Hello! This week, teen and teen-adjacent content: TikTok, a film about high school and a graphic novel about teens in space. Plus, is individual environmentalism a waste of time (no) and my favourite newsletter.

Article: TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface by Jason Parham, published by Wired in August 2020
In my mind, this article is the natural successor to this 2017 Teen Vogue piece on reaction gifs and digital blackface. (“These GIFs often enact fantasies of black women as “sassy” and extravagant, allowing nonblack users to harness and inhabit these images as an extension of themselves.”) Who is censored, celebrated and tokenized on social media, specifically the giant of teen social media, TikTok? The answers... won’t shock you.

Film: Selah and the Spades, written and directed by Tayarisha Poe (2020)
A couple of weeks ago it rained all day on Sunday, so we had a double matinee in our living rooms. There’s something so luxurious to me about watching a film (or anything, really!) in the middle of the day, and a themed double-header is the best approach. That Sunday it was films with teens. Selah and the Spades is set at a fictional boarding school in the US. Different factions rule the school; Selah rules hers, and with it the thriving drug supply to the school’s rich students. But this is not an ordinary teen films – it’s highly stylised (you can really tell that director/writer Tayarisha Poe was influenced by both Wes Anderson and Rihanna) and moves somewhere between realism and high school fairytale. A joy to watch.

Book: On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden
I recommended a Tillie Walden graphic novel before (in #7 of this tinyletter), and as I said then, I bought another one, and that was On A Sunbeam. It turned out to be one of my favourite, most absorbing reading experiences of the year. This is a queer space opera, or, as Walden describes it, “my initial goal with Sunbeam was to create a version of outer space that I would want to live in. So of course that includes tons of queer people, no men (did you notice?), trees, old buildings, and endless constellations.” It’s so beautifully made and so emotionally compelling that it left me feeling open and hopeful and emotional for a few hours. Which is pretty good in 2020! I really enjoyed reading it cover to cover in print, but it was originally a webcomic and you can read the whole thing on the project’s website. (If anyone has good webcomic recs, especially works in progress, let me know! Some of my favourite reading experiences have been webcomics, especially when they update just when you need them to.)

Learning: All That Performative Environmentalism Adds Up by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic
One of the things I worry about all the time is systemic versus individual action. I don’t want to get too caught up in either to forget about the importance of the other. This article helped me sort out some of my feelings about whether my individual environmentalism is pointless (it is not). 

Other: The Rec Center newsletter
This is the only newsletter I open as soon as it arrives in my inbox, a weekly collection of articles, memes, funny tweets, art and recs from the fandom world. I read it Saturday morning in bed and usually cackle loudly at least once. Includes articles about topics such as the “haute couture history of Sailor Moon”, K-pop fan activism and primers on time travel fanfic. What’s not to like!

That's it! Bye!