What a Week, Huh?

Lemon, it's Friday.

Literally a week ago, I thought to myself, “Y’know, I think it’s time to move the brackets to Substack.” It was a bit of a rash decision, in that I hadn’t been stewing on the idea for too long. Twitter was not a wildly unusable tool, but just on an ethical level, I felt a little squicky considering its new owner. (And I’d delayed thinking about what to do during the six-month period this year when it seemed like Twitter would remain un-Musked, as it were.)

This week, my thought is “Ah, so I’ll leave Twitter because someone’s likely to charge me for it.” Now, you might point out that for the moment, the only thing anyone would have to pay for on Twitter is a shiny blue checkmark that will denote that you are a super-cool and 100% real person, and not a sad dork and/or troll.

And while that may be true, the operative phrase in the previous sentence is “for the moment”. If the guy’s gonna lay off half of the site’s staff and start charging people for the tiniest, stupidest little icon, how far off are we from “You want to tweet? Well, you need to pay for that privilege first”? I wonder.

Anyway. Over the course of the last few days, lots of folks have started subscribing to this newsletter so I figured I would use today’s post to give you a sense of what you can expect here moving forward.

I just started following you on Twitter because of your Muppet Christmas Carol tweet. Who are you exactly?

I’m Josh Spiegel, a freelance cultural critic who also does a lot of goofy March Madness-style brackets centered around the Walt Disney Company. Also, re: The Muppet Christmas Carol, as much as everyone is excited for the extended version with “When Love is Gone” to arrive on Disney+ on December 9, it doesn’t match the excitement these guys feel!

Where have I seen your work?

[In the dulcet tones of Troy McClure] You may remember me from my reviews and essays at Slashfilm, Polygon, Episodic Medium, and other fine outlets. Disney is my main focus — one way or another — at most of the places where I write, but not just that.

So will this newsletter just be the Disney brackets you’re talking about?

Primarily, but not entirely. I will likely use this newsletter to a) share my work on a semi-regular basis (weekly or bi-weekly), and b) share any thoughts on the Disney parks, films/TV, etc.

Are you still finishing out the Disney Legends bracket on Twitter?

As long as Twitter keeps the lights on, yes. (Considering how tumultuous the week has been…I mean, we’ll see, right?)

What will the next bracket be?

You’ll find out soon, I promise.

Now that you’re doing the brackets on Substack, are you going to share out a long-term schedule of future bracket ideas?

I’m open to that, but it depends on you. Let me know by answering this poll (which I may or may not be adding as a test for future brackets themselves).

Are you just going to be on Substack now?

I’ll stick around Twitter, but as mentioned above, there’s been a sinking-ship vibe to the site for the last few days and I doubt it’s going to get a lot better.

Can I find you anywhere else online?

The two big spots you can find me, aside from Substack, are Letterboxd (which I’m more sporadically updating) and Mastodon. I’m very new to the latter, but it seems very Twitter-like but less awful, so far.