DRW50

And now they are trying to bring Gawker back... Yes, "men with balls," or whatever the hell the quote was, when that was the last of the problems with Tom as a character by that point. The end result of this was storylines like Marshall Travers raping Jessica and being hurriedly killed off because of fan confusion and anger (noticeably the same 'journalists' who loved Hunt Block's Craig had little to say here). And Jessica and Margo fighting over that Doc sleaze soon after. The likes of Hogan, Guza, JFP, Logan, Hinsey, etc. could never get past their inherent disdain for and shame for soaps, shame that they had to cover or work in the genre. And this shame and self-hatred helped to kill the work of generations of artists.

It's about personality cults. A lot of people are suckers for people who have funny quips in interviews. Many journalists, like Carolyn Hinsey and Michael Logan (he of the leather jacket headshot) also saw themselves as above soaps and as cool, and he played into that because he clearly hated soaps. These same cultists followed him around from soap to soap, to diminishing returns. The last being Y&R, where his groupies worked with the fawning groupies like Branco and the Daytime Confidential hacks, and a few bloggers and others who were also trying to push more legacy hypes like Tom "cut the crap" Casiello, who was supposed to be a tie to Marland because he had an old ATWT story outline, or something (I can't remember anymore). I still have bad memories of how the Sheffer personality cult infested soap magazines and to a lesser degree some of the boards then (as so many fans loved Hunt Block's Craig). Magazines that I used to have some semblance of respect for, like SOD (I had given up SPW by then, mostly), praising the "comedy" of Jack being raped by Julia. There was a real toxicity and cruelty in the soap genre and the journalists and wannabe journalist fan sites that covered it in the '00s. In some ways it prefaces what we would see in politics and online with things like Gamergate. I miss the soap genre with all my heart, but as I type this out I realize for the first time what a bullet we dodged by not having to see just how incredibly vile and terrifying everything would have gotten if more than 4 bare bones soaps had managed to make it through the '10s.

Mike Gravel, Democratic senator of Alaska from 1968-1980, has passed away. He is likely best remembered for his efforts to get the Pentagon Papers put into the Congressional record. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/27/1010702706/mike-gravel-former-alaska-senator-and-anti-war-advocate-dies-at-age-91 Unfortunately much of his legacy ended up being exploited by a lot of the dead end/nihlist/grifter left - I believe there was even an instance last year where the edgelord youths who ran an account for him ended up having to do cleanup duty because in an interview he did it was obvious he did not entirely share their views. Anyway, I won't be posting any Twitter links that they made all about themselves, so just remember the man and not the narratives.

I don't get the feeling Marisa Tomei enjoyed her soap work much either, but she mostly just doesn't talk about it.

It's sad if anyone out there gets into Corrie through 2010, the year that killed the last of the show's heart.

Oh I know...it's just when we got to parts like, "Some say he's a recluse, but look at these selfies!" that I started to wonder if we'd walked into a parodic exercise.

In our current times, mistaking one black actress for another is tone deaf and gross. I think fan outrage was the only reason they responded.

Welcome back, @Max.

I hope you're right. In other news, the current and future voice of the GOP reminds us what is on the way:

Just politics isn't something I'm sure we can afford right now. It's word games on top of word games on top of more word games and the more this happens the more the benefits of whatever this deal is or was meant to be (whichever deal we even end up with...if we end up with a deal...) fades. Again, I blame Manchin and Sinema and the other gutless senators who let them say this stuff for the camera, I don't blame Biden, but I wish at the very least there was better coordination so we did not have to end up with confusing walkbacks that play even more into the hands of the GOP and the media. A nebulous infrastructure deal with so much else like voting rights left hanging in the wind isn't worth all this time and capital if this is the only way they can even manage to sell it, but if this is what we are getting (and I'm aware it may be the only thing Manchin and co will even consider), I just hope the unforced errors can be contained.

Around and around and around and around: I guess what he said on Thursday was saying the quiet part out loud and now after Manchin, Sinema, and the so-called Republican "moderates" got on the line, we have to go back to these games. All it really accomplished was a bunch of negative headlines yesterday and giving the media another chance to try to portray his administration as bumbling. The whole theater he is being made to perform is just ridiculous at this point.

