peaks and valleys: april 2022
much like olivia wilde's custody papers, i am serving this to you in the middle of a movie premiere (by movie premiere i mean me once again showing friends kevin gates talkin about rihanna's forehead)
this post is too long for email so you can read it here or download the substack reader app for iphone.
peaks
taylor swift finally acknowledged her trauma dump of an album (which is why it is my favourite) evermore by dropping the merch for it on april fools day… she is so insane for that!!! truly one of the megaminds of our generation.
i wish i was over this album after all this time but it truly has such a tight grip on me (and my playlists). right where you left me (miss havisham coded) and ivy (!!!) are ingrained in my brain but cowboy like me is near and dear to my cold dead yee yee heart.
with the united states hitting a million deaths total since covid began two years ago, there is something about evermore that still hits as hard as it did when it debuted december 2020. the knowing you have to move on but feeling Stuck in the past seemingly forever more. things are feeling more normal with each day but will we ever fully get back to The Before? there has been such immeasurable loss of loved ones + the back and forth of restrictions and quarantines that it sometimes seems impossible.
i know covid is pretty near the bottom of the totem of Most Pressing Issues on the docket of our attentions, but i think it was hard for me to fully accept it as an endemic because of how sloppily the people we elect and pay to be in charge fumbled, well everything pretty much every step of the way. unlike taylor, i DO need your closure coronavirus!!!! what is the truth!!!! what is the scientific right/good/unselfish thing to do now?? but i guess it is like taylor also said, “in your soul, you know when it’s time to go. so then you go (and stop talking about a nearly two year old global pandemic and album). you just go” even when the cdc (and taylor’s social media coverage of evermore) seems more aligned with vanessa hudgens and no body, no crime….
megan the stallion @ coachella! while the overall outfits from attendees of week 1 and (do not even get me started on) week 2 left much to be desired, megan ate with not a crumb in sight under the most advanced telescope. sorry i am just running out of ways to say megan THEE stallion!!! the Looks! the stage presence! the songs!! the freestyle?!?! POPPING PLAN Bs CAUSE I AIN’T PLAN TO BE STUCK WITH YOU?!?!?!?! i know for a fact that megan would NEVER write a song about logan paul so even when i am at my ugliest, i will always be a Hottie!!!!!!!
hayley williams joined billie eyelash onstage at coachella week 2 and sang misery business. on any given day, this would be showstopping amazing unique never been done before etc but paramore has pretty much retired the beloved anthem from their setlists so it felt even more of a Moment. seeing the younger generation also knowing and loving the songs we grew up with officially solidified my status as an old head :/
paramore has been with me for most of my life but a severely devastating breakup with a best friend a few years ago caused me to be unable to experience the joy listening to the band we both loved. i think friendship breakups are more devastating than romantic ones (certainly in my experience) because there is something so specific about each friendship that can never be truly duplicated or forgotten. people i thought i would spend the rest of my life with never even cross my mind anymore but no longer being able to send that instagram meme to someone… there has been so much loss over the past few years that hearing my favourite hairstylist ceo belt the words that have echoed through every shower i have been in for the past !FIFTEEN! years felt so cathartic and healing. and god does That feel so good.
r/place. in a person’s life you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself spend four days on reddit doing international wars over pixel art.
essentially, reddit brought back a special event where everyone in the world joins a blank space and can make art, one pixel at a time every few minutes. communities on the internet banded together to make artwork of their favourite content creators, video games, movies, memes, etc.
twitch streamers from around the world racked up hundreds of thousands of concurrent live viewers as the war of the pixels raged on but nothing was funnier than the entire country of france taking up “too much space” on the map with their odes to their country and making them a target of pretty much everyone.
and i am not sure if you have ever heard an angry french man yell in english but hearing “vee onlee vant to make bew tea full arrt” or “zorry for ze dms yew arre reeceeving” is a million times funnier than whatever unaired oscars joke amy schumer forces us to hear this week.
kourtney kardashian and travis barker getting married!!! i personally love a vegas wedding! kourtney and travis also, in my humble opinion, are the most believable of the hot girl sickly emo guy celeb couples. they seem like they are actually having fun! they both are in their 40s with kids they love and mostly minding their business, barely even inviting us all into theirs…unlike The Others… i also unironically love kourtney even more than i love knowing that scott disick is punching the air right now and emailing raya support to see if they can lower the youngest age on the app.
