To me, life is a series of experiments. I’m a mad scientist writing tests for my own life. Both Frankenstein and his monster.

So, when a girl’s video crossed my FYP about rejection therapy and applying anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It echoed over and over and over until I couldn’t help but conduct my own mini rejection therapy experiment.

I decided to apply for one thing a day…and because I’m an over-achiever, that one thing turned to ten.

Somewhere in those ten applications, I decided to start applying for music festival coverage.

Why I was so desperate in the first place

I had tickets to Lollapalooza that I had to sell due to employment (sigh), and the idea of missing girl, so confusing by Lorde and Charli XCX was so painful that I genuinely went insane. Applying to cover a different festival was, medically speaking, a coping strategy.

But Bumbershoot was never a consolation prize. It’s THE music festival in Seattle, celebrating the city’s music and arts scene “from punk to performance art, ballet to wrestling, pole dancing to roller skating, food to fashion, and all manner of ingenuity in between.” It’s heading into its 53rd year, it takes place September 5–6 at Seattle Center, and it’s always been a dream of mine to go.

So: why not try?

And guess what?! Well…you’ve probably figured it out from the title of this post, BUT I WAS ACCEPTED! So now, I’m going to Bumbershoot!

…

Alone!

Doing it Anxious and Alone

Unfortunately, if you had to describe my personality in three words, nervous would be one of them. I’m a walking billboard for Lexapro, and no one’s ever seen Piglet and I in the same room if you get what I’m saying. And if you don’t, I HAVE EXTREME ANXIETY!

And yet, I like doing things alone.

People are always shocked by that, but here’s my thought process: If I stopped myself from doing something every time I had no one to do it with, I wouldn’t go anywhere. So, I decided to become extremely good at doing things alone through my own version of exposure therapy. I’ve gone to hot pot by myself more times than I can count. I’ve gone to a handful of concerts alone, did Lollapalooza solo once, and that same mentality is even part of why I chose to move to Indiana for college.

And now I genuinely prefer it, especially for my favorite things. At a music festival, going with someone means half my attention is spent worrying whether they're having fun, whether they like this artist as much as me, whether they want to leave. Sometimes I like to be selfish! So, when it comes to music festivals specifically, I genuinely enjoy going by myself!

And so, I have decided to take you along with me. To the festival, yes. But also to all of the prep I do as someone going alone and someone going scared.

Here is my: Anxious Girl’s Guide to Going to a Music Festival Alone

1. The boring BUT IMPORTANT paperwork

Like reading the syllabus on the first day of class, I like to get the basics out of the way early so I’m less stressed the day of. Go through the website, the emails, everything you got after buying your ticket. Write it all down in one note on your phone: location, entrance, set times, bag policy, parking.

Since I’ve already done this for Bumbershoot, here’s what I found, so you don’t have to:

• When: Saturday and Sunday, September 5–6, Labor Day weekend

• Where: Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St, under the Space Needle

• How big: Seattle Center is big, so expect a lot of walking! COMFY SHOES!!!

• Ages: All ages

• Bag policy: Clear bags up to 18" × 18" × 6" are allowed. Nontransparent backpacks, shoulder bags, and small handbags are also allowed. They just may be searched and take longer at entry.

I also personally get extremely stressed trying to find parking, so I avoid it entirely. I’ll be getting a ride…which is to say, I’ll be begging my mom.

Pinterest time!

Picking an outfit for an event is an event in its own right. Finding a look that fits the occasion, is comfortable, makes me feel confident, AND showcases my sparkling, stunning personality is an actual art form. So I dedicate a real chunk of time to it, early enough to gather every piece and try it all on. There is nothing worse than putting on an outfit you were sure about only to discover it looks like it was assembled for an Adam Sandler movie.

For me, the most comfortable thing on earth is an oversized graphic tee, and Bumbershoot is grungier than Lolla or Coachella, which makes it the PERFECT place to cute-ify one. I love a giant graphic tee with a lace slip underneath, chunky Mary Janes, lace socks. Peak PNW indie sleaze. That's the direction I'm going. Moodboard below.

OH ALSO! Anxiety hack: clothes are a conversation starter! People love to talk about similar interests, so I always like to wear one piece that’s unique or signals one of my interests, whether that’s a cool piece of chainmail or a Disney pin.

Become temporarily obsessed with the lineup

My favorite part of any festival is always always always the music. And I love festivals particularly because you get to experience so many different sounds all at once.

But I hate feeling unprepared, so the best part of any festival planning for me is the music research phase. Here’s how I do it:

1. Create a playlist for the occasion.

2. Go through the lineup and categorize the acts into three buckets: artists you know, artists you’ve heard of, and artists you don’t know.

   

3. Put all of the songs you know into your playlist.

4. Start going through the artists you’ve heard of. Listen to their albums. Save the songs you like into the playlist. Keep going until you’ve exhausted yourself. You don’t have to listen to everything!

5. Then play it to death until the festival!

Here’s my playlist (work in progress):

Give yourself side quests

As an anxious girly, I hate feeling lost and not knowing what to do when I get to an event. At a music festival, there are inevitably going to be little gaps where you suddenly become painfully aware that you are standing somewhere by yourself. Everyone else will look busy and socially fulfilled, and your brain will immediately decide you are the only person at the festival who has ever been alone in public. DO NOT PANIC. This time, you’ll be prepared because I’ve created this Bumbershoot bucket list for me and for others who need a handy-dandy music festival guide to going alone.

The point isn’t to finish all of these. This is not another schedule to stress yourself out over. They’re just things you can reach for whenever you don’t know what to do next.

Be nervous and go anyway

I hate to admit this, considering I’ve just spent several hundred words telling you how much planning means to me, but at the end of the day, finishing the plan is not the point.

I can spend hours hyper-fixating on the lineup. I can pick out the most perfect outfit, and even memorize the bag policy. But eventually, all the planning has to end and I have to actually experience the festival.

So, the plan is there to get me through the door.

Who knows? I might miss an artist I wanted to see because I got distracted by the Cat Circus. Maybe I’ll meet someone and fall in love. Maybe, hopefully, I won’t.

Kidding.

Or is?

Anyways, maybe I’ll spend twenty minutes sitting alone wondering why I thought any of this was a good idea.

That’s the experiment!

I’ll still be nervous. I’ll just be nervous at Bumbershoot.

Just know: You don’t actually have to stop being scared before you start doing things. Sometimes you just have to apply anyway.

See you at Bumbershoot.

<3 brooklyn

Aries: thecriterioncloset.com

Leo season pulls Aries back toward pleasure, creativity, and having opinions just because it’s fun to argue. Criterion Closet gives you 1,000+ movies to search through before making the most important decision of your life: your top four Closet Picks.

Taurus: adwityac.github.io/pixel-chapel

Leo season asks Taurus to romanticize their inner world. Pixel Chapel is a tiny digital chapel for lighting candles, leaving flowers, journaling, and making the online world feel strangely peaceful for once. Plus, literally all of the tauruses I know are catholic, so…here ya go.

Gemini: liminalbingo.com

Leo season is feeding Gemini’s curiosity. Liminal Bingo turns wandering into a scavenger hunt, sending you looking for strange little in-between places you’d normally walk right past. I’ve started searching for these during my walks, and it’s made me a lot more observant.

Cancer: stillsayinggoodmorning.com

Still Saying Good Morning archives the good-morning images some person’s mom sends them every day, turning an ordinary family routine into something surprisingly precious. Leo season asks Cancer to think about what they value and which tiny things are actually worth holding onto.

Leo: envoy.henry.codes

I might’ve chosen this website based entirely on my own interests and aesthetics, but who cares! I’m a Leo baby! It’s my birthday month, and I can pick what I want! Envoy.Henry.Codes is a website where you write some poetry, submit it, and then a little machine in (I’m guessing) Henry’s house prints it out for him to read on a tiny slip of paper. How CUTE! Also, again, I’m a Leo. Of course I want other people to read my work at the press of a button. So, here you go, Henry. Enjoy my poems.

Virgo: historicaltechtree.com

Virgos might find comfort in exploring their curiosity this leo season. For that, I recommend HistoricalTechTree.com. This site lets you click around through the history of technology and see how inventions connect to each other over time.

Libra: clipart.studio

When I think Libra, I think aesthetic. I’m a Libra rising, and I personally attribute that to my gorgeous, glowing looks and fantabulous fashion sense. Clipart Studio is basically a digital collage table where you can flip through actual magazines, cut out whatever catches your eye, and build your own little artpiece. I love collaging. I love finding websites for collaging. Boom bop! BaM!

Scorpio: nobodyhere.nl/justme/me.here

While the days are sunny, Scorpios seem to be craving something darker. NobodyHere.nl is a strange labyrinth through someone’s thoughts, memories, amd secrets. It’s slightly invasive; it makes you you almost want to stop scrolling, but you can’t.

Sagittarius: stowaway.live

Leo season calls Sagittarius out into the wild, but unfortunately flights are pricey and I can’t afford them, so I found you the next best thing: Stowaway.live. Watch real flights and satellites pass above you as they travel to their destinations. Click on one of those flights and catch a ride with them, watching the world below you. There’s so much going on in the sky all the time that we can barely see!

Capricorn: typelit.io

I’m not sure if people like typing as much as I do, but I just assume they must because what is better than the clicking sound of words coming into digital existence? For Capricorns, though, it might be relaxing while being productive. If that’s the case, I present to you: Typelit.io, a website whose entire purpose is letting you retype classic books without making any mistakes. To some, extremely boring. To a Capricorn? NUT.

Aquarius: tetrageddon.com/meanderware

I’m not even sure how to describe this website, but I’m constantly trying to impress Aquarius, so this one is yours <3 Tetrageddon is a strange web of poems, hyperlinks, memories, art, and little corners you weren’t supposed to find. It feels like the internet before everything started looking the same. And also kinda spooky.

Pisces: bingebuster.net

This website turns your streaming services into a virtual Blockbuster, so instead of searching through the same webpage you always do, you can browse the shelves like it’s 2009 again. Very Pisces to make picking a movie into an entire nostalgic fantasy. Very dystopian now that I’m actually thinking about it…

Even though I only assigned each zodiac sign one website, I highly highly recommend going through all of them just because they’re super fun and I spent a lot of time finding and curating them so they’re Brooklyn approved ;P

Anyways!

Couple updates: I’ve spent a bit of time away from the Stacks due to moving and jobs and a bunch of other excuses that don’t really matter. However, I have settled and have been struck by a bunch of creativity! So, I hope to go back to a normal schedule startinggggg now.

I also think Substack isn’t a time for summer in general because I just want to be outside. Speaking of, do you wanna see pics of my garden? I just got these two carnivorous plants from the ren faire the other day and I’m actually obsessed with them. I walked into the garden this morning and one of my Venus Flytrap’s leaves were shut, so I think it caught a bug! How FUN.

Alright, so that’s my garden…

Anyways, love you guys! Bye!

<3 brooklyn

We are gathered here today to celebrate the life and acknowledge the death of what once was:

The Comment Section.

(baaaabum reveal audio clip)

A lot of people, when giving a speech about a loved one, lie.

They say “Old Uncle Bill never had a bad word to say about anybody” about the uncle who definitely did, every single Thanksgiving, say several bad words, about several groups of people. They say “Aunt Becky was a saint” about the grown woman who once threw a rubber flip flop at you doing 60 down the highway for breaking the rules of “quiet as a mouse”.

I get why we do it. It feels cruel to bury someone with all their worst parts showing. So we wash em off a bit. Make them a bit easier to remember.

I’m not going to do that here. The Comment Section was never a saint, and if I’m honest, she was never really a monster either, no matter what everyone said about her these last few years. She was gray. And gray was the most alive she ever was.

I want you to take a walk with me down Memory Ln. At every funeral, there’s a moment where someone stands up and starts telling stories. Well, I’m not standing, but this is that moment. A couple of my favorite memories from when The Comment Section felt most human. Most real. If this was a youtube video, it would be titled “Reply Guys being funny for 10 hours compilation”, but this is Substack and so, instead, you get a fake eulogy.

this guy’s dead wife

I don’t know what I can say about this comment that hasn’t already been said. It’s one of the most well-known comments in history. I absolutely had to put it as number one.

“If you could choose one dead person to bring back to life, who would it be?”

One user gave an almost too-honest, yet unexpectedly sweet answer about his late wife. He wrote about how much he missed her, how he would choose her.

And then, this agitating, grating voice:

“I also choose this guy’s dead wife.”

…You can practically hear the virtual pin drop.

You’ll notice a lot of these comments come from Reddit attached to the default profile picture and a meaningless username. As we continue through this eulogy, that will change. But at the Comment Section’s peak, it didn’t matter who you were or if you had a blue check next to your name. Companies weren’t littering the replies trying to steal fifteen seconds of fame.

That will change.

the lamp

This comment is very different from the first. Instead of a dry burn, this is an allegedly true story, posted in the comment section of an r/AskReddit post. The question was, “Have you ever felt a deep connection to a person you’ve met in a dream?”

