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fish sticks ARE culture, actually (Patreon)

Published:
2025-01-01 13:40:29
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Happy Near Year! In this one I reflect on 2024's high and lows and look ahead to 2025. I also yap about the popularity of fiction set at boarding schools and what the kids are calling dark academia.

Helpful links

"The Evacuated Children on the Second World War": https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-evacuated-children-of-the-second-world-war

Ted Chiang's essay in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art

Comments

emma

love love love the idea of a media log thank you for sharing!!

T.X. Watson

Kelly Link is so good! Also a piece of writing advice I got years ago, if you're into her work: read Lady Churchill's Rosebud's Wristlet. She edits it, & there's a lot of material in it that's basically other writers doing the kind of thing she does, but less perfectly, so it's easier to see how they put it together

Jane

Ah, commiseration on the career disillusionment due to AI--I'm just in education, and it's bad enough over here. It's cool that you're using it to take your writing projects more seriously though. And in terms of topics/questions, I'd love to hear more about how you became a recovering snob sometime. I am still too much of a snob, so I'm very interested in how you changed your mind.

LG

Happy new year! I really resonate with your learnings from 2024 about broadening and giving yourself credit for non-book media, and also letting go of the number. I also fall into the trap of reading things that are getting airtime instead of all the things I know will hit the spot - you are not alone haha I’m looking forward to 2025 pagemelt and am excited to see what you create this year! Unrelated sidenote: you had a video earlier this year about In Other Lands that prompted me to put it on my TBR - finished it this week and feel the need to thank you for talking about it because it was such a fun and emotional read and I probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise! It was a good book to end the year with 😌

KrustyFrank27

I wholeheartedly support your short story goals, both reading and writing! My last book for 2024 (and, subsequently, my first book for 2025) is Approaching Oblivion by Harlan Ellison. I know HE has a prickly reputation in the writing community, but damn do I love his work. I will read anything that man put out. I began Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang after your glowing recommendation of Elevation, and now that my life will be somewhat less hectic coming up, I’m absolutely jumping back into it. I think intentionality is the key. I used to get so stressed out if I felt as though I wasn’t incredibly productive and intentional with my media consumption, but now as long as I’m not throwing away my time with nonsense, I’ve let myself go on watching shows vs seeking out the shiny newly released movies that everyone’s buzzing about. It makes me feel calmer and more in control.

Crystal's Bookish Life

I love what you said about The Cruel Prince and fish sticks being culture. I truly love the connections you draw

Flare

How weird is it that I only realized that this page is called "Page Melt" and not "Page me it" after hearing it in the video? lol

breigh

this past year has been crazy to me re: gen ai as someone who works in engineering. like we've been talking about and using ai and machine learning (especially in academic spaces) for years, the technology is not new. chatbots are not new! what IS new is scraping huge amounts of data with literally no quality control (not to mention permission from the original source of the data), throwing it all in a black box and pretending the mediocre garbage it spits out is interesting. hope that public and professional reverence for this practice dies soon!

Samantha Rose Meyer

Loved your perspective on Dark Academia! I also find myself growing tired of the “cut throat” competitive vibes in DA, and am particularly repelled by an offshoot of that which is that a lot of Dark Academia is about murder as a sort of intellectual or creative pursuit, and I just find that fixation so… boring? Would love to hear your thoughts on why this has become such a feature of the sub genre. I’ve been blaming it on The Secret History’s influence, but obviously there is something people find compelling there that I’m just missing and I’d love to know what it is.

Kit

Happy new year Mel! I'm currently reading a comic called Secret Life by Theo Ellsworth, which is an adaptation of some early Jeff Vandermeer stories. It's a weird, uncanny story set in an office building and the frameworks you used in your Work video have been very helpful to me in interpreting what exactly is going om, especially in the comfortable-but-vacuous life of office work vs. the degraded-but-real nature of manual labor (represented in Secret Life by the custodians). There's a lot of interesting things going on in the story about the rewards of obedience against its perils and the necessity of disobeying against the consequences of doing so. I can't wait to see what you have coming in 2025 and if Tiktok is indeed banned in the US, I'm happy that you've carved out alternative places for yourself and this community.

Rhys Tunley

I'm in new zealand and we're in summer and still have had nonstop rain and mist since christmas😅😅 can't escape bad weather anywhere I guess

pagemelt
>>160202784

oh dope, that comic sounds extremely interesting and up my alley, thanks for sharing!! (and happy New Year!)

pagemelt
>>160184697

ooh yeah, that's an interesting thought. I'm also inclined to think some of it is just aping The Secret History for sure. and obvs The Secret History (famously) isn't a mystery novel, BUT for the dark academia that DOES also have a mystery component, I think the kind of whodunnit/murderer-among-us thing dovetails nicely with the themes dark academia tends to be interested in (competence! betrayal! pursuit of knowledge that's socially acceptable vs. pursuit of knowledge that's deemed deviant!). but i agree with you about finding a lot of it quite boring lmao

pagemelt
>>160166114

yeah the PRETENDING part is so baffling!!! if it were actually making good stuff, somehow, we could talk about establishing ethical parameters, but it's not even doing that! feels like i'm living in a different reality than some of these people!

