Janina Matthewson

In short season 10 of @withinthewires.bsky.social needs some music! It's the final season too, which is sad because @happierman.bsky.social and @j9andif.bsky.social are BRILLIANT colleagues and this has been a really wonderful world to be part of. <3

Wild to claim that we're the ones risking killing an industry that operates at a loss of several billion a year

The industry can't afford to do *anything* on its own but all the other costs are expected to be covered by continued investment, weird that the art it relies on is the only thing these people think should be free

Yeah, like for my serial, which is set in the 20s and has a posh lead character, I would use fewer, but in contemporary commercial fiction I'd use less

I would argue that nowadays fewer is kind of formal speech, so if this is for work, it'll depend on who's saying it, but then that's true of all "correct" grammar

Oh, I can count my hates. They are many.

Ofc language is an ever evolving, uncontrollable force and linguistic prescriptivism is a fool's game, and in modern use using less instead of fewer is perfectly acceptable because it has been used like that for long enough that its meaning has shifted, tyfyt

Fewer! Fewer is for things you count, less is for things you measure

Baffling news, honestly; surely he is already contracted to keep doing this till the heat death of the universe

Anna, I would only want you to be a journalist in 1924. Notebook in your hat, trenchcoat on

Taking at least one statistics class should be a requirement for journalism

Chapter I: A Stranger Appears 367BCE, somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea He woke in a cold sweat and, for a moment, he didn’t know why. His cabin was still and empty. The wood of the small ship creaked around him; he could hea...

The first five chapters of my serial novel are still free to read! Have you read them yet?
calamitystrinket.ghost.io/a-stranger-a...

Chapter I: A Stranger Appears 367BCE, somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea He woke in a cold sweat and, for a moment, he didn’t know why. His cabin was still and empty. The wood of the small ship creaked around him; he could hea...

The first five chapters of my serial novel are still free to read! Have you read them yet?
calamitystrinket.ghost.io/a-stranger-a...

The whole industry also has leaned far too heavily on social media for years, and that just doesn't work unless you are influencer level successful on social media. And often not even then

Art vs. Entertainment or; how to be a film guy Look, I wasn't going to write a newsletter today. I was going to be a few days late, which, given my intention is to be a week ahead, is already very late. But then my friend Marie's newsletter came o...

I read @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com's newsletter about film masterpieces and it made me have thoughts about film masterpieces
ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io/art-vs-enter...

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on how to wrest control of the information superhighways back from craven billionaires please step up, we need to get moving

Boris was simply both stupid and self-serving; a disaster for the country but at least we all understood WHY

This is US-centric, but applies here too, obviously
stringinamaze.net/p/policy-can...

I honestly hate Keir Starmer more than I ever hated Boris Johnson

SO FUCKING SICK OF FEELING INSANE

Labour could have simply looked at a list of all the cuts to services over the last couple of decades and renew that funding

Those shitty hotels are filled with people who would be living in and contributing to our communities, working and paying income tax, spending locally and supporting the economy, if the government would just process their fucking claims!

So fucking sick of feeling insane, yk, like what the fuck are we doing here

It's lucky authors love being read 💅

Chapter I: A Stranger Appears 367BCE, somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea He woke in a cold sweat and, for a moment, he didn’t know why. His cabin was still and empty. The wood of the small ship creaked around him; he could hea...

I have made the first five chapters of my serialised novel FREE TO READ for the next TWO WEEKS.
I would love for you to read it and to tell everyone you know to read it.
calamitystrinket.ghost.io/a-stranger-a...

People are calling it "an insane thing for someone with a brain this broken to commit to"

Chapter I: A Stranger Appears 367BCE, somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea He woke in a cold sweat and, for a moment, he didn’t know why. His cabin was still and empty. The wood of the small ship creaked around him; he could hea...

I have made the first five chapters of my serialised novel FREE TO READ for the next TWO WEEKS.
I would love for you to read it and to tell everyone you know to read it.
calamitystrinket.ghost.io/a-stranger-a...

