Aja Romano

@bookshop

Longtime culture writer, formerly of Vox. Member, WGAE, ATCA. They/them or she/her. - I am NOT @bookshop.org lol.

848 Folgt3.906 Follower4.022 Posts

Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir bookshop.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jul 5

frame from Succession of Cousin Greg saying "We hear for you!"

Aja Romano@bookshop· May 10

Just finished @lincodega.com's Pasha the Storm, and I feel a little overwhelmed by it! Such immense, immersive polyqueer worldbuilding, w/a large, sharply drawn, incredibly horny cast of characters, a deep mythology, and a salty pirate hero falling for a hot flustered principled naif half her age!

The gorgeous teal-blue cover of Pasha the Storm by Lin Codega, featuring the title character, a woman with wavy gray hair, being buoyed on the surface of a turbulent sea by a swirl of sea dogs emerging from the waves and encircling her.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Apr 23

I should also add that I am open to (really more like grabby-hands about) pitches! I have a giant brainstorming list of topics I'd love to publish that I'm happy to send out! Here's a little glimpse for you all. aja@fansplaining.com for pitches, questions, kudos etc!

Snapshot of part of a Google doc reading:

BRAINSTORMING TOPICS!

* tropes!
* AO3 trends~ and discourse as long as it’s actually additive (ie not just your thoughts on yaoi)
* femslash and female characters
* RPF, all the RPF
* standom and bandom
* global SFF fandom
* Romancelandia
* first-person pieces on elements of fandom that have influenced the writer in unique ways
* Chinese media fandom, including wuxia, danmei, short videos/series, dangai, any individual fandoms, the Chinese entertainment industry and issues therein, all the things
* old-school transformative fandoms and the history thereof
* Thai BL and GL fandoms (and BL and GL generally but Thai BL and GL stand out bc they've been so important as an industry)
* fandom and the publishing industry, especially anything exploring the complicated interplay between the two in recent years — thinking about the rise of romantasy, an increase in interest in m/m and f/f fiction, marketing drawing on fandom tag language, agents/editors looking for their next hit among AO3, promoting their authors as fanfic writers first, the rise of pull-to-publish and the rapid decrease in stigma around that practice, etc
* fandom communities/practices in more global regions than just the US/UK, Korea, and Japan!

Aja Romano@bookshop· Apr 14

obligatory

Naomi Wolf reacting "No! No!!" at a photo of a cute animatronic bear mascot wearing a mask and promoting vaccines

Aja Romano@bookshop· Mar 5

this had better end with a Paris vs Succession finale so i can be like PARIS VS LOGAN REDUX 🤗

Paris handing Logan his balls, yes i do just have this sitting around on my laptop

Aja Romano@bookshop· Mar 5

this match-up is biphobic 😭

my beloved Paris Geller and her Misandrist Sweater facing off against my beloved Jess Bradford and her Manos The Hands of Misandry Sweater, a personal attack on me, personally

Aja Romano@bookshop· Feb 25

I am the last person to learn that apparently Kaleidotrope is no longer streaming on any of the podcast platforms it's supposed to be streaming on 🤦 no clue why. But until we figure that out, anyone wanting to listen can still find it on YouTube! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Kaleidotrope Podcast show header. Art by Joy Yang.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Feb 24

What all of these pieces have in common is a form of “just asking questions.” On its face, “just asking questions” might seem like the fundamental role of a journalist. It often is — journalists may walk us through explorations of important issues by getting us to ask questions alongside them. But context is crucial; some questions might seem innocent, but what ends up happening is far more problematic and leads to undermining, derailing, or even distorting our understanding of the subject.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Feb 10

i thought i'd seen every level of always-a-dril-tweet but this is just palpable

screenshot of the famous dril tweet, "'im not owned! im not owned!!', i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob."

