Oliver Moss

New Album coming? Free DL of old album? Collab T-shirt with Homestarr Runner???

* And another hour long interview that seems very worth my time just dropped. I still haven't finished the What Chaos interview with Robbie. Just need to take all the HR content a sip at a time. Well, not all the content. I don't need to see all ten thousand promo vids, but all the content that I want to get to is going to last me a whiiiiille.

* For most of the season the Kraken had a lot of top players in the Injured Reserve list. We aaaaalmost have everyone back except Murray. Which means we might be able to do something wacky called 'play a game with the roster we intended for this season'.

But the downside is returning players means we need at least one person off the roster, and only a few can do so without waivers. ( Hockey talk )

Sens could easily have a large chunk of the fastest growing demographic in hockey fall in their lap. Just, a giant pile of money fall in their laps, and they are working hard to make sure it doesn't happen.

The Sens, on top of everything else, signed a famous homophobe this morning. As a goalie, even!

( Spoilers for, uh, the synopsis of the upcoming Heated Rivalry sequel )

There is a listing on B&N's website for a special edition of a 7th Game Changer book called Unrivaled, that sounds like a 3rd Shane/Ilya book. Reid had been teasing an anthology a bit ago, which would be a misdirect, but it's possible this is not a novel, it's an anthology that has a Shane/Ilya story in it.

* This is an unlisted youtube video that is Canadian news special from 2010 about the Legacy of Brendan Burke. In it, a then current NHL player confirms that there are gay players, their teams know, and other details. Also, it mentions a 'cancelled press conference' that was going to be about a player coming out.

Weird thing is, I swear to you I remember hearing about that press conference thing way back then. I wasn't into hockey then, but I knew people on LJ who were and also people who just were hype for queer news.

* Anyway, I am making references posts for myself of links to things like that. I also need to start one for some HR media about things Jacob Tierny and others have said, because they said cool thing... but if I ever quote them I want sources. There has just been so much media... so many good statements, François Arnaud pushing back against bullshit criticisms of the show, etc. I need to make like a personal reference index... eventually.

Earlier today I decided to gently, carefully, with references, talk to some people in my local discord - as in, these are people I know IRL - that ConformityGate is not real. It's easy to debunk ConformityGate because some of their 'proof' are claims that certain things happened on the show, but those things did not happen. You can just screepcap or clip and 'no, that is not what happened, they literally made shit up, here is what actually happened.'

If you have remained blissfully unaware, it's Byler Truther bullshit. Unhinged Stranger Things fans who learned nothing from being humiliated in Scriptgate.

Don't ask me what Scriptgate is, because I will explain and you will take 1d4 psychic damage

Now, it's being covered by MoistCr1TiKaL, a very prominent youtuber. 17.6 million subscribers. Their collective meltdown is big enough to be covered by Charlie of all people. jfc....

ESPN did an amazing podcast on Hobey Baker, an early hockey star who was queer. The research is really well done and the problems of researching historical queer figures is well handled.

Also, I a tumblr post that is very short, but a primer on looking into queer hockey. Basically, a quick overview of who Hobey Baker, Brock McGillis and Luke Prokop are. It's a starting point for people wanting to look into things.

I wrote it a while back, if I was writing it now I'd include Brendan Burke who did not play pro hockey and died young in a car accident. His father is Brian Burke was President of the Maple Leafs at the time and helped launch the You Can Play initiative in honor of his son, and did other things aimed at ending homophobia in the sport. He is now the Executive Director of the PWHL (top level women's league currently growing at a rapid pace in the US. Go Torrent! No, I mean, Torrent is the name of a team, you can watch the games on youtube. No need to torrent.)

Anyway, the PWHL has lots of lesbians, and one of the Seattle goalies is non-binary. There's going to be TWO expansion drafts this summer so IDK if we can keep them, we'll see. After the next expansion draft they aren't doing any new teams for a whole so we wont have players constantly jumbled around. It looks like Dallas and Denver are getting the last two teams. It's not confirmed, but most people are assuming those are the places.

* I am a big fan of shows being weekly. I powered through Stranger Things like it was my job yesterday to avoid being more spoiled. I want media that respects my time. It's also better for fandom.

Interestingly, in his second What Chaos interview Jacob Tierney said it's better for him as a creator. He can better tell what is hitting and what is not when the shows come out weekly. The feedback he wants to polish his craft doesn't exist in the binge model.

* Fandom has had top/bottom discourse forever. 99% of it is bad faith. First off all, yes, some gay people *do* identify as tops and bottoms. It was more common in the 80s and 90s, but it's still a thing that happens and is part of North American gay culture. (And elsewhere, but I am talking about NA here) Also, tagging a character as a top or bottom in a fic isn't a big fucking deal, it's telling people what type of smut to expect.

So, anyway, neither Shane or Ilya have top or bottom as part of their identity, but they have clear roles sexually. When the books were adapted by a gay man he didn't soften that, he leaned into it. I am shattered that my mind isn't dirty enough to have picked up on team logos being either phallic or.... peach-tastic. He assigned whole teams as tops and bottoms. Boston and Dallas? Tops. Montreal and San Jose San Francisco? Bottoms.

He's not being serious. It's a joke, a joke that works because, yes, tops and bottoms are things in NA-based gay culture. Even though, yes, a significant percentage of gay men don't actually engage in that.

It's a really bad sign of how much long-term fannish discourse has gotten into my head that seeing a gay man divide the entire NHL into tops and bottoms as a joke feels so good. I've been hearing people scream online that the concept of tops and bottoms doesn't exist outside of women fetishizing gay men, but that bullshit take only works online. There is a section of people in fandom who spend all day online and post a lot who really need to crack a window. I've known multiple gay men who ID this way, and it's usually a bit tongue in cheek. But yeah, me tagging who tops in a fic is not that big of a fucking deal, people need to settle down.

* Related to my last point about the section of online fandom that needs to crack a window... Before Heated Rivalry came out there was a creator whose deep dives on the books were the top google and youtube search results. He's had to private those videos and most of his content because when the show blew up the most detached-from-reality online discourses latched onto his videos and spewed comments that don't even make sense. It's just concentrated, fermented discourse that some people have made their entire personality. They were telling him his experiences and identity as a gay man weren't valid over and over again to the point where he mostly erased his entire foray into content creation because he couldn't handle the sheer volume of people saying the same things to him over and over.

* The Murder Between Us by Tal Bauer - I don't have to have Tal Bauer fomo anymore! A lot of m/m fans love his work, but most of the summaries were off-putting to me. No more fomo, I do not like his style. Melodramatic AF

* Snake Eater by T Kingfisher - I want to read more by Kingfisher. I liked this, but I DNF'd her earlier work Paladin's Grace. She's just going to be hot or miss for me and that's okay. Is it just me or ( Spoilers )

* 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi - My first Scalzi book. I've heard odd things about a few of his books so I never read them. This was more of a novella and it was an Amazon First free read so I nabbed it. At first I thought it started with an expo dump, but then things begun to click. It stayed with me a bit, I kept thinking about it. I liked it.

* The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy by Roan Parrish - Another established m/m author I'd never read. It was overstuffed, tried to do to much, wound up a mess. The sex scenes involving an AFAB trans person were great and didn't feel like the writer was trying to explain things to me, the reader. But yeah, pass.

My DNF pile for the year includes Paladin's Grace, Him and Check, Please. I nearly DNF'd The Murder Between Us, but decided to push through even as I rolled my eyes more and more. Not finishing a book makes me feel like I have too many open tabs, so I finished it just so my brain could close that tab and not think about it, try to keep the plot fresh in my mind.