#Event Magazine

[cliperry]

(x)

COVER EVENT

The band on stage during their recent tour.

Right: Harry is mobbed by fans at a performance in New York for NBC’s Today Show.

Your five unique full-page photos of the boys start here

‘THE GIRLS, THE MADNESS… FAME-WISE, THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE BEATLES’

Harry Styles

One Direction aren’t just a pop band. They’re a hysteria-inducing, social media-fuelled, world-conquering phenomenon… and after five memorable days with them in Australia, Event’s Louise Gannon knows why.

As the bush fires rage in the Blue Mountains overlooking Sydney, muddying the blue skyline with ominous plumes of grey, a group of hysterical teenage girls with tear-streaked faces are lying across the ramps that lead to the car park of the Sheraton hotel. There are hundreds of them, possibly thousands, swarming onto the roads, blocking the pavements, pushing their way into the stylish lobby. All of them clutch posters, placards, mobile phones, and teddy bears. And more are on their way.

This isn’t a protest or a demonstration. This is One Direction mania: teenage hysteria whipped up to unbelievable new levels of organised insanity with the aid of phones, Facebook, Twitter, and breathtaking surveillance and intelligence skills that would put MI5 to shame. The girls’ sole focus is a group of X Factor-formed pop stars, who in less than three years have conquered the world music stage and repositioned the UK (for the first time since The Beatles) as leaders in pop music.

What’s more, these five boys—working-class Northern lads with a splash of Irish (Niall Horan)—have amassed an estimated £60 million fortune in the process, making them the wealthiest British celebrities under 30.

From school to superstardom

Money, fame, power, hits, and hordes of beautiful girls flinging themselves at you. It’s the stuff of teenage boys’ fantasies. The band even have two private jets—one “party” jet, one “quiet” jet—and two tour buses along the same model.

“The party bus is just full of our Xboxes, DVDs, computers, and lots of old socks,” grins 20-year-old Liam Payne.

The quiet jet and bus are full of Harry Styles’s scented candles (the band’s favourites are Jo Malone’s Vanilla & Anise), eye masks, and blankets.

Despite seemingly having it all, though, these boys do still yearn for certain things. Styles, 19, dreams of getting his London home finished in time for Christmas.

“I bought it at the beginning of the year, then decided to move the kitchen. That turned into a bigger thing, and the last time I went it was all just floorboards. The builders have told me it won’t be finished till January, so when I finally get home I’ll still be staying at a mate’s house.”

Louis Tomlinson, 21, one of the three members of the band in a serious relationship, nods when I ask what his dream is.

“Absolutely honestly? It’s sitting in my garden at home with my girlfriend [Manchester University student Eleanor Calder] on a lovely quiet morning, having a cup of tea.”

But it’s not going to happen for quite some time. And the same goes for the band’s shared dream of getting a dog.

“We all want a dog,” says Tomlinson. “But we can’t have one because you need to have the time to be with a dog. And we never have the time.”

Every second of their lives is accounted for. An average day will start at 6 a.m. and finish at 1 a.m. A rare day off requires planning on the level of a military operation.

“It’s pretty hard to just ‘go out,’” says Payne. “If you do, you can try putting on a hat and shades, but it doesn’t really work. As soon as you spot someone who’s spotted you and they have their phone out, you have about 15 to 20 minutes before you get completely surrounded.”

“The other day Louis and I decided to go surfing. We got out of the car and were literally zipping up our wetsuits when we spotted someone with a phone. By the time we’d got out into the water there was a group of people on the beach. I mean, that’s lovely. But it can be a bit embarrassing when you’re trying to learn to surf and then you’re worrying about trying to look cool and not fall over.”

In a low-key photo studio on the outskirts of Sydney, Payne is sitting in the sunshine trying to explain exactly what it’s like to be a member of a band which, when it comes to American chart success, is officially bigger than The▸

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SIMON EMMETT

Above: Zayn with his fiancée, Perrie Edwards of Little Mix, after performing at Madison Square Garden.

Bottom: Liam surfing in Australia

“Beatles.”

“There’s just one word,” he says. “And it’s ‘surreal.’ I don’t think any of us have quite got our heads around it. Because how can this in any way seem normal to anyone?”

