VOL 2, NO 9

☆

I tamagotchu babe... / I recently cut my phone back to the bone, deleting any and every app that I found myself using to mindlessly fill time. All social media gone, Slack can stay, all news apps out, Kindle and Instapaper kept, games gone except chess and the New York Times Games app, and so on. I installed Dumbify. I had an honest — brutal, frankly — conversation with my notifications. And it's been nice. I am not telling you any of this because I want to promote some kind of opinion on doomscrolling and distractions and squeezing the juice out of every minute of your life. You do you. I am mentioning it only because I thought of my relationship with my phone a lot while reading about the terror of Tamagotchi.

❝It was the year 2010, and I had been given a Tamagotchi. I was surprised by this, because I was under the impression that Meredith really didn’t care for me. But oh, how wrong I was. Meredith fucking hated me. Her gift was not a cute piece of nerd nostalgia, but a brutal PsyOp designed to drive me to the brink of despair. And it worked.❞

⇩

⇩

...and other confusions. / 👾 Utopia Must Fall is Missile Command meets Galaga meets Asteroids. / Pnogstrom. / 💻 Does Google know how Google works? Signs point to no. / But also: Dear G-Diary. / The Backrooms have been located. / What is Medium? / A decade of China's internet content no longer exists. / 🚶What was "normcore"? ❝Normcore was dad jeans, New Balances, Patagonia fleeces, tube socks in Birkenstocks, Jerry Seinfeld, a regular degular baseball cap, a romantic hybrid of real and imagined suburban Americana.❞ Also: the oral history. / 🖕 Spotify bricks their own device because fuck you. / Rolling Stone cancels lifetime subscriptions because fuck you. / 🎨 The blackmarket for Taco Bell art. / 🍿 Trailer for BRATS. (FTR, my crush on Ally Sheedy is entering its fifth decade.) / Starring the Computer. / Planet Of the Apes goes to the mall. / 🗄️ The Hydrant Directory.

⇨