Hi! Welcome to the third 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
Honey, I Sold the Kids* | Aeon
We have laws to protect children from factory work. Why aren’t they protected from parents who monetise their lives online?
TGSotI Review: Influencer culture is…odd, but momfluencer culture is downright concerning. It’s one thing to — and I’m borrowing a phrase from the article itself here — open your own life up for strangers’ consumption. It’s another, perfectly terrifying thing to open up the lives of others, especially those who are under your care, to the Internet at large. This piece is equal parts fascinating, foreboding, and horrifying, and all parts incredibly narrated. Highly Recommend!
‘Dad said: We’re going to follow Captain Cook’: how an endless round-the-world voyage stole my childhood | The Guardian
In 1976, Suzanne Heywood’s father decided to take the family on a three-year sailing ‘adventure’ – and then just kept going. It was a journey into fear, isolation and danger …
TGSotI Review: This reads like a fiction novel, and I’m still reeling from the fact that it’s a real-life account. When I hear stories like this, I always wonder if I’d ever show the same grit, courage, and determination that’s displayed in them. It’s a harrowing personal piece, and sucks you right in.
First Acts: Creatives share their (very) early work | It’s Nice That
We invite four illustrators and designers to reveal their prehistory, sharing artworks they created as children and teenagers, and talking us through their early relationships to creativity.
TGSotI Review: I adore this concept so very much, this idea of talking to creative professionals about how they started and where they are now. It’s a demonstration of the intrinsicality of creativity, of how the place that art comes from isn’t something you can acquire, and of how heartening it is to see progress - both the before and the after.
Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul. | The Ringer
Paul Dochney posted his way into the halls of internet lore. After 15 years of anonymity, can he emerge without compromising his act?
TGSotI Review: The social media landscape, with all its hills and valleys and shark-infested water bodies, is endlessly fascinating. One of the weirdest things that I’ve seen emerge from this landscape is the concept of shitposting. I’ve heard it being described as ‘deliberately antagonising and provocative’, but I feel like that’s a dated definition. Now, shitposting is some mysterious concoction of nonsense, irreverence, irony, sarcasm, earnestness, and brevity. Occasionally, wit. And who better to give their take on the concept than the living adherent to Twitter shitposting himself? This is the unmasking of and completely normal interview with Dril.
The Walking Manifesto* | The Third Eye
A trans-flaneuse walks, walks, walks until the city opens up its seams.
TGSotI Review: The language used and subject matter is the greatest testament to this piece, so in place of a review, I’m just going to give you an excerpt.
“Contemplate the city. It exists, not as a unitary place, but as a shimmering, shape-shifting, amorphous entity which only very rarely corresponds to the physical limits of those things people talk of when they mean a city – the buildings and the streets and the stores.
It falls upon me, and you now, to carve the city I, and you, want.
And we do this by walking.”
A beautiful ode to home, to the familiarity of a place walked in, to the act of walking itself, and to the idea of the subjectivity - the personalisation - of a city. I loved it for making me think of home, I hated it for making me think of home. Highly Recommend!
Paper Artist Reina Takahashi Creates 100 Paper Breakfasts | Design & Paper | Art + Illustration
Takahashi’s latest endeavor takes us around the world with a hundred paper breakfasts, which she created in her #100PaperBreakfast project. With her tool of choice, a K2 size Excel knife, Takahashi took on a challenge of crafting a hundred different breakfast foods, in hundred continuous days. Some of the food items were inspired by her own cooking and some were suggested by fans and fellow paper food enthusiasts alike.
TGSotI Review: Two relevant facts - 1. Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day, and 2. I have a very minimal skill in design and aesthetics, to put it generously. Both these statements contributed to my absolute delight and awe as I scrolled through mouth-watering image after mouth-watering image in this project. My favourite ones were the tea bag, the pancake, and of course, the various forms of bread.
Roxane Gay: ‘My body is a cage of my own making’ | The Guardian
Strangers remove food from her shopping trolley, humiliate her in the gym and refuse to sit next to her on planes. How did size get to be such a big deal?
TGSotI Review: At the time of reading this, somewhere inside, there’s a blistering rage at the world at large for so obviously refusing to cater to a size of person. There is also hopelessness at realising that there doesn’t seem to be any lasting non-performative change, as well as a sort of stubborn disbelief that some people can be so cruel and callous. It should not be an act of bravery to exist as a fat person, and it should not be an act of bravery to write a personal essay about existing as a fat person. Unfortunately, I do feel a sense of admiration for Roxane Gay for writing this piece. Fortunately, I also deeply admire the quality of the piece itself.
Infinite Scroll | Instagram | Video
Infinite Scroll is a poem I wrote last year. This weekend I thought it'd be fun to build an old school crankie theatre within which the poem scrolls (finitely).
TGSotI Review: This is one of the coolest, most creative, most skilled things I have ever seen. I loved the content, I bobbed along to the background music, and I was constantly in awe of the engineering and craft of the creation. Watch for amusement, fascination, and delight.
The Class Politics of Instagram Face* | Tablet
Plastic surgery is changing, and for an obvious reason: When in history have rich women ever wanted to look like regular ones?
TGSotI Review: Roughly a little over a year ago, I came across the concept of body neutrality - the idea of practicing acceptance rather than any judgement or strong emotion towards your body. It was revolutionary, and genuinely changed the way I looked at myself and at the people around me for the better. It also made me a lot more cognisant of the institutions of beauty being held up all around us. In the middle of all that dialogue about race, privilege, gender, Euro-centric beauty, size and so on, I had never really considered the idea of status until I came across this essay a few weeks ago. Deeply unsettling in the most eye-opening way, its razor-sharp narration is clean and starkly unemotional. Just shedding light on ponder-worthy evidence of another facet of the pillars holding up and mutating beauty standards. Highly Recommend!
Frog | Harper’s Magazine
What happens to the pets that happen to you
TGSotI Review: I remember exactly where I was when I read this essay - waiting for a friend, a few days after my grandfather had passed away, absently pacing up and down the footpath outside the metro station. Maybe I’m recommending this because it managed to pull me out of my head, or allowed me to get a peek outside the grief-fog I was in, or let me appreciate something at a time when it seemed impossible that I could. But what can’t be debated is how lovely the article itself is. Charming, heart-warming, and yes, like all good pieces, a little sad. I hope Bunky and my grandfather are both happy.
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.
On Food Destinations from
Truly one of my FAV issues of
*A trademark painfully lovely piece 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 depths and mysteries (May 6)
The Physical Traits that Define Men and Women in Literature (illustration)
From pictures of the sea (May 13)
How are you doing?* (playable illustration)
Welcome to the Ambaniverse (illustrated prose)
From this place could be beautiful, right? (May 20)
How Airports Liberate—and Constrain—Those Who Pass Through Them
Social contagions can cause genuine illness, and TikTok may be a superspreader (video)
“They’re coming for every second of your life” - Bo Burnham* (video)
From i am at the very beginning of the rest of my life (May 27)
Things Organized Neatly* (tumblr blog)
That’s a wrap for May ‘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!
oh my god!! you are a gem <33 going to dig into ur words whenever wherever :)))))