you might have answered this somewhere before, but what's the story behind calling it radio free monday?
Oh, the question comes up every few years but if I can't find the old answers to it on tumblr I don't expect anyone else to :D
Radio Free Monday was created in response to a very old wank about fandom fundraisers; prior to roughly 2005, it wasn't the acceptable and common occurrence it is today. I was asked to publicize some fundraisers and I did so, but (as happens with popular blogs) that started a spiral where every time I posted one, I got requests to post three more. It wasn't just that I could reach a largeish audience within fandom, but also that my posting fundraisers gave them a kind of weight, legitimizing both the need and the ask. The dilemma became how to share all these fundraising posts while not becoming a fundraising-post blog, which would lower my readership and thus get those donation requests to fewer people. So I decided to do a once-weekly links roundup.
I decided since I was going to be posting on Mondays I would call it Radio Free Monday; I used the Radio Free title mostly on a whim, because I thought it sounded cool. "Radio Free" is actually primarily a term for a propaganda tool; the CIA began setting up "Radio Free [country]" all over the world so that they would have a broadcast presence in countries of "special interest" to the US intelligence apparatus. You can get an idea of the history at the Radio Free Europe article here.
It's had some evolutions since then; until I introduced the form, people would just comment on a post or email me, and I had to keep all the requests together and make sure I had all the data. The form allows me to weed out fakers (they generally won't bother filling out a form, even a very simple one that doesn't capture any information involuntarily), make sure I always get the pronouns right, and ensure that I never have to go chasing down a URL. I still code it all by hand, but because I have a spreadsheet, the coding has gone down from "roughly two hours on Sunday night" to "roughly forty minutes on Monday morning".
(Funny story: since instituting the form in 2014, the fact that I ask for pronouns and include they/them as an option has led to two nonbinary awakenings and one trans coming-out that I'm aware of.)
So yeah -- mostly "it sounded cool" combined with "seemed kinda apt" :D
