Sorry, there's no big essay or interview this week. Instead, here are a bunch of topics which I thought about writing a whole newsletter about — but everything I had to say, I realized I could say in a paragraph or two. Basically, it's five rants for the price of one. I hope you enjoy! (If enjoy is the right word for rants. Please send me your thoughts on this.) 

But before I unleash the mini rants… here’s just a reminder that you can get signed, personalized copies of any of my books from Green Apple Books here in San Francisco. They ship all over the USA! (Please put in the “comments” field if you want personalization, especially if you want something specific.) You can even pre-order a signed/personalized copy of my upcoming adult novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster, about a young witch who teaches her mother how to do magic.

With that out of the way, here are some short rants!

Sony’s Marvel Films Were a Missed Opportunity

This past weekend saw the end of the Sony Marvel universe as we know it. (Or whatever you want to call it.) Basically, Sony Pictures owns the rights to any character who’s featured in the Spider-Man comics — but not any other Marvel Comics characters. That's why we've gotten movies for Venom, Madame Web, Morbius the Living Vampire, and now Kraven the Hunter. The utter failure of the Kraven movie means that Sony is probably done making Spider-Man movies that don’t star Spider-Man.

In retrospect, it feels like a huge missed opportunity. Why did we get a freaking Morbius film — and not Silver and Black, the scrapped film about female antiheroes Black Cat and Silver Sable which was supposed to be directed by Gina Prince-Blythewood (who directed The Old Guard and The Woman King)?

In particular, I can't stop thinking about how cool it could have been do a movie about the Daily Bugle. We know the Daily Bugle newspaper exists in the world of Sony’s Marvel movies, because it shows up as an Easter egg in the new Kraven movie:

I'm envisioning a tense newspaper drama set in the world of Spider-Man, featuring Ben Urich and Robbie Robertson. It could be a bit like The Paper starring Glenn Close, or The Post starring Meryl Streep: possibly spanning a 24-hour period as Urich and Robertson try to break a single huge story. (While also dealing with J. Jonah Jameson’s attempts to insert bias into the process.)

This hypothetical film could have taken place in the '90s, before newspapers started going downhill. Or it could have taken place in the present day, with social media discourse shaping the newspaper’s coverage.

In my ideal version of this movie, we might glimpse Spider-Man swinging by the window a few times, and there could be a few references to getting that Parker kid to take some photos. But we wouldn't need to see the face of Tom Holland or Andrew Garfield at all. The focus would be on journalistic ethics and how to remain honest in our new compromised age of journalism. Please send me back in time several years so I can pitch this movie to Amy Pascal.

Wanna fight fascism? Stop attacking the homeless

The rise of fascism is a bit like the Matrix: it's all around us, it's in everything we do, and we can barely see it clearly because we're in the middle of it. Trans people and immigrants are certainly on the front lines of the current fascist onslaught, but for most liberal city dwellers, the thin end of fascism’s wedge will be the attack on the unhoused. As much as 2025 is going to suck for a whole lot of people, it's especially going to suck for anyone who has no place to live.

And here’s the thing: it’s not Republicans who are eager to persecute people who don’t have a home. It’s Democrats. It’s big-city mayors and other officials. There’s an effort to create a class of non-people who can be abused without consequence, and the Democrats are leading the charge.

I wrote before about the reasons why we feel so comfortable scapegoating unhoused people, but this situation is getting worse. The Supreme Court just gave cities a blank check to abuse the most vulnerable of their residents. And it appears a majority of people in so-called liberal cities have no problem treating people on the streets like actual garbage, instead of human beings. If you are a Democrat who yells about being part of the resistance, but you think it's okay to clear out homeless encampments and strip people of their civil rights merely for not having a fixed abode, then guess what? You are a foot soldier of fascism. Seriously, that's all I have to say.

I want a tense thriller about the Medicare Act

It's about to be the sixtieth anniversary of the passage of the Medicare Act in 1965.

Shamefully, it took twenty years after the end of World War II to pass a national healthcare law — and in the end, the efforts to cover everyone fell short. But the wrangling over the actual 1965 Medicare bill is fascinating to read about.

