together beautifully, tonally Rogue One is a completely different experience. It’s a film designed to sit in the swashbuckling universe of the original trilogy — with Vader mouthbreathing over the Imperial March — whereas Andor is something grittier and more determined.

So I was absolutely intrigued to discover that a fan had recut and rescored Rogue One into a three-episode Andor arc. What’s left is something tighter, more paranoid, more grounded. Something that asks: what if the vibes were different?

One of my fave things about old twitter was our local Twitter Secret Santa. Thousands of people in AoNZ signed up and were matched with a stranger and asked to send them a gift. The fun and the joy of it came from trawling back through your santee’s tweets and trying to work out what they were into and what they might enjoy getting a gift about. I talked about it a bit here.

Now that Bluesky has reached a kind of critical mass, this is our first year having a (midwinter) Bluesky Secret Santa. And today is the day we get to open our gifts.

Now, here’s where I need to confess that I cheated and opened my gift early. I know, I know. I nearly held out, but when it arrived it felt like it was a book or a magazine and my parents were coming to stay and I thought it might be something nice to read.

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: