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Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because he's operating under copyright law, not trademark law.

Trademark governs who can "trade" under what "mark" i.e. the brand identity of a company. Companies don't own their trademarked word forever, but they maintain the exclusive right to sell things under that brand in their specific market sector. Patagonia doesn't own the name of a geographical region, they just own the right to be the only company using that name to sell clothing and outdoor gear.

A drag queen name can be a parody of a clothing and outdoor gear company.

A company's trademarked logo can be used in parody creative works, with more leeway if it's not for commercial purposes. Trademark parody is allowed! Patagonia has been aware of and allowed Pattie Gonia's trademark parody for years.

Trademarks are specific to market sector. Actress Chase Infiniti could start a makeup line named after herself and her trademark would not infringe on the Infiniti car brand because they are different markets and there is no risk of confusion. Pattie Gonia could probably trademark her name to sell frozen veggie burgers and Patagonia would not care.

Drag queen Jan Sport did a collab with JanSport bags. What Jan Sport almost certainly did not do is independently apply to register "Jan Sport" as a trademark in order to sell bags on her own, because that would infringe on JanSport's own trademark in the bag market sector.

What Pattie Gonia is not allowed to do -- the thing that Pattie Gonia actually did do and is being sued for -- is apply to register "Pattie Gonia" as a trademark to sell clothing, because apparently Pattie is in talks with North Face and HydroFlask to sell "Pattie Gonia"-branded gear. These companies probably won't finalize anything unless Pattie shows that she actually owns the trademark. Unfortunately, "Patagonia" is already a registered trademark in the clothing market sector, and these two names are too similar to exist in the same sector (see: "likelihood of confusion" legal standard).

Your drag queen name can parody a clothing company. You can parody the trademarked logo of a clothing company. But you cannot use the same name to then go on to also become a clothing company.

In order to maintain their own trademark, Patagonia must sue for trademark infringement. If they don't sue, and Pattie Gonia gets her own trademark, Pattie could sue Patagonia for infringement on her trademark. You can see why Patagonia won't be dropping this suit no matter how much you harass them.

The new conflict is from Pattie Gonia using the Patagonia imagery and the Pattie Gonia name on her own merchandise. This is the email Patagonia sent, with the images they feel conflict with the 2022 agreement.

Pattie responded to that by disagreeing that she had broken any agreement, and also obliquely threatening to expose Patagonia for making tactical gear for the US military?

Pattie selling shit with her stage name on it Really Obviously isn’t going to have any negative effect on the continued lining of Patagonia CEO pockets, as if that even fucking matters, and no amount of waxing poetic about “well they have to 🥺🥺🥺” is going to make me say anything other than “fucking stupid if true then”.

In terms of whose pockets are being lined:

Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.

The unusual move comes at a moment of growing scrutiny for billionaires and corporations, whose rhetoric about making the world a better place is often overshadowed by their contributions to the very problems they claim to want to solve.

At the same time, Mr. Chouinard’s relinquishment of the family fortune is in keeping with his longstanding disregard for business norms, and his lifelong love for the environment.

(NYT Gift Link)

Since 2022, 100% of Patagonia's profits have gone to climate and environmental causes. They have completely restructured the ownership of the company so that this will continue in perpetuity.

Heyyy this is an announcement of the next installment of the novella series, SEASONS. WAKE UP! is the winter novella and all my books deal with queer and trans themes, but WAKE UP! is my book with the most explicitly trans characters/concerns. This story in particular is about gambling.

It's an unconventional trans-noir literary (???) thriller, following a middle-aged-ish trans lesbian at an uncertain point in her life. Her lot gets thrown in with a compulsive gambler; a dirtbag trans dude who worships a strange photograph and doesn't give a fuck about anyone, or anything beyond making a killing off of illegal underground games. Not long after she reluctantly takes him in, she is abducted one night to witness him play in a dangerous, high-stakes match.....

If you like a shorter read with trans characters where their transness is not the main tension of the story, if you're one of the five people on the planet who are like FINALLY THE TRANS MAHJONG THRILLER I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR, or if you know nothing about mahjong, and crave something a little more unpredictable with Lynchian elements, give it a go! The book will come out March 31st and is available to pre-order as a special-print paperback, a cheaper mass paperback. Once the book is out, the ebook will be free on Itch. <3 Thanks, all!! ^^

As usual, click the title to access the work. All of these are free!

fiction:

“Late Bloomer,” by Ian Kappos (2026)

Great Weird family gothic; evokes without didacticism, skewers the ways people fetishize trauma and justify mistreating others. I cannot tell if the ending should make me feel optimistic/relieved, terrified/sad for the protagonist, or a combination.

“Blue Movies,” by Ian Kappos (2024)

A young Oxycontin addict watches two sort-of friends spiral into a new, stranger addiction, eventually cut off from them before he can learn what comes of it all. There are bizarre DVDs showing people engaged in some kind of sex, torture, psychic education, or therapy with an octopus-like creature. There’s a vague intimation of alien visitation. If you love realistic stories about dissolute youth, and if you love the kind of Weird where you never learn the climax of a story, or exactly what’s going on, because the whole thing is told from the perspective of a peripheral character rather than the perspective of the person the Weird Stuff is mostly happening to…this is up your alley.