One of my first viral Notes on this app was about the Lamp Story: “I’m practically begging the lamp to look a little off at this point.” Self-deprecation at its finest.

That’s how important this comment is. That’s how deeply it has lodged itself into internet culture. You can make an incredibly niche reference to a lamp looking weird, and thousands of people immediately know exactly what you mean.

omg you people cant do anything

Every social media platform has its own culture. While it definitely has its bad moments, Reddit’s culture is largely built around sharing stories and spreading knowledge.

Twitter is completely different.

Twitter is the Wild Wild West. It’s a 24/7, 365-day Purge Day for the Robots that live there. You post something there knowing full well that at any moment, a complete stranger might decide to make you the joke.

Which brings me to another comment that changed the course of history.

People have always been rude, especially on the internet, but for some reason, this is the tweet I always think of as a turning point. After this, there seemed to be a shift in the way people talked about mental illness online.

I also believe this tweet helped normalize dry, casual bitterness as a punchline. The comeback of the comeback.

I don’t think this one tweet created that culture by itself, obviously, but it feels like an important moment that captured the exact direction the internet was already moving in.

And as always, if there’s a way to make money…

capitalism in the comment section

By 2017, Twitter had solidified its angsty personality. Yet, unlike today, there was still a pretty clear distinction between the people posting and the companies advertising to them. They still held themselves to higher, more LinkedIn-corporate-talk standards.

Then Wendy’s started talking shit.

And, while it is funny, I’d argue that this was the Comment Section’s “jump the shark” moment, the point where the wall between brand and user started to disappear.

And once brands figured out how to sound like people, people started sounding suspiciously like brands.

cause of death

And while the Comment Section was once so full of life, today we sit here gathered at her funeral.

Yet, there are more comments than ever!1 So how can she possibly be dead?

Well, she lost her authenticity. She lost her humanity.

Instead, today, you must follow a script.

There are around five comments you can post under almost anything that are guaranteed to get at least a few likes…which seems to be the goal of almost anything anymore.

“hope this helps”

“oh that’s not”

And we can’t forget about the viral comment of the week. Someone says something genuinely funny and within three days everyone has beaten it into the ground so hard that the original joke barely means anything anymore.

HOW DO YOU SHIFT?!

Once people realized a comment could feed their attention cravings, commenting shifted2. And after that, why risk saying something new when you could just say something everyone already liked?.3

And that’s SO BORING.

Before, opening comment sections used to feel like opening a bling bags. You had no idea what you’d get. Someone could tell you a story about a fake family and a glitching lamp, and you’d believe them. Someone could pwn the person who OG poster and you’d laugh with them because, at that time, not every comment seemed so miserable.

Now, it feels like most of the time I can guess the comments before I even open them.

Which isn’t hard because I’m extremely intuitive to the point where I think I might be psychic but STILL.

So, dearly beloved, that is why we are here.

The Comment Section is dead. The Comment Section remains dead. And we have killed her.

May she rest in peace.

Or, at the very least, may somebody come up with a new fucking comment.

<3 brooklyn

I recently started a job in retail and while I have discovered I’m decent at it, I have also decided I hate it because I spend significantly less time at my favorite place on Earth — the internet. So, I have spent my entire Sunday, my first official day off, exploring hidden corners of the world wide web. Last month, I presented my monthly website list as a set of carefully curated links that fit an uber specific aesthetic like dark academia mob boss wife or whimsical virgin suicides sofia coppola swan lake. This time, we’re trying something different. This time, you’re getting a LOT more sites split into three simple categories: websites, games, and substacks. My brain hurts and I simply want to show you guys some cool things I found rotting on the couch today. My back’s sore, my feet are cramping, enjoy. (A note that these websites have all been tested on my computer because that is my safe space. I have no idea if they hit the same on the phone.)

a lazy river for your cursor, playlists inspired by your zodiac sign, and cinema is back baby!

Nothing to Watch - A pillow, blanket and a bucket of popcorn dripping in butter has been my uniform this month; I feel like I moved into the movie theater. It’s having a comeback!1 And I’m excited to see how that continues throughout July. However, this site is for those days when you don’t feel like gambling on whether or not the row behind you will rob you of 20 dollars by talking throughout the entire two hour feature. It solves the modern issue of choice fatigue by providing you a simple interface for picking which movie to watch.

Worldwide Sidewalk Joy - July is the month of spontaneity, of going outside and exploring your town like a tourist. Here’s one way to do just that. This map shows a bunch of “sidewalk joys” that you can find and visit. “Sidewalk Joy spots are free, curated public galleries, exchanges and displays installed in curb gardens, front yards or sides of buildings. Examples include Free Little Art Galleries, Puzzle Exchanges, Toy Swaps, and more.” It’s super cute and I will definitely be visiting the mug exchange near me!

Cursor Camp - Okay… I’m actually, genuinely, absolutely obsessed with this one. Like I have it loaded and ready for when I’ve finished writing this post. I just got distracted and played it again for twenty minutes while editing this section. Cursor Camp is a playground for your cursor made by Neal.fun who has been featured throughout a lot of my posts. What can I say. The man’s got bangers. In cursor camp, your cursor is your avatar which you explore with, customize through little mini games, etc. The map is very interactive. You can fall down waterfalls, explore caves, play volleyball. What I loved most about it was finding different ways to communicate with the people around me using only my cursor. I spent a good thirty minutes hanging out with one cursor and it was just interesting to see how we used different movements and patterns to communicate different things. Super cool and would definitely recommend.

Packet Highway - I hope someone finds this site as interesting as I do. Packet Highway turns your computer’s internet traffic into a digital highway of cars. Every time your computer sends or receives a piece of information (like loading a website), a little car drives across the screen. If you are using a lot of internet, the highway fills up with heavy traffic. You can click on any car driving by to see exactly what piece of data it’s carrying. It is basically a fun, visual way to watch your computer talk to the internet, and I am oBsEsSeD.

Stumble Upon - Every single time I post a website listicle, I get a comment about the old website stumbleupon. SO! Today, I present to you: stumbleupon the reboot! This website is exactly like the old site where you refresh for a different random site each time. So, enjoy a comment section free of a stumbleupon recommendation :)

Firewood - Firewood is a browser-based physics simulator entirely focused on splitting logs. It is incredibly satisfying. ASMR level satisfying. Also! It’s gorgeous. It looks so lifelike because the creator of this site used their phone to 3D-scan their actual backyard chopping stump, a real axe, and real logs, dropping those photorealistic models directly into the browser. It makes me want to buy a giant red and black wool flannel and grow a beard.

Merlin Bird App - Oh, my true love, the Merlin Bird app. If you keep up with my notes, you will have seen that I’ve become obsessed with identifying birds recently. I saw a TikTok of different bird calls you might hear in my area and ever since then, I have become maternal toward them and addicted to catching them all. A big reason for that is this app. You can record bird calls and watch in real time as they’re identified. I love it. I love being able to track which birds I’ve seen recently. I love knowing their names. I fear I am one step away from buying binoculars.

Tiny Robots - I love robots and I will never apologize for that. This website is a collection of different tiny toy robots from the past that look a lot like the old 50s sci-fi diner aesthetic I’m obsessed with right now. This is my official statement that it’ll be a big trend in like two years. Anyways, I spent a lot of time looking through these robots, picking out which ones I want like an old Sears catalog.

Landlines - Landlines is a project built around satellite images. Draw on the screen and find Google Earth images that match your every line. It uses machine learning, optimized algorithms, AND you can even try it out on your phone.

Radio Venus - Have you ever wanted a playlist inspired by your venus sign? Of course you have! I just know that’s EXACTLY what you were craving right now. Well, this site builds you just that. Enter your birthdate, pick a genre, and get the perfect playlist inspired by the stars.

Singapore Tech Virtual Campus Tour - Okay this is kind of random, but it’s genuinely such an interesting format for a campus tour, I had to include it as a reminder that you can be creative on the internet…even when assigned with something as straightforward as a virtual campus tour. Explore Singapore Tech’s 3D virtual campus through an avatar of their mascot, an otter. Walk around and talk to NPCs to learn more about the campus. I just find this such a creative way to show off your school and the education there. I even learned they have tennis courts on the roof by taking an elevator up there. So unique :)

Similes - I find myself going back to the basics a lot when writing. I miss the crisp autumn aura of high school English class, and I find myself chasing that high quite a bit. This website is a deep dive into similes, which sounds simple until you remember that so much of writing is just finding a better way to say what something feels like. Very nerdy. Very useful. Made me want to annotate a poem and dramatically stare out a window.

life360’s TikTok account - Life360 changed their name on TikTok to be Brinity360 because of Love Island’s top couple Bryce and Trinity, and I think that’s really important to know.

‘the internet was made for play so here’s a bunch of browser-based games’ gby fall out boy

RNGdle - Alright. Is this the dumbest game to ever exist? Maybe. Is it also incredibly addicting and I cannot wait until tomorrow so I can play again? Absolutely yes! This is a wordle-type game where you get one random number a day. From there, it categorizegs the number to determine the point value of said number. I’m upset because the first number I rolled started with “69” and I got points for that 😭 but I didn’t have an account, so it didn’t save.

Catfishing - I LOVE this game. In Catfishing, you are given the tags to a random Wikipedia page. From those tags, you have to guess the Wikipedia page being described. It actually isn’t as hard as you think it’ll be and it’s incredibly fun, so have a go at it.

Wordslop - WordSlop is a word-association puzzle game where you type in objects or concepts to fill specific categories. I’m honestly not sure how to describe it, but it’s very low pressure and I like to play it while watching Love Island lol. Update: It’s editing Brooklyn and I am obsessed with this game. I have it on 24/7. I have to think of every word ever so please drop suggestions in the comments.2

WenWare - WenWare is essentially a time-travel version of GeoGuessr. Instead of just guessing where you are on a map, you are dropped into an immersive 360° historical scene and have to figure out both where you are and when you are. You move through different eras like Ancient, Medieval, or Modern and try to pin down the exact location and time period, which gives it a fun, investigative feel that’s much more about lore and observation than typical technical gameplay.

Takeaway Eight - I have yet to solve this game. It is incredibly hard. But essentially you are given an eight letter word which you must remove a letter from and rescramble until you get a real 7 letter word. I’m assuming this continues until the word is too small to make shorter, but I have yet to move past round one. So.

Kickoff League - This pick is inspired by the new current obsession with the World Cup and my continuous obsession of kicking ’s ass in chess! But seriously, this is a really cool site that combines chess and soccer. Instead of moving pieces, you’re passing a ball between them in similar patterns to the chess pieces.

VibeSail - VibeSail is a browser-based sailing game. I don’t know anything about sailing and I’m not quite sure it interests me that much. However, the art in this is just gorgeous and I could see a lot of people finding peace in this site. Not me though. Not me.

a substacker reading a substack about substacks on substack

Serving Biscuits in God’s Kitchen - A funny, poignant essay from Vittles about an anonymous writer running the tea and biscuit table at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in London. I didn’t think I would be moved by biscuit etiquette, but here we are. It’s about recovery, service, and how offering someone a cup of tea and a biscuit can become a profound act of care for people who often feel they don’t deserve kindness. Very simple. Very beautiful. Made me want to be a better person and also maybe offer someone a biscuit.

GemStone - In this essay, Tao Lin reflects on his middle school addiction to the 1990s text-based MMORPG GemStone III. It’s a nostalgic look at the early internet, social anxiety, and how a text-only virtual world became a place where he could disappear into another version of himself. By revisiting the game years later, he looks back at what those early online spaces meant and how they let people build alternate identities.

Why does everyone love Obsession but hate Don’t Worry Darling? - Two of my favorite movies in one essay?! This piece digs into why my current obsession CALLED Obsession is being praised for its horror of male entitlement while Don’t Worry Darling was dismissed for exploring a similar fear in a more pop-feminine package. Such a fun read if you love messy reception discourse, gendered criticism, and movies about men trying to control the women they claim to love.3

Lessons from Blackmail - I absolutely adore this piece. Jade Fabello gives a writing lesson by analyzing a spam email she received trying to blackmail her. It’s clever, entertaining, and genuinely useful. I read this piece after I wrote this post and had to go back and rewrite so much of it just because I was so inspired by the lesson. Useful tips and very funny.

Raw! Unfiltered! Journalling! - I love when someone writes in a way that makes me feel like I need to immediately open a blank document and confess every thought I’ve ever had. In this essay, Rosie Whinray writes about journaling as a private exorcism, a survival tactic, and a place to put the self you’re not quite ready to show anyone else. It’s funny, messy, witchy, and a little unhinged in the best way. Basically, if your notes app is your safe space, this one’s for you. An absolute favorite.

Alright, it’s 12:25 am. Sunday is officially over. You’ve been bombarded with links. I think it’s time for me to schedule this post and fall asleep to Obsession think pieces on Youtube. I hope you found something cool in this list! Love you guys!

<3 brooklyn

That’s how I found Tinsley.

One of her videos showed up on my FYP and I added her to my playlists immediately. Pop and twang and melodies so sticky they start following you around. So, I messaged her on Instagram and asked for an interview. Somehow, she said yes.

Brooklyn Lore Time: When I first started this blog, it was called “Byte-Sized Beats”1 and was supposed to be strictly about music and tech. Eventually even that felt too niche for me, so I renamed it something vague and meaningless, but I never stopped wanting to make music pieces. So this is a new series where I interview undiscovered artists I love and try to convince you to listen to them too. It’s inspired after , one of the first blogs I followed here, who introduces people to cool art better than just about anyone.

I’ve got a lineup I’m genuinely excited about, and it begins with Tinsley. Shoutout to her for being my very first interview :)

So, without further ado:

You’re so rooted in Seattle, and I feel like your story is very connected to the local scene. How has being a Seattle artist shaped the way you make music? What do you think the Seattle music scene has given you that you might not have gotten somewhere else?

Seattle is my home, so every memory, every relationship, everything that has shaped me into the person and artist I am has happened here. I’ve only ever lived in Washington. I have huge respect for the bands and artists who have come out of this city. I’ve found the Seattle music scene to be a very welcoming place. Sure, it doesn’t have the scale of music industry like LA or Nashville does, but there are incredible musicians here and a growing number of resources dedicated to keeping music alive, like KEXP, STG, Sonic Guild to name a few. I owe a lot of my initial encouragement and success to these panels called Mastering the Hustle that I attended put on by KEXP and Upstream Music Festival, which no longer exists. They were intended for local independent musicians, and I went to every single one of them trying to soak up as much info as possible and network. Local radio stations who have played my songs like Seattle U’s KXSU and KEXP have also played a major role in my music career and self-confidence as an artist. Shoutout to all the DJs who have believed in me!

Do you think the internet has made being an indie artist feel more possible, more exhausting, or both?

Both. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to even make or release music without the internet, and social media has opened so many doors for me as far as connecting with people who helped me start my music career. But the need to be constantly “online” is exhausting and it’s easy to get caught in the numbers comparison trap.

Being an artist now means you’re also expected to be a marketer, content creator, editor, and tiny media company. Do you enjoy the online side of releasing music, or does it ever feel like it pulls you out of the world of the songs?

I do get excited coming up with release strategies and building out the world of my songs when they first come out, but I also get pretty burnt out trying to constantly churn out content to sustain any momentum I get. Sometimes it feels like I’m spending more time trying to chase an ever-changing algorithm and play the TikTok lottery than writing new material or deepening my craft, but I try to remind myself that the amount of resources and time I spent on each of my songs is worth putting in the additional work and time so they actually get heard and reach new people. That’s what the online side of promotion is for. It’s a necessary evil, I guess.

I saw that you’ve named Taylor Swift, Feist, Alvvays, and Maggie Rogers as inspirations, which is an amazing list. How do you think those influences show up in your music?

I first learned to play guitar in high school so that I could cover Taylor Swift songs. It felt like she gave me permission to share my own personal stories in song form as a teenager, and my approach to lyrics and storytelling is heavily influenced by her. Leslie Feist is also a huge inspiration to me. She’s part of the reason I decided to go with just my last name for my artist project. Her vocal style and range is similar to mine, and her song 1234 was one of the very first songs I had on my iPod. Alvvays and Maggie Rogers both inspire me from a genre and melody sense. I loved how Maggie Rogers mixed electronic elements with folk music in her debut album, and Alvvays is a band I’ve seen live more than any other band. Antisocialites is probably my desert island album. I’ve listened to it so many times. I’m a sucker for a fuzzy guitar and synths.

What’s a tiny detail in one of your songs that you love and hope someone notices?

In the Twist The Knife demo, there is an instrumental that happens before the second verse. I ask Timothy, “Is this going into the second verse now?” And Timothy says “uh-huh.” We became so used to it that we kept it in the final. I love that it makes the song feel slightly unpolished and real.

What’s the most “you” lyric you’ve ever written?

If I had to pick right now, it’d be these from Distract Me:

I know we won’t make it

But I promise I can take it

You’re like really, really hot

So I’ll do it for the plot

I think that’s a good snapshot of my approach to humor and self-awareness in my songs.

I love listening to albums in order, and your self-titled album feels really intentional. Does the track order tell a story? Was there an emotional arc you were building?

Yes! I did spend a lot of time trying to figure out the right listening order for my album, especially because it was also pressed on vinyl so there was a clear A and B side. I wouldn’t say there is a specific story, it’s more a broader snapshot of coming of age and finding my voice as an artist, but I did want to take listeners on an emotional journey of ups and downs.

A lot of your songs have this really interesting contrast where the melodies feel bright and catchy, but the lyrics can be bruised, anxious, or heartbroken. Are you drawn to that contrast on purpose?

Thank you for noticing that! Yes, I do naturally gravitate towards that kind of contrast and juxtaposition. I find it creatively inspiring to play with polar opposites. Even in the way I dress, I love mixing more feminine and masculine pieces, like lace and leather, etc.

What’s the most embarrassing emotion to write about?

I honestly don’t think any emotion is embarrassing, but I think I feel most exposed when I write about how I’ve acted in past situationships and relationships. Both shame and self-sabotage come up a lot, but I know I’m not alone in them. There’s this quote that I come back to a lot that first inspired me to put myself out there as an artist: “The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”

— Neil Gaiman

What’s a lyric you wish you had written?

The first verse of Such Great Heights by The Postal Service are some of my favorite lyrics of all time.

I am thinking it’s a sign

That the freckles in our eyes

Are mirror images

And when we kiss they’re perfectly aligned

And I have to speculate

That God Himself did make

Us into corresponding shapes

Like puzzle pieces from the clay

And true it may seem like a stretch

But it’s thoughts like this that catch

My troubled head when you’re away

When I am missing you to death

So now you know about Tinsley, which means you get to be the friend who tells everyone else.

Her self-titled album is on every platform. Go put it on, all the way through. Be one of the people who heard her early.

🔗 tinsleymusic.com

<3 brooklyn

p.s. in case you think i'm exaggerating, here's my stats.fm

I joined in when others moaned and groaned every time a new episode of Euphoria dropped. I sent eye roll emojis in between Nate Jacobs analysis. I acted above it all, as if I wasn’t seated every Sunday night waiting for whatever insane thing Sam Levinson had planned next.

But in reality, Sundays were days I looked forward to.

I liked seeing my favorite characters in shocking scenarios backed by cinematic western music. I liked the commentary on the current state of America. Hell, I even liked Sydney Sweeney’s acting.

One of the reasons people disliked this last season so much was because of the religious conversations, specifically the ones Rue kept having. Even Lexi, Rue’s best friend, is annoyed by Rue’s sudden turn to God, saying Christians are judgmental and rude.

And while I wouldn’t coin Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria, a genius in any way, I would argue that he has been setting up an even deeper religious message since the beginning of the series.

I would even go as far as to argue that he has been retelling the story of the Bible through a modern lens since the very first episode.

The Biblical Lens

When I was in high school, my favorite class was English. Specifically because I loved writing essays. I loved reading a piece of literature, analyzing it with every brain cell I could muster, and creating such an out-there but well-supported take that my English teachers couldn’t help but bow down to me.1

My favorite lecture in English class was the Jesus Christ figure. I’m not sure why this particular archetype lodged itself so deeply in my brain, but it did. I remember watching The Matrix in class and having a full Socratic seminar over Neo as a Jesus Christ figure. I remember reading the Shadowhunters series around the same time and becoming so obsessed with the idea of Jace as a Jesus Christ figure that I wrote an essay about it just for fun.

So I feel as though I’m very well versed in identifying these figures throughout media.

And I have no problem claiming that Rue from Euphoria is, without a doubt, a Jesus Christ figure.

What makes a Jesus Christ figure?

There are a couple of checkboxes a character usually has to hit to be considered a descendant of JC. So let’s go through them and see if Rue can check them off.

Sacrifice

A Jesus Christ figure usually has a sacrificial role. The character suffers or dies for others, especially to save, protect, redeem, or awaken them.

In the last season of Euphoria, Rue dies from an overdose after taking Percocet pills laced with fentanyl, given to her by her sex trafficking boss, Alamo.

Alamo is the cause of a lot of evil within the Euphoria universe.

He owns a strip club that doubles as a sex trafficking ring. Throughout the season, we see subtle hints of him disposing of the women in his club when he no longer needs them. For example, he tells Angel to go to rehab, but it is very clear that she is either being murdered, sold, or something equally horrific.

After Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs2 go into million-dollar+ debt, Cassie asks Maddy for help. Maddy goes to Alamo, who handles the damage by murdering the people threatening Nate and Cassie.

(Spoiler: Not that it matters that much, because Nate has already been buried alive and murdered by a python/rattlesnake hybrid that only exists in the Euphoria universe!)

But Alamo doesn’t work for free, so now Cassie and Maddy owe him. They’re forced to work under him and make money through Cassie’s OnlyFans business. It is also implied that Alamo is also forcing Maddy to sleep with him.

All in all, he is a very very bad evil man. Like, biblical evil. He causes pain and violence throughout the entire season.

But when Rue dies, Ali, her AA mentor, decides it isn’t enough to keep running AA meetings. They feel useless when people like Rue are still dying every day. So he takes matters into his own hands. He shows up at the strip club with a shotgun, in his uniform, and kills Alamo.

Rue’s death becomes the catalyst that ends all of the pain and suffering caused by Alamo and his team. Her death awakens someone else. It moves Ali from prayer to action. From meeting room to battlefield. From witness to avenger.

Betrayal

A Jesus Christ figure is often betrayed by someone close to them. A Judas-like figure sells them out, abandons them, or chooses self-interest over loyalty.

For Rue, this is Jules.

In season two, Rue has relapsed and is back on drugs, but no one will sell to her. So she goes to Laurie, our monotone drug dealer, and tells her a made-up plan in order to get a suitcase full of ten thousand dollars worth of drugs.

While Rue is enjoying using her own supply, Jules and Dominic Fike’s character, whose name I can never remember, go to Rue’s mom and tell her she’s using again. They find the suitcase full of drugs and flush everything down the toilet.

When Jules flushes Rue’s drugs, she is betraying her. Even if she thinks she is saving her. Even if the audience knows Rue needs help. Even if the betrayal is technically the right thing to do.

It is still a betrayal.

Jules is Judas in that moment. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jules and Judas sound so similar.

I also find it interesting that Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss. In the biblical story, Judas kisses Jesus in order to identify him to the people who have come to arrest him. It is an act of affection turned into an act of betrayal. In Euphoria, that kiss is translated through Jules and Rue’s relationship. She is betraying her as her girlfriend, her lover, her intimate partner, the person Rue is supposed to be safest with. So the kiss exists in both stories, just in different forms. In the Bible, it is literal. In Euphoria, it is emotional.

Resurrection

In the last moments of the show, Ali returns to the farm that Rue visited in the first episode of season three after crossing the border as a drug mule. He meets the farm animals, including the new baby calf that was born three months ago, the same time Rue passed away3.

From this scene, it’s heavily implied that Rue has reincarnated as Dahlia’s baby. The camera hesitates on the animal for far too long. We get a dramatic shot of Ali and the calf making eye contact as if they know each other. The moment is too deliberate to be random.

But I also think the timing matters.

The calf was born three months ago. Rue died three months ago.

Three is a very important biblical number. It often represents divinity, holiness, completion, and resurrection. God is revealed as three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days. But most importantly, Jesus rose from the dead on the third day.

After Jesus dies on the cross and is placed in the tomb, he is resurrected after three days. Ali meeting the calf three months after Rue’s death mirrors that imagery. It turns the scene from a strange animal moment into a resurrection scene. Rue dies, time passes in threes, and then Ali comes face-to-face with something familiar.

There’s also the symbol of the golden calf, which represents false idolatry which is really what this show is all about right? Drugs, fame, sex, love, attention. All of the different addictions we treat as holy. All of the false gods the characters kneel to.

But Rue is not resurrected as a golden cow. She is resurrected as a real calf. A living animal.

She is not fake and shiny. She is not an idol.

She is ressurected.

Forgiveness

Rue’s entire character is centered around forgiveness. “I’m sorry” is in her vocabulary so often it might as well be her catchphrase.

Ali. Her mom. Gia. Jules. Herself.

So much of Rue’s arc is about the damage she causes when she is using, and the impossible process of trying to come back from that damage. She hurts people. She lies. She steals. She runs around town for a full hour’s episode. She destroys trust. And still, the show keeps returning to the question of whether someone can be loved after they have been at their worst.

That is a deeply Christian question4.

Can you forgive someone for their sins?

Number Symbolism

We’ve talked a bit about the number three, but number symbolism in the Bible goes a lot deeper than that.5

In the first scene of the first episode of Euphoria, Rue narrates that she was born three days after 9/11. From the very first moment we meet her, she is connected to the number three.

As I mentioned before, three represents holiness, resurrection, completion, and divine confirmation. Jesus rises on the third day. Rue is born three days after an event that reshaped America forever. Then, at the end of the series, Rue is resurrected as a calf born three months after her death.

Her birth and rebirth both point back to the number three, which makes the Jesus comparison feel even harder to ignore. Rue enters the world in the shadow of devastation three days later, and she returns after death three months later. Both moments echo the resurrection pattern.

Then there is the number seven.

Rue’s death scene is seven minutes long. While my mom keeps informing me that this is a medical fact, they didn’t have to include it. They didn’t have to be so scientific with it unless it mattered.

Seven often means completion, holiness, divine order, or perfection. It took God seven days to create the Earth. So Rue’s seven-minute death scene feels like the completion of her life. Her role is complete.

Miracles

Jesus Christ figures are known to perform miracles. Jesus turns water to wine. He heals the sick. He raises the dead. Well, Rue doesn’t do anything close. However, her tears do look really sparkly when she does drugs. No, I’m serious though. There are moments throughout the show when Sam Levinson includes some surrealist moments. Most recently, we saw Cassie as what the people have coined “Titzilla”. However, most of these surreal moments occur with Rue. These are her miracles.

Narrator

In Christianity, Christ is represented as three: the Father (God), the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit.

In Euphoria, we see these three versions.

There is the character Rue that we see. She interacts with the people around her. She knows only her own thoughts and actions. Her best friends are Fezco and Jules. This is Jesus Rue.

The second version of Rue is the narrator. This version of Rue is omnipresent. She narrates about Nate’s life, Cassie’s life, Maddy’s life. She shows us moments she wasn’t there for. She tells us secrets she shouldn’t know. This is God Rue.

And, in our final moments, we see Rue as her version of the Holy Spirit—Dahlia’s baby cow.6

Sunday.

Since the beginning, Euphoria has come out on Sunday nights.

For a lot of American families, Sundays mean waking up early and going to church. Sunday is the day of worship, confession, guilt, performance, family, and God.

So I find it very interesting that this show comes out on the same day, but at night.

It’s like church for people who don’t go to church anymore.

Instead of sitting in pews, we sit on couches. Instead of stained glass, we get glitter makeup and neon lighting. Instead of sermons, we get Rue narrating the sins of everyone around her.

Euphoria is Sunday service after dark.

Baptism.

For a character to be a Jesus Christ figure, they usually have a symbolic baptism. And while there are a couple scenes throughout Euphoria where characters swim in pools or large bodies of water, I think Rue’s baptism scene doesn’t include water at all.

In the season one finale, there is a surreal scene where Rue dances in a sea of people to All for Us, a song by Labrinth and Zendaya. Throughout the scene, she is thrown around by the dancers. Up and down. Side to side. Held, carried, swallowed.

The dancers almost look like waves. The people become a sea. Rue is drowning in them.

I think this is her metaphorical baptism.

The Moral Lesson

While a lot of people see religious figures as pure and holy, the stories themselves are actually dark and violent. Like Lexi says in the last episode, the Bible is full of sex and murder and other disturbing things.

And yet, God still forgives.

Jesus still dies for our sins.

I think Sam Levinson is showing this same idea in the modern world.

Euphoria is full of sex, addiction, violence, betrayal, lust, cruelty, debt, power, bodies, shame, and grief. And yet, within all of that, the show keeps asking spiritual questions.

Who can be saved?

Who deserves forgiveness?

What does evil look like now?

What does sacrifice look like now?

Can someone be holy if they were also an addict? A liar? A bad daughter? A bad friend? A person who hurt people?

What about the Other Characters?

While Rue is very clearly a Jesus Christ figure to me, I think the other characters play roles from the Bible as well.

Jules

Jules, as I said earlier, is Judas.

She loves Rue, but she betrays her. She betrays her in a way that is intimate and painful. Judas is not just some random villain in the story of Jesus. He is part of the mechanism that leads Jesus toward his fate.

Jules functions the same way. While Rue is in this mess because of her own choices and those alone, Jules’ decision to tell Rue’s mother about the pills causes her to be in debt to Laurie which is the catalyst to her demise. She is both lover and betrayer. Savior and destroyer.

Nate and Maddy

When we first meet Nate, he is obsessed with masculinity.

After finding videos of his father cheating on his mother with underaged boys, we see how deeply this affects the way he views himself, men, women, and gender. He is constantly working out at the gym, talking down to women, and trying to control every image of himself before anyone else can.

When we first meet Maddy, Nate is just as obsessed with her femininity. He comments on how hairless she is. He loves the way she dresses in skirts and heels. He is drawn to how perfectly she performs the kind of womanhood he wants.

To me, this parallels Adam and Eve.

Adam is the first man. Eve is the first woman. They represent the beginning of gender, desire, shame, and knowledge. So it feels important that Nate and Maddy are both introduced through such intense ideas of masculinity and femininity. They are not just boyfriend and girlfriend. They are performing man and woman like it is a religion.

Maddy is also constantly framed through forbidden desire, which is a common trait of Eve archetypes. In season one, we see how important virginity is to Nate. There’s a whole scene where he makes Maddy promise she’s a virgin while they’re having sex. Her purity matters to him, but only because he wants to possess it.

Then there’s the party scene, where Maddy sleeps with someone in the pool to make Nate jealous. Nate beats him up and eventually makes him report it to the cops as rape.

Even Maddy’s backstory frames her sexuality through something forbidden and disturbing. During her character episode, we learn that she lost her virginity at fourteen to a man who had to be in his thirties.

It’s disgusting, but it’s also part of how the show frames her. Maddy is constantly placed near forbidden desire. Desired too early. Desired wrongly. Desired violently. Desired by men who want to own her, punish her, or prove something through her.

Cassie

And then there’s Cassie.

In the story of Adam and Eve, the fall happens when the forbidden fruit is eaten. It is the thing they are told not to touch, even though it promises knowledge, desire, and transformation.

That is what Cassie becomes for Nate.

Nate believes that if he can become the perfect man, he can escape becoming his father. If he can marry the perfect trophy wife, make a lot of money, live in a fancy house, and have a white picket fence life with a perfect family, then maybe he will become the man Cal never was.

And in season two, Cassie starts to represent that fantasy.

She is blonde. Emotional. Vulnerable. Sexualized. Domestic in this weird, disturbing way. Nate imagines her as the kind of woman who could give him the life he thinks he is supposed to want: a wife, a house, money, twin boys, proof that he is normal, masculine, successful, and clean.

But he can’t have her. Not really.

Because Cassie is Maddy’s best friend, Cassie becomes the fruit.

She is beautiful, desirable, and treated like something to be consumed. And that is very forbidden-fruit coded, because the fruit in Eden is not ugly or obviously evil. Cassie’s whole role is: I am the thing you should not touch, but you want to.

For Nate, touching Cassie means betraying Maddy. It means betraying the social order. It means breaking the garden of the friend group. The second Nate and Cassie cross that line, innocence is gone. Everyone knows too much.

That is the fall.

Maddy finds out. Cassie collapses into shame. Nate becomes weaker, more pathetic, barely any toes. The fantasy of man and woman, Nate and Maddy, Adam and Eve, is over.

…Especially when Nate dies by a snake. In Genesis, the snake is the one who tempts Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The snake is temptation, corruption, seduction, and the beginning of the fall.

Lexi

In the universe of the Bible, we have the physical Bible itself, but we also have stories of the people writing, witnessing, and preserving the story. Stories of the ones that actually write the Bible.

In the universe of Euphoria, we have the actual show, but we also have Lexi writing a play about the characters inside the show.

Lexi does what the gospel writers do. She watches. She records. She edits. She turns people’s lives into art.

So, the religion was not random. It was not suddenly inserted into the story. It was there from the beginning.

I think that’s what people missed when they complained about Rue talking about God this season. I lowkey believe if things had gone differently, that would be more apparent. Maybe it was planned from the start. Maybe I’m overanalyzing again. Most likely the latter.

But still,

Rue was born three days after 9/11.

Rue was baptized by a sea of bodies.

Rue was betrayed by the person she loved.

Rue died for the sins of a world bigger than her.

Rue was resurrected three months later.

And Rue’s story ended on a Sunday.

So no, I don’t think Euphoria suddenly became religious.

I think it finally admitted what it had been doing all along.

<3 brooklyn

And so I thought, why not do the same thing with my specialty: websites. Using my much-abused Canva subscription, I built out some moodboards I thought were interesting and trendy. Then, I paired them with the websites I’d suggest to someone into that aesthetic. Alright, come take a scroll with me.

[ Reminder: these websites are best experienced on desktop. ]

[ Also, one of my own websites is at the end! ]

Nostalgia’s rose-colored screen. Flash games at the school library. The feeling of falling in love with the internet for the first time. I don’t know, 2008?

Channel Surfer - Okay, this might genuinely be my favorite website on the planet right now. Plain and simple, Channel Surfer is cable TV for YouTube made to look like those nostalgic DirecTV channel surfing guides. The creator of the site has curated a ton of different channels to scroll through, each with their own scheduled videos. No longer do you have to worry about infinite choice! We’ve 360’d back to cable! And, my favorite part, you can import your own subscriber list to watch your own subscriptions as channels. I’M OBSESSSSSED. I barely go on YouTube anymore. So please. Enjoy.

Antonymph - This is not a website. Well, it is. But it isn’t. This is genuine art. This is creativity!! This is what the internet is for!!! And also there are quite a few My Little Ponies in it. I don’t want to spoil much, so I’ll leave it at that, but this is definitely a reminder that code!! is!! art!! (Also, view this on desktop)

Cloudgazing - This is the CUTEST idea for a site I have ever seen. You’re given a picture of a cloud and have to draw what you see. Is that a dog with a man-bun? A depressed anglerfish? It’s digital cloud gazing! You can also scroll through a gallery of other people’s work to see what they saw in theirs. Adorable, human, and guaranteed to lift your spirits.

Pudgy Penguins - No one could ever recreate Club Penguin. It was a product of its time. However, if you’re craving something similar, this site might just be for you. It’s a small, cute world similar to the nostalgic game where you live as a penguin, customize your avatar, walk around, fish, and play mini-games. A charming little site to lose ten minutes in.

[ This is Editing Brooklyn. I did some more digging into this site and found out Pudgy Penguins is actually an NFT/crypto company that believes in spreading “good vibes, meme culture, and play.” Lol. No real thoughts on that, just interesting and a little random. Site still holds up as a cute social game.]

iPod Playlists (Facebook Page) - This is one of those ideas I’m mad I didn’t think of. This is a Facebook page run by Claire Hughes where she takes old iPods and creates playlists from the songs found on them. I think this is such a genius idea and I had so much fun seeing all the musical time capsules she’s made. Also, I love this for finding new songs! I’m definitely going to keep checking in on it.

Project Hail Mary. Artemis II. Why was April so space themed?

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - This website is a visual representation of our solar system where the moon is the size of one pixel. From that, you can see how far away and how large planets actually are compared to each other. It’s a long scroll, but it’s a cinematic piece of art that reminds me how empty space actually is.

Exoplanets - This is NASA’s site on exoplanets2 with some genuinely fascinating things tucked away in there. There are apparently over 6000 exoplanets confirmed by NASA—though they believe there to be over one billion of them—and they’ve made a fully rendered 3D universe where you can actually visit each and every one of them. Not only is this just an amazing resource for learning about space, but I feel like sci-fi writers could use this for inspiration. I’ve been randomly clicking through the 3D universe to see where I end up. The planets are gorgeous and it has been quite addictive.

Space Dashboard - This site really scratches the itch for anyone who wants to be an astronaut but also fears death and would absolutely say no if given the opportunity. It’s a small dashboard with a couple of space-themed livestreams and some data about upcoming space events, launches, etc. The author of the site says his goal was to create a hub with as much space-related data as possible, and I feel like he accomplished that. Honestly so well done. I feel like I’m working at NASA.

The Cosmic Stage - This website is a love letter to Carl Sagan, an American astronomer and planetary scientist. It’s another interactive solar system, but made by a music composer and motion graphics artist. The art and music are by the creator himself. He says he wanted to create something “that might help someone, somewhere, feel the enormity and beauty of the Cosmos the way Sagan helped me feel it for the first time.” Just lovely3.

The National UFO Reporting Center - Put your tin foil hats on for this one! Actually, in this day and age, I don’t think it’s very tinfoil-hatty to believe in aliens anymore. Well in that case, this website is an extremely large database of UFO sightings reported by the public. You can filter by shape, date, state, etc. I’m personally a skeptic4, but I do love a good database and an even better conspiracy.

The smell of rain and leather. Marginalia. A Donna Tartt unread on the nightstand. Morally gray characters in glasses because they are smart and you can tell because they have glasses.

