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mariabustillos.com
Maria Bustillos
@mariabustillos.com
32K followers 1.7K following 9.9K posts
I help run @flaminghydra.com and its writer-owned parent cooperative, the Brick House.

Digital ownership rights, archives, libraries, fun, and press freedom are things I love.

maria | at | flaminghydra | dot | com
mariabustillos.com | flaminghydra.com
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mariabustillos.com
Savage indignation regarding the Grok scandal, very satisfying read, new from Ian Williams @brocktoon.bsky.social

flaminghydra.com/issue-479/
There’s no engagement on Twitter. Get rid of that excuse. If you’re on the left or center, nobody on Twitter comes to your work through that app. If you’re on the right, you’re driven to post at ever higher registers, lest you get pinned down as the wrong sort of right, until you’re posting child porn prompts. If you’re still on Twitter, you’re a mark and an asshole who evidently approves of child porn, that is, who doesn’t disapprove of it enough to exit the child porn factory. Photo illustration by Joe MacLeod shows Elon Musk's face covered over by logos and prompts for X and Grok
January 12, 2026 at 10:56 PM
mariabustillos.com
Congratulations to our fiery collective @flaminghydra.com

flaminghydra.com/free (try unlocked pieces!)
flaminghydra.com/subscribe (subscribe!)
Screen grab of Flaming Hydra's Bluesky profile showing 50,000 followers
January 12, 2026 at 1:48 PM
mariabustillos.com
Leftists love Tolkien for reasons very different from those that inspire the devotion of the techbro right.

(I wrote this for the Marquette oral history project in 2019)
Tolkien himself had lived under the shadow of Mordor; that is to say, he experienced in his own life the global threat of all good things being annihilated forever by violent and malevolent forces. His mind was formed as a youth in the darkness of the first world war, in which many of his school friends were killed. The shadow we lived under in 1975 was not as black as it had been for him in 1916, but it wasn’t different in kind. Vietnam had ended, but middle schoolers in California were learning about the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, the Cold War, the looming environmental apocalypse (yes, even then), the endless killings and the betrayals of politicians and industrialists, all the greed and duplicity and real evil walking the earth. And everyone born since then has lived also under the shadow of Mordor, I think; and Tolkien’s books show a way to bear it, to fight back, even maybe to prevail. Despite its weaknesses—the simplistic and credulous view of monarchism, for example—there is a self-evident truth in the story of Middle-Earth, that so long as it is possible to conceive and imagine the overthrow of evil, well… that imagining contains within itself the proof, an ineradicable idea, that it is possible and could happen; and if it could, why then, maybe it must.
January 9, 2026 at 11:36 PM
mariabustillos.com
www.bbc.co.uk/news/electio...
Unknown: "She used to be great, she's still very beautiful." Trump: "I moved on her actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and fuck her, she was married." Unknown: "That's huge news there." Trump: "No, no, Nancy. No this was [inaudible] and I moved on her very heavily in fact I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said I'll show you where they have some nice furniture. I moved on her like a bitch. I couldn't get there and she was married. Then all-of-a-sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. She's totally changed her look." Bush: "Your girl's hot as shit. In the purple." Multiple voices: "Whoah. Yes. Whoah." Bush: "Yes. The Donald has scored. Whoah my man." Trump: "Look at you. You are a pussy." Bush: "You gotta get the thumbs up." Trump: "Maybe it's a different one." Bush: "It better not be the publicist. No, it's, it's her." Trump: "Yeah that's her with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything." Bush: "Whatever you want." Trump: "Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
January 8, 2026 at 7:34 PM
mariabustillos.com
If you want to (and can) stop thinking for a few minutes about current events in this week No. 1 of 2026, I highly recommend @jdconnor.bsky.social's analysis of this year's crop of movie Dads

flaminghydra.com/issue-477/
Thus we learn that the movies of the moment, like the critics, are Taking Stands. Because the baseline genre of serious Hollywood cinema is some form of melodrama, the big themes often end up involving family issues. This year, mothers are ambivalent (or worse!), kids are threatened (or worse!)—but what of the dads? I’m here to tell you what the Awards-Season Dads are up to.
January 8, 2026 at 1:15 PM
mariabustillos.com
?!?! re: the @johncusack.bsky.social Q&A in @columjournreview.bsky.social

1) Govt info doesn't FOIA itself;
2) The 1st Amendment is for keeping the state from jailing critics

Journalism is work, done by people who pay rent... the right gets this, the left doesn't

www.cjr.org/the-intervie...

