mailbag: your 'i was the main character' stories

Before we go on (brief! I promise!) hiatus and move to a seasonal format, Jamie takes a look at your submitted stories about being the main character -- from viral pets to grieving online to reckoning with your relationship to a changing internet, we explore the spectrum of what it means to be too online. Bonus: one of Jamie's favorite memes of all time calls in!

Thank you for making the first year of Sixteenth Minute so special, see you soon <3

Buy Raw Dog here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250847751/rawdog/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Join us.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
Said six.

Speaker 4 (00:55):
Hello, and welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where
we talk to the internet's characters of the see how
their moment affected them and what that says about us
and the Internet. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus, and today
we are closing a chapter of sixteenth Minute, and I'm
turning the mic over to you, my listeners, to share

(01:15):
your experiences being the main character and reflect a little
bit about your experiences online. And normally at the top
of an episode, I would go on as I do,
but I'm actually on the road right now promoting the
paperback version of my book Raw Dog Ian Let's get
a horn in there. But I've actually been meeting a

(01:37):
lot of sixteenth Minute listeners.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
It's been really cool. I just I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:42):
I work in a series of small rooms and it's
easy to forget that people actually are hearing this. But
as I'm writing this right now, I am sitting in
a hotel bed with my mom, drinking large iced from
Dunks in Boston with a mild hangover because my friend
Tory and I decided to be annoying at our favorite
margarita bar from college until two am last night, So

(02:06):
I feel great.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
I'm home and I'm happy, and.

Speaker 4 (02:09):
So it just feels like the perfect moment to reflect
on what has been a very chaotic and wonderful year
with this show. So, in case you missed it, sixteenth minute,
the show is here to stay, but after our first year,
we are going to be taking a short hiatus and
are going to return in the summer with a more

(02:31):
seasonal format, closer to the limited series work I did
before this week to week format where I'm going to
do deep dives and more thorough reporting on the corners
of the Internet that I feel are under archived or
under explored. So things to look out for the Internet
and death, the actual science behind ASMR, a genre I've

(02:55):
been consuming for.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
A decade and know very little about.

Speaker 4 (02:58):
Think about how the Internet connect to justice, connect to
court cases, connects to incarceration. We're going to have a
time on the sixteenth minute feed. But this last year
talking to the characters of the day from week to
week has been so fascinating. I felt so challenged and

(03:19):
hopefully have grown a lot as a result. And the
most important thing to me is to thank the subjects
of this show who have so generously given me and
you their trust in sharing their stories.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
It was really really cool.

Speaker 4 (03:36):
And an honor to you know, have an and shape
those stories.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 4 (03:42):
This show has challenged my relationship and continued addiction to
the Internet, and you know, more than anything, it's been
fun to learn about people whose image and whose legacy
we kind of take for granted.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Right.

Speaker 4 (03:57):
Plus, I'm a yapper and it's terminal, soho worked great
for me, And so much of sixteenth minute has been
made between here where I am right now in Massachusetts
and at home where I live in Los Angeles and
making a show like this, as I was saying, mostly
on my couch or in hotel rooms or in hospital bathrooms,

(04:18):
because yes, the entire thirty to fifty Faral Hogs episode
was recorded in a hospital bathroom with our incredible crew
of three, my producer Sophie and Ian and weekly voice
work from Grant. Making the show feels very small and personal,
and so getting ready for this episode and actually hearing
your voice memos has been really cool and kind of weird.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
You guys are freaks.

Speaker 4 (04:42):
I've been walking around with your voice in my ears
for the last week and a half and hearing the
ways that this show and the Internet on the whole
fits into your life has been really awesome. Not to
get all parasocial, but you guys did and I promise, promised,
promise to never sell you a meme coin, So let
me be Paris for a second. It's really cool to
be a small part of your life, and I hope

(05:04):
you'll stick around for what's next. Okay, I want to
get to your stories because they are amazing, and there
was so fucking many of them. What I can promise
is that of the one hundred or so submissions I
received for this episode, I did listen to every single
one of them, and if yours does an air, you.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Are so valid, etc. But I had to make cuts
of stories that were too similar, or there were.

Speaker 4 (05:30):
Sometimes sensitive elements that I didn't have time to handle
with the proper sensitivity and care the story deserved. So
if you submitted, thank you so much for trusting me
with your story. If you didn't hear back from me personally,
and I think over the course of these stories, we've
really covered the full breadth of the human on the
Internet experience, because you've sent some of the funniest stuff

(05:54):
I've heard about the Internet, and also some of the
saddest so so before we get into your voice memos,
I wanted to just share the logline for a few
stories that didn't make the cut. Ian Let's get some
circus music going here, a story about being shamed online
for defending oneself from being attacked by a goose, starting

(06:17):
a podcast about Drake before Drake was confirmed scary, and
becoming famous in Canada, being niche famous as a famous
call in person for the podcast My Brother, My Brother
and Me, getting cyberbullied on a Harry Potter forum in
the nineties, and a message just titled the Ballad of
Funky Kong. The list goes on, and let's be clear,

(06:40):
let wull be clear, I, Jamie Loftus, have had a
little experience being the niche main character myself. This has
in fact happened to me twice in the last ten years.
The first time was in twenty fifteen, when I did
a pick me performance art project that led to headlines
like this comedian slash American patriots selling Shrek nudes to

(07:02):
benefit Planned Parenthood, which.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
I have nothing else to say. That's exactly what it
sounded like.

Speaker 4 (07:09):
I painted myself like Shrek and I sold them. And
one time I was at a party and my own
nude was in the bathroom.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Moving on.

Speaker 4 (07:20):
I also went viral shortly in twenty seventeen when I did,
wait for it, yet another pick me performance art piece
that led to headlines like this, we talked to the
woman who was butt jugging infinite Jest. Again, I don't
feel the need to explain this further. It's a pretty
direct headline. And I do I have, you know, some
love for this younger version of myself now, I mean, folks,

(07:44):
she really wanted to be picked and eventually someone did
because true fact, Grant, who I'm going to marry, is
a fan of infinite jest.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
There you go.

Speaker 4 (07:56):
And he had encountered the butt chugging Infinite Gest story
when it first happened, and he didn't realize that it
was me who had butt chugged the book until he
started googling me when he had his little crush. And
to me, this is why the Internet is so addictive.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yes, it's awful.

Speaker 4 (08:15):
Yes, it's this increasingly hostile place that is stealing our data,
our time, is weaponizing our own identities against us, while
making it nearly impossible to function without it. But sometimes
your future husband first heard of you because you were
butt chugging infinite jest and you feel seen by the
world for a second, and it's hard to find an

(08:37):
IRL equivalent of that. I can't explain it. You're gonna
hear a lot of that, but you get it because
I've heard your voice memos and you're gonna hear a
lot of that today, of people's moment in the sun
or unwittingly becoming Internet niche famous. And after listening to
these stories, I've separated them into a few little categories.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Isn't that nice?