“It’s amazing, it’s crazy, it’s like nothing we ever even began to think would happen, but it’s also just weird. The performing, the writing, the albums—all that is just more incredible than you could ever imagine. But none of us had any idea about the rest of it.”

Styles shakes his head. “I mean, it wasn’t that long ago all we had to worry about was our GCSEs.”

Payne grins. “And getting through X Factor. Every Saturday we got voted through, we’d look at each other and think, ‘We’ve blagged another week!’”

“Our mums were crying when we left home because they weren’t prepared either.”

Zayn

They didn’t win; a singer called Matt Cardle did.

One Direction, a group of individual singers put together into a band by Nicole Scherzinger, came third.

Last month, Cardle played to a crowd of less than 100 in west London. One Direction are eight months into their Take Me Home world tour, taking in Europe, America, Australia, and Asia. Tickets for the seven Sydney dates at the 21,000-seater Allphones Arena sold out in just three minutes.

They’re the first pop band since The Beatles to really break America. Their first two albums have gone to No. 1 all over the world. Their latest, Midnight Memories, is certain to follow suit (the bookies aren’t taking any bets, as this is a given).

“It is the biggest achievement any British band has had in decades,” says Simon Cowell, who owns their label, Syco. “Say what you like about them, but One Direction have done the numbers. This band are absolutely massive.”

In May, they announced another world tour starting in April—this time in stadiums. Such was the demand for tickets that extra dates were quickly added.

So far, they’ve sold over ten million albums. Their movie This Is Us grossed £10 million in its opening weekend. Their combined Twitter following is approaching the 100 million mark. The One Direction statistics are as crazy as the fans.

Event has flown to Sydney for the band’s only interview and exclusive photoshoot to mark the release of Midnight Memories. Before I left, their friend and occasional mentor James Corden told me to prepare to be surprised by them.

Corden wrote the introductory skit for the album’s debut single, Best Song Ever, directed by his friend Ben Winston (son of the doctor and scientist Robert).

“They’re really young, they’re crazily famous, and you think they’re going to be the usual pop-star clichés,” he said. “But they’re really proper, decent guys. They’re smart. They’re a lot more grounded than I would have been at their age.”

The band are here with their ‘entourage,’ including head of security Scott, groomer Lou, stylist Gemma, Styles’s dad Des, and older sister Gemma.

There is a separate room set aside for the boys, but it becomes obvious within minutes that they just don’t roll that way. Styles handshakes his way round the room, sniffing and sneezing his way through a bout of extreme hay fever.

He drinks a vitamin shake with an espresso chaser.

“A few months ago,” he says, “we were doing calendar pictures, and my hay fever was so bad I couldn’t open my eyes, but I had to do them. They photoshopped my eyes in.”

Meanwhile, Payne takes Lou’s toddler, Lux, outside to play, Malik checks that his new tattoo (a space monkey) is covered up, and Horan and Tomlinson check out the food.

The first thing that strikes you about them, then, is that they’re not exactly aloof. The second thing is that they all look significantly older and a hell of a lot cooler than they did on The X Factor.

“We’ve all changed,” says Malik. *“I definitely found it pretty hard to begin with. None of us really knew each other that well, and none of us was really prepared.

“We were thrown in it together. We went through the same things. Our mums crying when we left home because they weren’t prepared either. I found it pretty hard at first. I was always trying to be too cool, like you do in school. I found it really hard talking to people, answering questions—you don’t want to sound like an idiot, so a lot of the time you don’t say anything at all.

“Then you realise everyone is in the same boat. None of us knew what we were doing. You can’t take yourself too seriously, and you all start to relax into being who you are. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to do this on your own—if you weren’t in a band.”

Horan nods. “I mean, we were all just pretty excellent at small talk. You get pushed straight in and you just have to grow up fast.”

Styles, who has dated It girl Cara Delevingne, Taylor Swift, and 34-year-old Caroline Flack, is the one who receives the most attention.

Three days later at Sydney’s Allphones Arena, he’ll be the one who gets the loudest screams. But strangely, of all of them, it’s Styles who analyses himself the least and seems the most relaxed.

“I would absolutely hate to be Harry,” says Payne. “Because I don’t think I’d cope with that extra level of attention.”

But Horan adds, “He definitely found the whole experience all very easy.”

Styles nods. “It wasn’t that long ago I was working in a baker’s, and now I’m ▸

“There was a girl in full make-up and high heels actually running on the treadmill, watching me,”

Liam Payne

▸ Doing this.