1/2
Now, this is not an argument against paying journalists, or that the realities of the journalism business aren’t fraught. I get that part of it. Newsrooms need to survive. But the news isn’t just a business. It’s enshrined in the First Amendment.
January 7, 2026 at 8:32 PM
mariabustillos.com
For Public Domain Day, a beautiful Tapestry for the Internet Archive @archive.org

(keep an eye on Tapestries! Long in development, a potentially web-changing innovation from the great Bob Stein of Future of the Book)

tapestries.media/u/futureofth...
A Tapestry collection, Public Domain Day 2026: Celebrating the Lesser Known at the Internet Archive. Intro text: On January 1st people celebrate the books entering the public domain after their copywrights expire. This year, that means books published in 1930. Unsurprisingly people focus on the "famous" titles which this year include As I Lay Dying, The Maltese Falcon, four Nancy Drew titles and Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. I sense that people read the lists and check-off the ones they've heard of, but rarely do more. So, I thought it might be interesting to dig a little deeper. Not only is it fun to explore the relatively unknown, I think there's a lot to be learned by looking at the ways our forebears looked at the world 95 years ago. Public Domain Day is celebrated all over the western world but each country or region has different copyright periods so the newly arrived titles are not the same. This collection is all U.S. based and all the books displayed here are from the Internet Archive.
January 6, 2026 at 5:40 PM
mariabustillos.com
MOBY-DICK WEEK at @flaminghydra.com wound up with a celestial Sea Shanty composed for the occasion by Dave Dudley, through the noble offices of @joemacleod666.bsky.social

Cerebral fireworks, laughter, sober reflections, and fun, for just $3/month

flaminghydra.com/moby-dick-we...
Gird yourselves, shipmates, a-goin’ to sea There’s a crazy long chapter about cetology We’ll hear about chowder and harpoons and cod The whiteness of whales, the indifference of God One line at a time, lads It’s gonna be fine lads Hey nonny let’s learn about blubber and shit Line after line There’s plenty of time And stuff in the middle you can probably skip
January 3, 2026 at 7:53 PM
mariabustillos.com
Sobering conversation with @tomscocca.bsky.social on corporate media stars and their complicity in the Beltway fantasy narratives that you can bet on on Polymarket

Newly free to read at @flaminghydra.com

flaminghydra.com/ezra-klein-d...
Bacon’s (very charitable) view is that Klein sees himself as influencing politics, rather than trying to tell the truth as he sees it, as a journalist or public intellectual would do. What do you think about that? TS: Bacon is right that Klein conceives of himself as an oracle of strategy who is called to steer the discourse, but there’s a much deeper problem than that. Klein represents—as does David Remnick, in conversation with Klein—a whole class of people who have spent the last nine years constructing a mythology or ideology and trying to pass it off as a strategic observation. These people have convinced themselves and one another that a collection of made-up and frequently impossible claims are the objective truth about American politics.
January 3, 2026 at 7:46 PM
mariabustillos.com
MOBY-DICK WEEK. Dang. So good. Today we have @kimkelly.bsky.social in the far North, and also an animation/podcast from @camoot.bsky.social and her friend Raj.

