Gareth Watkins
@garethwatkins.bsky.social
5.7K followers 2.4K following 7.2K posts
Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tribune, Vulture, MEL, New Socialist. Host of Death Sentence podcast.
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garethwatkins.bsky.social
The absolute most charitable interpretation is that you do have to be pretty online to know the full extent of Rowling's depravity, and most people aren't.
alexries.com
What are your theories as to why nominally 'liberal' people like Simon Pegg and Matt Berry are willing to work with Rowling?
Reposted by Gareth Watkins
okwonga.bsky.social
On the policy level - hearing from the very few people I know in that world, the corporate lobbying is as fierce as I have seen. Just an absolute firehose of cash being sprayed against regulation there.
jamesdaustin.bsky.social
Everyone knows at least one person (normally, but not exclusively, a guy) whose gone properly mental due to net rabbit holes.

We see public figures regularly go mad and destroy themselves.

And we have, at a policy level, just decided to put our fingers in our ears and go nahnahnah
alastairmeeks.bsky.social
Last night I heard of another friend of a friend who has been lost to a rabbit hole of online propaganda. We need to start treating this as a serious public health concern.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
(Dracula Flow voice) I'm smoking that Taliban bowl. Kush got me feeling like Malala Yousafzai.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
Sam Altman dangling at the end of a rope suspended from a lamp post by some of the millions of people he made unemployed as every computer in the city burns around him: <ack> AI could <ack> AI could create a new type <ack> of science called Schmysics.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
Ask anyone working in finance their favourite film and it's either Wall Street or The Wolf of Wall Street, ask any drug dealer about their favourite film and it's always Scarface. You literally can't make the 'this is bad so don't do it' message obvious enough for some people.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
Luffy's straw hat is yellow, like straw, and towards the 'end' of the story, which hasn't ended, he doesn't turn into Christ, he turns into a Tex Avery cartoon. At least Charles Manson had listened to Helter Skelter.
feraljokes.bsky.social
I can't believe this is real
garethwatkins.bsky.social
They don't watch films for adults.
Reposted by Gareth Watkins
trans.bsky.social
go the fuck outside. find a goth club. go there on a kink / queer night. go even if you think “you won’t fit in” (cheat code: just wear black).

be friendly. give yourself time. repeat as necessary. you will make exceptional friends.

life is for the living. do it scared.

🏳️‍⚧️🖤🏳️‍🌈
garethwatkins.bsky.social
If they weren't doing genocide I'd consider Israel's 'ancient Klingon proverb' thing with food quite charming.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
Spoiler: at the end the Fremen go to attack spaceships with knives.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
Shockingly, they've actually made a second season of Dorohedoro and it'll be out next year.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
Forgot about him - no, the former singer of the band Lostprophets, Ian Watkins (no relation), got shanked in prison.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
Fun Watkins facts!
1) The name can translate to 'King of the Hill' (a watt being a hill, kin meaning ruler')
2) Famous non-paedophile Watkinses include Teone 'T-Boz' Watkins from TLC.
3) It has a fairly mid Tartan:
garethwatkins.bsky.social
Having a name from a very small ethnic population (there's like 2 million Welsh people in the world) usually means that I'm safe from seeing my name in the news. Not today though!
garethwatkins.bsky.social
A friend of mine worked with sex offenders of Watkins' calibre, and based on what I heard from him my view is while 99.9% of the prison population can be dealt with in other, better ways, there's a tiny percentage of people, one in every million, who really do need to be away from other people.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
The past ultraviolence was a milkshake.
Reposted by Gareth Watkins
jacobsilverman.com
It's pub day for my book, "Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley," which chronicles the rise of the tech right and their role in the 2024 election. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way.
linktr.ee/gildedrage
Gilded Rage | Linktree
A searing look at the rise of Silicon Valley's far right. Out October 2025.
linktr.ee
Reposted by Gareth Watkins
latexmorbidity.bsky.social
In Prince of Darkness (1987), John Carpenter predicted that pure evil would take the form of slop
garethwatkins.bsky.social
People don't understand that he's a character actor, and that character is a guy who's so handsome that it's kind of gross.
garethwatkins.bsky.social
The Max Payne franchise is the only series of games that uses the optimal means to show character progression: the lead character should get fatter and take more pills.