Twitter is eating itself 🐦
➕ Democrats have retained control of the US Senate, & learning to code via the Backstreet Boys 🤓🤘
Morning my angels!! Happy Monday from New Zealand!!! Now - I can see other are a bunch of new faces here this morning so - HI - I’m Luce, and I write a daily newsy to help you keep up with all things news/pop culture/ internet/ future/ harry styles to try and make your life a lil easier (I’ll also try to talk about the ✨news✨ without making you feel like shit)!!! (You’ll also notice that I use a lot of !!!!, that’s just a lil insight into my brain/ what I’m like as a person for ya.)
For all my regular pen pals - you’re right in thinking that this email looks slightly dif this morning - that’s because we’ve moved from Revue to Substack to send this thing. We’ve been planning to move somewhere new for aaaaages, but when Elon bought Twitter and the platform basically started spontaneously combusting we thought ‘what better time than now to make the jump??’ (also, there are murmurings that they’re just gonna straight up shut down Revue and we don’t wanna accidentally lose you all.)
And if you’re here because you heard me talking about giving away tickets to The 1975 (yes I am still deep in my Matty Healy era) stay tuned for more info later in the week!!!
Now that we’ve got all the housekeeping out of the way… let’s talk about my weekend eh? Kinda fitting that I intro’d this with ‘housekeeping’ coz that’s legit what I’ve been doing all weekend. I just moved into a new house and we’re in the early stages of having to furnish it/ make it a home etc - and for those of you who are incredibly environmental people (as in, your environment affects your mood/productivity) you’ll understand me when I say IT’S STRESSING ME OUT THAT WE DON’T HAVE A COUCH/ ALL THE THINGS WE NEED! Needless to say, we spent the weekend op-shopping and scouring Facebook Marketplace for some deals.
In between trying to find a bargain, we of COURSE made time to watch the Black Ferns beat England in the Rugby World Cup final!! Honestly, this was the best game of rugby I’ve seen in SUCH a long time, and our wahine really did just fucking KILL it out there. It was also just amazing to look around the pub and see SO MANY PEOPLE showing up for women’s rugby - ugh, we love to see it.
I also need to make a quick shoutout to the ladies I met at an event I spoke at on Friday who chanted ‘Luce! Luce! Luce!’ as I made my way on stage - I know you’re all now subbed to the newsy, so HI, and ILY, and THANK YOU FOR THE CONFIDENCE BOOST.
Damn, enough about me now… let’s get into some news, shall we?
Elon let anyone buy a blue tick and Twitter ate itself
Democrats have retained control of the US Senate
How the Backstreet Boys Taught Me to Code
Alanis Morissette Says She Dropped Out of Rock Hall of Fame Performance Because of Sexism and Disrespect Among Production Team
What seat do you prefer on a plane?
Elon let anyone buy a blue tick and Twitter ate itself
Who here is surprised that people on the internet got the opportunity to buy a blue verification tick for $8 and didn’t just use it normally/ as intended??? Not me! For anyone who missed it, over the weekend people were buying up blue ticks left right and centre and… using them to impersonate other people/ brands. I must say, this led to some of the internet’s greatest comedy, but also, some companies saw their share prices plummet based on fake tweets.
Case in point: someone impersonated pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly (who usually charge hundreds of dollars for insulin) and said that it would now be free, causing their stocks to plummet:
And then Bernie Sanders dunked on them further:
And there are a bunch more Greatest Hits from the weekend included in my silly lil round-up over on Insta:
Democrats have retained control of the US Senate
After Catherine Cortez Masto saw victory in Nevada, it was confirmed that Democrats have retained control of the Senate, meaning ✨in the simplest terms✨ Republicans won’t just be able to block Biden’s decisions for new judges out of principle. Yep - this means that “should a Supreme Court seat become vacant due to an unexpected retirement or death of a justice, the Republicans would not be able to block Mr Biden's choice.”
We’re still waiting to see what’s going to happen with the House of Representatives, but naturally, I’ll keep you in the loop!
