Riley MacLeod
@rcmacleod
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Co-founder, @Aftermath_site . Previously: Next Generation Audiences @washingtonpost , @LauncherWP , @kotaku . Trans; he/him. riley (at) aftermath (dot) site
Brooklyn NY
Joined October 2010
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Pinned Tweet
Introducing
@Aftermath_site
, a new website started by
@LukePlunkett
@xoxogossipgita
@Vahn16
@Papapishu
and me! We're worker-owned, reader-supported, and you can learn more about why we missed blogging so much that we started a media company here:
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Warner Bros. Scrubs Cartoon Network Website, Erasing Years of History
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I finally read the "no one under 25 should transition i guess?" article and: I went to an informed consent clinic at 20. I looked up lots of places to go and it seemed like the one where they wouldn't deny me hormones because I was gay and didn't like sports
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To the folks already telling me saying which character in TLOU2 is trans is a spoiler: it's only a spoiler if you think trans people's genders, unlike cis people's, are meant to surprise you. Despite what decades of trans storylines may have led you to believe, they are not.
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I guess this is my chance to tweet the tweet I used to rehearse in my head: at least for a bit, a transexual ran Kotaku, which is an objectively kickass statement
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I don't know what this scaremongering world is where idk you go to talk to a dr about hormones and they jab them into you immediately, but if real (IF??) maybe that's not a problem with trans people wanting hormones?
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Media execs don’t want the sites, they just want the names
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I had to have one session with a therapist, who did not try to ferret out what trauma turned me trans. I had to get blood work, and talk to drs about what they knew and didn't know about T. Once I was eligible for the script, I still got to decide when to accept it and fill it
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Every person who writes an "is it too easy to transition" article should have to attempt to refill a testosterone prescription
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I don't think this about 10k in any other aspect of my life, but 10k is a literally meaningless amount against my balance and interest rate
White House officials are leaning toward canceling up to $10,000 in student loan debt for borrowers who make less than $125,000, sources tell CNN.
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You don't need charts and breakdowns of Xbox's new Game Pass tiers to see what's happening here: things that cost more and work for you less, because everything is rotting from the top
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A journalist's first responsibility is to readers, not to what a company might prefer
Valve's baffling Deadlock decisions don't need defending
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@AlfordAlice
sometimes i like to yell "i studied theology, how did you think this was going to go?!" at my student loan bills
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I don't say this kind of thing often, because I don't like the idea that your work might only have one home, but here's an essay I really don't think I could publish anywhere but Kotaku. Grateful today, despite today.
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Well, after almost five and a half years, today's my last day at Kotaku. I'm so sad to be leaving all my incredible colleagues, but I'm so excited for the great things I know they'll keep doing without me.
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Gender reveals are obviously dumb, but it seems real unfair that when cis people do them they get to blow shit up, while I just got to fill out a bunch of forms and make my parents cry
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So if I'm reading this right, the overall AI pitch is that we should give the job-stealing machine the things we made at our jobs so that it can steal our jobs, but this will be... good for us? Because... movies are going to be video games, which we already have? Am I following?
This New York Times piece confirms much of what I said on my Thursday newsletter, while also adding that Meta is so desperate for data they considered buying Simon and Schuster! I am cooking!!!
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This article has been gnawing at me since I read it. I've seen some critiques, but I think what's filling me with the dreaded Feelings is that the researchers aim to follow the subjects for 20 years. That is, you may know, about how long I've been trans.
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The games journalist debate over whether to cover the contents of the Insomniac hack raises questions about what games journalism is, and when else we should put people ahead of hype
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🔥
NYU Game Center faculty penned an open letter in support of student protestors Tuesday. We spoke with them to learn more about the decision and the role political expression plays in game design.
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A moving and difficult article on Karen and Henry Berg (gift link)
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I wrote a bit more about how you can turn down drinks in Cyberpunk, which as a sober person (Still! Can you believe it?!) is really cool:
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Thinking about how when I started at Kotaku, our tips and guides largely took the form of " before you play" posts. They were never big traffic doers, but their tail was OK. The writer was often, but not always, also the reviewer of the game, and they weren't super onerous to do
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I used to work holiday weekends at a video game website
NEW: Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) says gun control measures would likely not be taken up until after Senate Memorial Day recess
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And here's this longitudinal study and the outcome it's reporting so far is "trans people still trans," something that maybe feels useful or interesting or important to cis parents/gatekeepers/politicians but is, in my opinion anyway, not terribly useful to any trans people?
