women doing things

plus fav vs. fave, I'm excited about hacks season 3, etc. 👸🏾

When I was compiling this issue of Enrichment Activities, I kept noticing that I was just straight up doing this:

Men can make art too or whatever but consider this post my International Women’s Day. This is me passing the Bechdel test. My all-women Ghostbusters cast—actually, no, not that. Anyway. Eat up!

hbo hax

I’m not ready for the person I am going to be when Hacks is back on air. A show I’ve marketed to any unsuspecting person in my life as “slow burn showbiz age-gap lesbians from some of the people who brought you Broad City,” Hacks is triumphantly marching towards a much-anticipated season 3 after getting murdered during the strike/the HBO Maxacre, only to rise again, in the style of Jesus or Jon Snow or Futurama. And thank GOD because the WAY in which I need to see this ship canonized. I’m not like this about literally anything else, I’m like 99% out of the woods from my Tumblr fandom years, I just really really really need them to “will they” because they’ve been doing sooooo much “won’t they” that it’s driving me insane. Here’s the trailer, and at 1:23 you’ll understand the scream me and my roommate/fellow Hacker Emily just scrumpt:

On May 2nd I will be seated and donning my metaphorical garish sequined jumpsuit. You should be too.

dream blunt rotation: the movie

Elsewhere in Entertainment News, life still hasn’t returned to normal since I read this headline:

Someone get the defibrillator??? Are they even allowed to do this?? This sounds like a dream I would have and then I’d wake up and cry because I knew it would be too good to be true? Like one of those impossibly high-powered fan casts that used to circulate online after the publication of a dystopian YA novel? The idea of this movie is gonna be my whole personality from now on. Now I know why AMC invented A-List—so I can personally insure that it does numbers on its opening weekend.

I’m drooling all over the place wondering what the story is gonna be. Some thought-starters off the top of my head:

• A perpetually stoned dolphin trainer (Palmer) and a beautiful but chaotic mermaid performer (SZA) at a disreputable aquarium in south Florida rescue a rare albino baby sea lion from the clutches of their weird boss (Woody Harrelson) and must drive across the country to California to release her into her natural habitat, pursued by his henchmen.

• When an accidentally racist, out-of-touch ad campaign leads to the embarrassing cancellation of a major brand, the advertising agency who they go to after firing those responsible tasks a Virgo girlboss influencer slash copywriter (SZA) and a quirky butch lesbian art director (Palmer) with rehabilitating their new client’s image. It’s a modern-day Black girl Mad Men.

• In this comedy mystery, two former child stars reunite as adults after twenty years of no contact following a bad falling out—one who became a raunchy reality personality on a Real Housewives-esque show (SZA) and one who walked away from fame to become a mother (Palmer) to a daughter who wants to be an actress. They reunite to solve the disappearance of their third co-star, who left a few clues only they can decipher, leading them on a quest that has them facing uncomfortable truths about their pasts.

which is your favorite?

Before I say anything else: whose side are you on?

I conducted some Instagram poll research a while ago about how people were shorthanding “favorite.” The catalyst for this poll was that at work, my coworker provided me with copy that included the word “faves.” I changed it to “favs” in the design because I personally only use “fav” and had never really considered spelling it “fave” before, and she gave me a note to “correct” the “spelling mistake” AKA revert it to “fave.” This made me wonder—is this an age group thing, like how my little sister will use “n” as an abbreviation for “and” which I never do? Is there a correct and incorrect spelling, or is it just a matter of personal preference?

For the poll, I asked people to self-report which they preferred, and then cross-referenced that with my own archives of text messages from them. Some people voted that they used one but in texts heavily favored the other, some used both interchangeably. “Without the E it looks like it’s pronounced ‘fahv’ instead of ‘fayv’” was a prevailing line of reasoning from the Fave Favorers, which I get, but also I’m not losing sleep over anyone not understanding what I mean by “fav.” “Fav” was the overall fav, which I did consider to be somewhat correlated with my Gen Z demographic, but one of the most fervent Fav Favorers in my texts was my Gen X mom. Here’s some further reading that explores which version of the word major publications tend to use, because apparently we need them to tell us what to do. Enrichment Activities proudly favors fav.

extremely badass extremely well-documented anti-genocide student movement

As stupid as social media can be, and as much as I spend all my time yapping in complaint about it, especially in this newsletter, I have never been more grateful that it exists than I have been during the last six months of US-funded genocide in Palestine. Without first-hand accounts of the devastation on platforms like Instagram, the average person in America would never be able to see what was really going on there, cockblocked as we are from the truth by the media companies in the bad guys’ pocket, curled up against their checkbook. The incoming TikTok ban is direct proof of just how threatening youth-led social media is to the crickety old men at the top, who would rather we just use it to buy things instead of informing ourselves outside of their propaganda. In the everyone’s-a-journalist world of modern social media, I’m glad it’s serving a more noble purpose than its handlers would’ve wanted, even as Meta tries to censor these voices.

