Hi! Welcome to the twentieth 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.
This newsletter has been split into two sections. The first is external links that I truly adored, sometimes with my own little endorsements. The second is similar, but within Substack. There once was a third, compiling all the recommended readings on over the last month. I’ve since discontinued the mini-TGSotI, so all links can be found in one place, right here.
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. I’m always open to discuss/debate/listen to your opinions about any of these links and would probably ascend to a higher plane of joy.
Happy reading!
TGSotI Reviewed
Ask Ugly: my mother is pressuring me to get plastic surgery. How do I deal with imperfection?* | Jessica DeFino, The Guardian
Dear Ugly,
I’ve had hereditary eye bags under my eyes since I was a kid, and I’ve dealt with people telling me that I look tired since I can remember. I’ve tried every eye cream and concealer under the sun, and nothing has hidden them or “cured” them. My mother recently got a blepharoplasty [eyelid surgery], to get hers removed once and for all – and now she’s pressuring me to do the same despite the fact that I’m in my 20s. She looks great, but the idea of changing my face (even if it’s to fix a perceived flaw) makes me sad. Any advice you have for coming to terms with an “imperfection”?
– Not Tired
Edward Lear’s Nonsense Botany (1871–77) | The Public Domain Review
With his Nonsense Botany series the Victorian artist and writer Edward Lear turned his peculiar brand of verbal and visual invention to the world of plant taxonomy. A little over a century earlier the Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus had laid the foundations for the binomial nomenclature system, in which a species is given a two-part name: the first part identifying the species' genus, the second part identifying the species within the genus. The system, with its usage of Latin grammatical forms, proves fertile ground for Lear's imagination. Originally the series was put out in three instalments — in Lear's nonsense collections of 1871, 1872, and 1877 — and all three featured in a posthumous collection published in 1888 from whose pages we have taken the following highlights.
A Guide to Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys | James Grebey, Vulture
With so many weird little guys running around Miyazaki’s filmography, it seems time to honor and celebrate them. Not every creature in a Miyazaki movie is a weird little guy. We love Totoros of all sizes and we had a fox-squirrel pet of our own, like Nausicaä’s Teto. But those are individual creatures. A key aspect of Miyazaki’s weird little guys is how numerous they are. They’re a swarm, frequently providing little moments of comic relief as they move coal or swim through the sea. Their designs are quite simple, but their meaning frequently is not.
Voices On Addiction: Incorrigible, A Love Story | Jeannine Ouellette, The Rumpus
I wanted to be good so my mother would love me. But I didn’t know how.
My Mother, The Gambler | Victor Lodato, The New Yorker
For a long time, I didn’t know that what my mother was doing—playing the so-called Italian lottery—was illegal. She certainly didn’t look like a criminal.
How Bird Collecting Evolved Into Bird-Watching | Time Birkhead, Smithsonian Magazine
In the early 1900s, newfound empathy for avian creatures helped wildlife observation displace dispassionate killing
Forever Less of Beauty | Elissa Altman & Courtney Garvin, The Bitter Southerner
At night, when the moon is out, a woman’s mind races: the mundane, the painful, & the glorious.
In-house Links
This section contains links to pieces from different Substack publications. Again, the ones with the asterisk are personal favourites.
#38 from *
Keep going, still from *
marquis & peele from
What Words May Come from *
Pep Talk from *
That’s a wrap for October ‘24! Feel free to make me the happiest person alive by reaching out to discuss any of it. For weekly poetry and song recommendations, plus a sometimes-nonsensical-sometimes-profound-sometimes-toopersonal micro-essay, 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. I am deeply passionate about telling people what to read.
Thanks for reading, and see you next month!
ahhh thank you so much :')))