Emchap's Shit from the Internet 06/12/19 🍠
California apparently heard me saying nice things about it and decided I shouldn't get too comfortable; it's been in the 90s all week, and due to my house having no insulation or central air, it's been hotter inside. It would be less of an issue, except that I work out of my house, so I've taken to being as naked as I can reasonably be for video calls and sitting a foot from a fan on high blast. It will only get worse; I am girding my loins. (I wouldn't mind it so much if I could just do the sort of languorous lounging that the weather suggests, but it seems unfair to have to troubleshoot email encoding while there's sweat in your eyes.)
A friend was in town last night, and it was wonderful to see her and to drink beer in an air-conditioned bar. I have known her since I was 11 years old, and we only were friends for a year before I moved to Atlanta. As she pointed out, our friendship is an early-2000's social media success story; we've been following each other on AIM and Facebook and then twitter and then instagram for the last 17 years, which is wild to me. She's seen me in every city I've lived in.
It is weird to think back on the way I used the internet in the early 2000s, and how different my life would have been if my family had moved even a year earlier. For one thing, I just wouldn't have met the kids I met my sixth grade year in Tulsa, but I probably wouldn't have stayed in touch with them in the day-to-day way that I did without AIM and Xanga and LiveJournal (I was a very cool child), which weren't quite as much a part of my life until I was in middle school. (Which is hysterical, of course; we were all babies and we were churning out just reams of weird play by post rpg board roleplay content as faux-wolves.)
(Sidebar apparently that site still exists, though in a new form. I love the internet.)
I joke a lot about how my advice for so much stuff is just to quit. And like, on some genuine level, it is. Life is too short to have friends you don't like and to do work on a boyfriend who's not nice to you. Moving across the country, both times I did it, didn't solve all my problems (wherever you go, there you are) but it certainly solved several!
But I think so much of my willingness to do that is based on the fact that I can maintain a lot of what is good about my life through digital mechanisms; huge giant swaths of my life have been mediated through these persistent online relationships since I was 12, and last night was a big reminder of that. Wherever I go, there I am, but so are all of my pocket friends.
Shit to read
Everyone go watch Gentleman Jack and read about the formation of lesbian as an identity. Pairs well with this piece on queer language before queer identity.
Paula Pell wrote this lovely piece on being fat and gay.
Let us all read about Jewish vacations in the Catskills.
Amy Sedaris is a stone cold weirdo and I love her.
Everyone go read the queer horse girl comic.
Millennials talking about home ownership in a non-obnoxious way that also highlights that almost no one buys a house without parental help.
The Fleabag jumpsuit isn't just about the jumpsuit.
A great and compelling read about a man discovering the identity of his grandmother's rapist/his grandfather through a family tree website.
There is an entire fascinating language for gay Londoners in the 40s and yes I absolutely learned this from fanfiction.
God please read this fucking WeWork article.
Speaking of fanfiction, I loved loved loved this legitimately fascinating data science piece on how Archive of Our Own maintains a usable tag taxonomy. It's so good.
Shit to eat
Buy a box of watermelon popsicles.
Rent a house with no A/C.
Work out of that house.
When the no A/C and the home working cause you to sweat like a stuck pig, have a popsicle.
When you run out, get more.
Shit to listen to
This Swedish version of Book of Mormon is wild. They are... very Swedish looking.
I have watched this version of "People Will Say We're in Love" like 100 times this week and my sister is seeing the production today and I am so jealous.
A film in the gay Londoner language mentioned above.
Shit to buy
I am obsessed with these Moroccan poufs, whether in black, or in blue.
Also this jumpsuit.