After seeing the US-funded atrocities abroad, student protestors and their allies are now taking to Instagram and TikTok to document and spread information about the protest movement on college campuses all over the world, forming encampments sustained by a network who communicate online to make sure they have the resources to stay. I’ve never been more proud of the Columbia student body, which is something I never thought I’d say after graduating, and I’m so inspired by their bravery in the fight for what is right. I hope that at some point in time, Columbia is fucking embarrassed by the bitter irony of being a school that pats itself on the back for earning the nickname “the Protest Ivy” yet runs to their NYPD besties at absolutely breakneck speeds to sic their $29 million taxpayer dollars a day pig task force on its own students for peacefully protesting a genocide. In another twenty years, they’ll tout this very movement on every prospective student tour like it was their idea all along.

always a dull moment

“I’m only on Facebook to buy shit on Marketplace!” I scream until my vocal cords snap, meanwhile, a tiny and perverted part of myself loves exploring the decaying caverns of Facebook.com like it’s a fucking archaeological dig. As the largest and most fossilized social media currently active, like, yeah, I’m totally gonna poke around in here, all the while saying the meanest possible things I can think of about Mark Zuckerberg aloud if anyone whose impression of me I care remotely about is in earshot. I’m an anti-Facebook Facebooker, or whatever the backs of those hoodies used to say.

This research has generated an exciting discovery: I have stumbled across a gem on the has-been website that would even impress Arte Fact at the Curio Shop. Dull Women’s Club is a public Facebook group of 924k self-proclaimed “dull women” from around the world, who post unglamorously about the minutiae of their offline lives, but posting all the same, like anti-influencer influencers.

“a dull monotone giggle.” no notes, love it

They introduce themselves and their “dull” jobs, hobbies, and habits, attaching not necessarily a negative connotation to this word but instead using (reclaiming?) it to almost mean something like… “real”? An inner peace to be found by decentering the endless tortured scramble of Internet aspirationalism and instead actively choosing to celebrate the mundane?

dull, regardless of the fact that the name “honey mae shashaah” sounds like it came right off a rupaul’s drag race cast list.

And man, are they active. They are firing off what are often essentially just Tweets like Elon never bought Twitter, a constant stream of random thoughts from the nurse at your elementary school or your old neighbor’s British mother and a metric ton of self-consciously boring phone photography. It was a relaxingly low-serotonin activity to scroll through these pictures of backyards, assorted cats, and regular-looking women in their 60s. And to them, it’s a convincing argument for the social media version of heaven.

i adore this one

They do strangely talk about their shoe sizes and bananas (?) a lot, though according to their admin rules page, “SHOE SIZES & BANANAS are something fun and completely optional,” which, I’m so sorry, doesn’t clear that up one bit. One lady included her blood type along with her shoe size in her intro, which made me worried for a sec that this group has some kind of scary black market medical underbelly, dull women advertising their bodies to be taken over by aliens or something.

I guess that’s one of my main takeaways from reading this page—I kept wondering what the catch was, when it was gonna get weird, which clue was gonna alert me that this is inevitably some kind of fetish thing, something impure beneath all this “dull” signaling which would prove to be only a diversion. It was like watching that Adam Driver movie Paterson, where it’s just this guy’s monotonous life and the whole time you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, for his girlfriend to leave him or his bulldog to choke to death, but instead it’s just… dull. Like if nothing happened at the end of Jeanne Dielman. The Internet is such a sensational attention economy that the only reason you’d ever see something is because it’s outcompeted a bunch of other flashy shit for supremacy on the TL, so you’re always expecting a certain level of theatre. The dramatized lives of rich, artificially-enhanced Hot People have become the norm in our social media world where everything is sharp and heightened, but perhaps a new character is now on the digital horizon. Maybe the dull women will save us all.

criminally adorable picture i took of my roommate tortilla basking in a ray of sunshine

well-behaved women rarely make daisies

this is how i'm announcing that i am learning spanish on duolingo. i'm tired of not being able to understand the gossip at my laundromat in los sures.

Stress Positions (2024)

If you’re a Search Party enjoyer like me, please please please follow John Early to his latest project, the similarly-initialed Stress Positions. It’s a movie about millennial loserism set in summer 2020, when that generation’s fragmented, isolated interpersonal relationships were rendered literal and external at the height of Covid lockdown. Early plays the hilariously-named Terry Goon, a gay disaster in his mid-30s who married his rich boss when he was an intern, only to be eventually replaced by a new intern once he got “old.” Now squatting in one of his soon-to-be-ex-husband’s properties, a decaying Brooklyn brownstone, he finds himself the caregiver of his sister’s 19-year-old Moroccan-American son (Qaher Harhash), a beautiful male model with a broken leg. And it’s a pandemic, so there’s that.

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Terry’s friend, a trans woman named Karla (played by the film’s writer/director, Theda Hammel), is similarly trapped in a living situation that she must contort herself to fit into in order to maintain—she’s in an expired, bed-dead relationship with her girlfriend, Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), who pays for their Greenpoint apartment with the money she made off of an offensive book she wrote based on Karla’s life.

at the screening I attended, theda hammel was interviewed by torrey peters who wrote detransition, baby and who immediately asked her if they were “even” because apparently torrey wrote a character based on theda into her book, and then theda wrote a character (vanessa) who wrote her character (karla) into her book, who even lived in torrey’s real-life apartment, which was a filming location for the movie.

It’s a lot of Millennials Behaving Badly, a lot of improper mask-wearing, a lot of white people talking out of their asses about the Middle East, and a lot of period-appropriately patterned Baggu. I had a great time. It elicited both laughter and cringes, and there’s a chaotic sequence involving a Theragun that I will never fucking forget. Go see it at the IFC!

This is week’s Enrichment Activity is to come up with your own plotline for the Issa Rae-produced Keke Palmer/SZA movie. You can share it with me or keep it to yourself but in any case maybe Issa Rae is secretly combing Substack for story ideas and we could potentially Incept her.