Seeing a classic work fractally reconstructed through these phenomenal minds is the @flaminghydra.com way

flaminghydra.com/issue-473/
MOBY DICK WEEK headline over the image of a gigantic whale leaping out of the sea
January 2, 2026 at 12:54 AM
mariabustillos.com
Dude if you just came out and said you're returning to your human rights lawyer values e.g.: trans rights are human rights you could fix this mess in ten minutes
January 1, 2026 at 10:50 PM
mariabustillos.com
What. No.

Don't use their language, @newyorker.com that is not even a real word. What the hell is wrong with "flee" or like. "Flee this godforsaken country"
[email subject line] The New Yorker Daily The Mexican Couple Planning to Self-Deport
December 30, 2025 at 8:37 PM
mariabustillos.com
Unmissable
Rob was more connected with the Credibility Gap, satirists on alternative radio with a sharp political, countercultural edge. Just to give you an idea of where they were at, one of their broadcasts was called “J. Edgar Hoover: Too Proud to Die, Too Dead to Live.” Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Albert Brooks were also part of that scene.
December 25, 2025 at 9:08 PM
mariabustillos.com
I love @davidjroth.bsky.social's writing for a lot of reasons but one of the main ones is, he loves the world. There's nothing rarefied about his intellect, his humor, his humanity.

Just makes me want to keep on living basically.

Here he is on Hallmark movies

flaminghydra.com/issue-468/#h...
I know I have been watching these movies the wrong way, or more to the point watching them too much. Before second-screen entertainment was a genre unto itself, Hallmark movies filled that niche; at their best they are made with care and craft, and the good ones really are sweet and funny and creative around the edges despite the thick syrup of formula poured over all of it, but they are also intended to roll over into each other, to compound into an agreeable vibe, to be enjoyable even if you missed a third of the action to check on whatever you’re baking. They are made quickly and cheaply, and apparently in unusually pleasant circumstances, but they are not films that cry out for detailed note-taking. They are not films that cry out at all, really. They murmur and coo and twinkle.
December 24, 2025 at 4:55 PM
mariabustillos.com
Hit that subscribe button because WOW. Truly. An instant classic from @josie.zone, I will be reading it forever

To say nothing of what is coming next week to @flaminghydra.com

flaminghydra.com/subscribe
December 24, 2025 at 4:38 PM
mariabustillos.com
This is not my beautiful @newyorker.com

what the heck is up with this advertisement here.
page of the new yorker dot com showing headless obese people sitting on stools and in place of their heads there is like a giant candle flame?
December 24, 2025 at 2:10 PM
mariabustillos.com
and my colleague @benehrenreich.bsky.social
Ah, Freedom To the surprise of precisely no one who has been following her career, Bari Weiss, in her new role reporting to David Ellison as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News,
December 23, 2025 at 10:59 PM
mariabustillos.com
an excerpt from my colleague @raxkingisdead.bsky.social
The dynamic strikes me as analogous to that of my boomer parents stumbling on my horny AIM conversations twenty years ago. But the key difference now is that the conversations are no longer with human beings who can be shamed, scolded, or even prosecuted.
December 23, 2025 at 10:59 PM
mariabustillos.com
Watching holiday films with @davidjroth.bsky.social today at @flaminghydra.com wow! he is a good writer.

flaminghydra.com/issue-468/#h...
photo illustration by Joe MacLeod has a lot of Hallmark and Christmas things, Mr. Met, I only just noticed that the Hallmark crown is almost just like the Rolex one, also has OY TO THE WORLD! on there which is the name of a Hallmark movie
December 23, 2025 at 9:57 PM
mariabustillos.com
Went to the most amazing concert of carols with a choir and orchestra, and as a gift from my host received a party favor I shall treasure always (pictured, on head)
me in a decorative headband feat. felt reindeer horns, with the tree behind me
December 21, 2025 at 11:13 PM
mariabustillos.com
Do not welcome me. I am not going in there