Big of the ghoul Keir Starmer to finally admit that Palestine also has a right to exist

There are many methods you can use to hold on to power and I'm sure I've complained about them all at one time or another, but the one I want to talk about today is this: pretending that you are such a special boy that you deserve all the wealth and power you have, and everyone else deserves to be down here in the dirt because we are not special boys. From time immemorial the rich have established social rules that, by design, set them apart from the rabble. Each level of your stratified society then apes the one above them and those at the top change the rules to distinguish themselves once more.

History, literature, philosophy – these are all interpretive arts, and you can interpret everything in myriad ways. In theory, that's fine – if your spirit is strong and your heart is true, you can toss around all kinds of ideas, figure out what you believe in, and learn how to back it up. For some, though, a strong spirit and a true heart are not markers of a learnéd man. A learnéd man knows the point of a debate is to find rhetorical tricks to one up one's opponent. A learnéd man doesn't care about truth he cares about the effective argument. A learnéd man goes home every night and rubs one out to the Socratic Method.

A slate of people with truly abhorrent views have used civilised debate to establish themselves as pundits. They use neat haircuts, crisp suits, and big vocabularies to express deeply racist, misogynistic, and homophobic ideas and insist that if those ideas were weak then we, the horrified, would be able to brush them away with our rhetoric. It's a grift. A PR move. It spreads their message further and makes it seem legitimate. Giving these people the respect of your attention affirms them and their regressive opinions as reasonable. Every liberal who has indulged this idea of civilised debate from the right is a rube who has allowed themselves to be used for propaganda.

No amount of good manners will make racism civil, just as no amount of uncouth behaviour will make calls for equality less righteous. Fascists are our enemies, whether they're dropping pleasantries or racial slurs, and we have to fight them all. Those who claim we should engage with them in good faith, that we should be engage in dialogue are actively slowing our progress. We need civility in substance, not in style. We need codes of honour not of conduct. We need to call a fucking nazi a fucking nazi. We need to shut them down at every turn, whatever their medium or mode of address.

Wrote about why the idea that we should engage with civilised debate with fascists is elitist and also dumb

ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io/we-have-beco...

There are many methods you can use to hold on to power and I'm sure I've complained about them all at one time or another, but the one I want to talk about today is this: pretending that you are such a special boy that you deserve all the wealth and power you have, and everyone else deserves to be down here in the dirt because we are not special boys. From time immemorial the rich have established social rules that, by design, set them apart from the rabble. Each level of your stratified society then apes the one above them and those at the top change the rules to distinguish themselves once more.

History, literature, philosophy – these are all interpretive arts, and you can interpret everything in myriad ways. In theory, that's fine – if your spirit is strong and your heart is true, you can toss around all kinds of ideas, figure out what you believe in, and learn how to back it up. For some, though, a strong spirit and a true heart are not markers of a learnéd man. A learnéd man knows the point of a debate is to find rhetorical tricks to one up one's opponent. A learnéd man doesn't care about truth he cares about the effective argument. A learnéd man goes home every night and rubs one out to the Socratic Method.

A slate of people with truly abhorrent views have used civilised debate to establish themselves as pundits. They use neat haircuts, crisp suits, and big vocabularies to express deeply racist, misogynistic, and homophobic ideas and insist that if those ideas were weak then we, the horrified, would be able to brush them away with our rhetoric. It's a grift. A PR move. It spreads their message further and makes it seem legitimate. Giving these people the respect of your attention affirms them and their regressive opinions as reasonable. Every liberal who has indulged this idea of civilised debate from the right is a rube who has allowed themselves to be used for propaganda.

No amount of good manners will make racism civil, just as no amount of uncouth behaviour will make calls for equality less righteous. Fascists are our enemies, whether they're dropping pleasantries or racial slurs, and we have to fight them all. Those who claim we should engage with them in good faith, that we should be engage in dialogue are actively slowing our progress. We need civility in substance, not in style. We need codes of honour not of conduct. We need to call a fucking nazi a fucking nazi. We need to shut them down at every turn, whatever their medium or mode of address.

Wrote about why the idea that we should engage with civilised debate with fascists is elitist and also dumb

ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io/we-have-beco...