Nounsense - This game reminds me of the Wordle days when, similar to Taylor Swift5, there was a new variant coming out every day with slight gameplay changes. In Nounsense, you are shown a list of words and must guess the most common noun that follows each word. “Murky” → Waters type beat. I am quite bad at it! But it’s still so entertaining.

In Every Language - I don’t know if I’d consider this dark academia per se; I mostly just wanted to put this website in a post because I think it is the coolest, so it’s close enough. In Every Language is another Wikipedia-based website, but this one shows how the same Wikipedia article will show a totally different cover photo based on the language it’s in. Just type in a phrase and you can see about 300 images. I find this so disproportionately fascinating. For example, I looked up Harry Styles and Kazakh knows what’s up.

OncePosted - This site is a big collection of scanned postcards. All of them are gorgeous, and a lot of them have messages written on the back, though admittedly they are all quite hard to read. Seriously, do only doctors write postcards?! Badum tss. Anyway, it’s a tender project — nice to scroll through when you’re feeling sentimental.

If Only I Sent This - This is a wistful little website meant for secrets and unsaid things. Choose a notecard and write the words you never got to say to someone. Write confessions you wouldn’t dare admit to today. Write whatever you want. It’s sappy in the way I usually roll my eyes at, and I love it anyway.

LonelyWiki - There’s a saying I’m sure most of y'all know that goes: “You die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second when somebody mentions your name for the last time.” This website pulls on those same heartstrings. LonelyWiki chooses one Wikipedia article to display every day that received under 2000 views last year. So, if you want to flex your niche, uncommon knowledge, this is the place for you. I love the site’s about:

…

Like okay?? Got me feeling maternal over some hyperlinks.

Romantic knightcore. Sword and flower. Lace and lilypads. 2026 modern medieval movement???

Anna’s Secret Garden - Y’all are going to love this site. Anna’s Secret Garden is a simple yet gorgeous place where you can draw little flowers and have them appear on a floating garden. It's small and soft and slightly enchanting. There’s also a section to view all of the flowers created on the site. A community garden! See if you can spot mine!

Celestune - Have you ever asked Spotify a question? I’m serious. Have you ever asked it a question and then shuffled your playlist to find out the answer? Like asking the stars, but you’re asking the bars (that was so cringe, sorry). Well, I have. All the time actually. So this site is quite literally Amazing to me. You ask a crystal ball a question and get a random song back for your answer. I love the zine look it has. I love the idea. I love this site!!!!

An Abundance of Beasts - An Abundance of Beasts is an “endless medieval bestiary generator”. It pairs a medieval painting of an animal with a description of another animal. Most of the information comes from Medieval Bestiary: Animals In The Middle Ages. As a lover of medieval art and history, I’m a big fan of this one. Mostly I just sit and stare at the images.

The Dollhouse - This website is gorgeous and creepy and girly and haunting and. Well, just look for yourself, but basically this site is a digital art show. A space for a handful of artists, each with their own room in this digital dollhouse. You must explore the rooms and the art inside to find collectibles. Once you find all of the collectibles, you can visit the “Chatroom” which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a real love letter to digital art and I absolutely love the look of it. A truly digital zine.

Titivillus Teachings Typning - I LOVE THIS SITE. I love all sorts of games, but one category I love to collect is typing games. They’re such a fun way to pass time while pretending to work on something. They remind me of sitting in computer class. I miss computer class. When it’s late at night and I just want to watch YouTube and do something with my hands, typing games are the way to go. This one is medieval-themed and STUNNING. I could spend hours here.

pondbooth - This one is from me! I’ve been wanting to work with hand tracking, so that was the focus for this project. Pondbooth is a photobooth inspired by one of my favorite hyperfixations that shows up in literally every project I do: ponds. You can dress yourself in fairy wings. Tap the glass to make water ripples. Hold fairy-inspired items in your hand. And get a cute downloadable souvenir at the end. I packed it with little details, so you keep finding new things the longer you stay. This is my little love letter to the magic of ponds. Hope you take a scroll!

If you got this far, thank you for reading. I had so much fun making this list, and I really do think these are some of the most worth-your-time corners of the internet right now. If you give any of them a try, let me know what you found. Also, I genuinely loved this format, so definitely expect more soon.

<3 brooklyn

oo and i just created an Instagram and TikTok so follow me there if you want to see more!

It’s April which means it’s officially The Season of the Perpetual Sneeze. The cherry blossoms have bloomed, the bees are frantic, the air is a thick yellow soup of pollen, and my sinuses are so awful I look like I’m cosplaying Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer.1

And yet, despite the itchy eyes, the primal urge to clean is kicking in. There is an undeniable need to throw open every window and scrub the baseboards until they shine like a new tooth. We are in the thick of the yearly spring cleaning where we all collectively decide that if we can just wash the winter out of our linens, we might finally be able to start over.

We tackle the closets. We sweep the dust from behind the fridge. And eventually, we hit the Junk Drawer.

Every home has one: The Museum of Indecision. It is the sacred place where an Allen wrench from a desk you bought in 2022 lives in tangled, metallic peace with a single, suspicious AA battery and a variety of sauce packets from different chain restaurants over the years2. It’s messy, it’s honest. You can touch it. You can organize it. You can, eventually, probably, see the bottom of it.

But while we’re busy scouring our kitchens and gutting our wardrobes, there is one space in our lives that remains stubbornly shuttered, dark, and increasingly heavy. I call it the digital junk drawer; others simply call it the ‘Downloads’ folder.

We all have one. While the world outside is blooming and renewing itself, our desktops are accumulating digital dead leaves. We are hoarding .dmg files for apps we already installed, Zoom links for meetings that happened three years ago, and screenshots of holiday gift ideas from November that we never actually bought. It is a junk drawer that never gets jammed. And because it never stops us from closing the drawer, we never stop to see what we’re actually carrying.

It feels like a betrayal to have a sparkling kitchen and a ‘Downloads’ folder that looks like a digital landfill.3 If we’re going to be ruthless with the physical clutter, we should be just as cold-blooded with our data.

Think of this as a manual for a digital4 spring cleaning. A way to stop hoarding our past intentions and make room for the present.

Step 1: The Archaeological Dig

Before you delete anything, you have to find the floor. Open the folder, sort by “Date Added,” and scroll all the way down until you hit the oldest, dustiest layer of your digital life.

This is the Digital Carbon Dating phase. You are looking at the strata of your past intentions. You’ll find the fossils of who you were six months, a year, or three years ago:

• A Spotify Wrapped screenshot from 20215.

• A crochet pattern PDF for a project that is still, technically, in progress.

• A 3:00 AM screenshot of a comment that was supposed to motivate you.

• An Atomic Habits PDF. Bookmarked to page 12.

This is where the cleaning usually stalls. We struggle to hit “Move to Trash” because we treat these files like Potential Energy, as if a piece of our soul is stored in that 2MB file.

But carrying around the “Digital6 Fossil” of an old hobby or a past anxiety is just dead weight you forgot you were carrying. Hitting delete is an act of mercy. You are letting April actually be new.

Take a long look at the bottom layer. Acknowledge the version of you that needed those files, pour one out, then delete the folder.

Step 2: Inventory the Species

As you move back toward the present, you’ll start to see a pattern in the chaos. Recognizing these “species” of digital junk makes it easier to realize how little they actually offer.

• The Exoskeletons (.dmg and .zip files): These are the installers left over after you’ve already set up the software. They are the empty eggshells left behind after you’ve already made the omelet. Don’t keep the shells in the carton. Throw them out!7 Unless the entire grid goes down8, you can always find these again.

• The Aspiration Files: The “Intro to Ableton” PDF9 or the “Mastering Italian” ebook. We hoard these because they feel like a down payment on a better version of ourselves. In reality, they are usually just bookmarks for a curiosity that lasted for exactly one Tuesday in November.

• The Anxiety Receipts: The screenshots of tracking numbers for packages that arrived months ago, or confirmation codes for appointments you’ve already attended. These were vital when you were panicked, but now they are just artifacts of a stress that has already passed. It just keeps that old anxiety on the desktop.

• The “Maybe” Memes: Images you saved to send to a specific person but never did. Now, the context is gone, the joke is dated, and the moment has passed. They are the digital version of a “thinking of you” card that you forgot to mail and found six months later.

Step 3: The Mercy Killing

Now that you’ve identified the ghosts, it’s time for the actual purge. Forget the urge to “organize” these into neat, sub-divided folders; That’s just moving the dust from one corner of the room to another. We are looking for a clean break.

• The 10-Second Rule: If you click a file and can’t remember why you saved it within ten seconds, it goes to the Trash. Your immediate confusion is a sign that the file has already lost its meaning. Trust your intuition over your hoarder instincts.

• The Guilt Audit: This is for the “Aspiration Files.” If looking at a file makes you feel a tiny, nagging sense of “I really should have finished that,” delete it immediately. You are clearing space for things you actually want to do, rather than carrying around a graveyard of old obligations.10

• The Time Capsule Hack: If the thought of hitting “Empty Trash” gives you actual heart palpitations, create one single folder named “Spring Purge 2026.” Drag everything into it. Move that folder to an external drive or a cloud service and delete the local copy from your computer. You’ve cleared your mental space and your hard drive without actually having to commit.

Once the folder is empty (or at least readable), take a second to listen to the silence. There is a gorgeous, artificial “crunch” asmr sound the computer makes when you finally empty the trash. A tiny, digital reward for the act of letting go.

In a season that is already demanding a better version of you, your digital junk drawer is the one place where you actually have total control. You can’t stop the cherry blossoms from exploding into pink glitter bombs outside, and you can’t stop the bees from their April commute, but you can stop your 2022 tax returns and old profile photos from cluttering up your present.

Open the digital windows. Let the 0kb breeze in. You’ll find it’s much easier to breathe…even if your sinuses are still convinced otherwise.

<3 brooklyn

And like my stickers, I have a bookmarks graveyard full of sites I might never see again. However, every once in a while I come across a website that is so genuinely interesting and fun that I can’t let it go. Those get a permanent tab.

This is a list of those places. I’ve done this once before for music discovery. This time we’re headed to the land of the writers. For people who love language and occasionally lose it. For the days when the cursor blinks and blinks and nothing comes.

Some of these are tools. Some are rabbit holes. One of them is technically just a window1. All of them made me want to write.

Welcome to the world wide web, baby! I’ve got a passport and no plans2.

Let’s go.

Visuwords

Type in a word and watch it bloom3.

I typed in melancholy and it became a sprawling constellation of everything it’s ever touched. Synonyms, opposites, cousins, the words that live next door and the ones three neighborhoods over — all connected by little color-coded lines that tell you how they relate.

From melancholy, I found black bile humor, which sounds disgusting, but I couldn’t stop picturing it. Medieval doctors diagnosing sadness like a stomach bug, poetry as a symptom. I went in looking for a word and came out wanting to write a whole medieval comedy4.

There’s also a shuffle feature. Hit it and you’re thrown a random word like poppy. I lost twenty minutes on poppy.

My one complaint is that you can’t click through or learn more about the different words that pop up. It really is just the map. If a word catches your eye you have to retype it yourself, and there’s no detail waiting for you when you get there, just more web, which is still cool, but I’d love to be able to fall deeper into it without having to surface first. Still. One of my permanent tabs.

4theWords

I have written about my complicated relationship with gamification. I stand by everything I said. And also…sometimes it just works.

4thewords is an RPG writing site. You have quests, monsters, and a little avatar. The monsters have HP, and every word you write takes one point off. Defeat the monster by hitting your word count within the time limit and you get a prize which is usually a piece of clothing or a random object for your character. The prizes don’t actually do anything, but that’s fine because that’s not the point.

The point is that I opened it and suddenly I was writing.

I love adventure games, so any excuse to be inside one, even a low-stakes browser-based one with a UI that’s more cute than immersive, is an excuse I’ll take. The gamification isn’t deep5, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be enough to trick your brain into starting.

And that’s what it did for me. My biggest writing problem is the blank page6. I stare at it hoping poetry just arrives, which is not how I work and I know it’s not how I work, and yet.

4thewords fixed that by giving me something else to focus on. I wasn’t trying to write something perfect. I was trying to kill a monster. The words were almost a side effect.

Fair warning: you will probably think more about your word count than your actual sentences.

But, it’s fun. I like fun.

Old World Illustrations

I went in expecting old drawings. Dusty botanical sketches, maybe some maps, the kind of thing you pin to a mood board and never think about again.

What I found was fairy tales.

Old Book Illustrations is a free archive of illustrations scanned from 18th and 19th century books that are all public domain, all searchable, and all completely free to use. And yes, some of them are botanical sketches, which are honestly really gorgeous7. But some of them are this:

And doesn’t that just make you want to WRITE? Looking at this little mothman traveler8!!! I felt nostalgic for something I had never seen before. That's the only way I can describe it. It looked like the illustrations from the fairy tales I grew up reading. I wanted to know him, and he's not even real.

