(incidentally, the beard thing is because jesus had a beard. the bear thing, no fucking clue)

Once I made a typo in a search trying to find out why orthodox priests have beards. I found something way better instead.

"Not every billionaire is a policy failure," argues an opinion piece in the FT.

Comrades, we're winning the argument. They've conceded the broad principle and are reduced to haggling over details.

https://www.ft.com/content/2c8c610b-83f3-4cab-b409-bab69f4c2207

Bangers & Milk
Curds & Slop
Rotten Odds
Bits with Bits
Rotten Ends
Brain's & Slop
Milk & Milk
Egg's & Beggs
Nick Beggs On Cheese
Marmite & Vinegar Soup
Eggy Surprise
An Oat
"George"

I deleted my previous post. It turns out David Copperfield didn’t actually saw that woman in half. I apologize for inadvertently spreading misinformation and I promise to do better going forward.

Also btw, the recent netflix adaptation of the Babysitters Club had no business being as good as it was and if you loved the books as a kid it is a heady nostalgia kick.

@stavvers a friend of mine is an author, predominantly of YA books. I chatted to him once about those books and how they got kids reading. Well, he said to me, the number of book sales in total remained about the same, but now everyone was buying those books and everyone else’s market collapsed. So even that upside turned out to be a lie.

@stavvers point horror might have been full of wanky "american high school mythology" shit BUT

hell yeah death and murder and almost invariably girl protagonist and girl friend and "boyfriend is well meaning but a bit clueless". or "boyfriend is a fuckin waster and probably the killer"

some of the short stories were fuckin dark too

And a confession: I never read Animorphs, the cursed covers scared the shit out of me (and still do)

@stavvers People forget how huge things like Animorphs were, Goosebumps, the entire genre of choose your own adventure books that took the ball from D&D and ran with it through millions of kids imaginations, and then there's comics, the explosion in popularity of manga... People want to defend Harry Potter because they like it and can't just be honest about that, they need to reinvent it as revolutionary and their continued support as necessary for future generations of kids, as God knows, they won't just read something else.

I would like to apologise for the blatant erasure of Goosebumps/Point Horror/general Point franchise in this thread. I absolutely exhausted my library's supply of them.

See also: Round The Twist. The books were, quite possibly, even weirder than the TV show.

Anyway, I'll leave you with this: Tim Curry's number from The Worst Witch. If you haven't seen it before, you're welcome. If you have seen it before, you're welcome. https://youtu.be/SSZYVFc6BqI?si=UkIzJ46IJDav8RDO

And so, there's another reason to fucking hate the transphobic wizards series and culture's reaction to it.

So when they say the transphobic wizards series got kids reading, what they really mean is that perhaps boys were reading now because a shameless Worst Witch rip off starring a boy appealed more to them. In other words, once again, it's prioritising boys rather than raising them better.

And then it hit me like a bus. There were tons of major serieses with all the merch and adaptations, etc but... most of the protagonists were *girls*. And we know, because of patriarchy, this is a turn off for boys because society tells them they don't wanna read that.

And of course, there were series to suit all ages. Good old Tracey Beaker, beautifully illustrated and a working class hero. Teenage worrier Lettie Chubb, full-frontal snogger Georgia Nicholson, I remember you and your ubiquity around the millennium.

But then there were so many British books, too. I remember when the transphobic wizards series came out and I thought it was a shameless rip off of The Worst Witch, but less good because it didn't have a weird film adaptation with Tim Curry serving major cunt

So I've been wondering about the blatant Sweet Valley High erasure (so popular that I still occasionally get earwormed by the theme tune for the TV show. And the Babysitters Club erasure, so popular that there were approximately 11 million spin offs and ambitious crossover events. Maybe we discount these because they're American?

You get those ghastly ~fence sitters~ who try to defend the transphobic wizards franchise by "it got kids reading" and just... were they living on another fucking planet in the 90s, because there were heaps of kid books which were media juggernauts at the time, and kids were fucking reading them.