As this NIH paper shows, there were a lot of different ways Medicare could have gone, including a semi-privatized version (similar to the Medicare Advantage plans we have now) which Senator Jacob Javits was pushing pretty hard. A lot of people don't even know that Medicare, from the beginning, was designed to use private insurance companies to process claims — nowadays, these are known as carriers. This was by no means a foregone conclusion: there was almost a version of Medicare that was entirely administered by the government. (Which would make it much easier to eliminate private insurance and move to Medicare For All.)

At the center of these debates was Wilbur Mills, a larger-than-life congressman from Arkansas who later pushed through more progressive taxation in 1969 — and was eventually brought down by his association with an Argentinian stripper named Fanne Fox.

So I am craving a taut, high-energy TV show about the fight to pass Medicare into law. Give me the full Sorkin. (But not actual Sorkin, please.) I want highwire meetings, hallway monologues, startling reversals, secret scandals and dramatic reversals. Make us feel the miracle that was the 1965 Medicare act — both how incredible it is that it happened, and how easily it could have been either better or worse.

It’s time for low-budget, DIY movies and TV

I just watched the first episode of a TV show called Davey and Jonesie's Locker on Hulu, which I've been meaning to check out for ages. It's an extremely silly comedy about female friendship and having an interdimensional portal in your high-school locker. It seriously looks like it was made for a tiny fraction of what an episode of House of the Dragon costs.

Lately, I just really crave TV and movies that look cheap. Bonus points if they're silly and kind of outrageous. On the TV side, I've talked a lot about my love of Extraordinary and the Brazilian show Back to 15, and there are a handful of other low budget, goofy TV shows that I've loved lately. On the movie side, my two favorite films of the year are Hundreds of Beavers and The People's Joker: they don't have much in common, other than looking like they were made with sofa-cushion money and being completely off-the-chain. They both use virtual backgrounds that look amateurish as heck, and feature physical comedy in a surreal void. 

Why do I love DIY-looking TV and movies? Part of it is just a reaction to the fact that most Hollywood entertainment these days looks ridiculously expensive and lavish, which a lot of people are starting to get tired of. With high budgets often comes a certain blandness. But also, this defiantly indie/cheap aesthetic feels subversive in this age of corporate domination: it's the equivalent of those direct-to-VHS movies that I obsessively watched as a youngster. I predict that the next few years will see a flowering of micro-budget, maximally-ambitious, utterly ridiculous entertainment. And I am here for it.

James Bond needs to embrace science fiction

It’s time for a new James Bond — and given the way No Time To Die ended, we’re liable to get another soft reboot, like when Daniel Craig took over the role in 2006. After approximately 10 billion Bond films, it’s also time for a new approach once again. My suggestion? Lean into science fiction.

James Bond films have always been techno-thrillers, often involving fanciful tech like that wacky DNA-based weapon in No Time To Die. But the technology in a James Bond film has divided neatly into two categories: 1) 1960s technology (what is normal in Bond’s world) 2) some outlandish futuristic tech that is the subject of the story, which is often a superweapon of some kind. (And Bond usually has two or three fancy gadgets.)

In other words, Bond movies haven’t really kept up with technological progress — but they continue to include a few random bits of technology that are basically magic.

James Bond is a 1960s guy who exists in our world — a world of ubiquitous surveillance, pernicious algorithms, poorly tested self-driving cars, drone warfare, and so on. There are some good stories to be told about a classic man in a world where everything, not just one shiny MacGuffin, is new and strange.

Music I Love Right Now

Walter “Wolfman” Washington was a singer and guitarist who mixed blues and funk. He was basically the heir to the great Johnny “Guitar” Watson — something he acknowledged by covering a bunch of Watson’s songs. Here he is doing his own version of Watson’s song, “You Can Stay But the Noise Must Go”:

I was lucky enough to meet Walter “Wolfman” Washington when he played a gig at a small club years ago, and I basically just talked to him about Johnny “Guitar” Watson. I also really love Washington’s cover of “Skin Tight” by the Ohio Players, and a ton of his original songs are fantastic as well. (The album Funk Is In the House is just non-stop greatness.)

