discussed:
who has the aux cord during your dissociative episode
why skirts and dresses over pants is the ideal winter look
snoopy sister
Hey gURLS. I wasn’t sure if I would get this newsletter out this week, but then I found this picture of Vanessa Paradis in a Jean-Charles de Castelbajac coat and I knew I had to carry on.
That’s the thing about what I’m trying to document in this newsletter. The stuff girls like might seem frivolous or dumb or shallow to the rest of the world. And why write about this stuff when it feels like everything is collapsing? When your heart can get broken and it seems like all you can do is scroll and scroll — past war and grief and suffering on such a massive scale.
Because you gotta keep your heart beating. You have to put on your eyeliner and tease your hair and wear a coat made entirely out of Snoopy plushies. Selfish somedays, sure. But the only thing that really matters in the end. Girls know this.
So straight from my heart to yours, here’s a new issue of Internet Bedroom <3
listening: DJ Mandy
You might find Amanda Shultz, aka DJ Mandy, in the club. But you’re more likely to find her online, dead-eyed, DJing from her kitchen counter. Appropriately, her profile description reads LET ME COOK. Put simply, DJ Mandy’s sets, which she chops and screws for her uploads across social media, sound like what would happen if your TikTok was left on auto-scroll. This recent upload, which she posted well after MLK Day, sutures together He is We’s “I Wouldn’t Mind” (merrily we fall out of line/out of line), PSY’s unrelenting 2010s K-Pop single “Gangnam Style,” and MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” finishing off a beat drop on Bad Bhabie’s bratty sleeper hit “Gucci Flip Flops.”
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So much of online culture has become about curating an aesthetic, a brand, even an irony. DJ Mandy defies the pull towards curation by indiscriminately mixing together anything and everything. The landscape of sound that results is hilarious, often unsettling, unlistenable, and, honestly, kind of good. While she admits that DJ Mandy began as a comedy bit, much like the music itself, irony has bled into sincerity and become something new as her comments section is often flooded with listeners remarking, “wait, why is this kinda good?”
My personal favorite set is this one, in which she warps Drake’s inexplicable introduction of his alter ego, Anita Max Wynn, into Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” and Mitski’s “My Love is Mine All Mine,” pitching all these viral sounds up and down at random until they become as nightmarish and twisted as they do at 3 a.m. when I can’t sleep.
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reading: Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz
Journalist Taylor Lorenz has spent the past decade writing about youth culture online, and her resume includes coining the phrase “OK Boomer” and being kicked off Twitter by Elon Musk, all of which sounds highly nightmarish. But being the millennial-writer-on-the-ground (or, I guess, in-the-void) when it comes to digital culture makes Lorenz uniquely qualified to write the history of Internet fame and influence in her first book, Extremely Online.
My read of Extremely Online is not without criticism. The story of how we came to live in the panopticon that is influencer culture and always being online isn’t exactly “untold,” for starters. But I want to recommend it to you grrrls for Lorenz’s keen historicization of social media, which centers how girls and women were a driving force behind the shift that has seen regular people become the digital pop culture.
From mommy bloggers to the scene queens of MySpace, Lorenz’s book had me dreaming about another book somebody should write about the real untold story of the Internet: that of the early Internet It Girls, who were the real reason we were all going on these platforms in the first place.
wearing: skirts and dresses over pants
I’ve lived my entire life in the Midwest, and as a girl growing up in the 2000s who lived far outside of the suburbs where my high school was located, I was no stranger to coming up with creative solutions to keeping warm while waiting for the bus on dark January mornings. This included sometimes throwing on a baggy pair of jeans underneath a pleated skirt like I was a pregnant teenager written by Diablo Cody.
This was a look that was not celebrated at my particular high school, but I loved wearing skirts or dresses over baggy pants because it allowed me to comfortably blend masculine and feminine while also distracting from the fact that I had a DDD cup as a 13-year-old. I don’t care how many times you show me that one picture of Ashley Tisdale, wearing skirts or dresses over pants was definitely an alt look.
So it does warm my heart to see the girls online paying homage to the cold, Midwestern teenagers busing in to boring suburban high schools by coming up with creative ways to bring this y2k look back. I love the look above from gucciganggabi (aka Gabi Menard) where she layers a deconstructed denim micro-mini over a baggy pair of jeans. And this lineup of fits from artist will.o.lord prove just how versatile layering dresses over jeans or pants can be (plus I really want one of their custom pieces <3 <3 <3 so good).
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obsessing: snoopy girls
The Snoopy-Pilling of Girl Internet has been underway for the past year and a half, filling For You Pages and Tumblr blogs with edits and tributes to the little guy. No one is writing about this or its importance, so I am proud to break the Story of the Snoopy Girls right here on Internet Bedroom.
I first noticed the girls gravitating towards Snoopy around the end of 2022, when the TikTok user GROVY GIRL (@itsgrovy) revealed that her little sister only used her phone to make edits of Snoopy, which said little sister would then send to Grovy. In her TikTok introducing Snoopy Sister (@snoopyiscool) and her lore, Grovy admitted that the Snoopy edits were “kinda therapeutic,” a sentiment the rest of the Internet wholeheartedly agreed with.
Soon, Snoopy Sister had amassed thousands of followers and multiple copy cats, like snoopyedits whose perfectly synchronized Snoopy edit set to Gucci Gucci by Kreayshawn remains a high point of Snoopy edits for me personally.
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The demand for Snoopy edits, the Snoopy Sister Lore, being just a little guy — all this was just the beginning of Snoopy Supremacy across the Internet. And it didn’t just start and end with Snoopy. Soon, there were not just Snoopy Girls, but also Miffy Girls, Sonny Angel Girls, Monchichi Girls. As long as the character was a little guy who didn’t talk much, there existed a subset of girls online willing to adopt them as their mascot.
So what are we to make of these cutie talismans? Are they just silly little guys? Or are they a way to push back against the selling of ones time and likeness that happens every day on social media without us noticing that much?
xxx r.m.
next time:
omg next issue drops on Valentine’s Day so you know we’re gonna do something special! I am so hyped because next newsletter is really a love letter to Internet It Girls. You won’t wanna miss out!
listen, my dog is going blind and I spent the entirety of January moving, so I haven’t really wanted to plumb the depths of my soul recently. If anyone wants to send me their VHS copy of Prozac Nation, however, I might get that paid subscriber essay out a little quicker ; )
Love this so much!!!