Hi! Welcome to the second issue of The Good Side of the Internet. Super glad to have you here. For a brief run-down on what all the hullabaloo is about, please visit the About page for this publication.
As a reminder, this newsletter has been split into three sections. The first is external links that I truly adored, with my own endorsements and a little explanation about why I enjoyed them. The second is similar, but within Substack. The third is a compilation of all the recommended readings on
over the last month.The ones with the little asterisk next to them come Highly Recommended (by me). Please do heed the trigger warnings if they’re present. For access to paywalled essays, feel free to reach out to me. I’m always open to discuss/debate/listen to your opinions about any of these links. In fact, if that happened, I would ENTHUSIASTICALLY participate, and ascend to a higher plane of joy. Happy reading!
TGSotI Reviewed
Fan edits are the internet's love language | Mashable
For the uninitiated, edits are fan-made videos typically set to music that slice together clips of a celebrity or character. (They're also occasionally referred to as fancams or vids, but fancams typically feature only one celebrity or public figure, and vids tend to use footage from TV shows and movies.) The act of creating fan edits is called vidding. In fandom, edits allow you to express your fandom and your perspective with like-minded individuals.
TGSotI Review: I love fandom. I love when I used to be a part of it, I love the community of it, I love the creation of any sort of fanworks. It’s like saying ‘I love this piece of media so much, that I’m going it take the characters/the setting/the plot etc and put them in a different context because my love is not restricted by its origin’. It’s endearing, it’s powerful, and it’s fascinating as hell. This piece talks about edits, specifically, within the larger context of fandom, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this very rational sort of explainer and analysis. Major props to
for recommending fandom-adjacent reads like this.Running With Hank | Runner’s World (tw: anxiety, depression, alcoholism, substance abuse)
How my daughter’s rambunctious mutt saved my sanity while she was lost to the darkness.
TGSotI Review: Some essays read like they were painful to write, like the subject matter was painful to relive, and like every word is a very private recollection of something very personal. This is one of them. Deeply visceral and beautifully written, it feels like a love letter to a pet and a memorial to a daughter wrapped in one. It’s definitely heavy, and one of the more emotional pieces I’ve come across, but its masterful narration will linger in my memory for some time.
The Teacher Crush | Longreads
What happens when a teenager develops a risky infatuation?
TGSotI Review: “Though he never took advantage of my lead, he played his part, too. He never told me to stop. Never told me I was being inappropriate in my advances, in my clear obsession. I finally see he loved the attention, too.” I’ve come across a few pieces about this sort of thing, this very concerning phenomenon of adults refusing to be the adult, and the responsibility for healthy social interaction being pinned on the minor instead (and the blame for unhealthy social interaction also being pinned on the minor - usually a girl). It’s creepy and disturbing, and makes for a horrifyingly absorbing story. All it needs is a writer that can do it justice, and you get an essay like this one.
All The Forgetting* | The Rumpus | Comic
And still - I don’t know how any of us bear it, the marching-on of time. All the memories and all the forgetting.
TGSotI Review: Beautifully drawn and narrated, this comic depicts one of my favourite, super-fun topics and the choice agony of modern poets everywhere - the human condition. Contains gems that floored me like ‘How can there be so much forgetting in a life?’, ‘How could I have forgotten so much?’, and a painfully relatable bit about the artist’s relationship with her grandmother’s death. Highly Recommend!
A Scammer Who Tricks Instagram Into Banning Influencers Has Never Been Identified. We May Have Found Him. | ProPublica
OBN, a mysterious fraudster, says he made hundreds of thousands of dollars by exploiting Instagram’s security gaps. He’s eluded Meta and law enforcement, but we followed his trail to Las Vegas.
TGSotI Review: I’ve always enjoyed reading investigative articles, and ProPublica’s journalism always delivers. The detective work, the research, the nature of the scam itself speak for so many things - the cleverness and the cunning of humans, the ego and the power of social media scammers, and the additional and improved channels of planned crime that platforms like Telegram and Discord provide. Perhaps the most jarring is the bit of pity for influencers that I felt while reading this. It’s that powerful, and no less interesting.
GPT’s Very Inhuman Mind | Noema
Like Narcissus and his reflection, too many AI researchers are searching for the essence of intelligence when it doesn’t exist.
