i'm your favorite girl blogger's favorite girl blogger

having a great summer!!!

discussed:

🐈‍⬛feeling strange

✂️decoupage!!!!!

❤️‍🔥sculptures of cute fat girls <3

Hey gurls<3

Welcome back to another issue of Internet Bedroom, which was recently described by one of you lovely readers as the perfect blog for the chronically online. I am honored.

As you know, in this newsletter, I document girl cultures past and present (and future??) every other Wednesday and I fucking love doing that for y’all and seeing what y’all are into and just generally getting turned on to cool shit from your comments and DMs (and also your newsletters!!).

Like much of the rest of girl Internet, I have spent my summer thinking about all the ex-friends I would or would not work it out with on the remix with. The list is short. As someone who has always had extremely intense, sometimes all-consuming friendships with other women (that sometimes end very badly), I can’t stop obsessing over how part of brat summer is about accepting that girl friendships/partnerships/collaborations/whatever are often complicated for reasons beyond our control (i.e. because we’re taught to hate ourselves kind of).

I particularly appreciate the acknowledgement that sometimes femme people are forced into close proximity with one another — whether it’s because we are in the same industry or the same scene — and there’s this pressure to be The Nice Girl and Get Along With Everyone or else you’re a bitch and you’re not feminist enough. Patron Saint Party Girl Charli speaks to this directly when she defended “Sympathy is a knife” as specifically not a diss track against one other woman (Taylor Swift), but, rather, an exploration of being compelled to play nice with people you don’t or wouldn’t naturally get along with just because they happen to be women and also happen to be in the same industry as you.

@charlixcxbrat psa!

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Anywayssss, once I find the time to actually sit down and make my zine, all you bitches are gonna be sorry (and by that I mean, I’m going to work this all out with myself on the remix so it is, in fact, me who will be sorry).

Let’s get on with the newsletter.

remembering: Emily the Strange

2024 is an It Girl Renaissance. In one of my earlier newsletters all about Internet It Girls, I wondered if one could still be an It Girl in an age of overexposure, when every detail of our lives seem to be online and there’s not that much mystery anymore. (Asked and answered by “360”, honestly. Sorry, sorry I swear to god that this is the last time I will mention brat jfc).

Emily the Strange is one of my favorite Fictional It Girls, and one of the few FIGs who is a cartoon character! She’s aloof, unreachable, mysterious in origin, “known but also unknowable” (shit!!!!!). And if you set foot in a Hot Topic or Plato’s Closet any time in the early to mid-2000s, she was absolutely everywhere, a beacon of sorts for weirdo kind of bratty girls who were into Invader Zim.

Emily started appearing on skateboards in Cali back in the 1990s. Her Wiki claims that she was originally designed by Nathan Carrico for Santa Cruz Skateboards but it also says she was created by Rob Reger for his very 2000s sounding company “Cosmic Debris Etc.” (yes Etc. is part of the company’s title).

Obviously these two messy bitches are unwilling to budge on who created Emily, but as all It Girls know, we really create ourselves. We are everywhere and nowhere all at once, which is definitely true for Emily whose ubiquity in the 2000s was not tied to any one specific piece of pop culture. She didn’t have a cartoon. Most of us didn’t know she had a comic book series. There was this weird Nintendo DS game, but it’s not like we knew her from that either.

Emily just was. She was weird. She was cranky and witty all at once. She had a pack of black cats that she hung out with. She was maybe in a band. She was an artist. And for little mall goths or girls who occasionally wore black nail polish in the 2000s, she externalized how we were all feeling inside. So yeah, long live Emily the Strange. If you want more analysis of her cultural impact, might I recommend this brilliant TikTok.

Also, all week I’ve been trying to come up with something that describes that Hot Topic/y2k mall goth/Invader Zim/Johnny the Homicidal Maniac wave that Emily was a part of, so if y’all have any ideas, please let me know down in the comments thank youuuuu.

obsessing: Decoupage! TV

If anything, this newsletter will be remembered as a desperate plea to bring back public access television. I have already written about the goth girl v-jays of 90s Austin, TX’s RAWTime, and now I have another public access tv show from the depths of the archive that is perfect if you’ve been Chappell Roan Pilled this summer: Decoupage!

Decoupage! was a public access show based out of LA in the late 80s helmed by Summer Caprice, the drag persona of Craig Roose. The show featured everything from interviews to performances and mail calls from the post-punk artists and performers who were icons of the underground. Think daytime talkshow but with the guests running the show <3 As Ms. Caprice put it: “We want all different kinds of people on the show. I wanna cover everything…from the real to the unreal!”

Personal highlight: this amazing cover of Sonny and Cher’s “Bang Bang” with Riot Grrrl-era punks L7 with cult actress Karen Black as front woman.

I won’t lie, I discovered Decoupage! completely by accident while looking for pictures of Ms. Vaginal Creme Davis, a Jackie-of-All-Trades who is a legendary underground artist, drag performer, musician, zinester, and all around source of inspiration. Ms. Caprice interviewed on her show!!! So, I came for the interview with Vag and stayed for the punk kitsch.

If you watch nothing else from Decoupage! please watch this interview with Vaginal Creme Davis where she shows off her zine:

making: girl sculptures

Whenever one of Shin Min’s sculptures comes across my feed, I can’t help but kick my feet and giggle. Shin Min, who goes by the handle fatshinmin on insta, makes huge sculptures of fat, playful girls and if I lived in a mansion, I would surely put on in my front entryway. It’s not a big secret that femme body uniformity is a thing in South Korea, Shin’s homeland where she lives and works, and her sculptures both call attention to that while remaining super funny and cute and joyful.

fatshinmin

A post shared by @fatshinmin

These sculptures are like big doodles come to life in a way. I love how physically imposing they are — you can tell they are just massive by looking at these images of them in galleries — but then at the same time how they’re also super messy and unapologetic in their goofiness. I’d love to make it over to South Korea so I can see them in person!!! But for now, I will just happily scroll through Shin Min’s gram and enjoy from afar.

fatshinmin

A post shared by @fatshinmin

Ok GIRL (so confusing) - that’s all I have for ya!!!!! Hopefully something from this newsletter made you smile or wonder or look at something you’ve never seen before (or remember something you’d once seen but forgotten about).

I love ya and I hope you are all doing well and please let me know what we should call Emily’s aesthetic down in the comments ok byeeeeeeeeeeee