“I’m very lucky, and as far as I can see, it’s all good. I don’t overthink anything. Everybody else analyses you from your hair to your eyebrows to the way you wave your hand. If you start worrying about it and overthinking everything you do, it all just becomes false, so I think, ‘Just carry on as you are, do what you do and get on with it.’”

He once said his hair got so much attention he wanted to shave it all off.

“Well, it’s grown longer now, and I like it like this,” he laughs. “I’ve grown into it. I think we’ve all changed, loosened up.”

“And now we all actually look like ourselves,” laughs Payne. “We’re older. We’ve all got hair everywhere now—even Niall. We’ve got bigger, we’ve got stubble, we’re turning into men.”

“Payne has developed some serious abs himself.”

*“I’ve always wanted a strong body, but I never had the focus to do the training. We have a trainer with us, and for me, it’s been one of the best things about this tour, getting into the shape I want.

’It can be tricky using gyms in hotels. The other day, I was sweating through the last few minutes doing dips, and the electronic doors kept opening and shutting with girls standing behind them, screaming at me.

Another time I went into an empty gym, and there was just me and a girl in full make-up, a dress, and high heels actually running on the treadmill, watching me.’*

“Yet despite the private jets, the personal trainers, and the high life, a down-to-earth Northern vibe pervades.”

“They probably have more of a ‘us’ because we’re always working.”

Styles talks about the comparison with The Beatles.

“We all sat and watched the film of them arriving in America,” he says. *“And to be honest, that really was like us. Stepping off the plane, the girls, the madness—it was exactly the same as when we got there, just 50 years earlier.

‘But none of us think we’re in the same league as them music-wise. We’d be total fools if we did. Fame-wise, it’s probably even bigger, but we don’t stand anywhere near them in terms of music.’*

Payne is perhaps the most analytical member of the band.

He first auditioned for The X Factor when he was 14 but was told by Cowell to come back in two years. He went on to study music technology before returning to The X Factor and ending up in One Direction.

“You dream of things happening like this,” he says. *“But then you don’t really ever expect it to happen. It was all so incredibly quick for us, and it’s only really now, a few years on, that you start to have some sense of it all.

At first, we were just unbelievably grateful that we’d even got a record deal, let alone anything else. Then it went very mad very fast, and you spend the first year or so thinking you don’t deserve any of it.”*

Tomlinson nods.

*“This year, we turned up at the VMAs [the MTV Video Music Awards, attended by the likes of Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Timberlake]. We still feel so new and like we’ve got no mates on that level at all.

We were put with all the hip-hop crowd, sitting next to Drake, which was pretty cool, and Rihanna was right in front of us. But we don’t actually know any of them. Harry knows Elton John, and he’s incredibly nice to us. But our actual mates are people like Little Mix and JLS.’*

While the world around them focuses on the phenomenon, the band themselves are focused on the music.

Even in the eye of the storm, they have one eye on the future. There’s no talk of cutting and running, no thoughts about when it’s all over.

Tomlinson and Payne each co-wrote around half of the tracks on Midnight Memories.

“We’re still learning,” says Payne with endearing honesty. “But we’re getting better and better. It takes longer to get your confidence in writing than it does in performing, and we’ve definitely started to hit our stride. Working in the studio is the best thing for me about being in the band.”

Tomlinson says,

“You start off just listening to everyone, but the more you do, the more decisions you start to make yourself. At first, it was really hard: you sit in a room with writers asking you about your love life and stuff like that, go together a song.”

Inset: Louis with girlfriend Emma Calder

*“This album is definitely more rock, more of us. Writing the songs ourselves—that’s the thing that makes you start to feel you deserve to be where you are, not all the other crazy stuff.

We do look at other bands—even people like Take That—and see what it was that made them. Whatever else, it’s the songs that are going to last, so that’s much more of a focus for us.”*

They’ve discovered the paradox of fame on this world tour.

As Oscar Wilde wrote, “In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

One Direction are loved by millions but barely get to spend any time with the ones they love. They’re travelling the world, but bar arenas, hotels, and television studios—they get to see very little of it.

“A lot of the time, we actually prefer sleeping on the tour bus,” says Payne. “We park it next to the venue and▸”

“We just stay there.”