Speaker 4 (09:02):
Arguments about celebrities victim of bad clickbait, Internet grief pets
a classic, and of course the life consuming niche Internet
forum and other stories sprinkled throughout that I think you'll enjoy.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
But first we are kicking off or.

Speaker 4 (09:22):
I was the main character spectacular with the subject of
a famous meme who has been on my list of
subjects to cover and turned out to be a listener
of the show What aget Here's Cliff.

Speaker 5 (09:36):
Hi, Jamie, my name is Cliff. And while I was
never an Internet main character, I had the dubious honor
of being one of its first memes. This was back
in like the late nineties, where the movie Forrest Gump
had just come out. I probably still had AOL And
then Forrest Gump he sat on a bench for most
of the movie telling a story, and we had a
bench that had the phrase been laid off on it,

(10:00):
and a friend and I thought it would be funny
to take a picture of me sitting and just blocking
the word off and haha, half a second of a chuckle,
you know. And it only really worked because I was
this nerdy, autistic kid and you couldn't tell if I
knew what was happening or was completely oblivious. But in

(10:21):
a way that did take off a little bit. On
the early days of the Internet, of course, someone made
a meme out of it, and you know where it
said been laid it, they added this kid clearly hasn't,
and yeah, it made the rounds. I thought it was
funny at the time. I was recognized for it one
time a year or two later during college at a

(10:42):
party and people asked if I had been laid yet,
and when I answered that I had, these cheers went
up and everyone gave me drinks. I was odd looking
back on it now, but but I don't know what
I would have thought if that happened now, because you know,
just I would not have been able to handle the

(11:03):
sort of experiences a lot of the people that you've
interviewed have had. And yeah, so I wonder what it
would be like now, or maybe it would have never
taken off because it's not something that you can really
do anything with because the joke's kind of self contained.
But I still see it pop up in the wild

(11:25):
once every five ten years or so, just to remind
me that the Internet does not forget So anyway, thanks
for all you do. I appreciate it and look forward
to hearing other people's experiences.

Speaker 4 (11:36):
Thank you so much for calling in, Cliff. I cannot
tell you how delighted I was. Thank you for listening.
All Right, we're going to keep moving. One of the
most interesting middle ground ways to become the character of
the day is to say something publicly but not intend
for it to break containment. This happens all the time,

(11:59):
as we now have al rhithms that are boosted on
locking in on trends in a way that no one
could have anticipated. That is the wrong side of the
internet finds you on this show. This has happened to
Willie McNabb of thirty to fifty Faral Hogs fame, It
happened to Coffee Wife, it happened to doctor Allie Luke's
The Smell Doctor, and it could happen to you. Here's

(12:22):
listener and friend and amazing poet Maya Williams.

Speaker 6 (12:26):
Hi, Jamie, So picture this.

Speaker 7 (12:29):
April twenty twenty two, I decide to make a TikTok.
I don't always make tiktoks, but when I do, apparently
this could happen. There's one clip I have of Keiki
Palmer being hilarious from a Variety's Light Detector series, genuinely
not knowing who Dick Cheney is. And then I have

(12:50):
a clip of Tyler Perry on the Variety Light Detector
series mimicking Keke Palmer saying, oh, I'm sorry to this man.
I don't know who this man is and is, even
though he does know JJ Abrams and has worked with
them before. And then there's a clip of me saying
further proof that he's not funny unless he's mimicking black women.

(13:12):
No surprise, to my surprise, up to forty four thousand.

Speaker 6 (13:17):
Views is upon the video.

Speaker 7 (13:23):
I receive comments from people of many racial backgrounds saying
things like, oh my gosh, I agree with this, and like, yeah,
Tyler Perry could do better in entertainment. And then there
are some comments that are entirely from black folks who
say things like, oh, you're just being a hater, or hey,
shut up, or hey, Kiki Palmer has worked with Tyler
Perry before, maybe it's okay that he mimics her. And

(13:47):
then I end up turning off the comments when someone
comments sys wear, are your eyebrows activating like that childhood
insecurity that I've received before, And it made me laugh
but at the same time made my heart saying. So
I'm like, Okay, I'm done with these comments, let's turn
them off. But I wanted to share this with you
because I'm very curious about what happens when people of

(14:12):
marginalized genders are trending because of entertainment media and reacting
to it, especially people of marginalized genders who are black people.

Speaker 4 (14:23):
So Maya brings up a great point at the end
of her message, because, as we've talked about on this
show many times, the Internet is informed by and often
intentionally amplifies real life discrimination particularly in the video driven
era that we're in right now. We've looked at stories
like this, in particular recently with Taska Brown of Gorilla

(14:45):
Glue fame, in which she was faced with rampant misogynire
even from within her own community. Tayzonde of Chocolate Rain
fame also spoke to this in detail in our recent
series with him. Makes me think of a conversation I
had recently when I was listen to me.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
This makes me think of a conversation I had.

Speaker 4 (15:06):
I sound like a pastor, but this makes me think
of a conversation I had recently when I was talking
about main characters at UCLA brag, thank you, and yes,
I did make sure I was working with professors that
were pro Palestine. I spoke at the Center for Critical
Internet Theory, and after the talk, a professor who I
will not reveal the name of because I cannot wait

(15:27):
to speak with her on this show was talking about
how pivotal she felt the switch from the text based
to video based internet was and how she wished that
her students had gotten the chance to experience true Internet anonymity, which,
as we all know, could go in a number of directions,
but isn't really available now, and we're going to cover

(15:50):
stories from that era in a bit. But I hadn't
really ever thought of it this way, and there is
so much truth to that, because, to continue our celebrity
comments spectacular, how someone looks is always commented upon, whether
it's the celebrity themselves or the user. Here's Hayden and
Jessica Chastain.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
Hi, Jamie.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
I have one incident where I was sort of anonymously
a main character. Back in late August of twenty seventeen.
I was checking Twitter during the workday, as one does
when it's slow, and saw that the actress Jessica Chastain
had tweeted something I found a little bit inane about

(16:35):
the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that had happened
a little bit prior to.

