girls like me are just waiting to die
discussed: the 90s-era anime about a girl who becomes the Internet; the AI girlie pop bop of the summer; and why we should all be making magazines to document our lives
Ok hi and welcome back to Internet Bedroom, a newsletter all about girl culture and nostalgia that is now also a home for my longer essays, which help me feel something again. Seriously though, thank you all for reading and sharing and generally having really deep, wonderful conversations with me over DM about “the internet is our bedroom.” I really feel like I have the best readers on the World Wide Web.
I was so nervous to post this essay because it’s quit different in tone and content to what I had been posting. And I also feared a bunch of red pill ppl coming out of the woodwork and attacking me as much as I feared someone reading the essay and being like, “That’s really fucked up that she watched red pill content. What a horrible monster.” But so far neither of those things has happened and for that I am deeply grateful. It seems like Substack as well as my little corner of the Internet is truly a place where I can put out work that’s a little more challenging and find readers who want to read it! So thank you, thank you, thank you for reading and sharing and DMing me your thoughts and just generally being the best.
If you are new here, Internet Bedroom is a newsletter that started as a way for me to distract myself from the book I am currently writing, which is a history of girls’ bedroom culture. I would find so much cool girl-related stuff while researching for this book and often that stuff did not fit in the book itself, so I started creating this newsletter with lil curated lists of all the cool girly trash I was finding or remembering or obsessing over.
I think now I’m ready to start doing more long-form work as well, but I want to stay true to my roots and give you all a classic Internet Bedroom Style post where I curate a list of girl cult stuff that’s been on my mind that I think you should know about! As always, thank you for reading and for sharing and for making me want to be a better writer <3
watching: serial experiments lain
There are a few animes that should be canonical for chronically online girls like me. And Serial Experiments Lain is at the very top of that list (right next to Nana) because it is about a girl who literally becomes the Internet.
Serial Experiments Lain hit Tokyo TV waves from July to September 1998 before making it to America on DVD and VHS in 1999. It was also irregularly shown on American TV — mostly by local stations: a station based out of San Francisco that focused on tech news, a PBS affiliate out of San Jose that infamously screened the seventh episode on 9/11 after a news report. After Lain receives an email at school from a dead friend, she returns home to find that her parents have bought her her very own computer (called Navi), which she uses to access a social version of the Internet called the Wired. And as Lain becomes more deeply enmeshed in the Wired looking for answers about her friend, she begins to lose all sense of reality, like you do when you spend a lot of time online.
Unlike a lot of anime, Serial Experiments Lain is not the product of some overworked auteur but a relatively anonymous group of animators who made thirteen weird little episodes about a girl becoming the Internet before the social Internet was really a thing. The series touches on everything from conspiracy culture to Virtual Reality to the social media rumor mill (again, there was no social media at the time, so this was super prescient) to how The Wired creates and sustains multiple different versions of reality.
And, even though a lot of people have never watched Serial Experiments Lain, Lain herself remains a culture touchstone for the chronically online, her descent into unreality not quite a parable or a warning, but certainly a fable for the 21st century. Also, shout out to my husband for sitting me down and having me watch Serial Experiments Lain for the first time to distract me from my parents’ divorce! One of my best memories of ever consuming a piece of media for real.
listening: Girly Girl Productions
Allow me to be so for real with you right now. I am including Girly Girl Productions in this newsletter as a way to maybe rid my brain of their songs by getting them all stuck in your head. And I’m not sorry because if I find myself singing “1 new vape, 2 lines of coke, free drinks from the bar, 4 more lines of coke” I am gonna lose it.
If you are older than 9/11, you might remember a weird time in pop music circa 2010-2011 where pop music manufacturing was having its first viral moment. I am, of course, talking about Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” which reminded us to have our bowl and our cereal. “Friday” was the first (and only) hit from a studio called ARK Music Factory, which effectively found kids at malls and asked their parents to pay them $2k - $4k in exchange for pop stardom and bops. Rebecca Black is really the only artist to make it to the next level from ARK Music Factory, but the Factory’s overproduced, heavily auto-tuned singles paired with amateur, heavily filtered music videos certainly set the stage for hyperpop and maybe even Brat Summer if you want to go that far.