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I don't know how you could own a site as special as Kotaku and so energetically mismanage what's special about it, but here we are
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Some personal news: absolutely delighted to announce I'm joining the talented team at
@LauncherWP
as assignment editor! I'm so excited to help out the great journalists there, and to learn from all the brilliant folks around the Post newsroom! Please send me all your DC advice.
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This story is heartbreaking and also amazing
"'You’ve got to deal with us, because God has called us into this church,' he said. 'It’s not your church to kick us out of — this is God’s church, and God has called us and engrafted us into it.'"
EXCLUSIVE: A Catholic diocesan hermit has come out as transgender — believed to be the first in the Roman Catholic Church to do so — with permission of his bishop, John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky.
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It's been a tough week, but here's some good (personal) news: I'm 100 days sober today. I feel anxious tweeting about it, but when I started I told myself I'd talk about it if I got this far.
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I'm a
#RealLiveTransAdult
with a master's in theology from Harvard. I can debunk any hate "good Christians" give you. Send 'em my way. ;)
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Back when we started a trans press, we had this sad joke "oh, it thinks it's people"--that some media talks abt trans people doing people stuff like you talk abt your dog when it walks on its hinds legs. He looks great, but I promise you "guy takes off shirt" is not a news story
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What a time for layoffs and closures to be ripping through the games journalism space, which has been covering this fact for years
New: The military told service members last month, "Don’t post anything in Discord that you wouldn’t want seen by the general public." Hundreds of top secret documents were already there
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Fascinated by the use of the word "success" in today's terrible Bethesda news-- if making good games that people love, and making all the Microsoft numbers go up, isn't enough, I simply don't know what is
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"writers and editors are assigned points value..."
EXCLUSIVE: Jezebel editor-in-chief Laura Bassett resigned from her post on Friday, as staffers say CEO Jim Spanfeller has become impossible to work for.
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I’m in charge of Kotaku today, please witness the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done:
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I'm 1000 days sober! I remember a friend attaining this number and me thinking "well that's impossible," but now here we are! What a world!
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Beard icicles is the most gender-affirming thing that’s ever happened to me
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Normal industry
GAMURS announced a $12 million Series A funding round today—but the real story is how the company's jarringly low freelance rates reflect the general underpayment of freelancers across the industry. Read my
@Digiday
🚨deep dive🚨 into GAMURS' pay practices:
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So I used to work in a prison (as a chaplain) and the ‘solution’ isn’t putting kids in prison with their parents, it’s getting rid of fucking prisons.
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@RenOrRaven
i am so boggled by this! are they advocating for... idk a return to the "real life test"? The outrage over "maybe ppl don't tell a doctor everything bc then they won't get hormones" thing that is like...literally how it worked everywhere before??
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Like, there's nothing wrong with studying any of this, more power to them I guess, but if you want to know if trans people are still trans long-term, you got an awful lot of data already floating around!
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I want to be a disaffected radical about Biden acknowledging trans folks in his speech, but I've spent a lot of the last four years worrying it would become impossible for me to keep living this version of myself in this country, so I'm going to go with it
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Stealth takedowns in Echo are a *terrible* idea. I don't think an NPC has ever done this to me in a game.
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Having read all these articles, I've been thinking about the weird arc of the "trans doubt" narrative. I feel like, through lit, we became "allowed" to talk about the sometimes messy reality of trans lives, and now that's getting used against us in the current ""culture war""
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Here are a lot of thoughts about Cyberpunk 2077, a game I'm not nearly through. There's good, there's bad, I'm exhausted but happy we can start talking about the game instead of its marketing
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Anyway I'm spending the evening trying to figure out if I should finally get a hysterectomy, research which thusfar has included parsing through the same urban legends and guesswork I've been hearing since the early 2000s
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Very trans joke: is there a "have you read Nevada" take in here somewhere, is that anything
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At long, long last, I had trans thoughts about TLOU2. They're complicated! Ultimately, I don't think the game does anything with its queer themes, but also I think that's fine--I don't need it to.