i swear that i planned to watch the batman in april. i also still have 273 movies and tv shows in the queue. but alas, i spent most of free time watching/rewatching all perfect 13 episodes of the first season of abbott elementary, wondering why i am still watching grey’s anatomy, wondering what is going to replace the trauma porn sized hole in my heart when this is us wraps up its final season, feeling HOODWINKED by the amount of jake johnson screentime i was tricked into believing minx would have, making memes for my favourite himbo, losing my marbles over series 5 of spanish riverdale aka elite on netflix, and falling deeply in love with anthony bridgerton (enough to MOMENTARILY consider buying the bridgerton monopoly).
and yet the highlight was getting to expose more people to the best worst thing i have ever seen: the hating game (now streaming on hulu). overall, nothing i watched in april really feels worth writing home about. i am currently galavanting with gay pirates on hbomax and have my ticket for everything everywhere all at once! also, i will finally be riddler coded when i watch the THREE HOUR batman. i will likeky continue watching the mormon show and riverdale but, honestly, i am open to suggestions because the Content lately is making me less content than i would like it to!!
valleys
honestly, the news has been bleak. the valleys of april have been so hard to write about which is why you are receiving this much later than normal!!!
constantly hearing about and seeing the defamation case of amber heard and johnny depp is so deeply upsetting. the case is rooted in domestic violence. any other case similar to this one would not cause fancams. i know everyone has an Opinion but as your resident gossip girl, i can confidently tell you that both parties are DEEPLY rotted to the core. there are no perfect victims, though, and talking about this case gives me the ick because of the subject matter of their separate abuse being so brutal and triggering.
ultimately, johnny and amber will be fine regardless of the case outcome. the real loser is the general public who is being used to get the true desired effect of this case. this is a case designed to redeem a public image not investigate domestic violence claims or audio recordings. based on your own personal experiences, you will identify and feel protective over one person and project those experiences onto people that have not walked the same path as you. spending 2 million a month does not remove you from being a victim but conflating your experience with theirs is not based in reality! with peace and love!!!
THE REAL CASE WE SHOULD ALL BE PAYING ATTENTION TO that i will probably do an actual deep dive on for subscribers now that it is finished (for now) is blac chyna v the kardashians!
as loyal readers know, no matter how old i get i will always be an ipad kid at heart. i love making silly memes and watching youtube videos on my little medium sized screen. in the more than a decade of being a youtube consumer, i have gone through waves of content consumption from various creators. while thomas huxley probably meant science and languages and other actual productive use of time, i apply his philosophy of knowing everything about something and something about everything to my content consumption as i manage to know something about pretty much every creator and everything about (too many) particular creators.
as youtube’s algorithm and model rarely lets a creator age up with their audiences, i have very few people that i watched in 2005 that still get my loyal clicks. one such channel that fell to the wayside of my notification hub was the saccone-jolys. yes, i am ashamed to admit that i once was a regular viewer of exactly two family channels: the ace family and the saconne-jolys. so, yeah…
while the ace family’s woes are more financial and business ethical in nature, the saconne-jolys have consistently found themselves in not quite boiling but perhaps uncomfortably warm water with their content: their children in their videos. if there is a single family or kids channel out there that is not exploiting (at best) their children, it would be such a warm welcome in a sea of truly horrifying stories that surround every single family channel that has ever disgraced youtube’s unregulated and unpaid child performer factory.
anna and jonathan saconne-joly were daily vloggers. they had two cute kids (now 4) and too many (6) dogs. but they were irish and sweet and mostly normal. when i watched, they never did pranks or weird clickbaits but just showed the mundane every day routines. i would love to fact check by looking at old videos but they have all been privated. jonathan claims to have privated them because their eldest daughter is 9 years old now and he wants to respect the kids privacy but she is still widely featured on his tiktok…so what is the truth?
***UPDATE! when i originally started writing this, every single video had been privated but as of yesterday, the channel is no longer empty and has 161 videos. which means 3, 283 videos still remain hidden on their channel. he also deleted the tiktok he had up explaining his reasoning by privating the videos***
i have said it a million times over that
YOUTUBE NEEDS TO REGULATE YOUTUBE THE WAY CHILD ACTORS HAVE LAWS PROTECTING THEM IN HOLLYWOOD!!!
i loved watching this family live their silly lives while i got ready for bed and i think it was very brave (if not darkly and deeply Content Brained) of them to talk about anna’s miscarriage so in depth as they were processing it. especially because when they did it, it was still not a common thing to talk about despite how many women experience them as well as fertility issues and the everyday ups and downs of pregnancy. but all of that still does not negate the fact that kids do not need to be on camera at all but especially 24/7/365 which is what the saccone-joly family did for eight years before switching it to every two days.
