Highball With Lemon

Pride Reads 2026, Day 14: John Rich & The Big Picture

Head spinning, heart full, after binge reading chapters 11-19!!! If you haven't been reading @ngoziu m/m romance webnovel, start now!! Life sidetracked me during updates but now I'm caught up and living. This is a hilarious, charming, and witty romance about John Rich, cover artist of The New York Review, and Tyler Hughes, action movie heartthrob. They meet, shenanigans ensue, they go viral, and then Tyler is bumped up to be the next guest on John's popular series, Cover Sessions. Folks get to witness a man fall in love in real time and yet... John is oblivious. It's a riveting story full of humor, friendship, flailing, glamour, Garfield, and big city vibes. Each chapter had me twirling my (non-existent) hair and kicking my feet. If you remember the high of reading Check, Please! while it was updating, you still have time to recapture the feeling as this novel has 2 chapters left. Read it while it's up and happy Pride!! 🌈

"Miss" means an unmarried woman. "Mrs." means a married woman. (both of these have origins in the word "mistress" as in "mistress of the house".)

I've had people (usually children) ask me at work if I'm a missus or a miss. I have replied that I am a miz, full stop. And when they pressed for which one I was REALLY, I have replied, "Why? Are you going to treat me differently depending on whether there's a ring somewhere?"

That's what Ms. is for. That is its linguistic function. It says, "This is an adult woman," and nothing else. Nothing else is necessary, and in my case, nothing else is desired.

I also use miz for other women unless and until they express a preference for something else because I don't magically know everyone else's marital status when I meet them. That's a courtesy—I'm declining to assume marital status and allowing them to decide whether they wish to declare it.

Image description: photo of a brown sign with white text that reads: "You can't save everything cute, eat everything that tastes good, and kill everything you're afraid of and expect a working ecosystem to come out of it." -- Flip Nicklin, wildlife photographer

And another guy stitched it with a whole breakdown of her most recent posts to go “The day before you posted this you posted another video saying you met this celebrity and he had just posted that he was in this city. You also posted a video in a hotel room and after searching up hotels in this city, we can tell it was this hotel because the wallpaper in your video matches the wallpaper in pictures on their website. By looking up restaurants by this hotel we can tell you went to this specific restaurant” and he was right

me: my dude we just woke up!! It’s time for wakefulness and doing things and Productivity

We're getting there little by little, sure. But it's a road.

The Fence has published an exposé on Stuart Semple (of Anish Kapoor 'feud' notoriety) which they have been working on for six months.

investigation reveals Semple / his studio / his partner Emily Mann (who's described as acting as his 'enforcer' in his business) :

mishandled £400k grant of public money intended for a public gallery, allowing the money to flow freely between the public project, his own personal studio and personal projects such as Culture Hustle (his online business selling paint etc)

underpaid or failed to pay many of his assistants to the tune of several thousand pounds each.

former assistants have taken him to court and he simply hasn't bothered to show up and he's threatened to sue former assistants who asked for their back pay

repeatedly funds ambitious projects that never see release eg Abode, an 'Adobe-rivalling' suite of creative software (he claims he still intends to release this)

encouraged a cult-like atmosphere at his studio in Bournemouth

was frequently in debt and having to negotiate with bailiffs etc for his debts while at the same time crowdfunding various projects

ran fake social media accounts boosting Semple and his work

The portrait that emerges is one of decades-long scam artistry tbh and someone who's juvenile, manipulative, narcissistic.

The Fence btw is a decent fairly small-circulation quarterly magazine from the UK which specialises in satire, investigative journalism, culture, and fiction. You can read the piece in its entirety if you register (which is free).

a few links:

The Fence's newsletter from April discusses this article & how Semple has tried to muddy the SEO waters

Semple threatened to sue The Fence for publishing this story - many of you are American so here's the relevant UK law on defamation.

The first thig that put up a solid red flag was the shipping material. It's cool that he has custom boxes for his studio, it looked really neat. Then I opened it and sae things like "Not for bean boy" printed all over the inside of the box.

Between Mirror, hyper pigments, and black 2.0, none of them were as extremely out there as the videos on his site made them seem. The colors are vibrant, the black is dark, and the mirror is shiny. But the level the videos showed them at are not levels I can recreate.

So like, he exaggerated as an advertising scheme. Alright, shame on him.