Rani Som! Boston tomorrow!

Hey friends,

Hope you’re all hanging in there. Time to have a very :) normal :) week :) !

But first! Our Boston Gender Ordeal live show is tomorrow at 5pm! It’s going to be a marathon travel day for us — maybe I shouldn’t call it a marathon because the actual New York Marathon is also tomorrow, but that’s actually part of the reason why I have to leave NYC at like 7am lololol — so if you’re in the area, it would mean a lot to us if you came to the show! We’ve only got a dozen or so tickets left, which you can grab here.

Other than our Philly show (December 3, baby!), I don’t have too much else to plug this week. Submissions are closed for both the 2024 grant cycle — which, btw, was plagued with scammy ChatGPT submissions this year… not loving our AI future! — and the Sex Change and the City anthology, so a lot of my work right now is sending emails and color-coding various spreadsheets.

We’ll have a new Gender Reveal episode out on Nov 11, but in the meantime, have you listened to our Gender Conceal convo with Rani Som? Rani is an incredible illustrator and author, and she has generously shared many of her works on her website, which I recommend perusing. (If you're reading this via email, you can click through to Patreon to see a few other examples of her work in the little slideshow.)

It was such a treat to chat with Rani about name changes, trans utopias, slim-fit J. Crew, Kate Bush, misanthropy, watercolors, NYC ska shows circa-1990, the Kuleshov effect in comics, and the freaky pickles on my wall lol.

The intro to Rani’s episode includes a little update about the future of Gender Conceal, but allow me to reiterate here: According to our recent patron survey, the vast majority of y’all would like us to keep mixing advice, AMAs, and loose chatting-with-friends episodes into the Gender Conceal feed, alongside these more researched, Gender Reveal-like interviews. So, next month, expect advice and chatting with a very special guest!

Oh, also!! I mailed stickers to new $5+ patrons this week, so if you joined in September or October, keep an eye out for those.

Okay, let’s do Links & Stuff:

• Tony Tulathimutte wrote the best Grub Street Diet and it’s not close

• Time to throw out all your black plastic cooking utensils :(

• From Vox, why internet commenters are always suggesting divorce

• Not spon, but the Secretly Store has a ton of gorgeous limited-edition vinyl on sale for $15 and I can’t narrow down what I want to order so I just stare at it all every day???

• This link list wasn’t sad enough so here’s a reminder of how bad everything is I guess!

In Tuck’s Creature Corner:

• Sabs investigated which species live at the Rainforest Cafe

• Salmon hats are back!

That’s it for this week. Good luck out there. Here’s your weekly Rhubarb, courtesy of my roommate.

Photo: Ruby sleeping peacefully on her heating pad. 

Xo,
Yr resident gender detective