Maria Bustillos
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mariabustillos.com
Maria Bustillos
@mariabustillos.com
31K followers 1.6K following 9.1K posts
I help run @flaminghydra.com and its parent cooperative, the Brick House.

Digital ownership rights, archives and libraries, fun, and press freedom are some things I love.

maria | at | flaminghydra | dot | com
mariabustillos.com | thebrick.house
Posts Replies Media Videos
mariabustillos.com
Good analysis of the wildly creepy Bannon-Epstein alliance shown in Epstein emails, dissecting their plan to create a global far-right political machine to "stave off 'Time's Up' for the next decade plus"

Why would Republicans release these documents? Why now?

bylinetimes.com/2025/11/14/s...
Bannon’s response outlines the coalition he believes can power the next decade of right-wing politics: “Populist/Nationalist first. Conservative Christians (catholic/evangelical) next. Reverse Alabama. This coalition staves off ‘Times Up’ for next decade plus.”
November 16, 2025 at 3:45 PM
mariabustillos.com
Is it a bit of a coincidence that this comes out the moment GB News-allied forces at the BBC toppled leadership??
BBC News headline: Major Corruption Scandal Engulfs Top Zelensky Allies
November 13, 2025 at 6:18 PM
mariabustillos.com
Also, why Peter Thiel made sure Gawker ceased to exist
post by ‪it's gita time‬ ‪@xoxogossipgita.bsky.social‬ the fallout right now with epstein emails and people being shocked at just how much people knew is pretty much why gawker existed
November 13, 2025 at 5:54 PM
mariabustillos.com
The kids sent me this and I love it so much, I hope it is real. Made me miss my mom a lot (though she was not a fan of Pin Floi, nor even of Maiker Yarson)
Insta post: "Can you guess these music artist names my aunt wrote down? *crying emoji*" [IMAGE] CDs in a zippered case labeled PiN FLOi, FiL COLIN, BAS STRIK BOY y BRiRNi, and MAiKER YARSON
November 12, 2025 at 8:25 PM
mariabustillos.com
This is the last guy who should be telling anybody how to Be a Man imo better alternatives abound

flaminghydra.com/issue-439/#a...
November 11, 2025 at 2:34 AM
mariabustillos.com
he has nothing to say about these, either

Human Compatible, Stuart Russell
Zero to One, Thiel / Masters
Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes
Life 3.0, Max Tegmark
The Big Picture, Sean M. Carroll
Lying, Sam Harris
Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom
Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
Radical Candor, Kim Scott
from ratboy genius (dogprom_2) on Twitter: LMFAO this fucking ad i just got. joyce BBQ'd his illiterate ass so bad he's pushing ads about how he reads books actually [QUOTE POST] from blinkist about '9 nonfiction books Elon Musk thinks we should all read.'
November 10, 2025 at 9:34 PM
mariabustillos.com
Are you a @flaminghydra.com subscriber?? if YES don't forget to VOTE for your favorite HYDRANYM on the theme:

FLY

some hilarious ones this week, people are getting really good at this

flaminghydra.com/hydranym-no-...
hot pink hydras breathing FIRE around the legend: HYDRANYM
November 9, 2025 at 5:14 PM
mariabustillos.com
Pleasurably vitriolic, super bracing takedown by Jessica Winter of the pestilential 'Notes on Being a Man' by shirtless centrist Scott Galloway

Thank you!

www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe.
November 9, 2025 at 1:28 PM
mariabustillos.com
JMJ means Jesus Mary and Joseph?!??!?!!!! I just found out

this is dazzling
reddit post with Catholic Nativity scene: J.M.J. I remember writing those initials at the top left of every wide-ruled looseleaf paper in Catholic grade school. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are the Holy Family and they are a model for all families. P.S. I'm a bit early for the Feast Day but it's not too early (or late) to reflect on their h [word is cut off in post]
November 7, 2025 at 9:59 PM
mariabustillos.com
thesaurus.com shows 'nerd' and 'dork' as synonymous with 'moron' 'half-wit' and 'dolt' but not with e.g. 'brain' or 'egghead'

used to be pretty good!! becoming unusable now
GEEK as in odd person; computer expert noun as in odd person; computer expert Strongest matches buffoon freak nerd weirdo Strong matches curiosity dolt dork goon guru techie
November 7, 2025 at 1:54 AM
mariabustillos.com
Great work from @404media.co tracing the the multi-pronged attack on culture: book bans, slopification, and the sabotage of libraries, universities, and schools.

www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...
Librarians, teachers, and government workers have had to spend an increasing amount of their time and emotional bandwidth defending the work that they do, fighting against censorship efforts and dealing with the associated stress, harassment, and threats that come from fighting educational censorship. Meanwhile, they are separately dealing with an onslaught of AI slop and the top-down mandated AI-ification of their jobs; there are simply fewer and fewer hours to do what they actually want to be doing, which is helping patrons and students.
November 6, 2025 at 7:16 PM
mariabustillos.com
For decades establishment Dems have moved heaven and earth to prevent progressives from winning primaries (and elections!) but the centrist line remains the same.