This assumption-close style is so insulting.
email subject heading from The Google Workspac. Welcome to your trial. Let Gemini take notes in meetings.
December 19, 2025 at 11:43 PM
mariabustillos.com
Absolutely cracking essay and review of the new Agnieszka Holland movie about Kafka from the wonderful @g-kwiatkowski.bsky.social, good heavens, read without delay

worldliteraturetoday.org/2026/january...
Not far from my family home in Gdańsk, in a manor in Srebrzysko, lived Joseph von Eichendorff, author of The Life of a Good-for-Nothing. The father of the main character throws him out of the house for laziness and recklessness, and the son becomes a wandering artist. Such coincidences always made the sense of guilt stronger and, at the same time, desirable, not negative, because ultimately the main character chooses the world of art.—that is, the world of freedom and self-determination.
December 19, 2025 at 3:49 PM
mariabustillos.com
to wit:
Theme: HERO'S JOURNEY P N A O T My Favorite Hydranyms (CHOOSE UP TO THREE) 【John T.】 Phileas, nobly attempting ovoid trek 【superba】 Pinky's 'NARF!' accompanies outrageous tactics 【John R】 Please, not another overused trope 【Selene St. Satellite】 prophesied naïf appears, overthrows tyrant 【Roxy Coryell】 Plotting Necessary Annihilation Over Tyranny 【Ethan S.】 Protagonists necessarily advance over thresholds. 【Esmeralda】 Popeye needs another oversized tinful 【Thomas】 Penitent Ne'er-do-well Actually Overcomes Troubles 【Corvalis Corgi】 People Not Always On Time 【Liz!】 peripatetic narrator's arc offers truisms 【Tom U】 Popular narrative about onerous triumph 【Maryanne Murray】 Polygamists never arrive on time. 【cathryn】 protagonist nourished, abyss overpowered: ta-da! 【Steve C.】 Penned Normalizes Archetypes or Tropes 【Jo S】 Partner needs Advil, organic tampons 【Cornelius Sabinus】 Pretending noble actor overturns tyrants 【The Lemon Drop Kid】 Punch noses, accept outsize tribute 【Alicia】 Probably? no actual outlaw triumphs 【Chris Lay】 Protagonist Needs An Otherworldly Tutor 【Tim ( but really his wife)】 Penelope Negotiates Asshole Odysseus' Treachery 【Elliott】 Pinocchio Not Appreciating Ocean Time
December 13, 2025 at 2:06 PM
mariabustillos.com
Flaming Hydra @flaminghydra.com is a cooperative of writers and artists publishing what interests them freely.

One or two big stories each weekday, features, criticism, interviews, comics, you name it. A weekly Hydranym game. Our new News On Fire column.

Partial list of our contributors:
Our Contributors: Amy Chu, Ana Marie Cox, Anna Merlan, Annalee Newitz, Ben Ehrenreich, Brian Hioe, Carrie Frye, Colin McGowan, David Moore, David Roth, Diana Moskovitz, Emily Flake, Felipe De La Hoz, Hamilton Nolan, Harry Siegel, Ian Williams, J.D. Connor, Jack Pendarvis, Jennie Rose Halperin, Jide Salawu, jj skolnik, Joe MacLeod, John Saward, Jonathan M. Katz, Josephine Riesman, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, k.e. harloe, Kim Kelly, Kola Tubosun, Laurie Woolever, Leila Brillson, Luke O'Neil, Maria Bustillos, Mark Yarm, Miles Klee, Misha Angrist, Moh Telbani, Myriam Gurba, Nathan Munn, Osita Nwanevu, Parker Molloy, Rax King, S.I. Rosenbaum, Sam Thielman, Tal Lavin, Tod Seelie, Tom Scocca, Tommy Craggs, Trevor Alixopulos, Yemisi Aribisala, Zach Rabiroff, Zito Madu
December 11, 2025 at 4:51 PM
mariabustillos.com
How @brianhioe.bsky.social busted his phone!! Again!

A riveting tale at @flaminghydra.com

flaminghydra.com/issue-460/#c...
a busted iPhone!
December 11, 2025 at 12:12 AM