Some thoughts after three months of Yap Year <3

Happy Thursday! I’m behind on Love Island USA (and have dropped the ball on the OG Love Island) but I have a lot of Thoughts on the state of the franchise. I’m gonna save it for next week so that I can catch up on USA first. 

Consider today’s newsletter as part Lore Drop and part reflection on the first three months of Yap Year (happy anni to me <3). I have loved the internet since I was a child playing Club Penguin on my home desktop. I’ve played with every new social media site since Facebook became open to the general public. I’ve always found platforms to be an interesting outlet for creative expression, but as I’ve gotten older, it has become far less fun. Everything feels higher stakes now.

More on this below for paid subscribers, so subscribe to the Yapper tier so you don’t miss it. Thank you all for three months of Yap Year! It has been a pleasure writing and hearing your feedback so far. 🫶🏻

If you’re in NYC, don’t forget to vote in the Mayoral Election! Early voting is happening now until June 22. Election day is June 24. Find your polling place here. I’m ranking the slate with Zohran Mamdani as my No. 1, followed by Brad Lander, Zellnor Myrie, Adrienne Adams, and Michael Blake. Don’t rank Andrew Cuomo!

I’ve lived many lives online. That is the beauty and the promise of the internet — you can constantly reinvent yourself with every new service that pops up. 

I have cycled through every trend and platform in the social media age, especially in the glory days of the 2010s when the internet still felt new and like a playground to be explored.

Throughout my teenage years, I started a fashion blog with a friend and a corresponding YouTube channel for it; tried to become “Tumblr famous”; started a makeup Instagram inspired by YouTube’s beauty gurus; and self-published two issues of a magazine on Issuu after failing to secure media internships (nuked off the site unfortunately).

All of this is to say that I’ve had a lot of trial runs with the whole “content creator” thing. It informs my work as a internet culture journalist. I appreciate the form and have consumed online media my entire life.

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