Noted in passing, pretty much

[oursin]

‘Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump: er, Mr Moore, isn't there something missing in your analysis, hmmmmm? You mention age and economic privilege in your analysis of fan entitlement, the 'gentrifi[cation of] a previously bustling and lively cultural slum neighbourhood', but apart from noting the misogyny of Gamergate and Comicsgate, where is gender? Apart from your condescending account of the 'woman devoted to the late Jim Reeves' (the OED contradicts his claim for the date of the origin of the term, which is far older).

***

Something which seemed connected to the above, and people getting boringly overseriously invested in things, but annoyingly, the 'Big Idea' piece in the Saturday supplement on the value of playfulness doesn't seem to be yet online, chiz. And made me wonder what actually is play vs work or effort and striving. Because it resonated for me with a) a conversation on bluesky earlier in the week about the guilty secret of historians - loving research, research is fun, and b) an article somebody linked somewhere and I failed to save about the horrible abusive exploitation that is cheerleading, not that that makes it different from a lot of sports, which are not about fun or play. Also - is it in The Dispossessed? I think it's Le Guin, anyway, about doing the work you love in a society which is not about exploitation but cooperation, the concept of 'work/play'.