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I feel like this blog is going to go down as the most relevant thing I ever write and it's real depressing
Media execs don’t want the sites, they just want the names
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I wrote about how often folks called things "young" or "new" in yesterday's interviews about Judas. Come read me think way too hard about Ken Levine
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@jackmirkinson
this whole "kids get hormones after 20 minutes" makes me crazy. I've been on T for nearly 20 years and my last refill took a month and a half--I'm not even being rushed into the prescription I already get!
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I've been on T for 18 years today! My day began by arguing with my dad about how "too much testosterone" didn't make me bald because I actually take too little of it since I don't do my shot regularly enough, but *anyway*
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I got so riled up about this idea that I can't evaluate my own feelings about my transition that I wrote a blog
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I saw my doctor the other month and asked him some long-term health questions--am I worried about menopause? osteoporosis?-- and he told me he didn't know, that no one (that he knew of, anyway) had really studied these questions.
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Welp, my brief tenure as Launcher boss has come to an end. I've been offered a position elsewhere at the Post, but I'm heartbroken I had so little time to lead this great team. Devastated to turn my big 2023 dreams for the desk into plans for how to wind things down instead
Today The Washington Post decided to lay off five members of the Launcher team and sunset the site. I’m heartbroken to lose
@LeaderGrev
,
@JhaanElker
,
@pithyalyse
,
@Shannon_Liao
and
@Vahn16
to The Post's layoffs. 🧵
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Had a rant at
@xoxogossipgita
this evening about our frustration with ‘it gets better’ rhetoric and just want to say if you’re a young queer who follows me, your life is worth living *now*, even if it’s hard as hell, and you have a ton of adults who survived and belive in you
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Here's a wild tweet: I'm two years sober today! Getting through this year has been a challenge, but not drinking remains a decision that feels awesome even when it feels terrible. Here's hoping the next year is, at the least, a little more fun.
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It will never not be a mystery to me what the money men think people want to do on the internet
Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, speaking at Investor Day, just one week after laying off its entire News team: "Over the next few years, generative AI will replace the majority of static content"
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I’ve been on hormones for 17 years (!!) today, which means my secondary sex characteristics are now old enough to bang up their first car because they looked away from the road to send a boy they like a funny TikTok.
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I used to tell writers it’s always OK to write a garbage first draft—you can’t fix something that doesn’t exist—but I’m currently writing a garbage first draft and it’s not OK at all, my advice was filthy lies and I’m sorry
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While talk of TLOU2 trans stuff is going around, here’s a spoiler-filled content note we wrote for the game. Minor spoilery thoughts thread about the character follows, which feels worth sharing to me for trans folks who are worried about playing the game:
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I wrote about TLOU's third episode: I think it does some beautiful and unexpected things with its source material, but it still falls into certain tropes about queer deaths
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I wrote a thing about bummer tweets
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Subtweet: we don't have to do "which generation did protest better," movements are inter-generational and build off each other, we don't have to reduce the arc of history to a buzzfeed quiz
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Good morning, Twitter! I’m six months sober today, which makes me Officially More Awesome than all the other things that will happen today
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It's me, still trans! There are far too few trans guys in my line of work, which I feel sad about a lot, but I don't know how wholeheartedly I can encourage you to become a journalist these days, since surely your life is hard enough. But I hope your day is good!
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I really appreciate seeing these grafs in an article about this topic. It's something that always sorta gnaws at me when we talk about these bills--that the harmful, even deadly outcomes of them are...how I grew up, how maybe a lot of you grew up
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Tenacious D canceling their tour let me dig into how much everyone, from politicians to regular people, are struggling to figure out how to talk about the Trump thing
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Going step by step through the Epic Games Store is definitely high on my list of highlights from this trial
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"If we let [trans] men in, and they go naked at the pool, that’s when it’s obvious that there’s no penis." Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but I own *limitless* penises, if not enough of them is a problem you're having.
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The allegations of mistreatment on "Beast Games," like so much of the darker aspects of both reality TV and MrBeast's style of work, are symptoms of the systems that prop him up working as intended
The MrBeast reality show allegations shouldn't be a surprise
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I was a lonely kid, but now I'm a
#RealLiveTransAdult
w/ amazing trans friends who love me even when I don't love me. We're waiting for you.