I don't really follow the DAYS fan/stan paths - I wonder how popular Cady was among the more vocal Jennifer fans, or even how many of those are left. I can't see a lot of the show's remaining fanbase disagreeing with Melissa's views (as soaps have chased away most fans who aren't white and conservative), but I never really heard the type of outcry over the recast (admittedly people knew Cady was always a temp and Melissa was not replaced because of her views) that I know I would have if, say, Hope or Marlena had been recast.

Three of the most callous and toxic figures who clog up the pipeline of Twitter, all together at last. The horseshoe at work. I wonder if the fat, ugly men who insist any criticism of Bruenig is down to her being attractive will continue to whack it off to her further enabling the likes of JD Vance (and that mentally ill Redscare pseudo-intellectual/psyop/gadfly).

I didn't watch (I didn't even know it was on TV anymore) but someone mentioned it on Twitter. Shameful.

Oh it was absolute dogshit, I agree. It's mostly just we know so little about Lucinda's years pre-Oakdale I was piecing together from fragments. You're right it doesn't fit her continuity - the biggest reason of course being that she clearly had no history with James when they connected in 1986.

It's hard for me to remember if they ever said much about Lucinda between her being made to leave home when she was in her teens and her time in Montega (or was Walsh before Montega?). This also reminds me that I cannot remember if the dead child she had with James Stenbeck was before or after Sierra.

I actually agree with some of their broader points, but this is one of the areas which reminds me of the whole, "Bernie will have rallies in the states of senators who don't pass his legislation!!!" mindset. It doesn't do anything in the real world. The idea that holding a press conference to talk about Matt Gaetz or Laura Ingraham would actually make any difference is very naive. I saw something similar to this earlier today when David Roberts said "thousands of people" need to fill the streets demanding Stephen Breyer retire. I was embarrassed for them.

@DemetriKaneThat's a wonderful discovery. To think it was on there for two years without anyone even noticing! I am thrilled to get to see any glimpse of that period, or of the Anne and Paul story. I wish we could see more of Anne - Judith Barcroft was such a luminous actress, as shown here, and I would love to see her interact with Peter White, Ruth Warrick, etc. It's a shame that her main surviving soap work is her poor role on Ryan's Hope.

Is this Lauren Marie Taylor in the K-Mart ad near the end? (lots of static) I think I've posted this one before, but it's funny to see Christine Tudor (I think) in the Bounty ad early in this reel.

Thanks. That felt more like a PR exercise for David than anything else, but it's nice to hear how he is doing.

Schatz's tweet is an illustration of what weighs me down about all of this - it is being framed as an outrageous betrayal of "moderate" Republicans. Even if Manchin and Sinema go along, the story veers away from being about infrastructure and becomes about how wrong it is that Biden and Democrats don't want to work for the common good, and what happened to bipartisanship when Biden ran on it, and all the other garbage. And this is even assuming Manchin doesn't cave, even though this is the situation he created in the first place. It's just a needless quagmire brought on by his ego and it means they are having to scrape through and will struggle to sell any of the benefits to the public.

I was talking about the bipartisan bill, which got about a day of praise from those who live for bipartisan bills until Lindsey Graham panned it. So now the focus will be back to "This is not truly bipartisan," with more tut-tutting from Manchin and the media, until weeks or months from now when the inevitable happens and they finally start work on reconciliation, which will also get a great deal of criticism from Manchin, Sinema, the GOP, and the press before final passage, if there is a final passage. I'm not even going to try to guess what would be in reconciliation, if that ever happens. I know they have no real choice in this, I know that if Biden had had his way they would not have done all this song and dance, but, to go with my original point, I just don't know how much public support the bill is going to have after not only being put through such a grinder which dragged out for many months, but also repeatedly being told by three different corners (the media, the GOP, Manchin/Sinema and those who hide behind them like Chris Coons) that such a bill is inferior and unworthy because our system is broken and we should all be friends and on and on and on. I wish that Biden had just not even focused on infrastructure if this is where we were going to end up. I don't know if he thought Manchin was going to be less delusional or if things are just so bad that even this is the best we were going to get, but in the end I just don't know if this is going to be worth it. If you or others want to see that as negative, then you can. That's your choice.