iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Aja Romano @bookshop.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

At @fansplaining.bsky.social we're celebrating our six-month-versary by giving you 50% off for the next six months! We've also made all of @gavia.bsky.social's Lanterns recaps free to read, so once you've caught up on those, take a look at all of our other articles and sign up! Join us! 🎉

fansplaining.com

Celebrating Six Months of Fansplaining: The Publication!

In October, we’re marking the half a year since we launched with a special sale.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'll get there eventually, even if I have to take the extra year on my PhD, even if I have to go into yet another supervision and say I barely got anything done since the last one. and it will hurt because hope is painful, but we all deserve to hope. we all *need* to hope. anyway. hi. I'm alive.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

there's a reason I got the CR quote that I did tattooed: hope is a painful thing. it's a hard thing to hold onto when you feel like you don't deserve hope; it's a hard thing to take with you knowing it will just give you the chance to fall again; there's a kind of unique, aching heart-pain it makes.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'm trying to get it back, but it's hard and quiet and lonely and unglamorous. taking comfort in the things that feed my soul - video games, my D&D group, fanfiction - as well as starting to gently immerse myself back in the theory that was so inspiring me. most days, I feel like I'm failing.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

...but at some point in the past months I've lost the enthusiasm for my work that helps me overcome the crippling self-doubt I am otherwise made of. now whenever I look at my writing I feel hyper-critical and panicked about how it isn't 'academic enough' or that it's half-assed.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

hi bsky <3 I still exist, but in big struggle mode at the moment. my fatigue has gotten worse through the year & I'm still dealing with some other new health challenges on top of existing disability (but starting to get there). I'm still working on my (final) PhD chapter on Madness & roleplaying...

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Dr Sam Hirst @romgothsam.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Having seen the Joyce Carol Oates very bad, not good tweet about romance and AI, I can't help thinking about the way that romance has been treated as a punching bag for so long and always by people who are completely unwilling to engage with the genre and know little about it.

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Project LETS @projectlets.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Support our comrade Chantal ❤️‍🩹 Chantal is a psych survivor and an incredible advocate for Mad Liberation, particularly for mad Black folks. They should have *never* been held in involuntary psych confinement. Please donate & share Chantal's post!! Abolition MUST include psychiatric incarceration.

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Destination: Toast! @destinationtoast.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I have been given a ✨🎁 gift link 🎁✨ to share with y'all -- read my article free for one week! But also support Fansplaining if you can, because they do great fandom journalism (like publishing me obvs 💅), and it's a bad economy for such things right now. fansplaining.com/crunching-th...

fansplaining.com

Crunching the Fandom Numbers

In 2013, curiosity about Johnlock fic led me to pull my first fandom stats. Today, the world of fandom data analysis is thriving.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

no stream today my loves, I'm in the worst pain flare I've had in a long while. (maybe delayed from my trip at the start of the month).

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Prem Thakker ツ @premthakker.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

New: Macklemore says Robert Kraft — who owns Gillette Stadium, where Macklemore & Ed Sheeran were to perform later this month — called Sheeran. Kraft rallied other owners together behind an ultimatum for Sheeran: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you won't be allowed in our venues.

I'm not sure how to start this. So I'm going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from The Loop tour.
But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don't lose sight of that.

Ed is my friend. I've known him for 13 years. We've shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I've grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we've had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I'm writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can't change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.

Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other
stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.

Ed was in …

What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I'm sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, "Free Palestine" becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that's why this time it became so important to silence me.

And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying "Free Palestine" gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn't protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.

I hope this isn't the end of my relationship with Ed.
Thirteen years of friendship doesn't disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door will always be open to continuing that conversation.

When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there's a phrase in Arabic:
لا شكر على واجب
"La shukra ala wajeb." There is no thanks for a duty.
That stayed with me. Because that's what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.

Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn't, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people be…

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Rachel Charlton-Dailey @rachelcdailey.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I'm actually shaking, I can't believe it's been voted down. I'm so proud of every single disabled person who made this happen

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daryl "rupert pumpkin" b 🏳️‍⚧️ @hypercubexl.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

GDT's reddit AMA spitting fire www.reddit.com/r/movies/com...

reddit comment:

Hello! Did you intend the ending of Pan’s labyrinth to be real or in Ofelia’s mind?

Guillermo Del Toro's reply:

My interpretation, and it's exclusively mine, is that it's real.

Because there's two things. One is what people call “The Shining Question.” The Shining Question is, Who opens the door for Jack to get out of the fridge? And Ofelia is in an attic with a guard outside her door, and she draws the door with the magic chalk, and she shows up in the labyrinth. So, the only way she could have gone into the labyrinth is the magic chalk. And the flower is real at the end. The flower that blooms in the dead tree. And the reason I think it’s real is because—and this is why I'm in favor of the human factor in art—I think that art does transform the world. You know?

Think about it for a second. One of the goals, with all this movement, is to make you believe that art is vulgar. That art is nothing special, and anybody can do art. That is like me telling you that I'm faster at running than Usain Bolt but I “run” in my motorcycle. Well, that's not the same. That’s not the same at all.

Art is important, and they want you to believe it isn't. It's part of the idea of control. The goal is not to have artificial intelligence. The goal is to foster natural stupidity. The goal is to foster you not looking for answers, and to trust yourself entirely to an engine. Look at the way we are dipping our toes into these things. We are starting to ask the machine, Is this true? For now, there's a correlation between reality and what the answers of the machine are. For now. But soon, we won't even investigate further. We will be told it's true. And if the machine is in the hands of somebody who should not be trusted, then your reality has been completely and utterly fucked. Because your intelligence ends at the question. You don't seek the answer. It's given to you.

Q: You recently mentioned that AI creates 'semi-compelling screensavers' and that you'd 'rather die' than use it. As a filmmaker who relies heavily on practical effects and creature design, what do you think is the biggest thing lost when a computer generates an image instead of a human hand?

GDT:

The three quarters of the process that gave you the chance to think of the idea that people don't think about without that process. Meaning, AI can get you to the middle really fast, but there's a dialectic with the process that gets you to that top 10%. I'll give you an example with the Pale Man.

We sculpted it as an old man, with a face. And then I said, Let's take out the face. This happened because I saw a photo of a manta ray and the poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. That combination, which happened at two different times during a week or a month, are not permutations that are chemically part of an equation. They are alchemy. And then I said, Take out the face, and then I said, Let's put the eyes on the hands. This triangulation happens because I spent a month or two months living with the idea of this creature. And it's not linear.

AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done. Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist.

And the second thing is the loss of the apprenticeship that one has as an artist. You're never a master; you're always an apprentice. This is a kinship I have with, for example, Chris Nolan. When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him—because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model—and I asked him, How did you do it? He said, “We put him in a storm in the ocean.”

And you're gonna find that 30% of a great image occurs accidentally. You know, either a drop of water hits the lens, or the camera shakes. I remember when in 1993, '94, Jim…

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

knocked myself fully into a flare with the weekend, so no stream today whilst I give myself an extra day to recover - but will be back on Thursday and Saturday! <3

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

no streams this week after all, been dealing with a lot of stress with the trip away and I need to just focus on that. will be back next week <3

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

we have immigrant concentration camps, diarrhea lettuce, zillion dollar gas, suicidal soldiers, measles resurgence, national park land sold to the highest bidder and teachers crowdfunding school supplies, but the real problems facing our country are a muslim senate candidate and an influencer

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pumpkin spice doodlemancy 🎃 @doodlemancy.com · 30/08/2026

brain, i understand that you'd rather do Preferred Activity, but right now we have to do Task. if we finish task we can do Preferred Activity WITHOUT feeling weighed down by the need to do Task. do you see how that works ah it's biting me my brain is biting me

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Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I recently had my first doctor refuse to wear a mask for me. They confidently told me “new science shows you only have to wear one when you’re sick”. I reminded them that asymptomatic transmission is real and that I’m immunocompromised & have been hospitalized for a cold… 🧵

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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 31/08/2026

the number of times i spot an article on the skyline that looks like something i would want to read and share and then it's on substack is...still way more frequent than it should be. what are you people still doing on there?! let me help:

leavesubstack.com

You Should Probably Leave Substack

You should probably leave Substack. Here’s why and how.