Anyway, sadly, Washington passed away a couple years ago. His final album, released posthumously, is called I Feel So At Home, and there are no funk jams on it. Instead, it’s an album of jazzy torch songs, with some blues mixed in. It’s sweet and melancholy, with even the happy songs feeling bittersweet rather than upbeat. There is some pretty heavy orchestration on some of the tracks, even. The drums are buried pretty low in the mix, but Washington’s bluesy guitar still gets a starring role. It’s a haunting sendoff for someone who was a true original (despite the comparisons to Watson) and I love it a lot.

so annoying (but good (but annoying)) that the key to making stuff is to just make stuff. this also applies to doing stuff

sorry it's just that i am unfortunately thinking about this unbidden and disproportionately often these days

Like nearly everyone else on the internet, yesterday the staff of 404 Media learned the name “Luigi Mangione” and sprung into action. This ritual is now extremely familiar to journalists who cover mass shootings, but has now become familiar to anyone following a news story that has captured this much attention. We have a name. Now: Who is this person? Why did they do what they did?

In an incredibly fractured internet where there is rarely a single story everyone is talking about and where it is impossible to hold anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes at a time, the release of the name Luigi Mangione sparked the type of content feeding frenzy normally only seen with mass tragedy and reminiscent of an earlier internet age when people were mostly paying attention to the same thing at once.

The ritual goes like this. You have a name. You try to cross-reference officially-known details released by authorities with what you are able to glean online. Have you identified the correct “Luigi Mangione?” Then you begin Googling and screenshotting his accounts before some of them are inevitably taken down. Did he have a Twitter account? An Instagram? A Facebook? A Substack? Did he post about the [tragedy and/or news event]? What were his hobbies and beliefs? Who did he follow? What did he post? Did what they post align with the version of a person who would do [a thing like this]? What are his politics? Is he gay or straight or trans or religious or rich or poor? Does he seem mentally ill? Is there a manifesto? 

Then you try to find out who knew him. Can you reach his family? His friends? A colleague or ex-colleague? How about someone who went to high school with him and hasn’t talked to them in a decade? A neighbor? Good enough. Close enough. 

Then comes second-level searching based on what you found in the original sweep. You stop searching his name and start searching for usernames you identified from his other accounts. You search his email address. You scan through his Goodreads account. What sort of information was this person consuming? What does it tell us about him? 

Then you write an article. “Here’s everything we know about [shooter].” Or “[Shooter] listened to problematic podcasts.” Or whatever. The Google News algorithm either picks it up, or it doesn’t. It gets upvoted on Reddit or it doesn’t. It gets retweeted or it doesn’t. Your editor is happy, because you have found an angle. You have “hit the news.” You have “added to the conversation.”

Monday night, NBC News published an article with the headline “’Extremely Ironic’: Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO Slaying Played Video Game Killer, Friend Recalls.” This article is currently all over every single one of my social media feeds, because it is emblematic of the type of research I described above. It is a very bad article whose main reason for existing is the fact that it contains a morsel of “new” “information,” except the “information” in this case is that Luigi Mangione played the video game Among Us at some point in college. 

If you are one of the more than 500 million people who have played Among Us, you will know that it is a cartoon video game that is similar to the IRL party game Mafia, in which players are randomly assigned the role “crewmate” or “imposter” at the beginning of each round. The imposter tries to blend in with the crewmates and needs to kill someone without being detected. At the end of each round, everyone discusses who they think the imposter is and then votes them off the spaceship. Among Us is not a game for children, but it is a game that is entirely normal for children to play, and it was incredibly popular during the height of the pandemic in 2020, to the point where after normal Zoom hangouts became bleakly depressing, people began to play Among Us with their friends and colleagues to pretend we were doing social events. Many people I know who have never played another video game in their lives have played Among Us, because it is a social thing that anyone can figure out and it is also incredibly popular. 