This is my favorite song from the ARK era, Alana Lee’s “Butterflies,” which is basically like if Justin Bieber’s “Baby” was sung by a girl computer. If you’re wondering “who is that rapping in the middle of the song?” it is none other than
Girly Girl Productions is picking up where ARK Music Factory left off and creating silicon sounding, viral-ready bangers. But instead of girls at the mall who want to be pop stars, they are seemingly creating said bangers using AI. Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I am not in support of the AI Artpocalypse that we are currently in (if you can even call it that). Besides stealing artists data, gutting creative industries of jobs, and being generally awful for the environment, most AI “art” is just really, really objectively bad.
But girls are always on the frontlines of innovation and trends, so it makes sense that Girly Girl Productions’ plastic single “10 Drunk Cigarettes” has been able to penetrate the TikTok soundscape during Brat summer.
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In many ways, a song about what girls need on a night out that de-centers men (to whit: “1 new vape, 2 lines of coke, free drinks from the bar, 4 more lines of coke” etc. etc. etc.) written and sung by a robot is the logical end-point for a summer where the Pop Girls were back in full force. And it’s weird to listen to a pop song where the environmental consequences are so quantifiable! Welcome to the apocalypse, girlies!
making: magazines to document our lives
And now for something completely different. You don’t have to do much digging to learn that I LOVE zines and small press and DIY publishing. My FYP absolutely knew what it was doing when it gave me this amazing pull from Berklee Ryann, who makes a full-on magazine to recap her life each year.
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I am obsessed. I love that it’s formatted like a fashion magazine but takes all the DIY cues from a zine. I love the scrapbook vibes mixed with her writing and doodles and collages and lists and playlists. I love that this is a time consuming hobby (because I need more time consuming hobbies). I love that this girl is inspiring me to actually figure out how to use InDesign. I am still very much in my cutting up and photocopying phase of zinemaking, but I should really devote more time to learning InDesign so I could make y’all an INTERNET BEDROOM magazine. Please let me know in the comments if this is something you would want.
There literally hundreds reasons I can think of to make a magazine about your life — because it’s fun; because we all need time consuming hobbies so we don’t lose our minds; because collage might be the most meditative art there is. But the reason zines and self-publishing are so important is because these tools give us the opportunity to have ownership over our art, our memories, our time. The tech companies like Meta still haven’t figured out how to extend their monopoly on human expression to regular old pen and paper yet, so when you make your own magazine or zine, you’re literally taking back your art and your time and your memories from the Internet. TLDR: Zines can’t be data mined or used to sell you Amazon products! And that is one reason why they are so meaningful to make!
Berklee has a bunch of tutorials and inspo on how to design your own magazine about your life over on her TikTok and if she had a Substack detailing her pages and process I would 1000% subscribe to it!
We should all be making magazines to document our lives every year — deal? Deal.
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If you made it this far I LOVE YOU!!! Seriously, thank you for reading.
Should I make an Internet Bedroom Magazine? If you had a magazine/zine, what would it be about? I want to know!
Again, thank you so so much for the support on my first long essay. My goal is to publish one longer essay a month and I’m already at work on next month’s essay! I’m excited! But I’m not going to tell you what it’s about because I don’t want to jinx myself. I’m getting superstitious about my writing, which is a first for me. And if you haven’t checked out this month’s first long form essay, which is about how I consumed red pill content for a year, here’s a link for ya:
I’ve been working in Indesign for 10 years now- I am here and READY to support this
You filled my heart with so much excitement and joy!! I wanna watch that anime so bad and I've just writtendown ideas of magazines I want to create asap