That’s what this site does. You go in looking for visual inspiration and come out with characters, whole worlds, a feeling you didn’t have before you opened the tab. For writers especially, it’s a gold mine. Every image is a prompt, a setting, a story that already started without you.

And, don’t hate me, but I’m also getting tired of Pinterest. Every Substack cover image looks like every other Substack cover image because we’re all pulling from the same ten searches. I am not immune to this and I know that! But, this is the way out.

Just go. Start clicking. See where you end up.

MyNoise

I have been chasing the perfect ambiance setup for as long as I’ve been surfing the web. Even my Neocities has its own little iPod of curated sounds on it. I take this very seriously.

The thing that makes or breaks an ambiance site is customizability. A YouTube video of rain is fine, but it’s someone else’s rain finely tuned to be perfect for their ears. You get their thunder, their intensity, their mix, and you just have to accept it.

MyNoise gives you your rain.

Pick a theme and you’re presented with a full panel of dials. Individual sliders for every element of the sound. Your storm can have more wind, less thunder, high rain, a little distant rumble, no lightning cracks at all. You build it until it’s exactly right. Until it’s the specific version of that place that lives in your head.

The first time I used it, I chose Summer Nights and let it run while I wrote poetry about my small town. Something about porchlight, guardian windmills, crickets. The sound didn’t distract me. I let it flow over me like I was sitting outside, and the writing followed.

They’ve also grouped the sounds by mood — focus, ADHD, daydreaming, destressing. So if you don’t know what you need, the site already has a guess.

The Most Dangerous Writing App

My biggest problem with writing is starting. I overthink everything. I want the first sentence to be perfect prose before I’ve written the second one, which means sometimes I never write either.

This site fixes that by threatening you.

Literally.

The Most Dangerous Writing App is simple: you start typing and you cannot stop. If you pause for too long between words, everything disappears. Just a blank page and the quiet humiliation of having lost your own thoughts.

The first time I used it I was just testing it out. Then my competitive side kicked in and I genuinely couldn't stop. And when you can't stop, you stop filtering. You write stream of consciousness, you write badly, you write things you'd never let anyone read, and somewhere in there you find the thing you actually wanted to say.

If The Most Dangerous Writing App is your morning pages9, then 750 Words is your end of day exhale. It’s the same premise, but a completely different energy. You write 750 words, roughly three pages, and that’s it. There’s no pressure, no timer, nothing deletes. It’s cozy!10

One is for edging yourself. The other is for winding down.

You probably need both.

Story Dice

Exactly what it sounds like.

Roll some dice, get some images, write a story using all of them. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

I’ve seen people use physical story dice in real life. Little wooden cubes with tiny illustrations on every face. There’s something about holding your story in your hands that I love. However, you’re limited to six images per die, and you get what you get. The digital versions don’t have that constraint. You can choose how many dice to roll, swap out themes, pull from hundreds of images instead of six. The prompt constraint is still there, that’s what makes it work, but you get to shape it.

Here are a few I like:

Dave Birr's Story Dice

Zero Dice

Language is a Virus

Roll, look, write. No overthinking, no blank page paralysis, just random images and the pressure of making them make sense together.

A bicycle and a comb and a cactus walked into a bar. Go.

Window Swap

This one’s a bit different. You have to step outside the box a little to get it, but stick with me. Window Swap is a collection of videos submitted by people all over the world — each one a view from their window. You don’t get to choose where you go; You just land somewhere and watch.

The first window I got was called Twilight Street’s Window. I sat and watched a front porch across the street, a deep green house decorated with pumpkins and cars silently passing by. The kind of scene that made me feel like I was in Gilmore Girls, which is the highest compliment I can give anything.

I stared at that little porch, those pumpkins, that specific quality of an October afternoon that belongs to someone I’ll never meet, and I wrote a fall romance. Just because I needed somewhere to put the feeling.

There’s something about watching a stranger’s ordinary view that makes you want to write. Maybe it’s the reminder that other lives are happening right now, fully formed, just out of reach. Maybe it’s just a nice window.

Either way, I wrote something. While staring out a window that wasn’t mine.

The internet is big. Most of us only ever see the same three rooms.

These are the doors I keep going back through. I hope you find a few of your own.

<3 brooklyn

1. Wake up.

2. Shower.

3. Teeth, hair, makeup.

4. Brew a cup of coffee.

5. Drink the cup of coffee.

6. Throw up the cup of coffee.

7. Go to my 9-5.

Work-life balance!

This went on for months. Wake up, throw up. Wake up, throw up. A ritual I never asked for, performed with religious consistency.

Eventually, my parents grew concerned—which, weird? I was finally going to be skinny! However, while I was making jokes about my slight case of bulimia, they were secretly researching gastroenterologists, looking for someone who could explain why their daughter had started rejecting her own life every morning before 8am.

Both my brother and my dad have EOE, a type of food allergy. They’ve spent years mapping their triggers1, so when my body started rejecting food every morning, they assumed I’d joined the family business.

So off I went to a gastroenterologist, where they knocked me out, shoved tubes and cameras down my throat, tested my white blood cell count, and determined that yes, I did have an allergy. My white blood cell count was actually higher than my brother’s, higher than my dad’s—competitive even in illness >:)

Now we just had to figure out what was trying to kill me.

We started with milk, since that’s a common one in the EOE world. When that didn’t work, we moved on to eggs. When that didn’t work, we tried cutting coffee itself. None of it mattered. My body had made up its mind about something, and I was the last to know what.

Meanwhile, I was miserable. My parents and I went to Disney World2 and I couldn’t even have the beer cheese soup at the Biergarten because dairy was our best guess as to what the allergy could be. What is the point of living! You’re telling me I’m at the Food and Wine Festival and I can’t have half the food?! Kill me now.

And then, right after I got back from Disney, my boss called me into a meeting where I was promptly let go…or fired…I don’t quite recall...

When it happened, I felt both dread and relief, which is a strange combination to hold in your body at the same time. Dread because the job market is brutal and I knew finding a new one would be its own kind of violence. Relief because I was thrilled to never see any of those people ever again.

It was around Thanksgiving when I got let go, so I flew down to Arkansas to be with my family for the holidays. While I was there, my parents dragged me to an allergist to get a prick test done because they needed to know if they could use butter and cheese for Thanksgiving dinner. I tried very hard not to go3, but they made me anyway.

Nothing ballooned up. My arm stayed normal. I was allergic to... nothing?

Absolutely nothing.

What do you mean? What do you MEAN?

I went through all of that—the tubes, the elimination diets, the cheese-free Disney trip—for NOTHING!?!?

Not only that, but my symptoms stopped entirely. I didn’t throw up again until the next Christmas when I took one too many tequila shots, which doesn’t count. My morning routine felt strange without the daily purge. Emptier. Almost boring.

At that point, my parents and I put it together: I had developed an “allergy” to work.

Which sounds fake, but is apparently very real. My body had become so stressed by the environment I was in that it physically rejected the place, the people, the whole premise of my life there. My stomach had been staging a protest for months, and I’d been too busy trying to make it to my 9-5 to listen.

Looking back, I should have seen it, but I genuinely didn’t know this was something bodies could do. I thought stress meant headaches, maybe trouble sleeping—not your entire digestive system hosting a daily revolt. And even if I had known, I’m not sure I would have listened. I was too committed to the person I was trying to become.

When I was younger, if you asked me for three words to describe myself, “creative” was always one of them. I wanted to be a pop star, then a musical theatre actress. I wrote songs with my ukulele and piano. I wrote romance stories and fanfiction4. I was the girl with the big ideas, and I liked her.

Then I took a computer science course in high school, fell in love with it, and decided it was the better career path. The smarter one. The one that would actually pay. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, without really noticing, I stopped calling myself creative entirely. I traded the word in for something that felt more serious. More like the person I thought I was supposed to be.

I became the “smart girl” with the “smart career.” I think that was the identity I was protecting through the vomiting, through the misery. I had five years of school, a degree, a job at a reputable fintech company, a paycheck. What kind of person walks away from all of that? Not a “smart” one.

So I kept pushing. I have this “push through” mentality about almost everything in my life: when I’m driving and it’s too hot, I just get annoyed and keep going without realizing I can turn up the AC. When I’m sick, I don’t see doctors because it’ll go away eventually. Push through works, until it doesn’t. Until your body is literally rejecting your life and you’re still sitting there, coffee in hand, thinking “this is fine.”

Losing the job didn’t magically fix everything. The allergy went away, yes, but I still felt like a failure for months. The rejections kept coming, I moved back in with my parents, and I spent a long time wondering if I’d ruined my life by not being good enough at the thing I’d sacrificed everything to become.

It wasn’t until I stopped trying to claw my way back onto the path I’d lost and started building something I actually cared about that I realized the truth: the identity I was killing myself to protect was so much smaller than the person I actually get to be.

Now I’m building a startup with my dad—an app that combines gaming, art, coding, magic. All of my favorite things in one place. And I still get to code. I’ve fallen back in love with it, actually.

It’s not the life 12-year-old me posted about on her Pinterest boards5. I gave up my apartment in Chicago, my proximity to friends and cute boys6, the whole life I thought I was supposed to be living by now. Now I’m back in small-town Arkansas with my parents, watching my friends post their cozy city apartments and their weekend plans while I grind on something that might not work. Sometimes the grief of the life I walked away from hits me out of nowhere.

Still, my body isn’t screaming at me anymore. My brain isn’t fighting itself every morning. For the first time in years, I actually like what I’m doing. I’m even writing songs on my keyboard again. “Creative” is back in my vocabulary, right where it belongs.

So if your body is screaming at you, listen. It might be the only part of you honest enough to say what your mouth can’t.

<3 brooklyn

So naturally, I had to make one.

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I’ve had a collection of doodles and half-baked ideas sitting in my Procreate gallery since last year. When I saw it was Zine-uary here on Substack1, I knew it was time to finally do something with them.

While this originally started as a small pun and a cozy nighttime guide, the zine slowly transformed into a funny, medieval parody of Tiger Beat and those glossy teen magazines I’ve always been obsessed with.

Hope you enjoy :) 2

I’m still mourning the fact that I didn't title this The Knight Cap3, but I’m obsessed with how this turned out anyway. Happy Zine-uary! Grab your favorite lute, get cozy, and enjoy the routine.

<3 brooklyn

Consequently, I’ve decided that one of my resolutions this year should be to actually finish the games I own before …

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While watching the first half of the movie, I couldn’t help but notice how bright everything was. Every color in the animator’s palette seemed to be mixed with some hue of yellow to the point where I caught myself wishing for sunblock and shades.

That’s when I noticed—like Rapunzel and her own celestial patterns1—how much the sun played a part in the art of The Emperor’s New Groove. Kuzco’s crown resembles a rising sun. His entire palace is decorated in half-suns. Even his throne room feels like staring directly into a solar eclipse without the cardboard glasses they hand out at elementary schools.

But then, when Kuzco is poisoned, turned into a llama, and thrown into the back of Pacha’s cart2, everything changes. The colors shift from warm, sunny shades to earthy browns and deep blues. Darker. Grounded. Human, if you can call a llama human.

I decided to do some research into this. Naturally, I spiraled.

The Divine Emperor and the Center of the World

The Emperor’s New Groove was based on the Inca Empire, the largest pre-Columbian American empire. At its height in the early 16th century, it stretched across western South America, encompassing parts of modern-day Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. The center of this empire was Cusco, a city whose name means “center of the world.”

Kuzco, which shares the same name as the capital, was based on the Sapa Inca, the divine monarch of the Inca Empire, believed to be a direct descendant of Inti, the sun god. He was literally the son of the sun, and when he spoke, it was a divine decree rather than mere royal orders.

Pacha, on the other hand, is a name that means “Earth” in Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire.

So right there, in a 2000s Disney movie featuring David Spade as a talking llama, we have the entire cosmological hierarchy of an ancient civilization: the Sun ruling from above, and the Earth below, quietly sustaining everything.

The movie’s visual language mirrors this perfectly. At the beginning, Kuzco exists in a world drenched in gold and blinding light. His palace sits atop a hill, elevated above everyone else. He wears the sun. He is the sun—burning so bright, so selfish and untouchable, that he can’t see anyone standing in his light.

What It Means to Be the Sun (And Why It’s Terrible)

Kuzco’s entire personality is solar in the worst sense. The sun doesn’t consider whether you want warmth or shade. All it knows is how to burn. Kuzco operates the same. He fires his elderly advisor for “throwing off his groove.” He plans to demolish Pacha’s village—the home of an entire community—to build a summer home called Kuzcotopia (complete with a waterslide!) And when Pacha begs him to reconsider, Kuzco doesn’t even pretend to care. Why would the sun concern itself with the Earth?

The sun doesn’t have friends. It doesn’t need them because it’s too busy being the center of the solar system to bother with connection. Kuzco doesn’t have friends either. He has servants and advisors he can fire, an empire that revolves around him, but nobody who knows him. Nobody sits with him. Nobody truly loves him.