“Eleanora,” by Jess Koch (2022)

Twin girls growing up in poverty with an abusive, negligent, alcoholic mother discover their strange connection to a hungry forest. Feels kind of Southern Reach, kind of Dead Ringers, kind of Joyce Carol Oates, kind of fairy tale.

“The Last Testament at Hollywood Beach,” by Harmon West (2026)

This one’s SAPPY, like unabashedly romantic and sentimental, but in a way that I agree with and that really gets to me a lot of the time! In the best way possible, it reads like an adaptation of the Kesha classic “Shots On the Hood of My Car.” In both cases, the main theme is that death comes for us all, and to live like you can avoid it or like you will be judged at the end for how well you conformed to the world’s rules is to live like a fool. And though we’d all like to be remembered in another time, and for our loved ones to be remembered, the truth is that what we have are our bonds in this moment, whatever the moment may be. It’s good to go out on a celebration, if you have enough foreknowledge that you can. Also there’s a lot of stuff about being queer/trans in here, very much related to that theme.

“A Corpse Which Moves,” by Perry Ruhland (2026)

I’m very picky about zombie stories. I’m even pickier about zombie stories that don't really gesture at zombie interiority in any way. This one is very good, though. I feel like we’ve hit a cultural point where if you say “this horror story is actually more about love and grief,” then that makes people NOT want to read the horror story and assume it’ll be sort of try-hard and saccharine, or that the horror element will just be a metaphor thinly pasted on top of a domestic drama. But this horror story is actually more about love and grief, even though it is neither at all saccharine nor a domestic drama with a zombie apocalypse metaphor thinly pasted on top. Though the story is definitely playing on/hearkening back to the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in some interesting ways.

visual novel:

“FLESH/CIRCUIT,” by Em Reed (2021)

A thoughtful, noirish little VN (with essentially only one path). FLESH/CIRCUIT is similar to the famous “Lena,” but also contains a scruffy sex worker/entertainer heroine, an obsessed detective, and a rather sweet robot/human romance that in no way makes the rest of the story less downbeat and unsettling.

essays:

“The Animal’s Voice: Literature, Animal Rights, and the Age of the Anthropocene,” by Vinky Mittal (2026)

A survey of recent literature written from the perspective of animals!

“The Tweet As a Literary Form,” by Danny Cohen (2026)

An analysis of short form shitposts (including bsky and Tumblr posts, not exclusively tweets), making the case that such posts are a literary art form in their own right, following their own set of rules and conventions.

“The Boring Internet,” by Terry Godier (2026)

“The internet you grew up on* isn’t dying. A commercial veneer on top of it is.”

(*This essay is pretty obviously aimed at people around my age, in their thirties or early forties, whose Teenage Internet was the internet of the late 1990s to late 2000s. But I think it’s worth a read for anyone of any age who feels disillusioned with the web of today, and might even be more valuable for people in their teens and early 20s who don’t have clear memories of anything besides “there are like four social media platforms, and Wikipedia, and search engines don’t readily show you anything unexpected, interesting, or, often, even useful.”)

“We Might Have to Get a Little Less Fandom-y,” by Mo Drammeh (2026)

This essay really elucidates the way I feel about fandom myself— I think there are some very positive aspects to a lot of fan communities, I think the practice of creating fanfiction and fan art is in and of itself generally very cool (or, at worst, an anodyne masturbatory activity), but I am alienated from fandoms both by the social drama and bad behavior and entitlement towards creators often seen therein, and by the fact that a lot of the ways fandoms tend to engage with texts just fall flat for me.

Human beings stand proud and alone upon the surface of this angel-haunted world, in this cosmos of wild experiment.

by Rachel A. Rosen I won’t shut up about Notes From a Regicide until everyone I know reads it. Griffon, a teenage trans boy living in a post-apocalyptic, flooded New York, is adopted by an older trans couple, Etoine and Zaffre. Both of them are artists and refugees from a city called Stephensport, which is frozen in time in something vaguely akin to, but not quite, Renaissance Italy. They do…

CHEF needs you to fire THREE BEEF, TWO CHICKEN, and a RAVIOLI for Her.

If anyone here likes old timesy romantic poetry can they suggest something I could use about two people in love reuniting?

It needs to be in the public domain.

I wrote this for my novel:

When they disembarked, Duchess Skye Procella stood on the banks in a fetching brown homespun dress with a wide bonnet, waving and grinning at the sight of her love. If Liza had arrived sooner, they might have passed t’other on the road, so unexpected was this meeting. To her own surprise, Liza felt herself quite overcome, and she began to cry, though she yet smiled. What is there to say of a lovers’ reunion that has not already been written by poets more gifted than myself?

and it occurred to me that instead of writing more on the scene I could literally copy and paste a poem if it's out of copyright

If anyone here likes old timesy romantic poetry can they suggest something I could use about two people in love reuniting?

It needs to be in the public domain.

I wrote this for my novel:

When they disembarked, Duchess Skye Procella stood on the banks in a fetching brown homespun dress with a wide bonnet, waving and grinning at the sight of her love. If Liza had arrived sooner, they might have passed t’other on the road, so unexpected was this meeting. To her own surprise, Liza felt herself quite overcome, and she began to cry, though she yet smiled. What is there to say of a lovers’ reunion that has not already been written by poets more gifted than myself?

and it occurred to me that instead of writing more on the scene I could literally copy and paste a poem if it's out of copyright