Aja Romano@bookshop· Feb 8

you are not wrong 😅

screenshots of a MyDramaList watch list that keeps going...

and going for another 2 screenshots after this except Bluesky will only let you upload four photos at once 😅

Aja Romano@bookshop· Feb 5

Weibo night everyone

Aja Romano@bookshop· Feb 5

And yes my son is there, look at him 🙏

Wang Yibo wth curly hair and a gorgeous black suit with a priest's collar, and a fetching antique Chanel brooch that costs more than my house, looking dapper and luxurious

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 25

this one got to me

screenshot of the r/nursing subreddit index page, with a large picture of Alex Pretti as the main sidebar image. The top post from today is a post asking if the sub can change the main image to Alex's picture to honor him. The other top posts are also all expressing outrage about Pretti's death.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 22

combatting the horrors by adding weibo and wechat emojis to the new @fansplaining.bsky.social admin slack

emoji of a yellow featureless emoji-head with starry eyes and a rapt "yay!" expression. They have little blob hands posed in "yay!" fists

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 22

Tennesseeans who oppose HB 1711, which would force all local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE or be sanctioned (THESE FUCKERS), if you're emailing your reps, feel free to borrow my email (see alt text) + I'll thread source links! cc @thetnholler.bsky.social @indivisnashville.bsky.social

Dear [reps],

As your constituent, I'm writing to express my opposition to HB1711, which mandates that all local law enforcement agencies in Tennessee must enter into 287(g) agreements with ICE. I wish to express my strong fear and worry that if local law enforcement are forced to cooperate with ICE, the result will be widespread fear, increased agitation and violence from ICE on our streets, and increased criminal acts, including the unconstitutional abduction and detention of US citizens without legal recourse or due process.

I also want to stress that courts are already ruling that ICE's methodology is unconstitutional, and yet despite this ICE's power and lack of supervision only keeps increasing. It makes me feel genuinely deranged that here in the United States of America, we suddenly have a secret police force that has been arresting and unlawfully detaining hundreds of US citizens, has killed multiple people in their custody without any accountability or oversight, has shot multiple peaceful citizens in the streets (from previous link: "At least three people have been shot observing or documenting immigration raids, and five people have been shot while driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action"), firebombed a six-month-old baby, and unlawfully entered homes — including shooting a man through the door of his own apartment — in order to (again, illegally!) arrest people.

In addition to everything I've just mentioned, yesterday the AP reported that ICE has been instructed to act on authority to enter people's homes without any type of warrant. This is everything the constitutional clause against search and seizure was meant to protect us from, yet instead TN, vanguard of the 2A, wants to force local law enforcement to cooperate with these untrained, unsupervised, lawless thugs?

It's terrifying. We should be working with every other state in the nation to abolish ICE, not further encourage domestic terrorism.

Thank you,
[Name]

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 19

my smol son, who is five years old, wishes you a good day

Wang Yibo, standing in a comfy plain dark grey jeanswest sweater and blue jeans, looking at the camera. his hands are in his pockets with the thumbs tucked over the edge of his sweater. he has poodle hair and a relaxed expression. photo manip (to remove all the background ad copy and leave an empty white background) by @songminu.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 16

not even bothering to drop the rest of this thrice-cursed sentence from this unbelievably infuriating article because if I have to read these words so do you

screenshot of a news article reading "Under the proposal, AI and other machine-generated evidence offered at trial without an accompanying witness"

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 15

From Tumblr, posted yesterday, redacting username to hopefully minimize harassment:

Screenshot of a Tumblr post reading:

ICE is now calling bomb threats into food pantries they’ve been denied access to. So that’s where we’re at.
Keep the pressure on. They were at my bus stop today. I am so scared for all of us. I feel like all the plans my partner and I have been making have just evaporated into thin air. How can you go on a trip with this? How can you build a family with this? The only thing we do with my family is go out to dinner, that’s off the table for idk forever? They want you to believe my city is a shithole and all I see is neighbors booked solid for the next three months to help kids that aren’t theirs get to school. Everyone collecting food for everyone - folks who can’t leave the house, folks who will lose SNAP because that man cut it off. Minneapolis is my adopted home but it’s so beautiful and my neighborhood is my favorite part of it. I know I’m panicking but I also feel like they’re just going to come kill us in the night.

