Janina Matthewson
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j9andif.bsky.social
Janina Matthewson
@j9andif.bsky.social
860 followers 420 following 910 posts
Writer. Tired. Romcoms as Georgie Tilney.
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j9andif.bsky.social
Oh hey, the portrait of her on wikipedia is the perfect reaction shot for this
Charlotte Brontë is unimpressed by your shenanigans
November 14, 2025 at 3:35 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
We did it Joe
Screenshot of Apple watch award for a November challenge that says, "you earned this award by reaching your stand goal 1 time in a month."
November 1, 2025 at 7:32 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
Lol, you can tell I had a rough October
Apple watch fitness award for a November challenge that says, "earn this award by reaching your stand goal 1 time. You've reached it 0 times so far this month."
November 1, 2025 at 4:15 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
People are saying "she's having a real normal one"

ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io/ok-so-we-all...
But on top of that, we need to calm the fuck down because quite frankly it is graceless to get all het up by a simple practicality just because it doesn't work for you. Oh, you wish people would just buy books without knowing what's in them? Me fucking too, but that's not the world we live in. People have a lot of demands on their time and money, and they need to be given reasons to part with either.
October 31, 2025 at 2:25 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
*Very* delighted by this sign in warning I just got from Buffer, we should still call them this imo, society started to fail the moment we started saying "MacBook"
Date: Wed Oct 29 2025 Browser/Device: Chrome, Macintosh Location: London, GB (Approximate)
October 29, 2025 at 5:51 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
I was annoyed about people being annoyed about romance tropes so I got a little carried away for this week's newsletter.
OUT FRIDAY, DON'T FORGET TO LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.
ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io
Everyone hates tropes, everyone hates books being sold based on their tropes, everyone hates those graphics with all the little lines pointing to the tropes. No one wants to hear about enemies to lovers, fake dating, forced proximity, everyone thinks it's a sign of declining literacy, a readership that wants to be pandered to rather than entertained, stuff like this is why Rome fell or what the fuck ever. I'm not talking about tropes simply existing of course, tropes have always existed and we've all always been broadly fine about it. Mistaken identity, cross-dressing, secret twins – tell me which of Shakespeare's plays I'm talking about, I dare you. No, I'm talking about tropes being named and talked about and used as a reason to read a book. So this week I'm using my newsletter to tell us all to calm the fuck down. 1977 words
October 29, 2025 at 5:44 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
We've had a productive evening
Two small pumpkins carved, one with three eyes, one with the weight of human suffering. In the background, King of the Hill plays
October 13, 2025 at 9:30 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
Look, I think he's beautiful
A small pumpkin carved to look like he has just achieved sentience and regret it
October 13, 2025 at 9:28 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
Wrote about why the idea that we should engage with civilised debate with fascists is elitist and also dumb

ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io/we-have-beco...
There are many methods you can use to hold on to power and I'm sure I've complained about them all at one time or another, but the one I want to talk about today is this: pretending that you are such a special boy that you deserve all the wealth and power you have, and everyone else deserves to be down here in the dirt because we are not special boys. From time immemorial the rich have established social rules that, by design, set them apart from the rabble. Each level of your stratified society then apes the one above them and those at the top change the rules to distinguish themselves once more. History, literature, philosophy – these are all interpretive arts, and you can interpret everything in myriad ways. In theory, that's fine – if your spirit is strong and your heart is true, you can toss around all kinds of ideas, figure out what you believe in, and learn how to back it up. For some, though, a strong spirit and a true heart are not markers of a learnéd man. A learnéd man knows the point of a debate is to find rhetorical tricks to one up one's opponent. A learnéd man doesn't care about truth he cares about the effective argument. A learnéd man goes home every night and rubs one out to the Socratic Method. A slate of people with truly abhorrent views have used civilised debate to establish themselves as pundits. They use neat haircuts, crisp suits, and big vocabularies to express deeply racist, misogynistic, and homophobic ideas and insist that if those ideas were weak then we, the horrified, would be able to brush them away with our rhetoric. It's a grift. A PR move. It spreads their message further and makes it seem legitimate. Giving these people the respect of your attention affirms them and their regressive opinions as reasonable. Every liberal who has indulged this idea of civilised debate from the right is a rube who has allowed themselves to be used for propaganda. No amount of good manners will make racism civil, just as no amount of uncouth behaviour will make calls for equality less righteous. Fascists are our enemies, whether they're dropping pleasantries or racial slurs, and we have to fight them all. Those who claim we should engage with them in good faith, that we should be engage in dialogue are actively slowing our progress. We need civility in substance, not in style. We need codes of honour not of conduct. We need to call a fucking nazi a fucking nazi. We need to shut them down at every turn, whatever their medium or mode of address.
September 20, 2025 at 1:19 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
A disembodied hand uses pink finger chopsticks to pick up maybe a marshmallow? While black white and grey finger chopsticks lie rightfully ignored nearby
September 16, 2025 at 11:55 AM
j9andif.bsky.social
I hate AI for a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is that it's robbing people of drive and curiosity. If you think of a particular kind of picture or song or whatever that you would like to have then you, traditionally, had three options. You could make it yourself, using whatever level of skill you have (and developing that skill further as you make it). You could hunt around for an artist who's already made something like what you're after (and in the process discover a lot of other great art). Or, if you can afford this kind of thing, you could commission an artist with more skill than you to make it (which means you've supported a working professional and contributed to the industry as a whole.) Now it's like people don't want to even consider that all that is possible. An easy answer is at their fingertips and they're going to use it without even weighing up the other options or considering what is lost in the process.
August 26, 2025 at 1:48 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
I watched a lot of American Idol and I'm here to talk to you about ai
ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io/friends-fear...
The early rounds of the show were obviously awful, exploitative shit, but there was a repeated refrain among the people who would go on to crash and burn in the audition. They were there because they just felt they were supposed to be a star. I don't want to dunk on people who were humiliated on international television, but what's interesting to me is how many people believed they could rock up and become, not just a professional singer, but a famous one when they've clearly never put in any work towards being able to sing. They haven't sung enough to know they're bad at it, which raises the question of whether they actually even like to sing. I'm not saying there aren't people who sing a lot and are still not great at it – it's me, I'm the problem it's me – but if you sing a lot and you're not great at it you learn that you are not great at it and you work at it to improve. You're an entertainer, you're there to give people a good time, and if they think you're not having a good time then they won't either. Part of the job is hiding the job. It's a double edged sword, obviously, and that's one of the things that's got us here, with people claiming they should be able to have the magic of art without the work of making it. It's not just that they don't understand the work, it's that they don't want to understand it. They want to inhabit this perceived world of the artist. They want to believe it exists. But it doesn't. Artists live in the real world and they do real work and it's hard. You do your best work when you're lucky enough to have found a great director, or editor, or whatever – someone who understands what you're trying to do, who sees what you're capable of, and who can push you hard enough to get you there. This involves arguing but in collaboration, rather than contention and, with the right creative partner, it's invigorating and satisfying and honestly one of the best parts of the process. A lot of people don't understand this and you see it on reality TV all the time. If you're used to creative work you see the comments of people like Simon Cowell (Or RuPaul, or Keith Brymer Jones, or whoever) for what they are: useful notes from an expert that will help a contestant grow. But to a lot of the audience (and honestly too many contestants) they land as criticism. Insults, even. The truth is you get to choose how much you want to improve yourself, in whatever direction. If you're not very strong and you want to get strong, you start picking up heavy things. You pick up heavier things this week than you did last week and it's hard and you have to push yourself. If you can afford it you hire a person to push you for you. You accept that it's hard and you do it and as it becomes easier you choose whether you want to accept that ease or make it harder again and get even stronger. If you want to become good at art then you start doing art and you're bad at it, but you keep going and try to be a little better this week than you were last week. You study and read, you take a class if you can. You push yourself or you find someone who'll push you and you get better. It's not easy, but it should be satisfying. If the process of learning how to paint feels like hazing then maybe you just don't like painting.
August 26, 2025 at 1:47 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
This is the new zealand voting guy for those who have not made his acquaintance
A weird orange figure waves at you and encourages you to vote
August 18, 2025 at 6:51 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
Coming out as pro Lauren Sánchez: Bond girl

ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io/ok-look-im-g...
Hiring all of Venice for your wedding is obviously outrageous behaviour! But it's outrageous behaviour that doesn't make me wonder if we've all been Truman Showed as part of a social experiment to see how thoroughly a fucked world people will accept before we run fully mad. So you can imagine my delight at his latest piece of tomfoolery: trying to get his hot new wife into the next Bond film. Look, I get it, it's ridiculous, it's decadent, it's indefensible. But it's also very, very good, it's the best billionaire behaviour we've had in a while.
August 15, 2025 at 4:57 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
Wrote about those lonely, lonely menfolk

ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io/men-hug-your...
We regret to inform you that there has been a discourse. Ian Dunt is worried about men getting laid. He's worried that all the advice for men on getting laid comes from right wing dipshits like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and that the left doesn't talk about it at all. Literally he says that the "progressive left seemingly has no opinion on men getting laid." He then has some ground breaking advice like talking to women as if they're human beings. Pretending women are men to help you see them as people. I'm actually not that mad at the advice – it's basic but there will always be people who need basic advice. What the problem is, what the problem always is, is that he doesn't appear all that interested in why (not all) men have to be told to see women as people in the first place. The way I've seen a lot of men online talk about sex it's clear they see it as an achievement. This, I think, is why they put such emphasis on bullshit concepts like high quality women, why they're resistant to the idea that we also want to have sex – casual sex even! Because if we're having sex with them simply because we want to it lessens their achievement. The sex is a trophy to show that they deserve sex and if someone is just offering sex for the fun of sex, well, where's the value in that? They want to have sex because of what having it says about them. They want to have it because having it affirms their masculinity, which they are insecure about because they've bought into an ideal of masculinity that is deeply fucked up. It's not new that. Behaving in dysfunctional ways to affirm a fucked up ideal of masculinity is ancient. The claim that the left needs to concern itself with the sex lives of straight men as a counter to the right seems, on its face, fair. After all, the right is setting their arguments within a broader call for the return to a system that deliberately subjugates women. Forced pregnancies, restrictions on education, tradwives – patriarchy classic rebranded for the internet age. We have to find a way to meet the one need, without capitulating on all the other shit. Men are lonely, men want to get laid, these are realities we have to face up to and apparently we can't do anything about the fact that the onus is still always on women. The problem is that romantic and sexual success isn't actually a cure for loneliness. It's not just that no one is owed a date, no one is owed sex, no one is owed a relationship, although obviously all that is true. It's that none of those things will solve the actual problem. The problem is that too many men and boys never learn how to be vulnerable with each other. Straight men on the left who want to provide an alternative to the manisphere, your job is actually quite simple: have friends. Invest in your friendships. Make plans to see each other where seeing each other is all you do. Talk about your problems. Invite your friends to talk about theirs. Hug each other. Be open and vulnerable and close. I honestly believe you could change the world.
August 8, 2025 at 2:19 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
Coming to your inbox on Friday
ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io
I'm actually not that mad at the advice – it's basic but there will always be people who need basic advice. What the problem is, what the problem always is, is that he doesn't appear all that interested in why men have to be told to see women as people in the first place. Which is not that surprising when you consider that the progressive left has been talking about straight men and sex for genuinely decades. It's just that it's mostly been women talking, so I guess Ian Dunt hasn't noticed. Women had an entire sexual revolution over what we're looking for in the bedroom and we have not shut up about it since. We've explained carefully in columns and books and movies what it is we need; if you want a crib sheet on how to successfully bed a woman, we have provided you with so many. They all boil down to one thing, really: we want men to be willing to communicate with women in general well enough to learn what the specific woman they are into wants.
August 2, 2025 at 10:05 AM
j9andif.bsky.social
buff.ly/YnVaTdT
This is the thing that I come back to again and again. When there is insufficient institutional help we are also robbed of the ability to help others. We are born to be part of a community, we are connected to everyone else whether we like it or not, and when we live in a system that lionises individualism that instinct for connection becomes agonising. When we are forced daily to confront a suffering that we can do nothing to alleviate, when that is coming on top of our own survival becoming so hard to achieve – this is corrosive to the soul. Everyone I know is currently navigating life under the constant burden of our helplessness. Everyone I know is wrestling with this baffling reality that we have no recourse to prevent a genocide everyone can see on their phones every day.
August 1, 2025 at 2:38 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
I've made the first instalment of my new serial free to read! I would love it if you'd read it and enjoy it and subscribe for future instalments and tell your friends and families and representatives to read it and enjoy it and subscribe for future instalments!

buff.ly/SWAW0AN
367BCE, somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea He woke in a cold sweat and, for a moment, he didn’t know why. His cabin was still and empty. The wood of the small ship creaked around him; he could hear the gentle splashing of the waves. He hoped, briefly, that it had just been a nightmare, but then he saw it: a small puddle in the corner of the room. He darted towards it and pushed up the trick floorboard he’d rigged before setting sail, pushing his hand into the small cavity below. It was empty. 1923CE, somewhere in Mayfair Nell Bartlett had decided to cut her hair. She sat at her dressing table, gazing at her reflection, conducting a careful survey. Two lips, indifferent red, and so forth. Quite a serviceable face, if we’re honest, and perfectly suitable to its purpose. Or the purpose it had had until recently, but we’ll get to that. Straight black brows, cool blue eyes, with a slight droop to them, and hair falling to her waist that could most accurately be described as ordinary brown. Nell had never been dissatisfied with her appearance, but she’d woken up with a sharp yearning for change. Something to suit her new circumstances.
July 27, 2025 at 10:59 AM
j9andif.bsky.social
Me and cookie
July 13, 2025 at 9:44 AM
j9andif.bsky.social
Bugs bunny in a tux meme reading: i wish all our american friends a very let the whole world know that today is a day of reckoning
July 4, 2025 at 1:22 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
Wrote about how comparing feeding books into an LLM to a human reading books is dumb and bad and for losers

