Early Portland tix! Other events selling out! Halloween pigeon!!!

Hey friends,

Hope you’re all hanging in there. My friend Jesse is currently visiting from London, and yesterday we dressed up as each other for Halloween, which was incredible for me because not a single person at any of the parties we went to had ever met Jesse before. The ultimate niche costume! I assured them that I was, in fact, nailing it, and who were they to argue?? (I gave Jesse my extra “I voted” sticker and it was spectacular how many drunk people were just like, ‘Oh, cool that you got to vote!’ to this guy who is visiting from the UK for one week.)

Speaking of voting, I was SO excited to get the Halloween pigeon sticker—and it seems like everyone else was also excited for the Halloween pigeon, because there was a LINE to vote at like 2pm on a Friday??? Wild that the secret to democratic participation/libbing out is simply printing a cool sticker! (The other secret is to have a hot, kind, 34-year-old socialist run a groundbreaking mayoral campaign, but we could also vote for him on like seven other days so I really think the festive bird was a huge part of it.)

Anyway, two big book updates for you this week. First and foremost, THE POSTAL SERVICE PICKED UP MY PACKAGES. A miracle!!!!!! So, if you ordered Sex Change and the City from Girl Dad Press directly, you should have your copy in a few days if not literally right now. I hope you enjoy the activity page and also the rest of it!

Secondly, tickets are now available for my Nov. 19 Portland tour stop! I’ll promote this publicly tomorrow, but you can grab your tickets early here. (The venue made us charge $10 but I’m giving everyone $5 off books & merch so that it maths out to $5/ticket.)

I love graphic design :) <3

I have no concept of whether this event will sell out quickly or not sell at all — like, on the one hand, this is a way smaller venue than the sold-out Portland Gender Ordeal show; on the other hand, does anyone want to hear three songs about my exes circa 2015-2020 before hearing me chat about a Sex and the City anthology???? —but you may as well get tickets now just in case they go fast!

Speaking of selling out, there’s currently one spot left for the Oakland tour stop! You can also still RSVP to my Minneapolis tour date with Cass Adair and my Seattle tour stop with Serena Hommes. (Chicago event is waitlisted, Philly is low-key overcapacity, and Brooklyn is no RSVP required so just show up!!!)

Back in podcast world: our guest for this month appears to have fallen through, which is actually so normal and fine, but does mean we might end up a couple weeks behind! But we will publish a Gender Reveal and Gender Conceal by the end of the month… they just might not be spread out as well as I’d like. But presumably you would not even have noticed if I didn't mention it?? Oops. (But also, if there’s anyone you’d like to hear from right now, particularly on Gender Conceal, let me know.)

Okay, let’s do Links & Stuff.

• My friend JD interviewed Niko and me about Sex Change and the City and also GarfieldEats, the failed Toronto restaurant that Niko and I both independently fixated on in 2019.

• Everyone has been talking about this very funny and compassionate deep dive into gooning culture, and I wasn’t quite sure how to sum it up so I’m going to quote Kelsey McKinney trying to sum it up instead: “[The article] is as upsetting and riveting as you might expect, but it’s better written than I expected. I tried to pull one quote from this and they were all either incomprehensible or disgusting so I guess good luck going into this tab.” Good luck!

• I very much agreed with this review of One Battle After Another, but it’s paywalled on Hell World so I guess you’ll have to subscribe to Luke’s work or uh track down my Letterboxd for a worse take.

• Speaking of movies! I finally watched The Stroll and I did cry near the end and also baby Zohran is in there? So that is my recommendation to you.

• I don’t recommend watching this but I did watch it like six times. Nightmare ass slop!

Podcast corner:

• In the recent Gender Conceal episode with Cass, I mentioned listening to one episode of Planet Money, and here it is! Extremely interesting look into how mutual aid money is getting into Gaza, and how the currency is literally falling apart.

• Writer Cory Doctorow just published a new book called Enshittification—he also coined the term—and I found him to be a very compelling speaker on this podcast. (If you can’t handle the host lol, I’m sure Cory is also good on other podcasts.)

• Most importantly, Brace Belden wrote about podcasting and unfortunately he’s so correct about 96% of this.

That's it for this week. Here's your weekly Rhubarb.

Puffin was at the top of the newsletter, of course. We love when a puffin meets a pigeon.

Xo,
Yr resident gender detective