This is to say that the fact that Mangione played Among Us is about as relevant as saying that he breathes air or eats food or sleeps sometimes, and yet, the fact that he played this game became the headline and lead to a national news story that supposedly tells us something about the man who allegedly murdered a healthcare CEO. This is journalistic malpractice by the writer’s editor, and the writer of this article—who has been covering a whole host of topics over the last few months, jumping from major news story to major news story—is getting righteously dunked on by their colleagues and by the public at large for doing such a credulous nonstory. It is not really the writer's fault. Their editor should have prevented this story from being framed in this way, and has hung the writer out to dry and to be ridiculed. But I am positive lots of people are clicking on the article. 

The NBC News article is just one of countless in this general genre. Some of them are better than others. Many of these types of articles, when written about mass shooters, are toxic for society—for a brief moment there was a concerted effort to not name mass shooters or do biographies about them because experts believe that such coverage valorizes them and inspires others. But people read them and so they will continue to exist forever and always, and then people on social media will share the stories and say “you don’t hate the media enough,” and when referring to these types of articles they will unfortunately be correct. 

Mangione’s story is actually different because the overwhelming majority of society does not sympathize with, empathize with, or agree with the ideologies of mass killers. Publishing their manifestos or their ideologies or biographical information valorizes them, and that is bad. Mangione’s act, regardless of anything else, has had the effect of speaking to systemic cruelty of the American healthcare system that all Americans suffer under and which has caused untold amounts of death and pain. And so people—including me—want to know who Mangione is and what made him allegedly do this. It’s just that it’s not clear what we are actually learning from years-old social media accounts.

Writing about the problem with writing about the killer is not new. It is also easy because it is easy to criticize the work of others. We also have written about the UnitedHealthcare shooting because it is an incredibly important news event where there is an extreme vacuum of information. The assassination, as we have all written, speaks to the horrifying state of healthcare and capitalism in this country and has been a uniting force between left and right—overwhelming healthcare costs do not care who you have voted for. This event and this moment feels very important. 

How to cover it, and how to cover the alleged killer, though, remains very difficult. When I learned the name Luigi Mangione, I did all of the things described above. In fact, I think I did them extremely quickly and extremely well. We do this ritual because maybe he did publish a manifesto or maybe there was a simple story to tell people. But when it became clear that wasn’t the case, any morsel of information became good enough for a news article. 

Within minutes of the release of his name, I had joined the Discord channel of the game development club he cofounded at Penn State. They were already talking about him! Someone had mentioned that Luigi Mangione himself was actually still a part of the Discord server. “Dude what, this is insane,” one user said. “Just the publicity we needed,” they added, as if the small computer game development club at an Ivy League school is an entity that needs to worry about its “publicity” at all, in any way.  

I found Mangione’s Github (not hard), then I found his Substack account, where he commented (irrelevant) things on Substacks that I have heard of. Then I found one of his WordPress blogs (private). Then I found another of his WordPress blogs (not private, but very old). We, like everyone else, dissected his Goodreads reviews, his tweets, his Instagram, his Facebook. My unrelated group chats were popping off about a Google Doc someone found which was apparently Mangione's high school paper about class struggle in ancient Rome (his Roman Empire?)

It became clear immediately that Mangione, the person, has many characteristics in common with the type of people that we often cover at 404 Media. He is interested in—possibly skeptical of—artificial intelligence. He is a game developer. He follows and comments on Substacks and is from Maryland. I am from Maryland—maybe I know someone who knows someone who knows him? By random chance I saw on the surfing subreddit that someone who knew someone who knew him said that he hurt his back surfing in Hawaii. Is this real? I have no idea. But maybe a lead? 

Like I said, how and if to cover this stuff is complicated. Is a Github project about AI from 2017 relevant to 404 Media readers because … we write about AI? Is the Facebook app he worked on in high school notable because it says something about the Facebook app ecosystem during the Cambridge Analytica years? The answer, honestly, is “of course not.” And yet, in the feeding frenzy of a news story like this, everything feels like fair game and every morsel of information feels like it could be somehow relevant, even though it surely is not. In fact, dissecting random accounts from many years ago does not just not inform the public, it muddies the waters about what actually happened and why.