This is the loneliness of being the sun. You can be worshipped or feared, but love requires proximity, and the sun exists at a distance that makes intimacy impossible. Kuzco lives at the top of his palace, surrounded by golden half-suns that reflect only his own light back at him. He is the center of his world, but his world is empty.

The Fall to Earth

When Kuzco is turned into a llama and thrown into the back of Pacha’s cart, the palette shifts. Suddenly, we’re in Pacha’s world with the darker earth tones.

Pacha’s home is a simple hut on a hill, surrounded by terraced farms and family. Small and warm. It smells like soup3. This is where Kuzco has to learn what it means to be human.

At first, Kuzco resists. Of course he does. He’s used to being the commanding, above-it-all sun, but the earth doesn’t care about his titles. The earth simply is. Mud doesn’t apologize for being muddy. Rivers don’t reroute themselves for emperors. And Pacha doesn’t worship Kuzco. He helps him, of course, but only because that’s what decent people do, not because Kuzco actually deserves it.

That’s humiliating for someone who thought he was divine. Now, Kuzco must walk, get dirty, sleep on the ground, and eat at someone else’s table. He relies on someone who has every reason to leave him behind.

Slowly and painfully, Kuzco starts to see what he’s been missing. He sees Pacha’s family—how they laugh together and take care of each other. How they exist in a web of connection that doesn’t revolve around power. He finally sees what it looks like to be rooted in something, to truly belong.

By the end of the movie, Kuzco doesn’t want to go back to being the sun. He doesn’t want the palace or the crown OR his waterslide4. He wants what Pacha has: a life full of people who know him. He wants to sit on the earth and share a meal. He wants to be seen as a person.

So, he makes a choice. He saves Pacha’s village and keeps the hill intact. In doing so, he reconnects with the earth.

The sun can burn alone, but a meaningful life is lived on the earth among others.

Who Needs Who More?

As I was watching the film, I caught myself asking: Who needs whom more? Does the Earth need the sun more than the sun needs the Earth?

The obvious answer is yes. Without the sun, we freeze and die. Crops don’t grow. Earth would be another hard rock floating in the void of space.

But I’d argue the sun needs the Earth, too.

Without the Earth, the sun is another star that will eventually burn out and explode. One of billions. Gas and fire, unremarkable and unwitnessed, doing what stars do, with no one around to care.

The earth creates poetry about the sun. We compose songs like “Here Comes the Sun.” We have entire genres of photography dedicated to that specific slant of light that makes everything look like it’s been dipped in honey. We notice the flecks of light that come through glass, through leaves, through the cracks in blinds. We have words like “luminous,” “radiant,” “incandescent”, and “rhombus of light”5 because we needed language to describe what the sun does to the world.

The sun doesn’t see any of this. It doesn’t get to feel what happens when light hits someone’s face in that particular way, or watch a sunset and cry because something about the colors feels like the end of something beautiful. The sun just burns. Alone.

We give the sun its beauty and meaning. Without us, it’s just another burnt-out star. With us, it’s divine and worshipped, the subject of myths and religions, the inspiration for Instagram captions. We make the sun matter.

And Kuzco learns this the hard way.

At the start of the movie, Kuzco doesn’t think he needs anyone. He has power and a palace and a theme song sung by Tom Jones, but when he’s stripped of all that, he realizes he’s been burning alone this whole time. No one wrote songs about him. No one noticed his light.

Pacha doesn’t need Kuzco. Pacha already has a family and a home. But Kuzco needs Pacha. He needs the Earth to remind him what it feels like to be seen, to be grounded, to matter in a manner that isn’t about power.

By the end of the movie, Kuzco stops trying to be the sun. He learns to sit with others, share a meal, and build connections. He realizes being at the center of the world is empty without real relationships.

Substack, Ego, and the Obsession with Being Seen

Like all my essays, I must connect this childhood movie to a modern-day internet app. Which brings me, unfortunately, to Substack.

Everyone wants to be the sun. I see it all the time in r/Substack. People ask, How do I get more subscribers? How do I get people to read my work? Why isn’t anyone engaging with my posts?

The story is always the same. The person consistently pushes out content, confused about why the Substack gods aren’t blessing them with loyal subscribers despite their efforts.

I understand. I am this person. I refresh my stats with the same nervous energy I reserve for checking my bank account. Writing into the void is lonely. You want proof that you matter.

But, far too many on Substack want to be Kuzco, pushing out content and retreating to their own palaces. They avoid using Notes because they’re “serious writers,” who can’t be bothered with commenting because it feels beneath them or too transactional—a waste when they could focus on their own empire.6

They huff and puff and settle on writing three notes a day to let the algorithm know they’re committed to the platform and should be gifted readers accordingly.

But they’re thinking about it all wrong. It’s only transactional if your intention is set that way. This mindset misses the real point: just as Kuzco had to leave his palace to discover life’s true warmth, writers must engage sincerely with the community for genuine fulfillment and meaning. Strategy without sincerity is obvious; a real connection provides the value.

Touch grass. Go back to your roots. Stay grounded. We have all these sayings for a reason. They all mean the same thing: reconnect with your humanity. Remember that you’re not a god. You’re a person, trying to make something, and so is everyone else.

Kuzco learned this. He had to fall from his palace and lose his crown and spend the entire movie covered in mud, but he eventually understood that being the sun doesn’t make you special. Being connected to the earth does.

The Sun Still Burns, But It’s Lonely Up There

I’m not saying you shouldn’t want people to read your work! I’m not saying don’t care about your stats or your subscribers. I care about all of that deeply and probably too much.

But growth happens in the soil7. It requires roots, nutrients, and a connection to something solid. Plants reach toward the sun because it provides them with what they need. In return, they transform that light into life. That’s the exchange. You can’t have growth without both elements working together.

Everyone wants Substack to be the new Tumblr, the next cozy corner of the internet where community and culture bloom organically, but culture doesn’t happen simply because we want it to. Culture is built by people who show up and participate, who give a damn about something other than their own metrics. Tumblr wasn’t Tumblr because of the platform’s features. It was Tumblr because users reblogged each other’s posts with unhinged commentary, built inside jokes, and created collaborative art8. They genuinely cared about the weird things other people were making. You can’t manifest that energy by standing on a hill and waiting for it to come to you.

The sun can burn as bright as it wants, but without the Earth, it’s a star in an empty sky. And you? You are not the sun. You’re Pacha. Or at least, you should want to be. Pacha has something Kuzco spent the whole movie trying to find: a life that matters.

So yes. Be the earth. Engage. Comment. Touch grass, both in the literal sense and metaphorically. Build something with people, not above them.

And maybe, if you’re lucky, someone else will see you as their sun because you finally allowed for space in your orbit.

<3 brooklyn

“Why does my feed keep showing me Taylor Swift think pieces?”

“Substack, show me literally anyone who isn’t posting self-growth hacks.”

I am no Saint; I’ve definitely whined about my own feed more times than I can count, but after a short sulk, I usually do the obvious thing: adjust, use the search, explore a new site, or maybe even delete the app entirely if it’s no longer serving me.

What shocks me is how many people forget that option exists. I recently had a post of mine get some attention where I shared six cool sites to help expand your music library, and surprisingly, a large portion of the comments were people confessing they had forgotten how to use the internet. That broke my heart a little.

You can’t call it the “online world” if you never leave your feed. If your entire internet life happens inside TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, or Twitter, you’re simply mall-walking, and malls are fine: predictable, climate-controlled, food courts and chain stores on every corner, but don’t mistake the mall for the city. The city is bigger, stranger, full of alleys, basements, and hidden doors. That’s the real internet, and you haven’t been there in a while.

This curriculum is designed to remind you what the internet used to be—and still is. I’ve built it to help you get your digital spark back. After this course, you won’t complain to the algorithm gods anymore, praying for a better feed. Instead, you’ll remember how to make the internet your bitch again.

Unit One: Getting Started

Before you can learn to be online again, you have to understand how you already use the internet. Growth requires a baseline, and most people have no idea how narrow their internet habits actually are.

This unit is about tracking yourself: what sites you visit, how you behave inside them, and what patterns your devices nudge you into.

Step One: Take Inventory

For one full day, write down:

• Every website you visit: For this exercise, do not count unique profile pages on a platform. Two different Substack publications = one website (Substack).

• How long you spent there.

• What you actually did there (scroll, search, click, comment, buy, lurk): Pay attention to what types of content you are liking. Is it negative? Positive? Do you auto-like everything or save likes for what you love? When you post, what topics are you posting about? Are you talking about content you want to see more of or less? When you comment, why? Are you commenting out of support, anger, or worse—self-promotion?

Step Two: Notice Behaviors

After a full day of inventory, analyze your behavior. On your main sites, what do you actually do? Are you just scrolling? Do you ever leave your go-to app’s fyp? DO YOU USE THE SEARCH?

If you type “I don’t want to see XYZ” without using the actual Not Interested button, do you notice more or less of that content?

Spoiler: it’s more. Algorithms don’t think like us. Their goal is not to show you what you want to see; it’s to keep you on the platform. When you post “stop showing me sabrina carpenter think pieces,” it reads as: “Ah, Sabrina Carpenter keeps you here. Gotcha.”

Are you traveling the online world with intention, or letting your apps baby-bird content into your mouth?

I’m not judging you. I swear. I won’t even see your notes, so be honest. Look at your habits and—like I do with every conversation I’ve ever had—analyze the hell out of it.

Step Three: Gather Your Tools

Before the curriculum continues, you’ll need:

• A notebook or doc to track your finds and your paths. Treat it like a field journal.

• A computer. I cannot stress this enough: the internet looks completely different on a computer than on your phone. Use both if you want, but if you have a PC, use it.

• A willingness to wander. If you only stick to the main roads, you’ll never find the hidden rabbit holes.

In order to grow, you have to first recognize where you are. You can’t go deeper into the internet until you know your baseline. Unit 1 is about self-awareness: your current habits, your current tools, your current limits.

Unit Two: Rabbit Hole Theory

You’ve tracked your habits. You know what sites you haunt and how the algorithm nudges you around like a Roomba. Now it’s time to leave the mall food court and step outside. Don’t worry. This will be fun.

Rabbit holing isn’t opening fifty tabs and hoarding them like Pokémon cards. In this unit, you’ll learn how to follow the thread.

The Rules of the Rabbit Hole

External Links Are Portals.

Every Wikipedia page, blog, or article has a little “External Links” section at the bottom. Most people never click through them. That’s where the real rabbit holes live. Follow one, read it, then go to that page’s links. Repeat until you forget what you started looking for.

Inspect the Skeleton.

In the early web, you could peek at source code and literally learn how the site was built. That hasn’t gone away entirely, but fewer people bother to look. Right-click → View Source or Inspect. You’ll find hidden gems: commented-out code, forgotten links, even easter eggs. Swifties used this to predict merch drops (though to be honest, predicting Swift merch is like predicting streaming prices will increase1). Even Substack has a hidden easter egg buried in its code2. Looking where you’re not expected to is the essence of rabbit holing.

The Three-Click Rule

If you’re not at least three links away from where you started, you’re not deep enough. It’s time to…...Click! That! Hyperlink!

Then another.

Then another.

Theeeeeeeeen another.

Don’t be afraid of new tabs. Don’t be afraid of your messy history. That’s the whole point.

Homework

• Six Degrees of Wikipedia

  • Come up with two completely different topics. Search one in Wikipedia and start on that page. Reach the other only by clicking hyperlinks inside the articles. Count how many clicks it takes you. This will train you to follow the trail.

  • Starter Prompts:

    • One Direction → The Oregon Trail

    • Rubiks Cube → Lean Cuisine

    • Coffee → The Bermuda Triangle

    • Winnie the Pooh → Quantum Mechanics

    • Minecraft → The Library of Alexandria

    • Kermit the Frog → The Byzantine Empire

• Inspect & Report

  • Pick a site you use daily. Open Inspect. What’s hiding in there? A careers page? A comment? A weird leftover link?

• The Everyday Object Test

  • Grab something in your room (your mug, hoodie, cat breed). Dig into it until you find one fact so bizarre you have to text it to someone.

We’ve turned the internet into a vending machine. Push a button, get the Coke. If it doesn’t spit it out fast enough, beat the living shit out of it until it gives you two cokes. Instead, rabbit holing retrains both your curiosity and your patience. It reminds you the internet is more like a labyrinth, and the labyrinth rewards wanderers.

Resources

The Wiki Game → I actually just found this. There’s a website version of the game, so you don’t even really need my starter prompts. See, wandering works!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random → Use this link to get a random Wikipedia article similar to the deprecated “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google.

Unit Three: The Art of the Search

The Search is a lost art. Once the most powerful tool of the internet, it now sits quietly at the top of every screen, ignored while people let feeds decide for them.

But searching is like spell-casting; The right mix of characters and symbols unlocks doors no algorithm would ever hand you. With practice, you can summon forgotten PDFs, hidden forums, and whole worlds buried under SEO rubble.