“We have our DVDs and Xboxes, and we have a quiet bus for sleeping. It’s actually a lot easier than being in a hotel.”

Girls are everywhere, but the ones they want to be with are—in the case of Tomlinson and Payne—back in England. Malik’s fiancée, Perrie Edwards from Little Mix, flew into Sydney a few days earlier, but they got to spend just one evening together.

“But that was really nice,” says Malik. “We went for a meal, sat around just chilling. You have to believe that in our relationships, it’s about absence making the heart grow fonder.”

Tomlinson, who has been with his girlfriend for the past two years, nods.

“I think we’re actually all pretty good boyfriends. We’re definitely romantic. But when we actually get to be with our girlfriends, we just want to do the normal stuff we never get to do, like watching crap TV together and staying in. It’s definitely harder, but I think we’re in relationships because we want to be in them, and we want to make them work. You only get distracted if you want to be distracted.”

Most of the day-to-day energy on tour appears to go into the logistics of getting them from A to B.

“In America, it was completely crazy, exactly like it is here,” says Payne. “In New York, it was terrible because the traffic means the cars go so slow the fans are everywhere. Sometimes it’s a bit like living in a version of the TV show 24.”

He pauses.

“When I think about it, I do start to worry about this whole social-media thing. I’ve seen documentaries about kids just staring at screens all day long, living through Twitter. It does make me uncomfortable; kids should be out living their lives, getting out, enjoying themselves. There are lots of times when I think about signing off from Twitter completely, because you feel you ought to stop feeding the machine.”

“They’ve been able to kick back in a few bars in America and at a couple of beaches in Australia with friends of the security team.”

Malik managed to get his tattoo on Bondi Beach.

“We went at two in the morning,” explains Horan. “It was pretty quiet, but it was absolutely beautiful.”

Several members of the band have bought houses for their family, and each has bought one for himself. Tomlinson recently got Malik to use his financial adviser (also used by Styles).

“He’s half-embarrassed to say it, but he does have an investment portfolio. ‘Not just one thing like property; you spread your money across investments,’ he says. ‘You just have to be pretty responsible.’”

“They’re not like average 19- and 20-year-olds.”

None of them can wait to get home. They miss their families, their friends, the relative freedom of the UK. They work 14-hour days, six days a week. They’re unfailingly polite, leaping up to let others sit down, listening respectfully to Harry’s dad’s advice.

And they don’t take offence at personal questions.

Harry grins when I ask him if he has a girlfriend. He’s now single, he tells me,

“But no one ever knows that. There was a picture of me the other day with my ‘secret girlfriend.’ I didn’t see it, but my mum rang up because they’d used a photo of me and Gemma [his sister]. She’s not my girlfriend!”

It’s a few days later, and the band are due on stage in Sydney. They’re running late because they’ve been presented with an award (for the fastest-selling sell-out shows ever) and have been chatting to Dannii Minogue.

The frenzied screams of waiting pre-teens and teenagers in the arena reach an ear-splitting crescendo.

They go on stage in the clothes they’ve been wearing all day. There are no outfit changes (bar Liam taking his top off), no dance routines, and very few special effects.

“What One Direction do is as far from slick as Justin Bieber is from being cool.”

They screen special video messages and giant montages of fan artwork, and in between their big hits, they talk, answer Twitter questions from the audience (“Which one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs would you be?”), and generally praise their fans.

It’s more ‘an audience with…’ than a concert, and as a piece of 21st-century interactive entertainment, it’s ingenious stuff.

Two hours later and the band are off stage, clambering into blacked-out vans as Scott and his team organise a police escort back into town.

Tomorrow, the band fly to Melbourne, then it’s Tokyo, and finally home.

“A proper cup of tea,” yells Tomlinson.

“And Christmas,” says Styles.

Their schedule between now and then is completely full, but no one is complaining.

“We can sleep when we’re 30,” says Payne.

‘Midnight Memories’ is out tomorrow.

TURN OVER FOR LIAM PIN-UP

[emcgoverns]

elizabeth mcgovern for “event magazine”/“mailonline” (may 2019) | 📸: david venni

[roscoehamiltons]

Lewis was ranked #1 Best Dressed Man at the Met Gala by GQ Magazine!

