My Favourite Internet Things (This Week)

I'm going to keep this brief: I've seen quite a few things I liked or otherwise thought were interesting on the internet this week,* so I thought a fun thing to do would be to compile them in a blog post. This also means that I can refer my friends and family directly to this post when I want them to look at the things mentioned, rather than to all the links individually. They probably still won't look at them, but at least this way it's less labour-intensive on my end.

Taylor Swift analyses

After much internal debate, I did eventually decide not to write a bitter blog post about Taylor Swift and the "You Need to Calm Down" controversy, so instead what I'm going to do is share a couple of articles here that mirror my thoughts on the whole thing:

• This article at Slate really nails why Swift's positioning "You Need to Calm Down" as a gay anthem is so insulting and ineffective. It also (unfavourably) compares the song to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way", as a few other articles have done, but I appreciate that Cauterucci acknowledges that Lady Gaga is actually a member of the queer community, not just an ally like Swift.
• I already linked to this article at Esquire in my previous post, but here it is again if you haven't already read it.
• And Esquire did another article on the whole thing - I guess Esquire is gay now? Anyway, this article tackles the making-it-about-yourself issue that was kind of a problem with the song.
• Finally, this piece at the Onion pretty much says it all.

Miscellaneous interesting stuff

Not sure if there's a particular unifying theme among these, except that they are all things I found informative, enlightening, or just amusing.

• Diverse representation in children's literature is still not good enough, as this infographic demonstrates. I believe the data used was American, but I would imagine this is a trend in UK publishing as well (and that's without considering how many of the books kids read here are American anyway).
• An academic named Dr Marijuana Pepsi Jackson recently completed her PhD on "Black names in student classrooms: Teacher behaviors and student perceptions", which was apparently inspired by her own experiences of having an unusual name. This really made me think about the significance of names and how they influence our views of people, and how this is impacted by things like race and class.
• A publisher in Germany found a cool way to get around the country's VAT tax on menstrual hygiene products - by putting tampons in a book. Perhaps they will sell copies in the UK soon?
• I recently went on Spotify.me to see my music listening stats, which sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out exactly what "escape room" as a genre meant, which eventually led me to discovering this website: Every Noise at Once. It's a bit hard to navigate, but it's full of music stats which cover everything from words associated with different genres to what people listen to in cities around the world. It's fascinating and I'm obsessed.
• At The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz wrote this very moving piece about her father and his relationship with books. I think anyone who loves books or comes from a bookish family will appreciate it.
• The revolution against the ruling classes has begun, and that revolution is being led by rats.

YouTube Channels

• I recently watched the 2016 movie Split, about a man with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), and it reminded me of one of my favourite YouTube channels: DissociaDID, which is all about DID and what it's like to live with the disorder. I found it incredibly interesting, and it's great to see people working for better understanding of mental disorders.
• At the moment I'm watching a lot of booktubers as part of a freelance job (yes, really), and one channel I came across recently that I really like is The Bookish Land. All of the videos I've seen have been good, but I especially enjoyed the ones on Chinese literature, which are very informative if (like me) it's not a branch of literature that you're very familiar with.

Fun stuff

Here are some of the things that have recently been consuming my time (and preventing me from actually applying for jobs, like I should be) far more than I'd like to acknowledge.

• I have watched this video of Jigglypuff singing Hedwig's Theme from the Harry Potter films every day since I discovered it over a week ago. It is the single greatest source of joy in my life now.
• This other video is the second greatest source of joy in my life, and I don't know why.
• You can now fulfil your childhood dreams of playing Dr Frankenstein with your favourite video game creatures by using this Pokémon hybrid creator. I've seen two "challenges" associated with this thing: with the first one, whatever hybrid appears when you load the page is your starter Pokémon; with the other challenge, you put the first letter of your first and last names in the first and second boxes respectively, and then the Pokémon that comes up is.... you, I guess? Anyway, all of mine were loveable yet horrifying, so I've left the tweet I posted about them below.

I tried that challenge where you put in the first letter of your first and last names and see what hybrid Pokémon you get, and all of my creations scare me pic.twitter.com/cNagi7wHS7

— Mary BP (@marytocracy) June 23, 2019

*Okay, they're not all from this week, because I was late to the party on some of the links and also have no concept of the passage of time, but I like to think that they have aged like fine wines rather than stale hot takes.

Feel free to comment below if you have any thoughts on the links I've mentioned or suggestions of other interesting internet things to look at. Also let me know, either by commenting or messaging me directly (since I know most of you readers anyway), if you've enjoyed this post and would like this link-sharing to be a weekly/monthly/regular thing. I'll probably do it anyway, because I've decided I don't need external validation anymore, but the support is always nice.