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Hey, I'm 5 years sober today. I wouldn't call it a winning year for my sobriety, but I did stay sober for it, which is the important win. Here's to not being this Simpsons joke so much in year 6.
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"The cost of transphobia is material...It’s the difference between having a shot at growing up with some bodily autonomy and having to buy back that right as a privilege in adulthood — if you can afford it. It is an attack on trans people as a class."
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In the grand tradition of eating shit, I present:
*Sigh* Riley is one of the people who Googled "eyes hurt" after the eclipse
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Delighted to announce my first day as Managing Editor
@Kotaku
. Honored to be helping out such a great team.
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I think I will not wait on hold for an estimated 30 minutes to see if my T refill is held up by the clinic supposedly trying to get in touch with me for appointments/bloodwork I literally just got for the medication I've been taking for 19 years, thank you
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I'm a year sober today! Part of that year, dear god, was *this* year, which took away most of my cool new sober hobbies and gave us all a lot of things to drink about. But here I am anyway--take that, 2020! Here's a scene from BoJack that made me cry recently.
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Dear everyone responding to that tweet by explaining how little games journos make, I bet you could own the hell out of that guy by joining a union
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So
@xoxogossipgita
found out there was an Alan Wake skin in Fortnite and challenged me to write Alan Wake writing about himself in Fortnite, in the style of Alan Wake. It is the dumbest, funniest thing I've ever done, and led me to create this amazing gif
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I try not to engage with this stuff but "trans people can't tell if they regret transition" is some truly next-level shit
I love it when they announce in advance that they are going to keep moving the goalposts.
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I’ve been at Kotaku for four years today! I’ve learned a lot of new skills, tormented a lot of writers with my editing pedantry, shown up through a lot of chaos without (I think!) getting hopeless or mean, and I still have *some* hair left, so that’s not too bad.
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"Maybe it’s the pandemic solitude talking, but hearing another trans man’s voice through my headphones made me uncharacteristically tear up." Tell Me Why hit me in all the trans feels. Really excited to see where the story goes:
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@annamerlan
Hello this is not a tweet about how long it took me to learn that she’s a real person and not a Twin Peaks joke, I swear it wasn’t at least a year
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Another thing I'm sad about: I said this back in my Kotaku days, but that this is the second time in my career I got to be a trans person running a games desk is astonishing. It feels like the kind of job they simply don't hire people like me for. (Uh I guess they don't lol/sob)
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@laracroftbarbie
i recently talked to my doctor about the shitty care i get at [doctor place] and i was still like, omg i shouldn't rock the boat or sound ungrateful though, and where else would i even get hormones oh no...
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Headlines about tempering Summer Game Fest expectations led me to look into how many times we've been asked to get on and off the hype train
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"The current threat of AI is not that it is going to be used to make highly compelling content that will replace human jobs. Instead, it will be used to flood every possible platform with low quality bullshit that is impossible to sort through."
TVs are becoming algorithmic feeds designed to show you targeted advertising in between AI-generated and low-effort garbage, just like everywhere else
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I'm not an H P person (I read one of the book once?) but I'm sad so many trans folks are hurt by this recent stuff, so here's a feel-good motivational speech for trans folks who are bummed right now: it's a downer that she sucks, but you actually don't need her.
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If I had this much money, I would fund the staff of a newspaper
A real estate company backed by Jeff Bezos is entering the housing market.
The new platform lets people purchase shares of single-family rental properties.
Yahoo News says the "startup will allow you to become a landlord in just 10 minutes and you only need $100."
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how often do you think the phrase "fatal blow" has been used in government-related news this year
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You guys, is Bob Ross, like, the original streamer, filming himself talking while doing stuff? Is that why Twitch is doing this?
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I appreciate the transparency in this newsletter, and also found this part really resonant: in this new landscape, what does it mean that so many of us are starting businesses when we... aren't inherently that interested in running businesses?
Kind of hard to promo this one. It’s just: lotta words about little newsletter (esp. what didn’t work)
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All right, lord help me, I'm wading into The Current Trans Discourse, much because it's a chance to talk about some stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about re Being A (Nearly) 40 Year Old Trans Guy In 2021 On The Internet
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Thanks to your conversations with me here, I've got a blog about rumors, why journalism can feel so weird and hard to trust, and the particular challenges all this faces in games
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