I do not plan on ever doing a murder or anything that ever puts me into the news in the same way Mangione is now. But whenever something like this happens I find myself thinking about my own digital footprint, which is extremely vast and in many cases extremely outdated. I do not think that my high school Live Journal or Facebook posts that I don’t even remember says anything about who I am as a person now or why I do literally anything that I do. But if you are good enough at Googling me you can probably find accounts I have and accounts I didn’t even know that I had and use it to build some sort of narrative about my life. I have met thousands of people in my life and plausibly any journalist could get in touch with one of them within a few moments and maybe they would say something about me—does that reflect who I am or why I do anything that I do? Probably not!

As we were all rifling through all of Mangione’s accounts, we at 404 Media were discussing if anything we had found rose to the level of “blog.” I told the other 404 Media people: “idk what we would write if we were even supposed to try to write anything, but he’s doing like open source AI and game development stuff. I’m going to email him. i dont want to do ‘everything we know about XYZ.’” We hit up Firaxis, a game developer where he worked, for comment. Same with TrueCar, a place where his LinkedIn says he works now. I emailed Mangione and messaged him on Discord: “Hi there - I'm a reporter with 404 Media - looking to talk to you. Hit me back if you have a sec,” I said on Discord, as though, in police custody, he would respond. (An aside: I once did this with the Crypto Couple, who were just sentenced to prison; I did hear back literally years later.) 

We theorized about what his motivation—as viewed through his Goodreads reviews—might be. Several hours into this I had what I can only describe as a shitfit, and realized that I had just wasted my day. I was mad at myself for doing this exercise at all, knowing from the outset that I probably would not write anything, that I had a lot of other completely unrelated things to do, and to be real, knowing that the time I had just wasted would mean that I would have to do those “other things” probably late at night. 

“I think let’s pivot off this, it’s distracting me incredibly. I have wasted the day and am now upset at myself,” I said. “Only thing I can think of [writing] is a meta story about how everyone rushes to find everything someone has ever done online, and how that is often like a useless act.” 

On the Bluesky social network, you may notice a lot of drive-by responses from accounts that rarely or never post — they just reply to other accounts.

The reply pattern starts with a phrase like “I respectfully disagree” and follows it with a fatuous objection. Another pattern is to start by agreeing, then pivot to trying to start a fight.

These responses are clearly from LLMs. Some Bluesky users have even gotten the bots to post a haiku, spill their prompt, or argue with another bot. [Bluesky]

Denise Paolucci (rahaeli on Bluesky) cofounded blog site Dreamwidth and previously worked in trust and safety at LiveJournal. She has a ton of experience with every possible form of social media bad actor and regularly posts on Bluesky about trust and safety. Lately, she’s been writing about our bot friends.

Paolucci thinks this particular wave of “reply guy as a service” bots are test runs by a spambot maker, who hopes to rent the bots out to other bad actors as a service: “It’s common for spamming software to be pitched as social media management.” [Bluesky]

Bad actors want to sort out what bot styles get the most responses for engagement farming. Bluesky is light on algorithms that filter what you can see, but spammers got in the habit of exploring how the algorithms work on Twitter, Facebook, and Threads so they could exploit them.

Some bots are being run to establish what can lower the quality of discussion on a platform. These bots may be political or commercial in intent. Twitter has long been overrun with this style of bot.

The bots also join followback and follow-for-follow hashtags. Content-scraper accounts are grown in the hope of selling the account to a spammer. Bluesky has a large number of followback accounts. Some of these accounts have already done things like switch from Democratic Party memes to neo-Nazi propaganda when they had enough followers.

The reply-guy bots are also flooding German-language Bluesky. [Bluesky]

Bluesky are on the case and blocking the bots. You should report the bots as “unwanted replies” and use the word “bot” when the offender is clearly a bot. [Bluesky; Bluesky]

Paolucci advises that you don’t interact with the bots or try to be clever — just report and block them. “An account with an established pattern of getting replies from legitimate users will fool automated detection systems better.” [Bluesky]

Paolucci runs various block lists for these bad actor accounts — if you trust her vibe check. (Click on “Lists” in her profile.) [Bluesky]

It can be hard to positively identify the bots — “the top 20% of inauthentic accounts will overlap the behavior of about 20% of authentic accounts.” But then, whether it’s a bot asshole or a real asshole, the answer is: just block. [Bluesky]