Speaker 6 (16:38):
That, something about like.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Espousing nonviolence when faced with a bunch of violent Nazis
that want to eradicate your existence. That she was one
of my favorite actresses, and I was already a little
bit sensitive to the topic because I'd graduated from BVA
and it was a really special place to me, and
up to that point it had been the location of
like some of the happiest memories of my life that

(17:04):
so far, which really had turned sour when you know,
all of these places that you recognize in the news
was papered over with nazeasonal white supremacists and stud So
I just still to this day I sort of have
like a knee jerk reaction to people being stupid about it,
and I, without really thinking too hard about it, I
fired off a tweet to her, like, not even thinking

(17:25):
that she would see it, because she had, I think
at that point, like half a million followers, and who
even can handle your notifications at that level, you know?
But it was the Martin Luther King Junior quote about
the danger of the white moderate, and I like close
Twitter and then went back to doing whatever spreadsheet nonsense

(17:46):
I was doing that day. And then I checked back
a little bit later and saw that she had replied
and was like a step and a half away from
calling me a reverse racist, and like we had a
little bit of a back and forth before she stopped replying,
So I thought that was sort of the end of it,
but the issue just continued to snowball some as the
day went on, even after she stopped engaging with me

(18:07):
directly and like with dealing with other people, because I
think at some point that Mary Sue wrote about it,
and then by the evening, like one of my Twitter
friends had set me an article like the huff Huffing
and Post had written about it, and that around that
point I started getting a wave of abuse from sort

(18:28):
of alt right hyper conservative egg profile stuff. And I
had linked it originally to the huff Post article. That
was because it was way more mainstream than anything of
the mary Sue.

Speaker 8 (18:40):
Would put out.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
Yeah, So that sort of was it for a while,
until a few years later I discovered that the reason
I got so much of the right like hyper right
wing abuse was because breit Bart had done an article
about it. Now, that's just sort of a fun fact
that breit Bart put a hit out on me and
couldn't even do it right because it was just my
Star Wars tand Twitter account. Every year in my calendar

(19:02):
there's a little alert for like Chastain Beef Day in
late August.

Speaker 4 (19:07):
And I think I speak for all of us when
I say Happy early Jessica Chastain Beef Day to us all.
And finally Kelly called in about the harrowing experience of
becoming the top comment on a half thought out body
shaming meme about Adele.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Hello.

Speaker 9 (19:23):
My name is Kelly. I'm a book designer living in Brooklyn,
and I became a very minor main character on Instagram
for one day when I got into a fight with
a meme account. It was May of twenty twenty, which
was famously a good and healthy time for all of us.
The singer Adele had just lost weight, and the account
Meme Queen, made a post that I still have a

(19:44):
screenshot of in my phone because again, good healthy time.
The post features two photos of Adele looking thinner than
ever before, with text above them that reads, Adele's glow
up is what twenty twenty needs right now. The actual
caption says, quote, her ex is punching the right now.
Because I was glued to my phone on May seventh
of twenty twenty for some reason, I was one of

(20:06):
the first commenters. I commented quote, Adele has always been
hot as fuck. Stop referring to weight loss as glowing up.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
Please.

Speaker 9 (20:13):
Unfortunately for me, she saw my comment early on and
replied to it saying, quote, no one said about weight loss.
Please don't put words in my mouth. Unquote In the
screenshot I have on my phone from sixteen hours after
the incident. My initial comment had fifteen, three hundred and
thirty seven likes and hundreds of replies. As it does,
this all happened very fast, and for several hours, I

(20:34):
was glued to my phone against the better advice of
my friends, replying back to people and arguing about the
very definition of the term glow up. And there were
a lot of people agreeing with me, and other comments
calling out meme Queen for fat phobia, But mine was
the one that everyone saw as soon as I opened
the comments, and by everyone I also mean trolls. But
the thing that is the most memorable to me about

(20:55):
this experience is the carrot photo. Several days before the incident,
I had posted a photo to my grid off my
hand holding a bunch of very beautiful carrots, stems, and leaves.
Included the caption said I'm just gonna say it, these
carrots are hot. This was conveniently the most recent post
on my grid, which meant that it was the one
that two or three of the more aggressive trolls from

(21:16):
Meme Queen's page decided to comment on. And so I
give you the most exquisitely stupid comment a stranger has
ever left on my Instagram. So the person who finds
carrots hot is the one who doesn't believe in fat shaming.
What anyway, I have no way of getting back to
the post since it's a meme account that has posted

(21:36):
approximately six hundred million times since. But the commenting and
fighting continued on for days after the post, and I
have no clue how the number shook out in the end,
and people forgot about it quickly, and I unfollowed meme
Queen because she posted too much weird, fat photic, normy
content and not enough memes, which, by the way, can
someone please explain to me how a photo of a
singer looking thin with a caption about her glow up

(21:56):
is a meme. As you've elucidated on this show and others,
the conversation around women's bodies in media has not gotten
any better. I appreciate all the work you've done to
push us towards a better place, though, and I figured
i'd share this story if you want to use it,
as it's only slightly more relevant than the other. One
time that I became a very minor main character, which
was because my girlfriend's parents saw Richard Dreyfus go on

(22:18):
a homophobic rant at a Jaws event, and I tweeted
about it and got quoted by multiple news sources. I
love the Internet.

Speaker 4 (22:26):
Thank you so much, Kelly, And when we come back
more of your stories, maybe welcome back to sixteenth minute

(22:46):
finishing and recording. This script is all that lays between
me and getting to meet my baby nephew Max. What
a time to be alive. Let's keep moving. My college
crush and my algebra teacher came to my book reading
last night. Boston is the most perfect place in the world,
and that's just a fact. Let's get back into your
stories up next. Aspin called in about some of the

(23:07):
most blood boilingly dishonest clickbait I have ever heard.

Speaker 10 (23:11):
When I was eighteen years old in twenty eighteen, I
was the media spokesperson for Lush Cosmetics first trans Writes
campaign in North America. My key quote was on display
in the front window of every North American Lush store.
So I got some interest from media companies to have
some interviews, which mostly were simple and nice, but Refinery

(23:33):
twenty nine put out a pretty wild clickbait article on me.
In their beauty diaries titled I'm a trans college student
and I spend one thousand, seven hundred and eighty two
dollars a year on beauty products, which was wildly inaccurate
since I mostly used free samples that I brought home
and also included an eight hundred dollars top surgery consultation

(23:55):
that I'd attended as one of those beauty products. Media comments, naturally,
it went crazy. Thankfully, my full name wasn't ever shared
in my interviews, but I was pretty vocal about my
involvement in the campaign on social media, so I still
got messages from people going is this you?

Speaker 8 (24:16):
Is it true?

Speaker 10 (24:17):
Or how can you justify spending this way? And all
sorts of vitriolic, hateful comments. And I even got questioned
by Lush employees at other stores if they realized who
I was. I felt pretty embarrassed and definitely misrepresented, which
was a hard place to be in as a transgender
teenager representing an entire identity group for an international company.

(24:42):
Refinery twenty nine did eventually change the name of the
article on search engines, so now it comes up as
transgender Man's skincare routine is all Lush products because they're
rightfully ashamed of their clickbait lies. It was a niche
main character moment, but it really has haunted me ever since.