ihavenoplanforthis.ghost.io/once-again-w...
An LLM is, by design, imitative. It is imitating everything at once which is why in general the output sounds bland and uninteresting, but it can also imitate specific things if you ask it to. We all saw this with the harrowing Ghibli nonsense a couple of months ago. It works by calculating the probability of each point of data it contains. If you ask it to write an essay on Shakespeare in the style of Joan Didion it will run calculations to determine what words you might want in that essay. The kinds of words in all the essays on Shakespeare it's eaten balanced against the kinds of words in all the Joan Didion its eaten get fed through the algorithm like scrap meat into a sausage grinder and spat out the other side in a clean intestine skin. This is not how real artists influence each other. Real artists take influence from other people's work in several different ways. I will describe those ways now:
June 27, 2025 at 6:14 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
The solution on the left – the simplest, most immediate solution, at least – is financial regulation. Things like taxing wealth, taxing corporations. Introducing limits on CEO salaries relative to the lowest waged employee. Your life is hard because the richest people on the planet are siphoning money away from the rest of us. We will improve your life by getting that money back. The victims of those policies have so much power. Every political party has big ticket donors who will be negatively impacted by policies like that. (Political donations should be illegal.) Every media company is owned by people who will be negatively impacted by policies like that. Half of our politicians would be negatively impacted by policies like that.
June 13, 2025 at 3:45 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
This is an interesting article, but I honestly think this is the most important point. Like, I didn't really see much Sinners press tour stuff cut through at all, but the film itself has been everywhere
www.vulture.com/article/new-...
Predictably, not everyone is sold on the New Media Circuit. Some are merely skeptical; others are openly hostile: “Don’t fucking talk to me about Hot Ones,” one A-list publicist told me. The reality is that it’s hard to tell if any of it actually moves the needle in name recognition or even ticket sales. “Unless there’s an ‘I am clicking through and buying a ticket’ button on whatever the fuck’s feed, I’m not sold it helps,” another veteran Hollywood publicist says. Yes, there are more metrics than ever — followers, views, streams, engagement rates — but they’re slippery, and no one seems to agree on what counts as impact anymore. In an ecosystem dominated by algorithms, even the most viral press push can feel like a whisper compared to the Netflix homepage or Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. If the most powerful recommendation engine is the platform itself, what’s the point of doing press at all?
June 7, 2025 at 10:04 AM
j9andif.bsky.social
I wrote about how we can build a movement like a body

i-have-no-plan-for-this.ghost.io/unfortunatel...
Hello and welcome to a new series I'm calling unfortunately it's time to take a lesson from. I'm calling it a series because so far I have two (2) ideas for it, and sometimes that is enough. And I'm coming in hot with a lesson from the modern church at a time when one of the most visible branches of the modern church, American evangelicals, are ripping apart the very fabric of western society. A bold move, people are calling it. A regrettable move? I'm here to talk about what the progressive movement could learn from the concept of the body of Christ. StrengthsFinder is a psychometric test that is designed to find a person's spiritual gifts. There is a list of 34 possible gifts and the test places them in order for you, with your top five being your core strengths. The idea is that knowing what your particular spiritual gifts are will help you contribute to the church in a way that's aligned with those strengths, instead of twisting yourself into knots to perform some universal ideal that is outside of your natural abilities – abilities that were, after all, given to you by god. Attempting to operated against your own, personal, individual gifts is literally going against god's design, is the idea This debate will never have a resolution because no one is wrong. There will be no consensus on what to do with leftist converts, no agreed upon system of atonement. We need to be ok with that. And we can be, if we acknowledge that no one involved in this movement has to be involved with every part of it. If you do not have it in you to forget and forgive, to welcome in repentant Trumpists, that is fine. That's not your part of the movement. I have a complicated, uncertain faith in god these days, but one of the things that keeps me holding on to some idea of him is that I fundamentally believe that every single human person needs and deserves forgiveness, and I also absolutely know there are people who I personally cannot ever forgive. I don't want to forgive them, I don't regret not wanting to forgive them. So for me god exists in part to forgive those who I can't. All I need to do is be ok with someone else forgiving them. We've gotten pretty good, I think, at reminding each other that we can't do everything, that we need to take care of ourselves, that we need to protect ourselves from burnout, it's a marathon, not a sprint. But I think we often take that as a caution about the amount we take on, rather than about the specific work we undertake. You can't do everything becomes instead you shouldn't do some things. Which isn't to say you won't sometimes have to dig in in areas you're not strong. Sometimes a thing needs doing and you're the only one there to do it and you just have to nut up. But in general, this is a big fight, there are a lot of us, it's going to take a long time. Find your lane. Don't force yourself into someone else's, and don't beat yourself up for not being able to run there.
June 1, 2025 at 6:58 PM
j9andif.bsky.social
Genuinely just a notifications tab full of this, what ist, and furthermore why
Screenshot of my threads notifications showing arbitrary posts by random, believe me you don't care what they say
May 29, 2025 at 11:21 AM