pagemelt
>>160068621

ahhh thank you so much. literally any opportunity to bring up and passionately defend The Cruel Prince 😭😭

pagemelt
>>160028789

thanks friend!! i'm also learning that inentionality is SO important. letting go of investing time in shiny new stuff just because everyone's talking about it has been huge for me too. i've started blocking out my time in a calendar, which seems nuts, but it's helped me SO much in seeing, visually, that there are only so many hours in the day, so it's senseless to beat myself up for not being productive "enough". also: hope you enjoy my boi ted!!!!

pagemelt
>>160023267

thank you for the lovely comment!!! i'm so glad you enjoyed In Other Lands, it is SUCH a special book

pagemelt
>>160005259

ooooh, thanks for the rec, I've never even heard of it! I'll add it to this list!! (ETA: just looked it up and it looks extremely cool, can't wait)

breigh
>>160166114

it’s crazy like “wow this large language model can put together sentences!” ok so could the chatbots i used over a decade ago as a child what are we talking about

Rome Parker

Hey Mel, thanks for another great video this month! I'm reading Dark Heir by C. S. Pacat--I wrote a review of Dark Rise a couple weeks ago. The series is both similar and different from Captive Prince. Have you checked it out?

pagemelt
>>160331257

Not yet! Mostly because I know how Pacat does series, so I'm waiting until the third once comes out so I can read all three in a row, haha

Ryan Berger

So many interesting projects and thoughts in this video that I don't even know where to begin. So I will not! Happy new year pal, can't wait to see what 2025 brings. May our outputs finally come close to the joys of sweet sweet input

stummyhort

It is a real tragedy that the campus genre is mostly dominated by romanticism of traditional institutions, because there really is so much to be said for the rag-tag, down-to-earth, working class cohorts you find at a community college or low tier state school. I remember feeling a bit embarrassed to commit to a humble commuter college as a big fish in a small high school, but looking back I am SO grateful I became disillusioned with Prestigious Academia™ early enough to have made that choice. I need the dark academia novelists to get community college pilled because THAT is where the sauce is at!!! Anyway. Great stuff as always, and yay to more in 2025!

Valentine 🐋🪐

Hello and Happy New Year! I have been following you for a while and I recently became a patron. I absolutely love your content and your insights on a wide variety of subjects. It’s a delight listening to you and I want to warmly thank you for all that you do. Can’t wait to see what exciting projects 2025 brings! 😊 Take care!

Abbie

I started my own commonplace book after watching this. Holy moly—there is something magical about moving my quotes from a digital note on my phone to a physical notebook! I’m surprised by how many of the quotes I’ve saved over the past six-ish years have been from nonfiction reads, even when over two-thirds of what I read is fiction.

Jen

I never did the reading goal thing because I had always thought of reading as a solitary activity, but then a few years ago after being in fandom and bookish socmed spaces for a while I decided to try it out, and I gave myself what I thought was the ultimate softball goal thinking it would be good for my ego. Lol. I BARELY made it and only did by technically cheating! So, never again with the reading goals for me actually XD. Ironically one of the things I thought would help is reading collected short stories, so I signed up for a couple of the sff mag emails I found on bsky. Now I want the LeGuinn collection too

pagemelt
>>161247261

Yeah one of the reasons I stopped doing a goal too was that I realized I was actively AVOIDING short stories that weren't part of larger collections because they didn't "count." Very silly of me, in hindsight!! Here's to SFF mags 🍻

Michelle Lippold

I love the idea of the commonplace book! I’m curious how you fill yours—like do you write down the quotes right when you see them? Or mark them somehow in the book and then go back and add them to the notebook? I’d love to try this!

pagemelt
>>161296615

Ooh I'll talk about this more in next month's vid! (Truly any excuse to talk about notetaking 😅)

Lauren Cole

i picked up exhalation after hearing your recommendation and went straight to story of your life and others after finishing it, and i can say you have many more perfect little gemstones of stories to look forward to!

Syd

i used to maintain commonplace books in high school and college but i kinda did a reverse where all of my quotes actually were pulled from tumblr instead of me just organically running across them in my reading. but it did introduce me to so many amazing books, poetry, and articles! also your warning is totally warranted because i was actually introduced to it by catholic camp counselors who used it to maintain bible verses that resonated with them (which is totally valid and they were perfectly normal about it but i have seen the people you have warned against). also i just think that with commonplace books that it really is up to the person making it how they wanted to organize it because it really is for your eyes only. mine had zero organization besides the quote, author, source, but i did tab the quotes that really stuck out to me. years later i still think about audre lorde saying "your silence will not protect you" and laura gilpin's "two-headed calf" poem. i also find the reading goal thing arbitrary because i do want to read a certain amount a year just to get through my ever-growing tbr pile but i started adding more specifics to it rather than quanity. like i want to read a debut author's work, i want to read more authors of color, i want to read more about paleontology, etc. i started doing it with other media too because i have the time for it so my goal for movies this year is every week to watch one movie i've never seen before.

pagemelt
>>162367990

Oh interesting, I hadn't thought about doing it like that! I think that's a lovely way to find new things!

Megan Hahn

How you talk about finding beauty in everyday American modernity really gets at something in my brain! Of course I love a Cruel Prince reference too haha. But also have you seen Sari Shryack's paintings? She goes by notsorryart online and has some really thoughtful things to say about the intersection of modern American poverty and beauty, and her work speaks to that as well!