(25:03):
Surgery consultation is a beauty product. Again haunting. It'll never
leave me.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
Thank you so much for calling in, Aspen.

Speaker 4 (25:14):
I wish I could say I were more surprised that
a clickbait site would sink so low as to bully
a trans teenager and misrepresent getting needed care. You deserve better,
Aspen forever. Let's go to the Refinery twenty nine headquarters
right now. But as other stories sent in demonstrated, not

(25:36):
all IRL to internet encounters are completely doomed. I mean
most of them are. But here too, that worked out
rather nicely.

Speaker 11 (25:45):
Hi Jamie and sixteenth minute folks, my name's Tom Lum.
We ran into each other on an episode of Never Posts.
So in twenty twenty one, I was working in software development.
It was fine. I just was starting to lose my
mind a little bit, and so I saw a job
application to work as a writer for sid Show, which

(26:07):
is a science YouTube channel that I adore. It was
made by Hank and John Green, who also made stuff
like Crash Course vlog Brothers and I've been a huge
fan of all other stuff since I was a teen,
and so I thought, you know what, I should apply
to this job, mostly on a whim. This was pre
COVID vaccine, so I was just spending all of my
days at home alone and really starting to lose my mind,

(26:31):
and I was just like, I need to change something,
and this seems cool. I'll just give it a shot.
And part of the application was they wanted examples of
you doing science communication. They need a video. I've been
meaning to learn how this app works, and I had
also been meaning to make something about this story I
had learned in college that I love to tell, which
is that we once gave Bee's jet lag for science.

(26:54):
And then I posted it to my zero followers at
like midnight and then went to sleep, and then I
woke up to five thousand followers, which was the most
I had had on any social media ever. And then
the videos started to really blow up, like it to
the point where my notifications on TikTok were functionally useless.

(27:18):
The magazine Popular Science also did a podcast episode about
that TikTok in which they mispronounced my last name because
they saw my username, which is Tom lum person and
assume my name was Tom Lumperson. I was very lucky
that this all happened when I was in my late twenties,
and I had already seen many stories of virality gone

(27:40):
wrong or going nowhere right.

Speaker 12 (27:43):
You know.

Speaker 11 (27:43):
I obviously didn't like quit my job and throw everything
into TikTok, but I started making more of those science videos.
Funny enough, Hank Green commented on that original video, and
then as I kept doing it, we became mutuals and
then friends. So that was always a truly wild which
gives me emotional vertigo if I think about too hard.

(28:05):
I also told Hank. I told Hank, you know, a
few years later, I was like, did you know about that?
And he was like, did we hire you? And I
was like no, but that's fine. It all weren't down
the end.

Speaker 13 (28:13):
Hi, my name is bj Colangelo, and I am telling
the story of the time I was the Twitter main
character of the day, and fortunately it wasn't for doing
or saying something terrible. It was Halloween twenty seventeen and
I went to the airport way too early, as I
am known to do, and sat down at the bar,

(28:35):
had a drink and met two women who were meeting
for the first time at the airport because they had
suspected that their husbands were having an affair with each other,
and they were flying to where their supposed business trip
was taking place so that they could finally confront them.
It was one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever evesdropped,

(29:00):
and as we were known to do in the late
twenty ten's, on Twitter, I documented the entire conversation. I
posted about it, turned my phone off, got on my flight,
thought nothing of it, landed, turned my phone on to
call a ride share, and my phone practically exploded in
my hand. Because it had gone beyond viral, it ended

(29:22):
up on BBC three. George ta Kai's social media shared it.
All of those weird aggregate sites that just compile popular
tweets for the day did whole stories about it. Cleveland
Magazine interviewed me about it because it was such a
huge thing that had happened at the Cleveland airport with me,

(29:43):
somebody who was at the time a journalist working in Cleveland,
and it was very surreal. But because I had done
my best to, you know, keep their identities as secret
as possible, people were very upset that I isn't now
turning into a private investigator and changing my flights to

(30:05):
go track these people down to give them closure. Nope,
it's just a weird thing that happened. I have no
idea whatever became of these couples. I have no idea
what became of their marriages. But it continued to be
viral for days later. Netflix shared it because it has

(30:26):
a little similar pra elements with Grace and Frankie, so
that put it on even more eyes. And as somebody
who also works as an entertainment journalist, that does mean
that every so often I'll be talking to somebody, I'll
say my name, They'll see what I look like because
I have kind of a distinct look of green hair
and I've looked the same way for about like a

(30:48):
decade now, and they'll ask me, Hey, are you the
lady who tweeted about the women at the airport, And
I have to say, yes, yes, that was me. Even today,
all these years later, I still get people randomly who
will find me on other social media platforms to ask
me if I ever got closure or if I know

(31:08):
whatever happened or what became of them, And the answer
is no, I don't.

Speaker 8 (31:12):
I do not know.

Speaker 13 (31:13):
Whatever happened to the shot lady and the gum lady
or they're probably gay husbands.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Thank you to Tom and BJ.

Speaker 4 (31:22):
And BJ's story in particular really stuck with me because
the quote unquote overheard viral Twitter thread was such a
moment in like the late twenty tens, and BJ, to
be clear, did the right thing here and properly hid
the identity of the folks that she was overhearing. But
it is one of my dream subjects to talk more

(31:43):
about how as social media progresses we have this habit
of knee jerk surveilling each other without being careful. As
BJ was like, social media to some extent is designed
to of course make us feel bad, but also to
have us surveil our elves and each other. It's something
I have to catch myself doing all the time. But

(32:04):
self in pure surveillance isn't what the Internet was built on.
The Internet was built on, of course, little videos of pets.
Here are two of your pet stories.

Speaker 14 (32:15):
Hi, my name is Joel Edmiston. I'm a listener to
your show. My cat went viral. Basically, my cat went
into the bathtub and he went in the bath with
water in it, walked around. I take a video, put
some audio on it and put it on TikTok. I
am a comedian. I have, you know, tried to ticked.
I had tried TikTok at that point, but it didn't

(32:36):
work out and I deleted to some stuff and you know,
just like on YouTube and Instagram trying to make things hit.
But this cat video, I went to sleep, woke up.
It was a gigantic and I've kept making videos. That
was in twenty twenty one, so I've kept making videos
about the cat with water stuff because he does like

(32:57):
water and he was a kitten at the time. Older now,
I you know, record my narrations over top of the videos.
I'm like pleased with the The account does make me
feel good because it's it's it's kept up the followers
and stuff. It's on Instagram as well now in a
way that I feel like it is sort of my

(33:18):
content and not just cat content and having the camera
pointed in the right place when the cat comes on.
I will say, there's a lot of positive feedback on
the page, also a lot of negative feedback that makes
me upset in a way that I wish it didn't. Like, obviously,
the negative negativity is going to be there, but I
just wish I didn't care so much. I think it's

(33:40):
called concern trolling when people act concerned for the cat
over the smallest details and pretend they're they're experts, or
when they're just calling me names or you know, blah
blah blah, and it never sees it to amaze me. This
is a cat after all, this is a cat page
after all. Yeah, And I can admit that I, especially

(34:03):
when things are really viral, I kind of read every comment,
and I wish that I didn't wish that I didn't
feel compelled to read every comment. Because here's what I do.
I delete every negative comment that I see. I blocked
the person. It's probably good practice, but the fact that
I have to read every comment for it, I kind

(34:24):
of like scroll past, you know, thoughtlessly over the positive ones,
but I see any negativity, it's like a delete.

