Dua Lipa's "Banned Books," Little House Review, DC Comics Vs. Comic Shops - Fandom Pulse Daily Briefing
Hello from the beach in El Salvador! I had a beautiful sunset yesterday evening forgot to send out the daily briefing because I was outside. Still have been working to bring the news to you as best as possible. Thanks for reading, everyone!
We’re getting near the end of the Reclaiming The Shire deep dive into Tolkien’s impact on cutlure. I’m going to format that into a book later this summer and release it because I think it was very much worth people’s reads. Only a couple of more chapters left. I hope you’ve been enjoying. The latest is lower in this email!
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Netflix’s Little House On The Prairie Premiere Plays It Safer Than Advertised, But Slower Too
Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie premiered July 9 with an eight-episode first season already renewed for a second, and the opening episode spends its hour on the Ingalls family’s wagon journey from Wisconsin to Kansas. This review covers episode one only. A lot of the ideological content that critics have flagged in advance coverage of the series s…
12 Blue States Sue To Block Paramount’s Warner Bros. Deal After Trump’s Own DOJ Already Cleared It
Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery hit its biggest legal obstacle yet on July 13, when a coalition of 12 state attorneys general filed suit to block the merger before it closes. California Attorney General Rob Bonta led the filing, joined by Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey…
DC Comics’ New “Anti-Price-Gouging” Rules Punish Retailers While Scarcity Stays DC’s Choice
DC Comics issued new terms and conditions for retailer exclusive variant covers this week, giving itself the power to ban any comic shop that charges too much for an Absolute Batman exclusive. Bleeding Cool broke the terms first: DC “strongly encourages” retailers to cap unsigned variants at five times cover price and signed variants at ten times, and reserves the right to cut off future variant access to any shop that goes higher.
How Star Trek: The Customizable Card Game Went From Brilliant Innovation To Complete Failure
Decipher, Inc. built the second-biggest trading card game business in America on the back of Star Trek and Star Wars, then watched a company vice president siphon millions out of the register while the games he was supposed to be steering grew too complicated for their own players to track. The Star Trek Customizable Card Game outlived its publisher by …
Dua Lipa Names Her New "Banned Books" Shrine “Manifesto,” But She Should Have Read The Books First
Dua Lipa opened a library on June 27, inside the 120-year-old Livraria Lello bookshop in Porto, Portugal, stocked with 100 books hand-picked by her media brand Service95. She’s calling it the Manifesto Library, and she wants you to know it’s a monument to books the establishment tried to erase. The problem starts with the name.
Wizards of the Coast Just Unionized Under the Shadow of Its Own Pinkerton History
Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering Arena development team voted 79 to 16 on June 23 to certify United Wizards of the Coast, the first union in the company’s history. The National Labor Relations Board tally covered 102 eligible workers across animation, art, design, engineering, and QA at the company’s Renton, Washington office. It also arrived…
Xbox’s Layoffs Triggered an Industry-Wide Panic, and the Reactions Keep Piling Up
Microsoft’s July 6 announcement of 3,200 Xbox job cuts and five divested studios did not stay contained to a single press release. Across Bethesda, id Software, ZeniMax, and the wider Communications Workers of America membership inside Microsoft, the reaction has turned into a running record of an industry watching itself get gutted in real time.
Reclaiming The Shire Part 13: Vance, the Shire, and the New Right
We started a retrospective on Tolkien’s rise to superstardom, which began with a left-wing movement in the 1970s appropriating his work and has slowly migrated over time to people realizing how right-wing and Christian Lord of the Rings is. Now, we continue.
Moana Got Cultural Consultants, Yet The Odyssey Got Mocked For Fans Wanting Greek Actors
Disney’s live-action “Moana” arrived in theaters with a team of Polynesian consultants attached to nearly every department. Dr. Grant Muāgututiʻa led the effort as lead consultant for the Cultural Trust, working alongside choreographer and associate producer Tiana Nonosina Liufau and songwriter Opetaia Foaʻi. The consultants worked to ensure the traditi…
Apex Magazine Pulls a Story It Only “Suspects” Was Written With AI, and Refuses to Even Check
Apex Magazine posted a statement this week announcing it had removed a story from Issue 153 over suspicion of AI assistance, and the editors admit in the same statement they have no way to confirm it. The story, “Vigil of the Tenth Air,” is gone from the website. Amended copies of the issue are going out to every subscriber free of charge. Here is the statement in full, as posted by the magazine: