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mel thomas

@pagemelt.bsky.social
2.6K followers 585 following 816 posts

several possums in a trench coat and one of them learned how to read they/them pagemelt.zone

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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
nEwSLEtTer tImE 🌠 substack.com/home/post/p-...
substack.com
Lucky number nine
Has anybody seen my earbuds?
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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 29/09/2026
There is obviously a whole body of scholarship pointing in this direction so forgive me for saying something so obvious but the media needs to treat tech executives like the leaders of hostile governments because that is exactly what they are
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
nearing the end of The Sopranos and reflecting on who i think is the most irredeemable, festeringly evil character on a show full of psychos
galaxy brain meme that goes from Richie Aprile to Ralph Cifaretto to Christopher Moltisanti to Artie mother fucking Bucco for the love of god stay away from him
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💙🦋 @proofofhumanity.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
finally got around to watching and enjoyed greatly 👍 it reminded me of the nostalgia re: recentish tiktok trend of using john mayer's "clarity," but mostly "no such thing" to recall early 00s monoculture and shared optimism/assumption of a better future
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Goodreads update:

Mel Thomas has read
We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

"put this on all your twee sapphic rec lists u cowards"
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
romance novel horseshoe theory is when i, a lover of the genre, regress to the neophyte's default contrarian position of "well what even IS an HEA, huh???" when the vibe of the discourse is getting too smarmy
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Garth Marenghi's Catbus @catbus.phd · 13/09/2026
waiting for your fave mufo to log on
a forlorn looking duck lying flat on a linoleum floor
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
last night at dinner i asked seth "who do you think is the most decent man on The Sopranos?" and we just kinda stared at each other silently for several moments
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
whenever i post critically about romcoms people will be in my comments telling me—often in good faith—that it's supposed to be funny and silly and therefore i shouldn't think about it too hard, and ????? imagine saying that about a funny thing a man made. imagine saying that about mel brooks
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Mel Thomas wrote a review of The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen by K.J. Charles: props to the vanishingly rare Regency romance that actually acknowledges that England was at war with France during that time lol
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
gonna tell my kids this was A Clockwork Orange. gonna tell my kids this was Oppenheimer. gonna tell my kids this was Knowing (2009) starring Nicolas Cage
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
i don't know anything about anime but my husband is watching Dragon Ball Daima, which to the best of my understanding is a program that bravely asks the question "what if all your favorite Dragon Ball guys got turned into lil babies?"
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
in hindsight maybe it wasn't clear from this post that my criticism of the Sopranos fandom is coming from inside the house lol. i am thoroughly and deeply Sopranos-pilled, and in case there was any doubt: www.patreon.com/pagemelt/pos...
patreon.com
blaming the MCU on Christopher Moltisanti | pagemelt
Again with The Sopranos, yes, but also a Red, White & Royal Blue Mafia AU fanfic (lol?), A Love Most Fatal by Kath Richards, Heated Rivalry
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
me: dang we spent a lot of money eating out last month. but no worries. we'll simply be more discerning about that going forward 😌 me one day later: let's go to to the cheesecake factory. yknow, for the bit
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
sorry i was weird and off-putting the last time we talked!! it’s just that that’s my truest, most fundamental nature
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
It’s mind-blowing that we have literal white nationalists in the White House carrying out unfathomably cruel, abusive, white nationalist policies, and the punditariat has spent the last two weeks debating if some people were too intemperate after a Black man was murdered by cops six years ago.
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
heated rivalry fans get a bad rap, but my god, what a generative space. 46k fics. meanwhile the sopranos fandom, active for almost 30 years, has 500 fics and a handful of AI-generated meme accounts called things like stugots_deez_nuts run by edgelords scared to death of loving anything earnestly
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
"AI is overhyped but it's good at searching for stuff." have you considered, lately, the relative nature of all things? how you considered the possibility that you are simply bad at searching for stuff
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
honestly i think choosing to attend a 4-year college and majoring in “influencer” is more aligned with the ideals of a traditional liberal arts education than majoring in business or marketing
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
it's pinball day :)
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
there's the old school enshitification model enabled by software just existing within capitalism, and then there's the new turbo-charged model where software is designed to be as labyrinthine as possible, forcing people to use the baked-in AI assistant to figure out how to do the most basic tasks
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
oh you wrote a gay sports romance? should we have a press conference?? should we invite your gruff but unexpectedly supportive coach-slash-mentor
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
annoyed by the youths and their slang!! not for the typical reactionary reasons but because when I search for "gardening" tiktok now assumes I want to watch a 20-year-old review their first store-bought edible
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Brandon Walsh @walshbr.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
My hot take about the “students cannot read whole novels / watch whole films / etc.” is that they can learn to do it. None of us are born with attention spans suited for long media. It is a learned skill and can be developed with practice.
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
my favorite thing about the sopranos is the sheer number of episodes (including pine barrens, the most beloved episode of the series) that would work beautifully as romcoms if you simply added one (1) smooch at the end
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
logged in to hubspot at work and it said, "good afternoon mel" and i don't like that. frankly the time of day i'm experiencing is none of their business
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
picked up madeline miller’s circe because samantha morton was my favorite part of nolan’s odyssey (and it wasn’t particularly close). about a quarter of the way through, and i gotta say….... this girl is kind of a drip! like sometimes when everybody bullies you, there’s a reason, yknow
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
seth and I stumbled upon this absolutely deranged use of our tax dollars while walking the dog this morning. we live in kentucky btw. approximately 800 miles from ground zero
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Mel Thomas is 5% done with Crush by Richard Siken: reading this is like being totally absorbed in prestigious movie and then a new character appears and he's played by tim robinson. like, he's doing a great job, who knew tim could act like this, but the very fact of him being tim robinson is suddenly all you can think about. okay imagine that but instead of tim robinson it's the title of a 100k word omegaverse fanfic u read 5 years ago
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
one must imagine sisyphus locked in
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
gotta appreciate the evil genius of the atlantic's business model. if it was 100% trash nobody would read it. instead it's 95% trash with an outrageously good ted chiang essay every few years
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
reading Possession, a novel that won the Booker Prize in 1990 about the discovery of an extramarital affair between two Victorian poets, has made me realize how fuckin weird people have gotten about policing other people's marriages on the internet, even if they're fictional
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Alice Averlong 🏳️‍⚧️ @alice.averlong.com · 24/07/2026
I have moved my gender into attack position
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
am i being pranked
clinically insane captcha that prompts the user to drag ONE character to the matching character behind the lines
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
one thing sci-fi authors from the '60s are gonna tell u (as the sky is raining fire and the surviving citizens of earth are evacuating to mars) is what the titties looked like
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
i read and occasionally talk about romance novels online, so i have a good sense of the landscape, and i think a lot of the thinkpieces agonizing over why women dominate mm readership are missing one big and obvious fact, which is that not a lot of men read genre romance, period
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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 06/07/2026
There's a part in the book "Careless People" where the author beats Zuck at Settlers of Catan, and he is absolutely wrecked by it. Someone pulls her aside to explain everyone else has been letting him win for years. I think about this a lot re: why tech bros think everyone will love AI chatbots.
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slop enjoyer @slop.guru · 04/07/2026
exercising my rights
cropped screenshot of a dominos notification:

Est. Delivery by 5:52pm - 6:07pm
Making Your Order We began preparing your order.
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Hugh Ryan @hughryan.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
The idea that trans or nonbinary or third gender or queer people are somehow "hijacking" the "gay and lesbian movement" is shockingly ahistorical. The idea that sexual desire, gender, sex, the body, and identity are completely disconnected is a much more divisive and recent idea
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Rusty Foster @rusty.todayintabs.com · 02/07/2026
With this privileged voice, I can help change the puppy killing industry from the inside
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
i'm sympathetic to the argument that people are only interested in hockey romance because it's a white people sport. it observably IS (derogatory). but also... have you watched a hockey game? men punch each other in the face with knives strapped to their feet. the drama is begging for narrative
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Dan Olson @foldablehuman.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Where are all these modern mainstream movies with a bunch of gratuitous sex that people are wringing their hands over, asking for recreational purposes.
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
a pride month diptych for our age, presented with joy and delight: 1) the actor who plays THEE christopher "don't disrespect the pizza parlor" moltisanti unc posting a pride flag to his grid, and 2) naomi klein wearing a ball cap that says "I'm coming to the cottage"
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Tits McGee @scientits.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
‘Say yes and never do it’ Mel Brooks knew how to deal with the studios
You have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out.”That’s probably the most famous scene in the movie, the campfire scene.

I know. He said, “You can’t punch a horse.” I said, “You’ll never see it again.” I kept saying, “You’re absolutely right. It’s out!” Then, when he left, I crumpled up all his notes, and I tossed it in the wastepaper basket. And John Calley, who was running [production at] Warner Bros. at the time, said, “Good filing.” That was the end of it. You say yes, and you never do it.

That’s great advice for life.

It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.
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Bethany Black @bethanyblack.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️ One milkshake to rule the boys, one milkshake to find them, one milkshake to bring the boys and in my yard to bind them 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️
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Ryan Hodes (The Stories We Tell) @thestorieswetell.co · 11/06/2026
My latest, in which I talk about wearable technology, Ring's fascist puppy ad, perv-maxxing, smart glasses psychosis, transhumanism, white supremacy, and a whole lot of other cheery topics! Featuring a wonderful convo w/ @hypervisible.blacksky.app
youtu.be
The Rise of the Perv Glasses
YouTube video by The Stories We Tell w/ Ryan Hodes
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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
nothing but love and light to tom "spiderman" holland but for some reason the Algorithms That Be have decided that I care a LOT more about that time he lip synced to a rihanna song 10 years ago than I actually do
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Rory @roryhume.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
If you too want a connection between liminal spaces, Norman Rockwell, and Say Anything...(1989), this is the essay for you!
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