Emchap's Shit from the Internet 02/6/19 🍠
I was on Twitter recently when I saw a post from Lena Chen go flashing by. (She's applying to grad school, apparently.) Lena was one of the first women I ever remember being Very Online in an early iteration of what would eventually morph into a several-year-long span of personal essays as the bulk of the women's internet (culminating in xoJane and its "It Happened to Me" feature, where people would mine personal trauma for $50 a pop).
She wrote about her sex life and being at Harvard, she wrote about being an early victim of revenge porn, and she wrote about growing disillusionment with institutions that had failed to help or protect her in any way.
And then she disappeared.
I assume what happened was that she became wise to the massive downsides of baring one's emotional all for the internet slightly before the rest of us did (since she was at the forefront of it as a content generation mechanism) and bounced. (Wikipedia says she apparently moved to Berlin under an assumed name.)
And for the most part, it seems to have worked! I hadn't seen anything from her in several years when that tweet floated by. She went from being a professional polarizing online person to just some woman applying to grad school.
I was thinking about Chen while reading Sarah McColl's Joy Enough recently. McColl came out of the same early what would now be referred to as lifestyle blogging chunk of the internet, though more traditionally wholesome—she had a blog called Pink of Perfection where she talked about her life and her husband and shared what was my favorite brownie recipe for many years. Eventually, she became a professional editor at a food magazine, and the blog faded away after a few last posts saying that her mom had cancer and they were optimistic, but she was spending more time at home with her.
The book details what happened next (divorce, dead mom), but I was reminded again of the weird quasi-intimacy of that particular few years in the internet. She was visible to me and her other readers as a small-time Martha Stewart until she wasn't; there wasn't quite the permanent record that there might be now. She stopped renewing her web hosting bills and quit the editorial job and went to grad school and now there's a memoir published in retrospect rather than an in-the-moment blog.
Women on the internet who I've been following on various platforms have all followed suit, it seems. Swaths of people who used to tweet about their home lives all seem to have gotten very quietly divorced. xoJane shut down and its writers mostly seem to have dropped out of the media landscape (and the ones who didn't aren't on Twitter anymore). It's the women's internet version of this xkcd comic.
All the women seem to be doing well, from what they share. I'm glad for them. I'm selfishly glad for me that I didn't take the media internship with a tech writer from that corner of the internet after college, and instead went into the quieter world of tech support before I got more than the one xoJane byline.
Shit to read
Things don't matter. That's okay.
One of the weirder realizations of the last few years has been acknowledging that there are relatively few downsides to just going through the world as if other people think I'm hot. It's a constant work in progress for someone who has disliked how she looks for approximately always.
This story about a dead cat made me cry.
Did you watch Russian Doll? Go watch Russian Doll, especially if you like The Good Place but think it's facile. Then read this story.
Apparently you move elephant seals by waving tarps at them and apparently they took over a beach during the government shutdown. I'm dying.
So publishing is apparently worse about reference checks than tech. Good to know.
I loved loved loved this konmarie tool for Twitter.
s.e. smith is one of the xoJane personal essay writers who didn't bail out of the media landscape, and I liked this essay on skin hunger a lot, as someone who lives alone.
This guy fucked up a script and liked a bunch of tweets and the essay about the experience made me laugh very, very hard.
Would you like to read a story about Terry Pratchett and AI and cry really really hard? Because then YOU SHOULD READ THIS.
Shit to eat
If you are in a place to do so, buy a rotisserie chicken.
If you're not, take three frozen boneless chicken thighs out of your freezer and stick them in the fridge to do their thing for 24 hours. Nervously sanitize everything, because that's what a legacy of adolescent vegetarianism gets you.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Put a cast iron skillet on medium high.
Rub the thighs with vegetable oil and salt and pepper or whatever seasoning mix you want to use. Pop them skin-side down for two minutes, and then adjust them so their own fat gets back under there and leave them for another three minutes. Flip and go for six minutes.
Chop up two onions, put the chicken somewhere safe, and then cook the onions for four or five minutes in the chicken fat and some additional oil if needed. Put on some music. Your house will smell great.
While they're cooking, chop up some other vegetables and toss in some garlic. I used three carrots, a parsnip, and some frozen hashbrowns. Do you. Season them with whatever you want. I sprinkled a Penzey's spice mix in there.
Toss them in with the onions and a teaspoon of salt and a bunch of pepper and cook for three minutes or so.
Add 3 tablespoons of flour and stir for a half a minute.
Add a cup of white wine if you have it and a cup of water or stock if you don't, and stir everything up. At this point you'll have a sort of gravy situation and feel pleased.
Stir for a minute or two until everything seems mixed in.
Add a cup and a half of heavy cream, the torn up thighs (hell yeah put the skin in there), and half a bag of whatever frozen green thing is in your pantry (I used broccoli). Add another teaspoon and a half of salt.
Stir that in for a few minutes until everything is warm. Taste and add more salt or seasoning or whatever you want.
If you own a baking sheet large enough to put your skillet in, do that. If you don't, put two small baking sheets on the rack beneath the middle rack where this thing is getting cooked. Otherwise the gravy will bubble over and fill your whole house with smoke. ASK ME HOW I KNOW.
If you have a pie crust in your fridge (you do, right? all butter.), roll it out and put it on top of the skillet and do your best to sort of tamp it down while the crust butter is melting. (If you don't, you can use puff pastry. If you have neither put some biscuits in there. Just get a carb on it.)
Cut slits in the top of the pastry so steam can vent, and put cream on top. Ideally use a pastry brush, but I just sort of smooshed it around with my fingers and honestly it was fine.
Put it in the oven for 22 minutes or so. Keep an eye on it.
Very smugly enjoy your large and filling pot pie while watching TV.
(Loosely adapted from this Bon Appetit recipe. There are people in the comments who say the recipe needs more cream, and they are unhinged as far as I can tell.)
Shit to listen to
Look at this unsettling music video.
Shit to buy
Join me in purchasing moving supplies from the internet so you can pay some nice day laborer dudes to put all your belongings in a truck once again.
Get groceries. They're good for you.