Speaker 8 (34:31):
Hi.

Speaker 15 (34:31):
I go by Sally Saint Rose and I am calling
in to talk about my tiny viral moment of my
fat sphinx named Joby. I rescue and adopt hairless cats,
and one of my first ones was named Joby. He
was amazing. He was a butterball of wrinkles. And I
have always loved taking pictures of my cats and posting

(34:52):
them online. I would post them on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr.
One time I woke up and overnight one of the
pictures had gone viral. People had made memes of it,
passed it around, so so many people did that, and
then the next thing, a video went viral of him
and one of my other cats in the bathtub. I

(35:15):
had made shower caps for them, tiny little cat shower caps.
I hadn't seen anyone do that yet, and I thought
that was adorable, and so I did that, and I
was one of the first people to post hairless cats
and the shower cats online and the people went wild
for it. I had media companies reaching out to me

(35:35):
to not only you know, use it, but they wanted
to manage it. And I still have a media company
that manages his videos. They get licensed out to Comedy Central.
He was on Key and Peel. It was awesome. I
loved the love that Joby got from people. I was like, Okay,
everyone feels like me. They loved Joby just as much

(35:58):
as I do. And it was great for a while.
Then I started getting the hate comments, the hate dms,
people searching out to find my personal accounts and emails
so they could write me messages to let me know
he's going to die. They want to kill him. He's
so ugly, really bizarre things. But I just, you know,

(36:20):
was like, hey, it's the Internet. Not going to pay
them any mind. And when he was eleven, he passed
away from his heart condition. He had HCM, which pretty
common and hairless breed unfortunately, but he passed away and
it was really sad. I was hit by grief really
really hard, and I would talk about it a little

(36:42):
bit online. And then I started noticing mass and mass
amounts of people unfollowing me when he passed away. I
thought it was so bizarre and I was like, why
are people unfollowing just because he's no longer alive? And
it was so weird. I couldn't understand. I was like,
do you not love him anymore because he's no longer alive?

(37:05):
And I did a lot of introspection about what does
this mean and why are people doing this? And I,
you know, had to come to the realization it's Oh,
it's the Internet. He was a moment of time for
people and then that was it, and I was putting
my feelings onto them of how I viewed Jobi of

(37:27):
my world. I'm, you know, will love him forever. I'll
have to carry this grief for him forever. And that's
not how other people viewed him. And so it really
puts into perspective other really famous Internet cats that have
passed away. Why they still post them continuously. You have

(37:47):
to keep up that facade of yes, most people know
that the cat is gone, but you have to keep
posting their pictures as if they're not. And that has
to be really hard.

Speaker 4 (37:59):
Thinking to Jolin Sally for their stories. We talked a
little bit about Internet pets in our Moodang episode, but
it's something that I would really like to continue talking
about because, as Sally is alluding to, pets famously don't
live as long as us, and so there is this
inevitable I've monetized my pet and now I'm grieving them,

(38:19):
And I just think it's a very interesting thing to
get into more. But while we're talking about foundational pillars
of the Internet, why don't we jump back into the
good old text based and flash animation forums we were
talking about a little earlier a lot of people are
still nostalgic for this Internet. While it had many problems,

(38:41):
it's an era of the Internet we've explored in episodes
like Badger Badger, Mushroom, an overly attacked girlfriend, or even
as late historically as the Dress, the days where we
could still sort of talk our shit in anonymity and
things went awry in a completely different way than they
do now Here are your forum stories.

Speaker 16 (39:03):
I'm a nineties kid born in the mid eighties. I
spent my earliest years playing in streets and creeks and
abandoned store parking lots, doing dumb shit that would likely
make it onto primetime news today. Minor vandalism, simple arts,
and plenty of petty theft, just kids being a fucking
menace tell us about ten or so. At that point,
my half formed frontal cortex became increasingly aware of the

(39:23):
allure of the Internet. But during my pre teen years
I spent untold hours trying to ignore the six o'clock
news in the background as I scour the latest links
page on this bb or that usenet. It was pure
information niche interest, someone's hobby and other's vault or shrine
to this event or that celebrity. But if actual information
or useful services weren't of interest, the chat rooms were

(39:44):
something awful, for instance, and for all the negatives associated
with that particular phase of the Internet, many people my
age looked back to this as its peak. The bar
for entry did not exist. Have you computer? Have you Internet?

Speaker 12 (40:00):
Yes?

Speaker 16 (40:01):
Please enjoy this unfiltered onslaught of the absolute worst takes
in the history of man. Pages upon pages of topic
and reply on things so momentous as the then current
theft of the US election by one George war Crimes Bush.
By the mid two thousands, advertisements had fully invaded these in.

Speaker 12 (40:19):
All other spaces.

Speaker 16 (40:20):
Websites cost money to host, and many of these platforms,
forums and chat rooms and infoboards provided no product beyond conversation.
The conversations were free and couldn't pay the bills, so
we started seeing ads everywhere. Jump ahead literally any period
of time. We're constantly looking for the humanity and the
ocean of corportization that has superseded this thing we thought

(40:40):
was the future. But the promise of infinite information and
connection at the press of a button has become that
only for data brokers and corporate sales managers. Is part
of the reason we seek out these main characters of
the day, that we can find something enjoyable that doesn't
come with its own custom checkout page is the smallest
reprieve for the those of us who saw the Internet

(41:01):
as a great and public good before capitalism realized it
could monetize literally anything. Characters of the day, while increasingly
fed to us, algorithmically represent the remaining possibility of the platform,
actual personalities and original thought that managed to get past
the near complete commoditization of every medium and deliver something

(41:23):
unique and human in a world increasingly devoid of both
those qualities.