1. Lewis Hamilton

There was a disproportionate number of all-white suits on the carpet last night-- Zendaya, Tyler Mitchell, Mary J. Blige, Anna Sawai, and, uh, this dude all sported spotless alabaster, among several others-- but none of them could quite catch F1 GOAT and Met Gala co-chair Lewis Hamilton in pole position. "From the moment I heard the theme," Hamilton wrote on instagram, "I wanted to work with Grace Wales Bonner." It's easy to see why: In collaboration with Hamilton's stylist Eric McNeal, the British designer crafted a sublime ivory tuxedo-- topped off with a matching beret from the London milliner Stephen Jones-- riddled with thoughtful references. The sash around his waist was embellished with cowrie shells, believed to ward off evil spirits in many African cultures, while his cropped jacket was a nod to the legendary jazz singer Cab Calloway. "This is more than a suit," Hamilton said. "This is ancestral history."

[fyeahblackactresses]

Ayo Edebiri at Vogue's First Friday in May Met Gala kickoff party

[baekhyunnybyun]

Wonwoo — WAVES China, March 2021 ↳ for @jeonwon-wonwoo ♡ send me a request

[ssweetener]

[gloriousgwendolinechristie]

Gwendoline Christie attends the launch of Issue 8.5 at The Lavery hosted by Perfect Magazine & Burberry to celebrate Kate Moss & Ray Winstone on April 29, 2025 in London, England.

[without-ado]

Biden Dropped Out

The historic decision makes Biden the first sitting President to cancel his re-election campaign in over half a century. (read at Time)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

2600’s amazing Hackers on Planet Earth con may go down under enshittification

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

It's been 40 years since Emmanuel Goldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. 2600 wasn't the first phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:

https://www.2600.com/

2600 has published hundreds of issues in which digital spelunkers report eagerly on the things they've discovered by peering intently at the things no one was supposed to even glance at (I'm proud to be one of those writers!). They've fought legal battles, including one that almost went to the Supreme Court:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

They created a global network of meetups where some of technology's most durable friendships and important collaborations were born. These continue to this day:

https://www.2600.com/meetings

And they've hosted a weekly radio show on NYC's WBAI, Off the Hook:

https://wbai.org/program.php?program=76

When WBAI management lost their minds and locked the station's most beloved hosts out of the studio, Off the Hook (naturally) led the rebellion, taking back the station for its audience, rescuing it from a managerial coup:

https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786

But best of all, 2600 gave us HOPE – both in the metaphorical sense of "hope for a better technological tomorrow" and in the literal sense, with its biannual Hackers On Planet Earth con:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_on_Planet_Earth

For decades HOPE had an incredible venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania (memorialized in the phreak anthem "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"), a crumbling pile in midtown Manhattan that was biannually transformed into a rollicking, multi-day festival of forbidden technology, improbable feats, and incredible presentations. I was privileged to keynote HOPE in 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1D7APjmVbk

But after the 2018 HOPE, the Hotel Pennsylvania was demolished to make way for the Penn15 (no, really) skyscraper, a vaporware mega-tower planned as a holding pen for luxury shopping and empty million-dollar condos sold to offshore war-criminals as safe-deposit boxes in the sky. The developer, Vornado (no, really) hasn't actually done all that – after demo'ing the Hotel Pennsylvania, they noped out, leave a large, unusable scar across midtown.

But HOPE wasn't lost. In 2022, the ever-resilient 2600 crew relocated to Queens, hosted by St John's University – a venue that was less glamorous that the Hotel Pennsylvania, but the event was still fantastic. Attendance fell from 2,000 to 1,000, but that was something they could work with, and reviews from attendees were stellar.

Good thing, too. 2600 is, first and foremost, a magazine publisher, and these have been hard years for magazines. First there was the mass die-off of indie bookstores and newsracks (I used to sell 2600 when I was a bookseller, and in the years after, I always took the presence of 2600 on a store's newsrack as an unimpeachable mark of quality).

Thankfully for 2600, their audience is (unsurprisingly) a tech-savvy one, so they were able to substitute digital subscriptions for physical ones:

https://www.2600.com/Magazine/DigitalEditions

Of course, many of those subscriptions came through Amazon's Kindle, because nerds were early Amazon adopters, and because the Kindle magazine publishing platform offered DRM-free distribution to subscribers along with a fair payout to publishers.

