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She literally went “debate me! Debate me!” Over and over like the grifter she is and when she couldn’t get what she wanted and when “no” wasn’t enough she resorted to retaliatory sex-pestery, posting an image of somebody’s body with intention to shame and embarrass and spawn more waspish tittering from her internet followers.

I have type 2 Narcolepsy. Studies have shown that serious viral infections can cause people to develop Narcolepsy if they are already genetically susceptible to having it. This includes covid. That is what happened to me.

Yall, I can’t believe that I have to do this, but I am going to say this in as clearly as possible

The anon was very confused.

by Billy Collins

I'm tagging this DCC because I doubt many people follow the Matt Dinniman tag. Reddit user u/RatGodFatherDeath did some incredible detective work to track down Matt's first published story, and it is an absolute must read. Below is the text of the post

In his Audible interview last year, Matt said: "The first story I ever published was in a national magazine in 1999" — he was just a kid, and his first book wouldn't come out until 2003. But he's never named the magazine or the story, and as far as I can tell, no interview, profile, or wiki ever has. The earliest credit anyone cites is The Shivered Sky (2003).

I'm a book collector and a DCC fan, and that gap bugged me. So I went looking.

The hunt:

Wayback Machine snapshots of Matt's old website (captured April 2003) had a "samples of Matt's fiction" section listing three early story credits: "The Virgin" — first published in Genre Magazine; "The Champion" — winner of the 2000 Spam Writers Contest; and "The Beggar and the Devil" — 2nd place in The Harrow's 2003 short story contest. "The Virgin" is the only one he flagged as first published, and at 1999 it predates the other two — so that was the thread to pull.

Genre was a national gay men's lifestyle magazine (1991–2009). There's no digital archive and no index, so I couldn't just look up which issue. What I could do: sellers listing old back issues upload photos of the table of contents. I worked through those TOC scans — on eBay and elsewhere — until I found the one that listed him. The confirming scan turned up on an Amazon listing for a copy someone had sold: the May 1999 issue, with "The Virgin" in the contents, billed as "an original short story by Genre discovery Matt Dinniman."

Then came the hard part: actually getting a physical copy of a 27-year-old magazine that almost never surfaces for sale. I searched eBay and other sites, then reached out to a seller who had other Genre issues in stock. He tracked down a copy of the May 1999 issue for me through a specialty back-issue magazine dealer (NSFW site)— and it arrived this week.

Full text of The Virgin from Wayback Machine is here

There's a bone in the shoulder I've been noticing on celebrities. It sits where my muscle does--and her muscle does, presumably--but her muscle has made work of unbuilding itself from view. For the bone's sake. The bone eats shadows and gargles them before it's done with them. The red carpet loves shadows. The red carpet loves bones. The red carpet loves tired women.

There is a Chewy box outside. I heft it in a grip slightly awkward and jump it up 3 flights of stairs. My hold is somewhat awkward, I think, as I set it down beside the cat who more than happily minds this box. I tear the packaging with key-teeth and note before the flap inverts that the box is marked 49lbs. It didn't feel 49lbs. I use my shoulder muscle and chicken-wing grip to jaunt the full cat litter one-handed to its place while my cat licks the unopened food bag. The motion is easy.

Those who make velvet marks of their high-heeled toes on the red carpet and those who heft Chewy boxes up triple-decker walk-ups are mutually exclusive groups. I imagine anyway the celebrity with all the fuck-you money in the world, and all the access to gyms and personal trainers and nutritionists and fitness plans, squatting heels-flat and grip-cupped to my Chewy box. I think that shoulder bone would writhe under taut skin like my cat shoving her hopeless face against the tiny opening from inside her cat carrier. I think the muscles would strain and the bones would hush them. I think the Chewy box would never move.