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Hello and welcome to Hydrapalooza, Flaming Hydra’s occasional post on our latest escapades. Miles Klee had been following a Sopranos meme account for ages, only to find there had been a right-wing English weirdo behind it all along. His story deepens into a reflection on fandom, identification, and the internet rot we love to hate and love and hate. And love. Join us to read the whole issue, along with the best journalism, comics, essays, reviews, and fiction on the whole internet: Tod Seelie shares his photographs of Tony Hawk’s secret desert bacchanal! A deeply insightful conversation on Russian poetry and autocracy with Talia Lavin and Zach Rabiroff. Listen to our Alien: Earth podcast series. And read Zito Madu’s story on football in Palestine, recently included in Triumph Books’ The Year's Best Sports Writing 2025. For just $3/month, or $36/year, subscribers can read it all, have commenting privileges, and play the weird new weekly HYDRANYM word game. How Dare a Dumb Thug Appreciate Tony Soprano?Part of me hates to do this amid The Horrors™, but, to quote an unfortunately brilliant email subject line from Trump’s comms team, there is “another disgrace I have to tell you about.” It involves the long-overdissected show The Sopranos, which ended in 2007, and which I have written about far too often due to my upbringing in the vicinity of the shots from the opening credits and a sincere pride in Northern New Jersey for producing this masterpiece of familial angst. Before I get to the scandal, though, a little context is in order. When the finale of The Sopranos aired, social media was still a novelty, understood mostly as a place where real people blithely represented themselves as, well, themselves. Real names and faces abounded on Facebook and YouTube, while MySpace, a platform very much built for individual users to showcase their unique personalities, was then the largest social networking site in existence. This moment was also something of an inflection point. The launch of Tumblr that year heralded an age of pseudonymous and anonymous web accounts, many of them centered on narrow genres and subcultures. Along with the nascent Twitter, it helped to give rise to what we now call the Stan Wars.
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