iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I remember vacationing at 26 being very mimosa-focused, and vacationing at 36 still involves booze ngl, but also I need to learn the name of every novel bird I encounter

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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

he's a serial workplace sex pest and a weasel and a hypocrite and if we ever cross paths it's ON SIGHT

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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 · 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 · 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

last night he was like, “name a Dragon Ball character and i’ll tell u if they got turned into a little baby.” i’m not a Dragon Ball fan myself but i’m married to a subject matter expert, so i've picked up a few things. I was like, "Bulma." turns out she's a baby now. "Piccolo." also a baby

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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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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 · 26/08/2026

it's a joke not a science paper

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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

like, at least with an influencer major there’s probably a performance element, lmao. maybe they’ll even make you take a film class

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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 · 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

lol NOPE, just a single purpose memorial that kinda resembles a phone booth

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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 · 02/08/2026

no I'm so sorry this was just a hypothetical example 😭😭 but I DO remember a lovely oneshot from the early days of the rwrb fandom called "we rolled up the carpet (so we could dance)"

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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

that way whenever they drop the next dumbass take du jour everyone actually reads the damn thing, having forgotten not to take them seriously as a publication

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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 · 27/07/2026

ahhhhhh yess it's such an incredible book MY GOD

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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I think you specifically would love it actually

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mel thomas @pagemelt.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

like if this book came out today you'd better believe there'd be a substack called "'Possession: A Romance' Romanticizes Cheating" which: yeah, it does. and it's fun to read lol. perhaps novelists who want to write interesting books should take note !!

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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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