You've Got A Bad Brain, Babe

An Introduction.

Hi!

My name is Ashley Reese, and I’d like to welcome you to Bad Brain, a blog/newsletter/unhinged nonsense drop-off point brought to you by yours truly. 

If you don’t already know me, here’s the quick and dirty: I’m a 30-something-year-old writer, widow, worrywart, and woman about town who has been Too Online for over half my life. My digital existence probably started with AOL chat rooms back just before the new millennium, but it was the Livejournal I started as an eighth grader in 2004 that truly cemented me as a chronic poster, addicted to sharing life’s minutiae. I’m also addicted to politics, pop culture, and general yapping, which led me to a decade-long career in journalism, covering everything from elections and horny HBO programs to my own relationships and sex life.

I strayed my career as a culture and politics journalist in 2022 when my husband, Rob, started to decline after three years of fighting a rare cancer. When he died later that year, I had no interest in returning to media full-time. I spent 2023 and the first several weeks of 2024 watching the only industry I’ve known become increasingly more chaotic and unstable, and quite frankly, I’ve had enough chaos and instability in the last few years to last a fucking lifetime. 

But I’ve missed doing deep dives on movie wardrobes, and writing about the weirdness of online fandoms, and making people so worked up by my mild takes that they try to get me fired. I’ve especially missed sharing life updates in longer formats beyond the character confines of Twitter (no one calls it X) and the aesthetics of Instagram. 

That’s why I’m so excited to launch Bad Brain, a space where personal writing and essays will live alongside interviews and general shitposting. This will be a place where I can talk about music that moves me (and bores me), bad fanfiction, agonizing grief, and how fucked up my Notes app and Google searches have become in my young widowhood. Bad Brain comes from something Rob used to tell me when I was spiraling. He’d lament, “Your brain is so evil. You’ve got a bad brain” — his way of telling me to stop believing all the self-sabotaging, anxiety-ridden thoughts that were banging around up there. He wasn’t wrong. It often feels like my brain truly is out to get me. But amid the neuroticism are moments of fun—nay, brilliance—and I plan to use this platform to put the good, the bad, and the ugly in one place.

Starting today, I’m sending out one email per week, straight to your inbox. Is your Gmail organized by category? My posts will land in your Updates folder, nestled between the credit card statement you don’t want to look at and the student loan email you want to look at even less. 

There are three subscription tiers:

• Free subscribers get one email per month (except for this month, when you get all four.)

• Paid subscribers get all four emails per month, including extras like AMAs, chats, collabs, and even more embarrassing old blog posts. Paid subscriptions are $7/month or $70/year.

• Founding subscribers get the same access as paid members with the opportunity to throw me a little extra. They also receive my undying love.

And, listen, I’ll be frank: Becoming a widow is an economic shock to the system, especially after living in a double-income household for half of my adult life. Subscribing to Bad Brain as a paid or founding subscriber helps me get back on track. 

And if you become a paid subscriber this month, I’m throwing in a video just for the early upgraders: me reading some Livejournal entries from 2004 and 2005. You’ll get a link to your inbox as soon as you sign up for paid or founding subscriptions.

Whether you’re a paid or free subscriber, I hope you’ll join me here at Bad Brain and enjoy the chaos that unfolds.