Speaker 17 (41:28):
Hi, Jamie, my name is Alex. I love your show.
Thank you so much for all the hard work making it.
In two thousand and five, I was a freshman in
college and I posted a really crude flash animation about
bathroom etiquette. It was called a Men's Room Monologue. I
posted that on new grounds dot com and it got
millions of views, thousands, tens of thousands of comments, and

(41:53):
I really felt like a main character, like a celebrity.
For actually a couple of months. The comments were rolling
in and it really spread around the Internet onto all
these other weird two thousand and five websites like Ebom's
World and I'll Bin a Black Sheep. People I met
in real life would find out I made the cartoon
and get really excited. It was a super cool experience

(42:14):
and people were so positive about it, which is weird
looking back, because the cartoon is so badly drawn, the
audio is terrible, the writing is just so I don't know,
we'd call it cringe now, like what an eighteen year
old boy would write in two thousand and five. I'm
grateful for it. It's a little hard to watch now,
and I'm grateful, I think, to have posted it back then.

(42:35):
I think people wouldn't be as nice about this cartoon now,
but the fact that they were nice kind of helped
push me towards my career as a professional animator.

Speaker 18 (42:45):
I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft
in the mid two thousands, and I was a regular
shit poster on my service forum for about a year
or two. Around this time, it was kind of an
open seekert that George Fisher from the band Cannibal Corpse
played on our server and people were always coming by
and asking what his character was, and at some point
someone started saying my character name as a joke.

Speaker 12 (43:04):
Things started to get out of hand. At that point.

Speaker 18 (43:07):
I had no idea who George Fisher was, and I
don't even think I heard a Cannibal Corpse song at
that point, ever, so I was really confused when people
started messaging me and calling me George. I was getting
in game mail from people giving me their actual phone
numbers and women offering me sexual favors with like really
explicit messages. I never responded to anything because it was

(43:28):
so awkward, Like I would see my name pop up
in the comment sections of George Fisher videos when people
were asking what server he plays on. At some point,
the real George Fisher like heard about people going to
me thinking I was him, and he got kind of
pissed because he thought I was doing it on purpose,
like I was trying to impersonate him, and my friend

(43:50):
made it pretty clear that George really didn't like me
when the topic came up, and eventually he transferred to
another server and I started getting less and less messages, thankfully,
but I never got any closure. So I guess if
you're listening George, or if you're someone who knows George
and can get the word do them. I'm sorry, this
is all a big misunderstanding and I didn't want anything

(44:12):
to do anything of this.

Speaker 4 (44:13):
Thank you so much, my boys. And when we come back,
a few more stories.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
For the road.

Speaker 4 (44:33):
Welcome back to sixteenth minute, the show you write and
record in bed.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
With your Mom. And here are a few last stories
I like to share.

Speaker 4 (44:41):
So when it came to stories about niche internet community trauma.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
There was quite a bit to sort through.

Speaker 4 (44:48):
I think most people who have been too logged in
have had experiences like this where one's time and identity
are wrapped up in a community where they feel uniquely seen.
The kind of community that can can consume you without
really having the possibility of leaking into your in person
life in a meaningful way, an actual second life, because

(45:10):
after all, a niche interest is niche for a reason.
You had to make a forum in order to find
your people, and the emotional attachments that are formed and
the validation received on forums like this can really affect
and shape you, regardless of how big or small that
community is. Here's Ayumi on being a moderator.

Speaker 19 (45:32):
Hi Jamie, It's Ayumi Shinozaki. While this is a very
small scale version, of that, I did want to submit
my story just in case it counts for something. Also
just because even at a smaller scale, it helped me
really put a lot of things in perspective as to
how I wanted to spend my time on the internet.

(45:53):
Moving forward, Basically, in the early twenty tens, I was
part of a confession blog or a fandom, unsurprisingly magical girls.
So it was Magical Girl Confessions at tumbre dot com
pretty much right away it started to catch on. I
was very excited about the blog as well, because of
course it seemed like a cool place to gather for

(46:16):
love of magical girls. So one of the things that
would happen a lot is misgendering. At the time, I
was not going by shiha pronouns I am now, but
at the time I was not, I was going by
they them or the demi girl pronouns I had created
for myself, which are gjem gear. There was a lot
of racist things, in particular because I am half Japanese.

(46:38):
People would try to talk about how I was into
Japanese enough for example, and things like that, and also
on the river side accept me as Japanese and then
be very racist about it, like a lot of these people,
I would say, most of these people never knew me personally,
never took the time to get to know who I was.
They just had this idea of me, and it was

(47:00):
very frustrating, very exhausting. By this point, I had to
talk to my own therapist about Tumblr, and constantly my
therapist would say, Okay, but why do you need to
be here, why do you need to be working on
this blog? But it's clearly hurting you so much. And
my partner at the time also would express very similar feelings.

(47:23):
And I had it in my head that if I
did things the right way, then maybe people could actually
see me for who I was and see that like
I was separate from these confessions, people were so focused
on the idea of me that they didn't take the
time to get to know me as a person, and
it was very frustrating. What year is it, Yes, twenty fifteen.

(47:44):
At near the end of twenty fifteen, my grandmother in
Japan was diagnosed with cancer, and we didn't know what
the situation would be, especially whether or not she might survive.
Despite the fact that I had not been able to
go back to Japan for a decade or so with
some emergency money, and I even took that a loane myself.
I went with my mother and my brother back to

(48:07):
Osaka to see my family for a week, and it
was a really great experience. And it was through that
experience that I realized I really wanted to come back
to Japan. So once I knew I was going to
leave in February, it became a thing of Okay, I'm
going to leave America, but I'm also going to leave Tumblr.
I just realized like there was no way for me
to ever get through to these people because they had

(48:31):
their idea of me, and I knew and I know
now that no matter what I do on the Internet,
people will always come to your posts with their idea
of what you represent to them. And I think accepting
that has been so important to my mental health and
to my life as a person who has been very
online all my life. And I'm so so, like so

(48:56):
much more at peace with my Internet usage. No that
knowing that, like I can basically just decompartmentalize any weird
comments that people will send my way if I know, oh,
they just don't know who I am they are projecting.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
Thank you so much Aumi.

Speaker 4 (49:14):
She is also a guest on the Bechdel Cast coming up,
so jump over to that feed if you run a
lot of episodes here. Next up a true pioneer, Casey,
who was a Disney adult before Disney adults were Disney adults.

Speaker 6 (49:28):
Hi, Jamie.