But then Amazon enshittified its magazine system. Having locked publishers to its platform, it rugged them and killed the monthly subscription fees that allowed publishers to plan for a steady output. Publishers were given a choice: leave Amazon (and all the readers locked inside its walled garden) or put your magazine into the Kindle Unlimited system:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/arp/B0BWPTCP4K?deviceType=A1FG5NAKX0MRJL

Kindle Unlimited is an all-you-can-eat program for Kindle, which pays publishers and writers based on a system that is both opaque and easily gamed, with the lion's share of the money going to "publishers" who focus on figuring out how to cheat the algorithm. Revenues for 2600 – and all the other magazines that Amazon had sucked in and sucked dry – fell off a cliff.

Which brings me to the present moment. After 40 years, 2600 is still at it, having survived the bookstorepocalypse, the lunacy of public radio management, the literal demolition of their physical home by an evil real-estate developer, and Amazon's crooked accounting.

This is 2600, circa 2024, and 2024 a HOPE year:

https://www.hope.net/

Once again, HOPE has been scheduled for its new digs in Queens, July 12-14. Last week, HOPE sent out an email blast to their subscribers telling them the news. They expected to sell 500 tickets in the first 24 hours. They didn't even come close:

https://www.2600.com/content/hope-ticket-sales-update

It turns out that Google and the other major mail providers don't like emails with the word "hacker" in them. The cartel that decides which email gets delivered, and which messages go to spam, or get blocked altogether, mass-blocked the HOPE 2024 announcement. Email may be the last federated, open platform we have, but mass concentration has created a system where it's nearly impossible to get your email delivered unless you're willing to play by Gmail's rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

For Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of 2600 and tireless toiler for this community, the deafening silence following from that initial email volley was terrifying: "like some kind of a "Twilight Zone" episode where everyone has disappeared."

The enshittification that keeps 2600's emails from being delivered to the people who asked to receive them is even worse on social media. Social media companies routinely defraud their users by letting them subscribe to feeds, then turning around to the people and organizations that run those feeds and saying, "You've got x thousand subscribers on this platform, but we won't put your posts in their feeds unless you pay us to 'boost' your content":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

Enshittification has been coming at 2600 for decades. Like other forms of oddball media dedicated to challenging corporate power and government oppression, 2600 has always been a ten-years-ahead preview of the way the noose was gonna tighten on all of us. And now, they're on the ropes. HOPE can't sell tickets unless people know about HOPE, and neither email providers nor social media platforms have any interest in making that happen.

A handful of giant corporations now get to decide what we read, who we hear from, and whether and how we can get together in person to make friends, forge community, rabble-rouse and change the world. The idea that "it's not censorship unless the government does it" has always been wrong (not all censorship violates the First Amendment, and censorship can be real without being unconstitutional):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

What can you do about it? Well, for one thing, you can sign up for HOPE. It's gonna be great. They've got sub-$100 hotel rooms! In New York City!

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv

If you can't make it to HOPE, you can sign up for a virtual membership:

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv-virtual-attendee

You can submit a talk to HOPE:

https://www.hope.net/cfp.html

You can subscribe to 2600, in print or electronically (I signed up for the lifetime print subscription and it was a bargain – I devour every issue the day it arrives):

https://store.2600.com/collections/subscriptions-renewals

2600 is living a decade in the future of every other community you care about, weird hobby you enjoy, con you live for, and publication you read from cover to cover. If we can all pull together to save it, it'll be a beacon of hope (and HOPE).

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/19/hope-less/#hack-the-planet

[gmanmedias]

day 1: make a board with your favorite stims

💞 💞 💞

💞 💞 💞

💞 💞 💞

@bloomics

[emcgoverns]

elizabeth mcgovern for “event magazine”/“mailonline” (may 2019) | 📸: david venni

[cumberbatchcom]

[GALLERY UPDATE] Benedict Cumberbatch and Sophie Hunter attended last night a dinner event by Vogue Magazine to celebrate Naomi Campbell.

Full UHQ pics on our gallery: [LINK]

[fyeahblackactresses]

Kat Graham, Lori Harvey, Teyana Taylor, Tyla, and Ryan Destiny at ESSENCE Black Women in Hollywood Awards

[baekhyunnybyun]

Jonghyun — Harper's Bazaar, June 2016 ↳ for @atlantis-area ♡ send me a request

[addisonbae]

Addison Rae

LACMA Art + Film Gala (2022)