TGSotI Review: Listen. I’m as fed up as you are with this whole generative AI thing. I’m fed up with the people that are fed up with it. I’m fed up with the debate both for and against the whole shebang. And yet, - call it my job, call it morbid fascination - I can’t seem to look away from this landscape. Do I think we should pause the development of large language models-based systems globally until we figure out how to fix prevalent issues in their development and deployment? Yes. Do I think a much closer inspection and regulation of the ethics and use of artificial intelligence is a dire need? Yes. Do I think there’s a terrible danger of the anthropomorphism of generative AI-based chat models, and that this article does a super job of highlighting why attributing human thoughts, feelings, activities to artificial systems is a stupid idea? Hell yes. And if I hear another ChatGPT joke I swear I’ll scream. Enough.
Reclaiming Cringe: Good Morning Messages* | The Swaddle
It’s hard to argue a case for good morning messages, but despite their cultural designation as cringe, they continue to populate smartphone real estate. Good morning messages are like pulp fiction novels, B-grade cinema, or short-form content from small cities that are similarly dismissed as low-brow – but the question here is who exactly finds them so. Like most cultural phenomena in India, asking why this ubiquitous, distinctly Indian mode of digital communication is “cringe” opens up uncomfortable answers about identity, self-worth, and humor that unsurprisingly have their roots in colonialism.
TGSotI Review: A couple of months back, I learnt about the phenomenon of ‘code switching’ from this article from The Quint - “…when a person changes or adapts their accent, their syntax, grammar, or even body language or appearance to fit a dominant culture.” It gave explanation to something that’s been widely ridiculed and mocked, and a concise phrase for something I had been trying to understand for a while. This Swaddle piece does something similar. It gets into the ‘why’ of finding good morning messages cringe, and really made me question a lot of my beliefs. It’s provided me with a different dimension to the way I’m looking at ‘cringe’, and at culture. To me, that makes it a fabulous read. Highly Recommend!
All True At Once* | Longreads (tw: suicide, substance abuse)
You made a fool of the words “feminine” and “masculine” — you were neither, you were both.
TGSotI Review: I have never read love and pain as separate things in any context, and I have never read them so well intertwined as I did in this essay. Past and present, family and the lack, blame and guilt - they all marry seamlessly, until all I can see is stark emotion. This is another piece that feels almost too personal to share, and I will always be in awe of the authors that have the courage to do so anyway. It’s a heavy one, and not at all the sort of thing you’d want to start if you’re looking for a quick read on the train on the way to office (I learnt this the hard way), but undoubtedly a beautifully written piece. Highly Recommend!
A Table For One* | The Soup Magazine
A writer, an artist and a photographer share their different interpretations of eating alone in a three part series for Soup.
TGSotI Review: If you, like me, have recently moved out and are getting used to being alone, doing things alone, living alone, eating alone, this series will resonate with you. Split into the solitude, the awareness, and the romance of eating by yourself, of setting a table for one, it’s a beautiful translation - into words, paintings, and photographs! - of this very curious, and sometimes painful but largely ultimately lovely, concept. Highly Recommend!
In-house Links
This section contains links to pieces from different Substack newsletters. The reason I’ve demarcated it is because there’s more room for interaction with the authors here. (Also because the formatting is very cute, I love that box.) The ones with the little asterisk are from some of my favourite publications, which are, in my opinion, well worth subscribing to.
A super interesting bit about the activities we give our time to and the ones that seem to take time from us, and how the whole thing could potentially be a bit jumbled from
This lovely and thought-provoking piece from
that mentions beautiful things like curd rice and not-so-beautiful things like trauma at the intersection of food and weight
A beautiful and teary-eyed-wobbly-smile-inducing writeup from
The thodi Masterlist
(I didn’t want to make this section too crowded, so I haven’t included the blurbs for each link. If you’d like some context about each one before clicking on it, I recommend navigating to the thodi issue that contains those blurbs.)
From an accumulation of homes (April 1)
Our daughter had a year left to live. We had to do something wonderful with the time she had left.*
What You Get Is the World from
From febrile (April 8)
Binge & Purge from
*
From web weaving (April 15)
When was the last time you howled with laughter? from
My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer
I don't need to arrive at a lesson after every traumatic event. from
*
From wandering alone (April 22)
That’s a wrap for April ‘23! Feel free to make me the happiest person alive by reaching out to discuss any of it. If you want the tinier, but week-lier, version of super fun links (along with poetry, book, and song recommendations, plus a sometimes-nonsensical-sometimes-profound-sometimes-toopersonal writeup), we’d be happy to have you over at
.If you’d like, please share this with your friends. Or your mother. Or on your Instagram story that you share a Spotify link on once in six months. Or anybody who you think would enjoy it. This is a fresh-out-of-the-oven publication, and I am deeply passionate about telling people what to read.
Thanks for reading, and see you next month!