Speaker 20 (49:29):
My name is Casey and my niche Internet claim to
fame is that I was an early Disney content creator.
I started posting Disney content on Instagram back in twenty twelve,
and in March twenty fourteen, I decided to start a
Disney small shop, and there weren't a lot of us
back then. There was just a couple. So my business
grew very quickly, and so did my Instagram following, where

(49:50):
I posted from the theme parks, I posted my products.
I would post pretty much every day to stay relevant
and to get people to find me. So at its peak,
I probably had around fifty seven thousand followers, which isn't
a ton, but for twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen,
this is pretty big in the Disney realm. I would

(50:11):
get recognized at the theme parks, I would get asked
for photos, and I made a lot of friends this way.
As you know, Internet people do. We kind of find
each other, find our group. But it also made me
more susceptful to toxic friendships. People that were you know,
clout chasing. They were looking for the kind of bump
that they would get if I was to tag them

(50:32):
in a photo or be on story with them, things
like that. You know. I found it really hard to
enjoy the theme parks as time went on, because I
always felt like I needed to be on in case,
you know, I saw a follower or a customer. One time,
a follower's dad posted a selfie in front of my
hotel room door. His daughter found my room and he

(50:56):
decided to grown man decided to take a photo in
front of my room and tag me in it and
say neighbors at Disney. So that was probably the scariest.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
Thing that happened.

Speaker 20 (51:07):
And I had to go to the front desk and
change rooms because I didn't feel very safe there because
then they started dming me and it was just very strange.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
You know.

Speaker 20 (51:17):
As time went on, the more stylized like lifestyler, lifestyle
influencer became more popular, and I was, you know, getting older,
and people stopped bothering me as much. Or you know,
maybe they recognized me, but didn't you know, I wasn't
relevant anymore, so people didn't bother me at the theme
parks anymore. But I do think that even just this

(51:41):
little small claim to fame can really affect you. And
there are times that I kind of miss, you know,
being known, and I can miss the free swag. But
you know, I don't think it's great for your mental
health to have so many people watching your content and
commenting their pinions, and the Disney influencers now they have

(52:04):
Reddit snark pages and reading that would be the worst.
So I'm probably glad that I was one of the
early ones.

Speaker 4 (52:12):
Thank you so much, Casey, And I want to be
clear this is a theme park adult safe space in
case you couldn't glean it from my whole vibe. I
firmly believe theme park adults either had perfect childhoods or
very fucked up childhoods and everyone else just doesn't understand.
And finally, we have a story about a niche internet

(52:33):
community that became a central part of Bailey's childhood.

Speaker 6 (52:38):
Hi, Jamie, my name is Bailey.

Speaker 21 (52:41):
I am an avid sixteenth minute listener, and although I've
never had a proper main character moment on the Internet.
I do want to share a little bit about a
now defunct website that I frequented in my teenage years
have called debate dot org. Spring break of twenty sixteen,
I was going to a very conservative middle and high school,

(53:04):
which I was at for six years, and I was
increasingly frustrated I was one of the only kids there
who wasn't Mormon. For whatever reason, I decided to join
debate dot org in a moment of boredom, but also
as an expression of I guess wanting to express intellectual rigor.

Speaker 6 (53:27):
You know, it was twenty sixteen.

Speaker 21 (53:30):
It was post Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for president. Now,
the structure of debate dot org is interesting because, of
course the main event are the debates, and you could
vote on other people's debates, but there were also polls
public forums of different topics. It was a common joke

(53:52):
that I was one of three women who used the site,
and although that wasn't factually true, it certainly felt like that.
I ended up meeting two people in real life that
I met on debate dot org. I watched Rocky Horror
Picture Show for the first time with him and weirdly enough,
my dad. I completely lied to him and said that

(54:15):
I knew him from school. He was a couple of
years older than me. The other person I met was
my ex older than me. I should not have been
in a relationship with them, and it took up a
lot of my life, or what felt like a lot
of my life at the time. I was involved with

(54:36):
this person from age thirteen to sixteen in different capacities,
as friends, as sexual partners, as friends again before COVID
happened and I.

Speaker 6 (54:54):
Slowly disentangled myself.

Speaker 21 (54:58):
Why I'm talking about debate dot org right now is
because I have a lot of complicated feelings in that
it is no longer an accessible website. I think I
discovered that about a year or two ago when I
was trying to go and view my old profile as
sort of a self flagellation exercise, and then found I

(55:19):
could no longer access the website. And I've tried multiple
times since then, including right before recording this, to see
and you cannot access the website. That comes with a
mix of relief and grief. I think often about a
remark that you made in an episode of Sixteenth Minute

(55:43):
that we the listeners were listening to a future piece
of lost media, and that is what debate dot org
has kind of turned into. The grief comes in because
I no longer have a portion of my life that
is documented. Oh that's my cat. She is mourning it

(56:04):
as well. Because of the ages that I was active
on that website. It shows a weird transition where I
was crystallizing my opinions that I still hold on certain things.
It's where I discovered David Lynch. It's where I discovered

(56:26):
a lot of different music that I now love. It's
where I formalized some political opinions that I still have
to this day.

Speaker 6 (56:36):
Debate dot org was a fever dream.

Speaker 21 (56:38):
I guess I'm happy I was a part of it
while I was around. I certainly will not be passing
on stories of it to my children and grandchildren if
they survive on a burning planet.

Speaker 4 (56:51):
Thank you so much to Bailey. There's so much to
think about with that story, but the first thing that
jumps to my mind is we should probably all hunt
your right. Thank you so much for setting in your story. Okay,
I saved the sticky stuff for last, as I wont
to do. As many of you might know, About half

(57:14):
of the first year of sixteenth Minute was produced while
my dad was actively sick in Massachusetts and I was
caretaking for him along with my mom and brother in
our extended family, and the other half of this show
has been produced after he passed away. Something that I

(57:36):
don't care how parasocial it is. Listener messages and being
able to talk about it a little bit on this
show shortly after really was a.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
Tremendously healing and cool thing.

Speaker 4 (57:49):
It was the first time I felt like in control
of what was happening in a long time. But suvice
it to say I've been weirdly in the trenches for
this year of studying Internet history, and the fact is
that the Internet's relationship with grief and grieving is I
think one of its strength. I'm very lucky to have

(58:12):
a great in person support system, but sometimes you wake
up in a cold sweat at three in the morning
and you're alone, and you just need to read a
Reddit post about how someone has felt the same way
you have and that it sucks, and then it doesn't
really get better, it just gets different.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
And for people who aren't.

Speaker 4 (58:33):
As lucky as me to have a reliable in person
support system, the Internet can be transformative in processing one's
grief or, as the case may be, processing one's recovery
from addiction.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
There are still good.

Speaker 4 (58:52):
Corners of the Internet, and so I really appreciated these
stories about the Internet and processing grief.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Here's Jake.

Speaker 8 (59:03):
Hey, Jamie, my name is Jake. Personally, I am twenty
six years old, and I started, I guess, interacting with
the Internet in a real consistent way. I would say
starting I was like seven or eight. Honestly, I do
have a very specific memory that feels just like significant

(59:26):
somehow in a way I can't really put words too.

