Welcome, goons!

I love the internet. I love it. I mean, it’s completely disgusting and toxic and a magnificent wasteland 99% of the time, but I will not encourage anyone, ever, to put their phones down and take a walk outside or close their laptops so they can be alone with their thoughts. Have you tried being alone with your thoughts? Because it’s terrible.

During the very early weeks of Covid, when we were frantically searching for ways to occupy our time, I wrote a little nightly email for friends and family that I called “I got you an internet,” full of dumb links and shitty distractions and selfish commentary. And at my last job, I’d open team meetings with a workplace icebreaker analog, “Give me an internet,” and I’d make people share one thing they enjoyed from their recent browsing. (They did not enjoy “Give me an internet,” I’ll tell you that right now.)

We are in peak Recommender Culture right now, whether we’re getting those recommendations via affiliate link on TikTok or Instagram influencers the app has selected for us. We are also in peak Newsletter Culture right now, and many folks are opting to bypass broken algorithms and “reclaim their platforms” or something by hitting their audiences directly where they can leave these creators on read in perpetuity: Their inboxes. So here I am. Again.

After it took itself on a burnout-related hiatus, my creativity is finally beginning to thaw, I think. It remains mercurial and unfocused (although I don’t know when it’s ever been one hundred percent compliant or zeroed in), but I’d like to use this project as a small way to train it back to life. So expect, here, more dumb links, shitty distractions and selfish commentary — with lots of nostalgia, showtunes, Bravo, Instagram accounts, throwbacks, deep dives and ridiculous goofs. I apologize in advance, but this is what I am like.

For all its conspiracies, flamewars and clickbait, it is still a beautiful, two-dimensional world. Let’s go online.