What's something you could give a 2 hour lecture on, no preparation needed?
Happy Thursday!
If we were to go into how Brieana's week has been, Brieana would emotionally fall apart for the maybe twentieth time this week, so let's pretend she's fine and it's fine.
I wish I had more time to write a cool newsletter like last week, but maybe that's an every other week thing. But there's always my girl, ANNE HELEN PETERSEN coming in for the clutch.
In case you didn't know, I love reading her newsletter, Culture Study. I always find it super fascinating, and she really is excellent at digging deep into things that normally I would not care about at all. Her latest obsession? RushTiktok! It's always interesting when she's working on a new piece because there's a flood of IG stories about a topic. It's also interesting because her audience is quite intelligent, and if I think about messaging something like "Hmm, why are all these sororities doing very Black music for their tiktok dances," when I go to the next post, someone has already asked that!
But I don't want to dive into her specific posts except for this last one that came out yesterday. Within it she talks about what are things that are worthy to be discussed in a long form essay, ie Rich Texts? Obviously for her, those things include RushTalk, Nap Dresses, and more, but at the end she asks
If we were to go into how Brieana's week has been, Brieana would emotionally fall apart for the maybe twentieth time this week, so let's pretend she's fine and it's fine.
I wish I had more time to write a cool newsletter like last week, but maybe that's an every other week thing. But there's always my girl, ANNE HELEN PETERSEN coming in for the clutch.
In case you didn't know, I love reading her newsletter, Culture Study. I always find it super fascinating, and she really is excellent at digging deep into things that normally I would not care about at all. Her latest obsession? RushTiktok! It's always interesting when she's working on a new piece because there's a flood of IG stories about a topic. It's also interesting because her audience is quite intelligent, and if I think about messaging something like "Hmm, why are all these sororities doing very Black music for their tiktok dances," when I go to the next post, someone has already asked that!
But I don't want to dive into her specific posts except for this last one that came out yesterday. Within it she talks about what are things that are worthy to be discussed in a long form essay, ie Rich Texts? Obviously for her, those things include RushTalk, Nap Dresses, and more, but at the end she asks
What is the rich text you’d love to read 5000 words (or more) on, and what, exactly, makes it so rich?
And obviously people can answer (and did... I really need to subscribe!!!), but it made me pause. And honestly, considering how my brain is 99% focused on a certain celebrity (and their social media team who truly haunts me), the fact that I paused about anything was kind of a relief.
(Side note, I have not slept a full night in about a month, so I do apologize if I sound off at all.)
But it's always such a delight to see people who are super passionate about something dive in discussing it and dive in deep. Obviously, y'all know about my love of video games, but I got a couple of "ohs!" from last week about the side of Youtube I find really interesting and how much I've been thinking about it. I super appreciated Anne Helen Petersen's article about the houseplant obsession and Barbieheimer, but I would love an article (and she might have done this but my brain = mush) on the restocking trend for like fridges and how that has kind of changed how certainly container stores (like The Container Store, obviously) have changed around their promotions.
Hell, I was in The Container Store last week, and it was pushing the college angle hard, and it made me realized that Bed Bath and Beyond, which was across the street, was now gone and how marketing from big box stores like the CS store I'm not typing again, Target, Costco, and more now have to ramp up their College Stuff advertising to vie for that corner of the market. But also - how much did they have before?? I want to see a post about this!
Maybe because it's been such a week (month, summer, year, two years, lifetime???) of me being overwhelmed and how it's usually so easy to vanish into the newest obsession with the same mindless energy of scrolling Instagram, it's been fun to let my brain obsess over something that requires a little more effort. Like, could I replay Kingdom Hearts for the ten thousandth time? Duh, and I will. But can I also be a little curious and dive into an area I'm not really well versed but want to learn more about just because? Yeah! And it's nice to find those things that keep my attention in such a way.
Wow this was longer than I thought it would be! Onto recs.
- So I found this super interesting Youtube Channel - Cinema Stix - one night after I woke up from a nightmare and could not go back to sleep, so I binged this entire channel, and it was truly delightful! If you've heard of the channel Every Frame A Painting, it feels like that, with a short snippet and analysis about a movie. I honestly watched every video and would recommend almost all of them, but I really liked this one about Ocean's Eleven, or when a director prioritized character over plot.
- As someone's whose company requires an amount of days per week she refuses to think about very very soon, this video about office jobs makes me laugh.
- If you haven't seen Kingsmen, this might not make sense to you, but one of my former coworkers was always concerned that I would watch the Church Scene to cheer myself up when I was sad at work. Now, if you haven't seen if, don't google the scene - just watch the movie! It's a tropey, wink wink call to the secret world of British Spies and Colin Firth looks super attractive in it. If you have seen it, check out this video about how they filmed the Church Scene. Apparently it was supposed to be twice as long! I could've just watched an entire movie that was that scene...
Have a nice weekend.
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