CONTENT #17

Good things I found online

I want you to stop what you’re doing. Take a breath, close your eyes, and pretend it is December, 2024. You are scrolling on Tumblr, past cat photos and text posts. Then, you see this.

For those unwilling to click away, imagine an old-fashioned newsletter with three columns. Two contain news stories: “Woman’s Private Stew Becomes Public” and “Local Woman Gets Into Seasonal Candles.” One is the Poetry Corner. An excerpt:

Christmas Sandwich

Let’s describe it in full

And account for each layer

The Christmas Sandwich

It fit for a mayor

The bread, gingerbread!

The mayonnaise, eggnog!

The meat is a reindeer,

Roasted over a yule log

Lettuce? Nope, Holly!

(But Lettuce be Jolly)

If you order delivery

It arrives on a red trolly

The salt and pepper are snowflakes

The cheese is confetti

It comes with a side dish

A bowl full of Jelly

Are you in hysterics? Reader, I was in hysterics.

Divorced of its context on someone else’s blog, I thought this must be a one-time bit. No. This is just one of hundreds of issues of Jennifer Mills News, a one-woman newspaper established in 2002. It is the best source in the world for news of Jennifer Mills, 40, Brooklyn resident, modern career woman. A sampling of headlines: “Great Deal On Apples Just Keeps Getting Better for Local Woman”; “Woman Drops French Fry In Purse”; “Woman Takes Chance on 7/11 Tuna Sandwich.”

Mills started out by printing each issue in her high school computer room. Later, she sent it to a growing readership via email. These days, she posts on Tumblr.

This is a summary of everything I love about the internet. Creating something for the sake of it. Weird windows into other people’s lives. An archive of material you never knew existed, but are delighted to dig into once you do.

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Jennifer Mills made me laugh, but Humano Sound made me dance. Humano Sound is “a project from the Pacific Northwest intended to honor music in its purest forms.” It lives on Patreon and Spotify and, maybe most of all, Youtube, where you can watch its affiliated DJs play vinyl records in hour-long sets, a bright, plant-soaked kitchen in the background.

My favorite set might be this one, from La Mala Noche. The set begins with a cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” I’d never heard before, one that injects a louche sensuality so pitch-perfect it supplants the original. When “Broken English” plays toward the end, it’s a haunting echo (as well as a bop).

If you’re tired of listening to what Spotify serves you, I highly recommend throwing on a set. Let a human being move you.

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And now, to get a little meta (not Meta) with it: Meow Mix. I can only describe Meow Mix as the internet in a video.

Animated by meowballz, a student at CalArts, it is a five-minute representation of a life spent online. Several different eras of digital experience are collaged together to disorienting – and #relatable – effect. MS Paint, AIM, Dust, ChatGPT, Temu, TikTok all make appearances, sometimes at the same time. To someone who grew up on the internet, who has all these shifting aesthetics imprinted on their brain like screen burn on an old TV, the effect is almost cathartic. Someone else remembers. Someone else understands how it all fits together.

Meow Mix doesn’t just depict the internet, it recreates the feeling of using it. The rapid cuts and frenetic music evoke the feeling of being too online, too long. All this to say: it is the best piece of art about the internet I have ever seen.