Today, Marvel Comics made the decision to fire Chuck Wendig from two announced comics issues and a yet unannounced book. This decision was made by Marvel in response to Wendig strongly pushing back against hatred, bigotry, misogny, and racism in our community and world. Suffice to say I vehemently disagree with this choice, one that was made to appease the worst among our communities. Because of this I have made the editorial decision to drop all Marvel comics related coverage from both our blog and our podcasts.

In a world that is becoming increasingly inflamed with hatred towards minority populations, I cannot in good conscience allow our platform to provide coverage for a company that is demonstrating such callous disregard for so many of its readers. The actions Marvel demonstrated today runs counter to everything our blog and podcast network stands for. 

About eight months ago, I published a post detailing rather abhorrent behavior by individuals nominally aligned with the Bring Back Legends/Give Us Legends movement. In the time since, members of that movement have decided the way to prove that harassment at Dragon Con 2015 didn’t happen was to engage in further harassment. Over that time I’ve received a near constant stream of abuse, harassment, and more recently, threats. While others may be able to shrug that off, I’m not one of those people. I’ve been open with my struggle with depression and anxiety. The never-ending abuse in the form of Tweets, emails, YouTube videos containing vulgarities and slurs that no one should be forced to endure has forced me to prioritize my health and well being. The vast majority of this abuse I have not shared anywhere.

Effective Sunday, April 17th, I’ll be stepping away from TSR and the blog. I’ve set a minimum one-month hiatus for myself, but my health is the first concern and if that window needs to be extended or be permanent, it will be. Here’s what this means to you.

• Nanci will be assuming sole editor duties over the blog
• TSR will either go into hiatus after this weekend or another host will step in to do the show with Nanci
• Western Reaches, Of Dice and Droids, and the Tosche Station Book Club will continue

We’ll see where we are in a month. I know stepping away is handing these serial abusers and harassers a victory, but at a certain point you have to take care of your own well being.

Fandom should be a place full of shared passion and joy. What myself and numerous others have been exposed to lately has been anything but. Remember, fandom is what you make it. Don’t allow it to become toxic, insular, and full of hate.

-Brian

If you’ve taken a look over at the sidebar on the right or listened to the last episode of the podcast, you’re probably aware that we’re running with advertisements now. Specifically, we’re running Her Universe and Audible.com advertisements.

I’ve been hesitant to run with advertising on the blog/podcast for all sorts of philosophical reasons, but the reality is I could use a bit of help financially to cover the costs of webhosting and keeping the lights on here. Thankfully we can be picky with the ads we run, so we decided to chose these two programs because the products offered are pretty cool. Chances are you already know about Her Universe‘s line of geek-inspired wardrobe and jewelry aimed at female fans. Audible is an Amazon.com affiliate that sells digital audiobooks.

In the interest of full disclosure, here’s the breakdown of what we’re getting with these ads:

• Her Universe: 10% of each sale (before tax/shipping) that originates from an ad on this site.
• Audible.com: $10 for each free trial subscription, $25 for each paid subscription, 10% per single download.

As for what we’d be using this advertising money for, primarily it’s going to go to paying for our webhosting and domain registration costs. Occasionally we might use some of it to get some material (books, comics, movies) for the staff to review. Honest, we won’t be squandering this on the quarter slot machines in Vegas.

For reference, every 18 free Audible trial subscriptions that originate from the blog/podcast will pay for one year of webhosting for the blog. /ShamelessPlug

If you’ve got any questions or feedback (even if it’s that you don’t want to see us run advertising), feel free to leave a comment here in the post.

Heather over at Zhobot and Dunc at Club Jade alerted me to an issue regarding our Facebook page a little earlier today. Long story short, unless I pay Facebook a rather large sum of money, our link posts there will only hit about 15% of people subscribed to us. Given that I’m already shelling out cash for web hosting, I’m in no particular rush to give Facebook money for a service that used to (and still should) be free.

So if you’ve noticed our posts aren’t appearing on your Facebook timeline as much or at all, you can keep in touch with us in one of two ways. First, you can follow us on Twitter. Second, you can subscribe to our newly created Google+ page. We’ll keep updating the Facebook page, but you may want to give us a follow at one or both of the other options just in case.

Finally, if there is interest, we’ll consider starting up a Tumblr page. If you’d like to see that, let us know in the comments.