#american politics
#minneapolis
#federal assault on america

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 12

A fun thing is that while AO3 did finally place a tag limit on individual fics, people's bookmarked collections still propagate every tag on every fic in that collection. So if you like to vanity search your own fic, you occasionally get hit with enormous tag lists like this one 😂

Screenshot of a bookmarks page on AO3, with only one bookmark shown, and that's because it's a bookmarked collection of someone's daily drabbles (very short fics) for 2019, with hundreds of descriptive tags gathered from all of the collected fics.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 11

it's giving

Tal ousting some foes (the traditional five of swords illustration from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, showing a red-haired person in a green tunic over a red shirt and breeches tucked into tan calf-length boots, holding two very long very big swords over one shoulder, another in their hand with the pointy end resting on the ground, looking smugly at the retreating backs of their vanquished foes as they walk away towards a large body of water with a vast sky streaked with grey cirrus clouds above)

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 11

welp the rest of the world is on fire so of course Google is now forcing us to either deal with AI summaries in our gmail inboxes or lose access to SPELL CHECK.

screencap of cursed Gemini summary of an email thread now appearing at the top of the thread. The thread is for a job I applied for.

Screenshot of a news article explaining that turning off Gemini means you also lose access to autocorrect, spell check, desktop notifications, package tracking, and inbox categorization.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 10

incredible analysis coming from a woman who was triggered by a stuffed bear

Naomi Wolf's iconic "No! No!!" tweet in response to learning that a fictional bear was promoting masking and vaccine safety. She is QT-ing a promo from the Stanley Bear account showing the stuffed bear wearing a mask and hospital volunteer uniform with his label "stan" written on it, standing outside of an NHS building.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 10

two kinds of people

A bar of music with a clef note, depicting a tritone sequence from tonic (middle C) to augmented fourth (F#) to dominant (G), all whole notes

Tony and Maria from the first West Side Story film

famous couch shot from the opening of The Simpsons

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 9

The AO3 bots are leveling up, I was halfway through this "review" like "ah, yes, it's true, i have written a sublime, time-obliterating literary masterpie— oh" 😂🫠

Screenshot of an AO3 comment reading "Astoundingly sublime, time unraveled from my grasp like a fragile trail of smoke, inevitable in its escape, carrying with it the weight of memories, regrets, and moments I never realized were vanishing until the air was empty. and compelling plan inspired by your story I found an interesting angle after reading your tale let me know if you’d like to hear it on IG (f r e y a l y s a n d e r 1 2)"

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 9

I tested it for reporting purposes! But actually it seems like X was just straight-up lying and this is still the intended behavior for all users, per The Verge. www.theverge.com/news/859309/...

Screenshot text reading "Interacting with Grok through replies on X is just one of several ways to use the AI chatbot. For example, the “Edit image” button still invokes Grok on every image displayed on X’s desktop website, and that same button can be accessed on the X app by long-pressing on any image."

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 9

just noting for the record that Grok's image generation tool is supposed to now be restricted only to "verified" users and not free users, but as a formerly verified user (i'm assuming that's why?) I can still 100% see and use it. not sure if i'm missing something obvious but here you go.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 8

See also the Blocks shutting down the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today rather than be forced by law to allow it to unionize. www.thedailybeast.com/trumpy-owner...

Screenshot of text from a Daily Beast article: "Tensions between ownership and union journalists reached a boiling point in 2019, when John Block reportedly stormed into the newsroom and threatened to “burn the place down.”

Several staffers believe the Blocks are shutting down the outlet as punishment after a federal appeals court upheld a November ruling finding that the Post-Gazette illegally declared an impasse in union negotiations to impose its own terms."

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 7

Except that Good's car wheels were turning away from the man who shot her, before he shot her. She was absolutely not using her vehicle as a weapon. She was fleeing from men in masks who were screaming at her.

non-graphic screenshot from a video of the Minneapolis ICE shooting, showing Good's SUV with the tires turning to the right, the moment before the shooting.

Non-graphic screenshot from the same video immediately after the shooting, with a better view of Good's tires clearly turned away from the person who shot her.

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 5

Đặng Thái Sơn's whole life seems very cinematic even before you get to the cutthroat piano competition. His mom's role as a resistance fighter, the transition from war to bourgeoisie and then back again. This passage from the linked Vantage Music article would be incredible to film!

Aja Romano@bookshop· Jan 5

Đặng Thái Sơn's mother and aunt were both seminal Vietnam musicians: his aunt was the first Vietnamese pianist accepted into the Paris Conservatory, and his mom (who also joined the resistance against the French) co-founded the Vietnam National Academy of Music. www.vantagemusic.org/magazine/chi...