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Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Most people know Tim Curry from his iconic movies, but he was a hell of a stage performer. Here he performs one of my favourite Sondheim songs… Losing my Mind from Follies. People often ask about my handle. It came from a song in this show. RIP Tim Curry. Thank you for helping me embrace my weird

youtu.be

Tim Curry singing Losing My Mind - Sondheim, A Celebration

YouTube video by eleanorpowell2007

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

grateful, as ever, to the indie publications who are working to resist larger media and preserve real journalism - like Fansplaining, Rascal, Aftermath to name but a few. please sub to whichever you can if you're able & support real, thoughtful indie journalism.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

when things escape containment that only ever brings threat and trouble to fandoms - I am studying one such incident right now, in fact. I don't want to honour the work of fan scholars only to bring dangerous attention to them. I'm studying fandoms where people have been doxxed & had death threats.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

that bigger outlet won't necessarily give the same respect to those fans that I/the smaller indie outlet have in asking permission to cite. they are not part of fan studies practices or aware of the reasons you might choose not to cite, & why we get perms. they risk it escaping containment.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

really concerned about this from the perspective of the people who are cited in fandom media. because when I ask someone for perms to cite their meta, their fic, etc, I am telling them it's for a set audience. they are trusting me with that citation. ...now a bigger outlet could just steal it.

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 26/08/2026

The best way to honor the two who have left us recently, imo, is to keep being as gay as possible

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marina grlica 🌱 @dovesplants.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

this week is homophobic

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Wylder 🏳️‍⚧️♿ $288/$800 Needed TODAY @wylder.myatproto.social · 26/08/2026

Hello if you're mourning Dolly, please know that you can carry on her legacy by investing in mutual aid, boosting posts for free & making sure NO ONE perishes asking for help. We HAVE to break the cycle of consumption over community if any of us are going to survive! A single boost can save lives!

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Micah @rincewind.run · 26/08/2026

if these things come in threes the universe absolutely owes us you know what as the third at this point

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Aftermath @aftermath.site · 25/08/2026

All the biggest announcements from Gamescom Opening Night Live aftermath.site/gamescom-openi...

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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 25/08/2026

[Exit Queen.]

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Alex Zalben @azalben.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Dolly Parton, among a thousand other amazing things she did in her life, gifted over 330 million books to kids through her Imagination Library program. Her passing is a tremendous loss to the world, but you can support the program today to keep it going imaginationlibrary.com

imaginationlibrary.com

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library | USA, UK, IE, CA, AU

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a book gifting program that mails free books to children from birth until they begin school in participating areas.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

sorry for the late notice folks, no stream today. I don't even know if anyone that watches my streams will read this but this is the only place I have to tell anyone. hospital appointment this afternoon was much harder than I thought. I'll be back on Thursday.

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alyson “october” greaves @badambulist.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

much as the murder of Brianna Ghey mysteriously stopped being about the climate of transphobia in the UK and became about teen access to social media, the death of Jason Arday is, equally mysteriously, no longer about racism and is becoming about free speech in academia

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

yeah, unfortunately I don't think bsky alt text is really built for images with this much text. you've done the next best thing which is link to the text version <3 thank you so much for all the effort you've put into gathering all this info.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

note: the images in the thread do not contain alt text, but the website for the letter itself has the list in text form. I do not think we can trust anyone who has signed this letter. Cofnas is a eugenicist, not someone pushing the boundaries of academic freedom. he's just a white supremacist.