This unit’s goal is to bring back the magic of The Search, and show you how to wield it like a wand again.

Summoning the Search

Use Your Operators

Typing random words into Google is like making a wish at 11:11—you might get what you want, but odds are it’s just vibes. Using operators is like ordering an Etsy witch to hex your ex-boyfriend (with expedited shipping). That shit actually works.

site: → Search inside one website or domain.

• site:nytimes.com soup → everything the New York Times has ever written about soup.

filetype: → Pull up specific kinds of files.

• filetype:pdf cyberpunk → research papers, zines, or old reports in PDF form.

• filetype:ppt Greek mythology → random classroom slides

“ “ → Force an exact match.

• “butterfly tattoos meaning” → only results with that exact phrase

- → Exclude stuff you don’t want.

• best laptops -ai → skips the new AI Overview answers.

before: / after: → Time travel.

• “Harry Potter fanfiction” before:2005 → early fandom results before AO3 dominated.

Switch Engines

Google is predictable. You know where everything is shelved—AI overview right on top with sponsored posts following after. To practice The Search, you must find stranger libraries.

Marginalia → A search engine built to surface small, forgotten sites instead of SEO-optimized links.

MillionShort → A search engine where you can remove the top thousand, ten thousand, or million websites from the search result.

Archive.org → A time machine of dead sites, VHS tapes, and zines. This is also a great place for old movies! Currently watching: Spellbound

Kagi → A paid search engine (with free trials) designed to cut out spam and sponsored results.

Seek the Living Archives

This is my favorite part of The Search: forums.

There’s something magical about old threads. Reading them feels like eavesdropping in another decade. You see facts, but also opinions in that exact moment of time. A thread from 2008 about iPods or Twilight or Geocities being deprecated feels like time traveling because you’re reading people as they lived it.

To find these, you have to dig:

• “topic forum” → “hunger games forum”, “muppets forum”, “tattoo forum”

• site:proboards.com → searches inside a massive old forum host.

• site:angelfire.com or site:geocities.com → Ghost towns from the early internet.

• before:2010 → time-travel into conversations before feeds swallowed everything

Even if the forum looks dead, the posts remain, and that’s COOL. It’s like wandering an abandoned city where the graffiti talks back.

Searches to Inspire You

site:.mil filetype:pdf UFO

site:.gov filetype:pdf “time travel”

site:.edu filetype:pdf “dream analysis”

filetype:pdf “cybernetics manifesto”

“guestbook” site:angelfire.com

“blogroll” site:neocities.org

“Twilight forum” before:2010

“Nintendo DS rumors” before:2004

filetype:pdf “coffee symbolism”

site:.edu history of the hoodie

Homework

• Mirror Search: Take one phrase and run it through multiple different search engines: Google, Marginalia, Million Short, etc. Compare the results. Which did you prefer? Why?

• Forum Anthropology: Find a niche forum. Lurk for 20 minutes. Take notes: what slang do they use? What was urgent to them in 2009?

• The Forbidden PDF: If you couldn’t tell by my recommended searches, I LOVE a pdf. Pick a random curiosity. Use site:.edu filetype:pdf or site:.gov filetype:pdf to find a paper. Read at least the first page and pretend it’s contraband.

Not everyone can summon a ghost from 2007, or find a PDF that was never meant to surface again. Learning The Search means learning to time travel, to argue with the past, and to drag forgotten knowledge into the present.

Unit Four: The Internet is a Playground

The coolest part about the internet is that it’s interactive. Books share knowledge through pages. Movies through scenes. But the internet? The internet is knowledge you can touch. Break. Play with. It’s sexy like that.

This unit teaches you how to play again. To stop treating the internet like a mall or a library or any of the other exhausting metaphors I’ve used through this piece, and start treating it like the world’s biggest……..one more metaphor for the road… jungle gym.

Instead of simply scrolling, you climb, you wander, you swing too far and fall on your ass. That’s the point.

Your Toybox

The internet is full of useless, delightful, and weird little toys that exist purely for play. Start there.

neal.fun → A collection of internet toys for your brain. Rank things no one asked you to rank (“Earth Reviews3”), solve absurd moral dilemmas (“Trolley Problems”), or waste fake government money like a reckless billionaire.

theuselessweb → One button that takes you to a useless site. It’s internet roulette, and half the fun is not knowing whether you’ll land on a digital screaming goat or a button that does absolutely nothing. I’ve spent much time procrastinating here.

patatap → Turn your keyboard into a one-person rave. Every letter makes a beat and animation.

neocities → The Wild West of the modern web. Handmade personal sites, clashing backgrounds, autoplay music, half-finished projects. It’s chaotic, charming, and a reminder that the internet doesn’t have to look like a Silicon Valley pitch deck.

Break Stuff (Safely)

The beauty of the web is that you can poke at its skeleton without consequence. Remember back in Unit 2, where we peeked under the hood with Inspect to see what websites were hiding? You’re going to do that again, but this time, you’re going to change it. Right-click → Inspect on almost any site and you can edit the text or images in your browser. Change headlines, swap images, rewrite entire paragraphs, or crank the font until it screams in hot pink. Nothing breaks for real. It’s all local— just your browser showing you a temporary, alternate version of the web, but before we had AI images, this is how fake news started.

Examples to try:

• Change a news headline to “Local Cat Becomes Supreme Court Justice.”

• Add color: hotpink; font-size: 200px; to a title and watch it scream at you in neon.

• Replace images with something dumb from your desktop

These change nothing but your display screen, however it’s a nice window into how the internet is built—and also a reminder that the web was never meant to be a glass box you just stare at.

Remix the Web

The internet isn’t finished, and it never will be. It’s copy-paste culture built for remixing. Stop thinking you need permission. You don’t even need to know how to code.

This is literally how internet culture was born. Glitter cursors, MySpace themes, Tumblr GIF walls—none of that came from scratch. People stole HTML snippets, broke them, duct-taped them back together until it looked like “theirs.”, and you can too! And you should! It’s fun!

Ways to start:

• Collage the Web → Screenshot a random forum fight and layer it with stock images until it looks like a surrealist zine.

• Neocities Frankensteins → View the source code of a hand-made Neocities page, steal a snippet, and drop it into your own. Make your own website!!!!

• Rewrite History → Take a Wikipedia article and blackout words until it reads like poetry. Or rewrite it entirely so your cat is the protagonist of the Cold War.

This is how the web was meant to be used: a sandbox where knowledge is cut up and reassembled into something new.

Make collages. Make art. Break it, bop it, twist it, ruin it on purpose. It’s play.

Unit Five: Build Your Own Corner

Exploring the internet is fun. Breaking it is fun. Remixing it is fun. But the real magic starts when you carve out your own corner.

The internet is made of corners—personal websites, tiny blogs, old forums, weird projects. It doesn’t matter if your corner is polished, half-broken, or visited by three people a year. What matters is that it’s yours.

Where to Start:

Substack blogs are a great place to start, but I’m assuming most of you know that. So, let me give you some other options! If you miss the tumblr themes of 2012, these are some options that replace that feeling.

Where to Start:

• Neocities → The modern Geocities. Hand-build a personal site with raw HTML, bright backgrounds, and GIF chaos.

• Carrd → A drag-and-drop site builder that takes five minutes. Great for a simple “about me” page.

• Github Pages / Netlify → If you’re ready for more control, these let you host your own projects for free.

• Notion / Are.na → Even a personal wiki or a visual scrapbook counts. If it’s a place where your taste lives, it’s a corner.

Ideas for Your Corner

• A personal blog where you review soups. (please please please please)

• A fan archive for an artist, show, or game nobody else cares about anymore.

• A living “digital garden” of your notes, links, and unfinished ideas.

• A mixtape site that pairs playlists with doodles or photos.

Your corner doesn’t have to be important to anyone, but you.

Homework

• Plant the Flag → Pick one platform from the list and claim a space even if it’s just a blank page with your name.

• Add One Weird Thing → Post something dumb but personal—a list of your favorite chips, a bad poem, a link you love.

• Show One Person → Send your corner to a friend (if you want) just to prove it exists outside your head.

The mall feeds you. The playground distracts you. The rabbit holes keep you wandering, but the corner is yours.

And the internet needs more of ‘em. Go build one.

The Internet Is Still Alive

The internet isn’t dead. It isn’t just TikTok and Twitter. It isn’t a mall food court where you shuffle between the same five storefronts. That’s the lie the feeds want you to believe.

The internet is still a city. A labyrinth. A jungle gym. A sandbox. A living, breathing experiment where curiosity is rewarded and weirdness thrives.

You just forgot how to use it.

Now you know again.

You’ve tracked your habits. You’ve learned to rabbit hole. You’ve practiced the art of search. You’ve played, broken, remixed. And now you’ve planted your flag—your own corner of the web.

The algorithm isn’t your friend, but it’s not god either. You don’t have to beg it for scraps. You can leave. You can wander. You can build.

So stop scrolling. Start exploring. Make something dumb. Make something beautiful. Make something yours.

<3 brooklyn

I missed the Percy Jackson wave. Only now, thanks to Hades the video game, am I spiraling back into Greek myths I only half-remember from high school. I keep circling the darker tales—the characters who live in liminal spaces. Orpheus and Eurydice. The Fates. Nyx. And, most of all, Persephone.

Next week, I move back to my hometown in Arkansas.

What my mom wants me to say: I’m working on a startup with my dad. Moving home will make it faster and cheaper, like Jobs in a garage.

What I actually say: I lost my job and haven’t found another one yet. The rest is true though—we are building something together.

Persephone was gathering flowers when the earth cracked open. One moment: sunlight, meadow, laughter. The next: a chariot surging up from below, her wrists seized before she could even scream. That’s how the story goes.

Chicago was never perfect, but it was mine—my rented meadow. Then the ground gave way: the job vanished, and Arkansas yawned beneath me. Two years in Chicago, and what do I have to show? Rent receipts. Rejection emails. A slight case of agoraphobia. I should’ve been networking. Instead, I was panicking, always convinced I had the wrong resource—time when I had money, money when I had time.

Now tomorrow has arrived, and it’s in Arkansas.

Pomegranates

The story says six. Six seeds, garnet and bloody, swallowed in the dark. Maybe Persephone was starving. Maybe she was tricked. Maybe she just wanted something sweet when everything else around her tasted like ash. Whatever the reason, those six bites bound her forever.

Last winter, I tried pomegranate.

It didn’t look like fruit so much as firelight. I moved home for three months to avoid the back and forth of holiday flights. My parents’ new house glowed like a castle on the hill, rebuilt after the tornado—bigger, stronger, daring the sky to try again.

At its center was smoke and fire. My dad manned the smoker like it was an altar, coaxing ribs and brisket into perfection. The fireplace roared, and I sat on the stone ledge until my back burned. Soup sprawled nearby like Cerberus at the gates.

Every bite of that comfort was a seed. Sweet, smoky, impossible to spit out. They tasted like love and safety, but also like tether.

I told myself it was temporary, just for winter, but seeds root. Even in Chicago, part of me is still tied to that smoky palace on the hill, to the fire that singes my back, to the Underworld. And now, I return.

The Throne

In high school, I didn’t understand Persephone’s power. How do you make anything romantic out of being dragged into the earth? There’s no soft lighting on that moment. No tasteful indie soundtrack. Just a chariot and a terrible rental situation.

But winter softened me toward her. I like winter. I hate being cold, but I love the aesthetic: icy blues, earmuffs that make my head look like a marshmallow, Taylor Swift chai cookies baked into ritual.

And winter works precisely because it’s temporary. If every season was January, I’d have very strong feelings about mittens and also probably be a less pleasant person.

So if Persephone knows spring exists, why would she spend her time in the dark pouting? She already ate the pomegranate. The deal is done. If the underground is your address, make it livable. Rule it. Put a fern in the window. Find the faintest slant of sun and claim it as your throne.

That’s my mantra for this move. I’m not here because I failed spectacularly (although the universe has provided generous evidence that I am fully capable). I’m here because being in the same zip code as my dad will make the startup faster, cheaper, and less lonely in the way that zoom calls almost never are. I’ll save rent money otherwise wasted on a shoebox apartment. I’ll eat home-cooked meals without cooking them. I will, if I must, learn small talk working at the one coffee shop that closes on Sundays and therefore is the kind of tragicomic place I belong.

And yes—unlike Persephone, I don’t have a divine guarantee I’ll come back in six months. Last time I had a plane ticket; this time I’ve got a U-Haul and a stack of boxes that don’t care about my metaphors—but I’m learning sovereignty doesn’t require certainty. It can be forged from refusal. I won’t spend my season below ground replaying the abduction like Spotify’s shuffle algorithm. I’ll build a life that will, if I choose, be easier to leave and harder to forget.

So I’ll sit. I’ll rule. When spring comes—if spring comes—Kore will get her chapter back. Until then, I’ll become Persephone.

<3 brooklyn persephone

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