As previously stated, “being a mutant” isn’t something hereditary or cultural in any meaningful sense. People aren’t raised mutant, and while they’re born mutants (except when they’re not), what does that really mean? This is again where LGBT identity is a much better guide than race or creed or culture, but even then: beyond affinity culture overt or covert, the biggest thing that brings LGBT people together is the basic human need for love. If you were a gay woman who found out that the population of gay women was reduced drastically, and that no more women will ever be gay, then your chances of romantic love have just been damaged horrifically. Not so for mutants! Mutants can and have formed romantic bonds, marriages, even had children with just about anyone. Not only have mutants loved mutants, they’ve loved baseline humans, differently-powered humans, Inhumans, Eternals, Externals, demigods, alien races, hybrid alien/humans, clones of past lovers, synthetic lifeforms, abstract cosmic entities, time travelers, ghosts, possibly themselves from an alternate dimension, I forget. If there were never more than 198 surviving mutants, those 198 would still do fine on Tinder.
And while we’re on the subject, Schumer’s funeral oration for Quinn’s character focuses on the fact that her father was an un-PC asshole who offended everyone he met, but was nevertheless remarkably funny and universally appealing, even to the black nurse who cared for him at the end of his life and whom he insulted on a daily basis (this is Method Man, incidentally). All of which is to say: it’s OK for white people to be terribly racist and offensive if their hearts are in the right place. God bless them for telling it like it is. The world needs more of these blessed, brave souls.
It seems like the only ones who didn’t like Secret Wars were about six critics who write columns in the fan magazines. I’ve gotten tons of favorable mail and tons of great response at conventions about Secret Wars. The mail, itself, was really incredible – the volume was great and nearly all of it was positive.
Jim Shooter from an interview in Marvel Age Magazine #27. The dismissiveness of critics of the original Secret Wars is one of those things that makes you realize that modern Marvel really is keeping some traditions alive. (via waitwhatpod)
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The announcement by the ministry of culture on Monday said the list of 120 songs “trumpeted obscenity, violence, crime or harmed social morality” and those responsible for website content would be face “severe punishment” if they were not taken down.
Five songs by the Taiwanese singer Chang Csun Yuk are included on the list, including I love Taiwanese Girls, with the line “I don’t like Chinese women, I love Taiwanese girls”, and the song Fart, which includes the line “There are some people in the world who like farting while doing nothing.”
Hello! Matt & Han here with an important message about Jam.
After nearly a year assessing many options, we’ve decided to stop operating This Is My Jam in its current form. Read on to learn about why the two of us have made this decision, but first:
1. Your jams are not going away
2. Thank you thank you for turning this crazy online music experiment into a community; good vibes and great tunes made every week worth it 💝
We hate it when projects we love go dark, so we’re taking a different approach and archiving Jam the best possible way we can manage. We want to preserve your jams, and we want to celebrate all 2+ million songs and the people who curated them between 2011–2015. We know this is no replacement for an operational Jam, but we’re making this archive as sweet as we can, and we’re actually kind of excited about trying to Preserve Things The Right Way online.
Wait So What’s Happening Exactly
This Is My Jam will become a read-only time capsule in September. This means you won’t be able to post anymore, but you’ll be able to browse a new archive version of the site.
You’ll be able to explore all the people and music that made Jam, and listen to everyone’s jams as Spotify playlists as well. Think of it as the best record collection you’ve ever walked through, like this, curated by some of the best tastemakers we know (aka you!).
Your profile data (jams, loves, etc) will also be exportable in a few formats, including text lists; the read-only API will stay online for developers who want to play; we’ll also be open sourcing as much code as we can on Github. And if you don’t want to take part, that’s cool, you can opt out or change what data you want to preserve in your settings. (More about data in the FAQ).
Why We’re Doing It
First and foremost, it feels like we’ve explored This Is My Jam’s original mission best we could. We’re ready to free up our evenings and weekends for new ideas and projects, while hopefully doing good by the thing that made Jam great: the 200,000 of you who shared more than two million hand-picked songs over the last four years, week after week. Whew. It’s been a serious privilege discovering music with you all.
tl;dr product nerd edition:
We started Jam in 2011, and since then the online music landscape has shifted dramatically – both in terms of how people listen to music and the ecosystem it exists in. This created three challenges for us recently:
Fractures in the services we rely on. In 2014, with the site on stable tech footing, the two of us decided to take newgigs and work on an upgraded, sponsorable version of Jam as a side-project that could become self-sustaining. But keeping the jams flowing doesn’t just involve our own code; we interoperate with YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter, Facebook, The Hype Machine, The Echo Nest, Amazon, and more. Over the last year, changes to those services have meant instead of working on Jam features, 100% of our time’s been spent updating years-old code libraries and hacking around deprecations just to keep the lights on. The trend is accelerating with more breaking/shutting off each month, soon exceeding our capacity to fix it.