How the Backstreet Boys Taught Me to Code
I’m putting this in here because it’s the most LUCE thing I’ve read this weekend. I basically owe my whole career to being a One Direction stan (as I’ve talked about here) because it gave me SO many skills that I’ve transferred into the job I’m doing now (community building, editing, building websites etc etc etc) so, any time I see someone else talking about the fandom-to-career pipeline I WANT TO SHARE IT TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSS!
This piece is written by Torie Bosch in Slate’s Future Tense newsletter, and it’s all about how being a Backstreet Boys fan is the reason she’s in her now ‘tech adjacent’ career:
My mother had purchased my family’s first home computer a few years before, and one day, I found the Backstreet Boys internet. It introduced me to hundreds of other teenage girls who shared my passion for sugary songs and smoothly executed choreography. Eventually, I had to start my own site, where I would publish both my own and other people’s fan fiction. To do that, I needed skills. I needed to learn HTML.
Fandom offers a wonderful opportunity for young people, especially girls, to develop some tech skills in a low-key, friendly way. For Claire and me, it was HTML. After us came One Direction fans, who, as Kaitlyn Tiffany explores in her fascinating recent book Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, engaged in far more sophisticated organizing, including running massive social media campaigns that would make marketing execs at major companies vomit with envy.
This isn’t a hot take (espesh not for those of you who’ve heard me say this time and time again) but the more we chat about and accept that 1) young women are allowed to be fans of things and shouldn’t be made fun of for it, and 2) you learn fucking imp skills by being in a fandom and shouldn’t be afraid to put them on your CV - the better!!
Alanis Morissette Says She Dropped Out of Rock Hall of Fame Performance Because of Sexism and Disrespect Among Production Team
Speaking of fandom, this year I have become the BIGGEST Alanis Morissette fan, and somehow this news flew under my radar (thank god for Liv and her Culture Vulture newsletter for keeping me up to date) (I guess you could say 🎶I Oughtta Known🎶) Anyway, after teasing us with a potential Olivia Rodrigo/ Alanis Morissette duet (the two had even rehearsed it the night before), Alanis pulled out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, due to their ‘anti-women’ sentiment. Here’s what she wrote on her Instagram story:
“Firstly, I have to say how much I adore Carly Simon and Olivia Rodrigo and Dolly Parton and Janet Jackson and Pat Benatar and Sheryl Crow and Pink and Brandi Carlile and Sara Bareilles — and all the amazing people and artists who were there.
I have spent decades in an industry that is rife with an overarching anti-woman sentiment and have tolerated a lot of condescension and disrespectfulness, reduction, dismissiveness, contract-breaching, unsupportiveness, exploitation and psychological violence (and more) throughout my career.
I tolerated it because nothing would stop me from connecting with those who I cared about and resonated with. I live to serve and connect with people and so over the years I sucked it up on more occasions than I can count in order to do so. It’s hard not to be affected in any industry around the world, but Hollywood has been notorious for its disrespect of the feminine in all of us.
Thankfully, I am at a point in my life where there is no need for me to spend time in an environment that reduces women.”
Whatever went down at that rehearsal to spark this last-minute pull-out, we may never know, but I respect the shit out of knowing what you’re worth & saying no to the things that aren’t serving you, so go off Alanis!!
Today’s mundane poll:
Elon's Twitter Takeover, Explained (The Shit Show Podcast)
Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Mescal, & Selena Gomez's New Doco (Culture Vulture Podcast)
7.3 magnitude earthquake hits Tonga, triggering temporary tsunami advisory (CBS)
TECH Sam Bankman-Fried steps down as FTX CEO as his crypto exchange files for bankruptcy (CNBC)
A federal judge calls student loan relief unlawful, deepening limbo for borrowers (NPR)
Deep-fried memes: what are they and why do they matter? (Dazed)
Watch My Policeman here!! (Our partnership with Prime Video)
SYSCA playlists (✨Supporters only✨)
Our HUGE SYSCA reading list! (✨Supporters only✨)
Thank you for changing to substack! I thought about suggesting it to you a couple of times, but I didn't want to tell you how to run your business. And amazing job converting everyone over without us all having to sign up again. 🥰
Omg MADE MY MORNING to see you move to Substack! Now all my fav newsies are on here (SYSCA, Emily Writes, Webworm, and the Spinny ones too)