This exchange is buried downthread someplace but it is kind of amazing
[empath75.bsky.social] Progressives can’t win everywhere, but if they win the primary they should get the same support from the party establishment as everyone else. ‪[@mariabustillos.com‬] You must not have followed Mamdani's campaign very closely.
November 5, 2025 at 4:01 PM
mariabustillos.com
^^^ this times infinity

They consider the left a useful tool, a way to burnish their intellectual credentials and increase their 'cool' quotient, nothing more.
Lincoln Project social post: Dick Cheney was a genuine conservative, a patriotic Republican, and a man who made hard calls in tough times, even when it meant being excommunicated from the GOP. Our thoughts are with his family.
November 5, 2025 at 3:54 PM
mariabustillos.com
Ekko Astral's Jael Holzman with the media perspective that democratic societies need to get with right away. A piercing and valuable talk between her and @parkermolloy.com
After I came out, Politico poached me from S&P Global, and then I was hired to build a newsletter for Axios. I still excelled as a journalist. But all that time, it became difficult for me to reconcile whatever romance I had left about my profession with the utter failures I was witnessing in terms of media coverage of people like me. And then once I saw that flaw, it became easier for me to see the many others. It’s really easy to view media as fair when you’re within the in-group of who’s producing the information. But if you’re in the out-group, it’s always just stunning and obvious how off the mark and divorced from reality the news coverage is. Who wasn’t spoken to? Who wasn’t listened to?
November 5, 2025 at 1:02 AM
mariabustillos.com
Was worried I might get detention at the @flaminghydra.com shindig but then my teachers relented, whew
Rabiroff, Scocca, and David Roth at the Hydra wingding last night Rabiroff, Scocca, and David Roth at the Hydra wingding last night looking quite a bit less stern
November 2, 2025 at 9:08 PM
mariabustillos.com
Relaxium!!! I'VE BEEN USING IT FOR YEARSSSSS
furious O'Reilly in famed 'WE'LL DO IT LIVE!' meltdown
November 2, 2025 at 8:55 PM
mariabustillos.com
Most terrifying and politically resonant movie ever made, THE WICKER MAN (1973) and then read about it at Flaming Hydra we have a whole week of scholarship on it
final scene of THE WICKER MAN (1973) with pagan madness on the cliff's edge
October 25, 2025 at 11:23 PM
mariabustillos.com
dang this is what it would look like if it were finished
October 25, 2025 at 4:11 PM
mariabustillos.com
Remember Katy Perry was so excited to live in SPACE she literally kissed the earth upon her return after like 11 minutes of SPACE
Katy Perry in Blue Origin jumpsuit kisses ground upon return from all-lady flight
October 25, 2025 at 4:02 PM
mariabustillos.com
THE WIZARD OF OZ at the Sphere in Vegas, delicately and hilariously observed by @lauriewoolever.bsky.social

flaminghydra.com/issue-430/
Tiny theatergoers before THE WIZARD OF OZ at the Las Vegas Sphere, beside the installation of 50-foot-long legs and 22-feet-tall ruby slippers
October 25, 2025 at 12:56 AM
mariabustillos.com
Pretty much essential for the future to stop using Amazon for any reason at all (and not just to ensure that your bed won't overheat)
Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots, a 10/21/2025 headline in the New York Times with a photo of a Robot
October 22, 2025 at 7:29 PM
mariabustillos.com
Super lucky to have @camoot.bsky.social at @flaminghydra.com. Laughter! unbelievably welcome

flaminghydra.com/issue-427/
Comic of purple Bobbing Head Turtle Possessed with Rage thinking, "I will haunt you and your children's children until I get my fur scarf back."
October 22, 2025 at 12:46 PM
mariabustillos.com
Get ready for WICKER MAN WEEK at @flaminghydra.com
A colorful, stylized image Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle in 'The Wicker Man'. Wow!
October 20, 2025 at 4:52 PM
mariabustillos.com
Freaking thrilling to see how brave and how alive people really are.

Exhilarating reports from all over:

flaminghydra.com/issue-425/
Showing up to put your body on the line against authoritarianism is the bravest and most important thing to do right now. It's an expression of hope and a way to generate hope in others, in a time so bereft of hope. No kings! — Talia Lavin
October 18, 2025 at 8:27 PM
mariabustillos.com
p.s. subscribe to @flaminghydra.com and read @samthielman.com on this topic

(this one piece is well worth the subscription price for srs)
These developments point both to the power of art qua art, and to a catastrophic social failure. Perhaps fandoms cling too fiercely to episodes of Star Trek and issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, beloved artifacts of a vanished world, prized for their excellence and rarity, but they don’t deserve to have their horizons diminished to that single point. Nothing that simply fulfills a single end-user’s need for immediate release is worshiped this way. Stories that can’t be enjoyed over and over are not literature. If you can’t bag and board them, if you can’t see the whole series five times, if you can’t sit through them in a theater full of shouting kids or suspiciously sniffling grownups, they aren’t the communion between audience and artist that distinguishes art from sneezing. Broadly educating people in the finer points of the humanities, some would say, is a sin worse than neglect—don’t you want young people to be successful, to have jobs? They have to learn useful skills, not the names and insights of deviants and creeps like Edgar Allan Poe and Vladimir Nabokov. Thus we have no broad educational project, formal or otherwise, that might introduce people who love Firefly to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, no footpaths in our bookstores between the aisles of Harry Potter Lego sets and the section where hungry enthusiasts might stumble across a Robin Hobb novel.
October 18, 2025 at 5:16 PM