family channels have had to turn their comments sections off due to pedophiles time stamping clips of the children. AND YET THEY SIMPLY TURN OFF COMMENTS AND THEN KEEP CHURNING CONTENT OUT. something has to change and quickly!!!!! it has been years since i tapped in with the saccone-jolys and one of the main reasons was the kids saying they hated being on camera! family channels are bad!!! but content revolving around children is evil!!! free ryan’s toys!!!!!!!!
and SORRY but it is giving very much trisha paytas of capitalising off something that is very trendy by jonathan making his nonbinary identity his entire identity and their second child’s trans journey the entire content on their youtube channel and tiktok. this is not a commentary on identity politics or either of their personal journeys, but there IS something very ick and sinister about capitalising off of something that is so personal in the most exploitive way possible. there are plenty of lgbtq content creators especially trans creators who make content about their lives/experiences/journeys in a way that feels authentic and educational (which is what jonathan says he wants to do with making constant content of their 8 year old trans daughter) not clickbait-y and disingenuous.
and speaking of disingenuous….the don’t say gay legislation. while it is very fun to see celebrities yell variations of GAY RIGHTS! on their social media, it would be nice to see someone actually address the real issue with florida man’s latest endeavour. gay people are real and they exist!!! they are teachers and lawyers and delivery drivers and doctors and pilots etc! we have lives outside of brunch, sometimes.
despite what the ryan murphy franchises will have you believe, being gay is only a small portion of identity not the entire personality. a teacher can be married to the same sex and acknowledging that to their students is not describing their sex life in detail unlike every hetero who starts actually ideologically grooming children from birth with mundane things like “you are going to break a lot of boys’ hearts” “do you have a boyfriend yet? no boys until you are 30!” etc etc etc.
how is it 2022 and we are regressing back socially and legislatively DECADES. grow up! log off of facebook or whatever knockoff social media platform and read literally any book please i am begging you!!!! pokemon going to the polls is not enough i truly am at a loss for why this is happening and how we can make it actually stop or even if we can :-(
megan fox and kim k are still trying to be kourtney but are only proving that falling in love with your sleep paralysis demon is possible. ok that may have been way harsh, tai! but i am so tired IN 2022 of celebrities trying to conjure up press the way i assume people did in like 1932! grow up!!!! i do not want to see pete davidson become his real spray tan ken doll he pretended to be for that old photo shoot with julia fox or hear about whatever blood rituals megan fox and the number one mens’ rights activist are up to! celebrities are so boring!!! where is the flavour?!?! celebrity blinds are going mainstream now because even normies are bored to tears of these flop pr stunts! gimme gimme MORE a c t u a l entertainment and less gabagool nonsense activity to currate headlines that seem to be spewed from a random words generator. this is why i flock to the julia fox and martha stewarts of the celebrity world!!!! if you are going to be out of touch, make it interesting and worth my while please!!!!!
seeing dave from chromeo on hasan piker’s twitch stream reminded me of the period in my life when i was The Chromeo Simp. so i started going through old tweets on my old account from when i thought i wanted to be An Influencer. a truly Haunted graveyard!!! i will never claim to be perfect by any stretch of the imagination but once again asking ??? to people who blame youth on their terrible racist/homophobic online posts. cringe? no diggity no doubt!!! like physically painful!! but ten years ago i was still just tweeting about girl bossing and begging dave from chromeo to love me. and not much has changed, sadly.
elon musk bought twitter. hate that!!! obviously he sucks but if i spoke more on my feelings about the man with a fake hairline and a real knack for union busting, i would end up on a federal watchlist. so instead i would like to focus this valley on a man i love but has caused me deep pain….by not changing the trajectory of every bone and muscle in my body!!!! dr. andrew jacono is a plastic surgeon allegedly but i think this man actually dabbles in the dark arts. so many times, i have almost dedicated an entire post to this man’s work that he displays on his instagram but would be just as readily showcased in a damn museum. he has worked on celebrities and has truly done tremendous work but seeing ordinary women instantly lose twenty years after getting a face lift from him??? i want that! ultimately, though, peak beauty for me will still always be big ang and miss piggy.
that is all for this month…the post-daylight savings seasonal depression definitely is getting me good, gal! writing the valleys was even more than what olivia rodrigo had in mind when she wrote brutal. things are looking very bad i fear. hopefully nothing life altering and devastating for millions of women happens in america in may!!
the himbo revolution is mostly done but been having a bit of writer’s block!!! and we lost one of our strongest soldiers jack harlow so been slightly bummed about that and working it into the narrative! sorry for being a weasley little liar but i actually promise for real this time that it will be headed your way sometime this month, subscribers! you will also be getting sunday scaries and ggbg and perhaps even a little surprise in between <3