Product fit in a changing ecosystem. We founded This Is My Jam at the height of the Music Hack Day era, a time when more and more services were starting to offer web-embeddable audio and video. Capitalizing on this trend, we helped unify these experiences to enable beautiful song sharing regardless of platform. But as these platforms matured and consolidated, streams moved from the web into apps, and more sophisticated licensing and geographic controls meant “sorry, this cannot be played here” messages became the norm rather than the exception. Online music habits change quickly, and our specific approach doesn’t suit today’s users very well.
Shift to mobile. Should be no big deal, right? Unfortunately, rules around mobile streaming are very different from web streaming, prohibitively so. We spent our initial funding on the web version of Jam, and felt doing mobile properly would require a total product reboot, something we weren’t in a position to do at the time. Since 2012 we’ve also watched nearly a dozen different companies attempt mobile single-song sharing apps. While none have taken off quite yet, we really hope that one of them will! It would be genuinely exciting to see a new player pick up the torch.
All The Hugs
Okay, we need a lot of these! Jam wouldn’t have lifted off without the hard work and inventiveness of original developers Andreas and Ralph, and contributions from Ben and Aanand; IFTFOM for life. Thank you to The Echo Nest for giving us our start; Brian, Jim, and Dave, you guys are the very best (and Brian, sorry for stealing your domain). Love to Anthony and the Hype Machine crew for bouncing many ideas and a sweet integration that helped us get started. Props to Dermot, Mark, Van and Shannon at MTV for giving us work when we needed it the most bootstrapping Jam. Thanks to the friends and mentors who advised along the way; Fred, Anthony, Nat, and to the people who helped us get Proper Business done; Robin and Mia, Gregor and Sachin at Reed Smith, Bruce, Miles and Lou. And to those of you who helped us shape this plan and let us bounce ideas over a drink, you are the #realtalk; Kristen, Joanna, James, Matt, Matthew, Dan, Arkadiy and Sam. Last but not least, thank you to the friends and passionate music fans who have unconditionally jumped on board with all the music projects we’ve ever got involved with (yes even that one) and kicked the tires. There are too many of you to list, but we know who you are. The things we make wouldn’t be as fun or as good without your curiosity, passionate feedback and of course, bug reports 😉
Onwards! Meet you back here for a final update in September when we’ve got an archive to show you. In the meantime, we’ll be answering any immediate questions that come up over in the FAQ. If you have one that we haven’t answered yet, hit us up on Twitter.
PS. Matt made a video inspired by the number of times we said “jam” in this post
Haven’t really been using TIMJ for awhile, but still sad that it’s going away. How are people going to tell me about new songs now?
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First, Fox’s promotion of Trump worked too well. He went from making the Republican primary more interesting to follow — and thus better for ratings — to dominating the Republican primary and potentially harming the ideological movement that Fox supports. Murdoch’s public opposition to Trump was a signal that the network wasn’t likely to tolerate Trump actually becoming the Republican nominee.
Second, Trump had spent much of his time in the hackier corners of the network — outposts of conservative inanity like Fox and Friends. But the debate was led by Fox’s more serious personalities. Baier, Kelly, and Wallace want to be known as some of the toughest questioners in news business — and Trump was a chance to prove their journalistic bona fides to the world. So where other Fox personalities wanted to treat Trump well in the hopes he would come back on their shows, Baier, Kelly, and Wallace wanted to embarrass Trump.
Finally, Fox News’s incentives had switched. Early in the campaign, the way to get bigger ratings was to build Trump up. But now the whole country was tuning in, and what most people wanted to see was Trump torn down — or at least the fight that would result if Fox News tried to tear Trump down. And that’s what they got. It was extraordinary television, and it led Fox to the highest ratings for any cable news program ever broadcast. Fox figured out how to profit off Trump coming and going, and, better yet, they got to decide when Trump was coming and when Trump was going.
Now Trump and Fox News are at war. And, as Nate Silver writes, this is a war Trump probably can’t win.
Marvel has absolutely no issue with LGBT characters in the Marvel Universe. We are sympathetic to the community that may have viewed Hercules as bisexual based on an implication in “Hercules: Fall of an Avenger.” I thought that Brett White’s op-ed “Why Bisexual Hercules Matters to Me,” was very thoughtful, I took it to heart and I made it recommended reading for my staff.
I’m really enjoying the way Axel Alonso tries to deflect criticism by singling out specific pieces that are easily dealt with; two weeks ago, it was the Noah Bertlasky piece about the publisher’s lack of black creators – something that he could dismiss as inaccurate without actually engaging with, because Bertlasky didn’t know artist Sanford Greene was black – and this week, a piece that foregoes anger at Marvel’s lack of LGBTQ leads in favor of apologizing and just hoping things get better. It’s a canny strategy; he defends himself from accusations that he doesn’t listen to criticism without having to really answer any criticism, or even acknowledge it as valid. Maybe Marvel’s PR is getting back on track after all.