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roterote @roterote.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Here is the full suspension letter from UGent that was sent to Nathan Cofnas, it shows ample reason for his suspension and potential termination. Including breach of contract, using the University of Ghent’s name and legitimacy to promote his racial supremacist views and causing reputational damage.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

in an hour on twitch I am streaming as part of the #Titancraft stream weekend, where we're doing a Team Rocket bedrock breaking "podcast"! come meet the lovely people who are behind the rocket farm, learn about TC & laugh at our antics. www.twitch.tv/melodioustear

twitch.tv

melodioustear - Twitch

Hi! I'm Callie (she/her). I'm from England, and I'm a PhD candidate in the health & medical humanities, looking at embodied Madness in interactive media. I don't stream regularly anymore <3 — melod...

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Chantal James @chantalalive.blacksky.app · 23/08/2026

Y’all I guarantee you. Any person you see asking for mutual aid online, if they could see any other possible way to get what they need to live, they definitely would not be posting their mutual aid online. It’s degrading, humiliating, & most seek every last recourse before they’d ever ask for help.

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Jonaya Kemper @violetriotgames.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

This Winter I'll be teaching an Experimental TTRPG course and I'll be focusing on solo journaling games. If you have a game you think I should read, or you have a game you really love, please plug it and tell me about it. ✨ Also please share widely. I want some non US perspectives.

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

going to one of Dr Milton's talks (no relation btw) early in my MA was a huge influence on me going into Mad & neurodivergent studies. this is a lovely article <3

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alex antics @alexeverette.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

HEARTBREAKING: artist on bluesky is creating EXACTLY your kind of shit but never uses alt text

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Jonaya Kemper @violetriotgames.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I mostly agree with this, and I'd go further in one place. If you're going to have things like slavery in a game, you owe it to your players to know the purpose of it being there and to not half ass it. Let's talk about the horror of what it really is and what it means. Or don't do it at all.

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Lee Hurley @hleehurley.com · 20/08/2026

They segregated jumping on shit

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calanthe milton @melodioustear.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I mostly practice the important white person work of shutting the fuck up and listening to your posts, but this felt like the right moment to say that as a fellow Mad person I am so grateful that you exist, boldly & radically & Madly.

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Buzbee @buzbee.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Hey y'all! I finally finished and uploaded my "AI Opted Out" graphic asset for Twitch! It can be used as a panel and/or an overlay element. It is 100% free but if you'd like to help me afford some HEPA filters for my asthma you can tip my ko-fi! Download: ko-fi.com/s/d80815996b Examples in 🧵

A square promotional graphic. The background is a pale yellow geometric honeycomb pattern. In the center is a frame with a thin brown outline, rounded corners, and a transparent white background. At the top of the frame in bold tan lettering is the title which reads "Free Twitch Panel & Overlay Asset". Underneath the title is significantly smaller text that reads "320x250". Below that is the subtitle that reads "multiple color options". Under the subtitle is the advertised graphic asset design. A large bold black text "AI" with a red crossed out circle above it. Just below it is slightly smaller, bold and bubbly red text that reads "opted out". The design is outlined in white, and then outlined in a slightly thinner black.

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Nadine Batchelor-Hunt @nadinebh.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Less than one per cent of professors in the UK black, this is a fact - not a debating point Despite this, the British media - particularly columnists - have spun a narrative that academia is full of unqualified black people at the top who are there simply because of they are black This is racist

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 18/08/2026

I feel this way about more and more things every day

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Professor Jason Arday's former students want to "gather everything good about Jason Arday, in the words of the people who were there" to make their contribution to the public record about him (rather than to debate events + controversies of recent months) leilacancode.github.io/everythinggo...

leilacancode.github.io

Everything Good About Jason Arday

First-hand accounts from people who knew him. Collected by his students.

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