Speaker 22 (59:28):
I in fifth grade had a friend pass away, and
it was honestly a pretty traumatic accident.

Speaker 8 (59:40):
He drowned, And I have a very distinct.

Speaker 23 (59:43):
Memory of learning the news and immediately going on the
Internet to help me understand. And I remember getting on
Google with like the old Google, like still Sarah font
back when it was a functional surge engine.

Speaker 12 (01:00:02):
Too.

Speaker 8 (01:00:03):
I typed in, you know, like what happens after you die?
And like is Heaven real? And like a bunch of
like honestly pretty like deep philosophical questions just asking Google.
I mean, I'm a grown adult now, I've done my
fair share of therapy and processing outside of that experience,

(01:00:25):
but it always looking back has struck me as a
maybe novel to this era that I immediately went on
the Internet to cope with grief at such a young age. Anyway,
maybe I'm just maybe I'm inflating my own importance here

(01:00:47):
a little bit. Anyway, love the show.

Speaker 4 (01:00:49):
I want to hug baby Jake so much, and to
close us out here is Ben.

Speaker 12 (01:00:56):
Hey, how's it going? My name's Ben.

Speaker 24 (01:00:58):
And in the early twenty tens, ish I was a
main character minor main character on Reddit for a couple
of days. I was a senior in college, as probably
three or four weeks from graduation, and my grandfather, who
had also graduated from that school, was losing his battle
with cancer and was in the process of being moved
to in home hospice care. I had been home to

(01:01:20):
visit him a couple of weeks earlier and say goodbye,
and even then he was determined, even if they caught
me up there in an ambulance, I'm going to that graduation.
But it was clear he was not making his way
across the house to the bathroom, let alone the track
up to Central Minnesota from rural Iowa. So while I

(01:01:44):
was there, my folks were going through photos prepping for
memorials things like that, and they found some photos of
Grandpa on campus, and you know, I thought it would
be a nice thing to replicate those photos and as
a way to have a together as part of this
process of graduating in this time of transition, and even

(01:02:05):
though he couldn't be there physically. So when I got
back up to campus, my girlfriend and I went and
found those spots out on campus, you know, kind of
look at the hillside and the trees and subtract sixty
years and imagine if that building wasn't there. You know,
I kind of dressed like him. He was wearing a
checked flannel shirt and some khakis. So I found a

(01:02:26):
checked flannel shirt and some khakis and took the photos,
kind of posed like him and sent them emailed them
back home to mom and dad. So this was, like
I said, early twenty tens, so kind of early days
of kind of right before the turn to the modern
social media age, and kind of promptly just threw them
up on without thinking on our slash picks, and they

(01:02:48):
pretty quickly shot up to being the top post on
the sub and then quickly after that turned into the
top ten fifteen posts of Reddit. And obviously that comes
with like a deluge of comments, less imposing.

Speaker 12 (01:03:01):
Then than it is now. Obviously it's not coming to
my phone.

Speaker 24 (01:03:03):
I didn't have a phone that was capable of that.
It was all browser based. But I think I was
happy for the distraction, right. It was, you know, I'm
going through this major turning of a page in my life,
this chapter change, graduating college, rite of passage, becoming an adult,
but also having you know this, my Grandpa's going to
die in the middle of all of this weight hanging

(01:03:24):
over my head. So to have this kind of like
proactive thing I can do talking about Grandpa with people
on the internet, I think felt productive in a way
that like taking tests and writing papers didn't to distract
me from it all. So it was it was kind
of an It was a good distraction, and most of

(01:03:44):
it was positive.

Speaker 12 (01:03:45):
Right.

Speaker 24 (01:03:45):
There's obviously edge cases. You had your militant atheists who
wanted you to know that you know it was it
was a travesty that these Catholics are still allowed to
run schools and brainwash the minds of our youths. I
studied theology in school, and nothing turns you against the
church like studying church history. Plenty of folks who really
needed me to know that in the title where I

(01:04:07):
put my grandfather and I sixty years apart, YadA, YadA, YadA,
the correct grammar is my grandfather and me. So I
obviously needed my bachelor's degree to be stripped from me.
But all of it was pretty pretty positive, you know,
all in good fun. Like I said, I dressed like
my grandpa in the photos, and so Maclamore's thrift Shop

(01:04:31):
had just come out. There's the line, I wear your
granddad's clothes, I look incredible. So lots of folks posting that.
On the flip side, there were also folks posting that
they needed me to know that my grandfather was far
more attractive than I ever would be, and you know
that's fair. That went on for about for a couple
of days, and then the people who write about what's

(01:04:52):
going on on the internet started reaching out. There were
only a few of them. The only one that I
actually talked with it was the only one that I
could verify kind of as a real person, and they
were a blogger at the Huffington Post, plus fifty section.

(01:05:13):
I think at that point I was kind of like
starting to make the realization that, like, oh, I should
probably be a little bit more private with this public
airing of grief. But by the time that we kind
of sussed that we weren't both trying to scam each other,
Grandpa died, and so where they were looking for probably
a little bit more perfunctory like I'm so excited to graduate.
I love my grandpa so much. They got a theology

(01:05:35):
major process in grief, philosophizing about family and what we
leave behind and the impacts on lives that we have.
To their credit, they posted what was essentially, you know,
a little bit of an essay mixed with an obituary,
and it still exists out there to this day, and
it's something that I'm glad is there for me to revisit,

(01:05:56):
you know, until the day some executive turns it into
a piece of lost media. Think at twenty two, I
would have had the wherewithal to write down how I
was feeling and to share my thought processes more than
just like talking with my roommates and my sisters, So
to have this thing that I can revisit, see this
snapshot of who I.

Speaker 12 (01:06:16):
Was at this moment in time.

Speaker 24 (01:06:18):
As you know, kind of my entire world is shifting
in addition to losing my grandpa.

Speaker 12 (01:06:23):
Is a nice thing to have. It's a nice artifact
to have of who I was.

Speaker 4 (01:06:27):
Thank you so much to Jake and to Ben. And
on that note, we close out this chapter of sixteenth Minute.
What do we do with the Internet? This massive thing
that billionaires will not truly let belong to us? Are
the good parts, the communal parts, even the healing parts,
worth all the damage that it is done to us

(01:06:48):
and to the planet and will continue to We're going
to keep talking about it, but until next time, This
is Jamie Loftus and you are listening to a future
piece of lost media.

Speaker 2 (01:07:02):
Look soon.

Speaker 4 (01:07:07):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and Iheartwordtaps.
It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Rostis.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen.

Speaker 4 (01:07:25):
Voice acting is from Brant Crater and pet shout outs
to our dog producer Anderson my Kats Flee and Casper
and my pet rockbird who will outlive us all.

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
Bye.