My Gmail promotions inbox is overrun with newsletters, from brands and stores pushing Christmas shopping to the several Substacks that I signed up to earlier this year. Most are deleted without opening, but there’s one that I always set aside time to read: Emily Kirkpatrick’s I <3 Mess, “a roundup of all the CrazySexyCool celebrity fashions you missed on the Daily Mail side bar this week complete with my commentary”.
Kirkpatrick’s is one of the only that I actively open, or save to enjoy later; the other being ‘are u coming?’ from Brock Colyar, another NYC based writer with an eye for funny and sharp pop culture observations. She started her hilarious celebrity fashion focused newsletter in 2020, alongside her job as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and other freelance writing gigs (like an op-ed about letting Marilyn Monroe rest in peace for The Cut, and a new brilliant story for Nylon about the changing face and aesthetic of party photography).
Housed on Substack – the influential newsletter platform co-founded by New Zealander Hamish McKenzie – I <3 Mess sits alongside a growing Discord (an instant messaging social platform that I’m not yet on), and Kirkpatrick’s own personal social channels. She is really great at Twitter, where her name is ‘internet baby’, and she’s also a big fan of TikTok. And, she's met John Waters; dining with him in a dump.
I fawned over Kirkpatrick in our first Screen Time column, so who better to ask to be part of this series where we obsessively ask extremely online people all about their own obsessive internet habits?
What’s your earliest internet memory?
My earliest memories of the internet are very sensory. The heft of our first PC, giant and beige, the stack of iridescent AOL CD-ROMS that the internet came on, the unbelievably loud beep-boops of the dial-up modem.
That, and constantly trying to get into Nickelodeon chat rooms that were always at capacity. Looking back, that was probably for the best as I’m sure they were just full of pedos.
What sites do you visit regularly/daily? And do you visit them directly or via other means?
Gmail, Twitter, Daily Mail, The Real Real, Seamless (not every day, but way too much for sure). And then usually whatever articles and interviews are going viral that day. Those I get from Twitter or from the Vanity Fair Slack, but for everything else I visit the website directly.
The last story/link you shared?
The last link I shared was for a very fun version of this Paco Rabanne purse my friend wants that was on sale. I am freakishly good at shopping for everyone except myself.
How many group chats are you in? What’s the name of the most active or the funniest?
Not enough! Maybe three? Four? But I feel like the one with my mom and sister doesn’t count because I forced them into it and they don’t really respond to me. The most active and the funniest is called “Tall Girl – A Netflix Original,” which is just me and two of my closest friends.
I went on a bachelorette trip last year and we had a group chat with like ten women in it called “The Washington Olympics” that was active on a level that bordered on psychotic, which is my personal ideal. And this one is currently dormant, but my friend who is also named Emily and I once made a group chat just called “The Emilys” that we added one other non-Emily into and I just love the idea of periodically adding in a different friend whenever we need to jointly address them.
Have you ever had a blog?
I think everyone my age had a blog. We came of age at the height of blog culture. So, yes. I had a Wordpress site called Rogue Vogue. Basically, every month I would take the new issue of Vogue and hand write my commentary on every page of it and then scan and upload those pages onto the website. I had maybe five regular readers, most of whom were my friends’ parents. And now I have my newsletter, which is more or less the same thing.
Social media gets a lot of bad press. What do you love about it? What do you dislike?
Social media definitely rightfully gets a lot of bad press. It’s unleashed a whole slew of evils upon the world, and I also just fundamentally don’t believe this many millions of people were ever meant to be able to communicate with each other simultaneously.
But that said, I do love the weird friendships I’ve built with people I’ve never met in real life. I also really value how much I’ve learned from everyone I follow. There’s so many smart and funny people in the world who know so much about so many things I do not.
What I dislike is the way billionaires are running all of these platforms into the ground as they try to figure out all new ways to exploit our data and creativity for profit.
I feel like the internet has also allowed people to form a lot of deeply unhealthy parasocial relationships with public figures. Modern standom is something that will never cease to baffle me. Like, go watch that Eminem music video. It’s not something to aspire to!
What’s your approach to Instagram?
What I’m doing on that platform could hardly be called an “approach.” But listen, I’m trying, man. I’ve kind of just resigned myself to the fact that it’s not my medium. But as Twitter slowly goes down the drain, I understand that I should probably figure out how to make the pivot to Reel-friendly content. Instagram just doesn’t have the hold over my serotonin production the way I know it does for a lot of my millennial peers.
Are you on TikTok? What’s on your FYP?
Yes – now there’s my personal serotonin machine hard at work. My FYP lately has been one endless stream of tarot card readings promising that new love is rushing into my life. That and cats doing cute stuff. Is it just me or has the algorithm kind of jumped the shark in the past year?
What was the last TikTok video you liked or shared?
The last TikTok I liked was a video of a guy dressed up as this viral TikTok puppet and pretending to do its little dance. The original puppet looks like a tiny ghost made out of a white handkerchief wearing a green gnome hat as it spins and dances and hides behind logs. But the best part is that the entire comment section of the video is just people saying “me when i was a baby.”
This is one of those perfect insider TikTok jokes where it doesn’t even make sense to the people doing it, but everyone is still more than willing to go along with the gag. This is just peak internet culture to me. This is why I can never log off.
Do you use Twitter?
Oh god, yes, way too much. All my friends are there. I like the immediacy and interactiveness of it. It feels like you’re just in one huge, chaotic group chat. But the double-edged sword of having built a following on there is that I actually feel like I can’t get away with talking as much shit as I used to. That and all the nazis and racists Elon is letting back on the platform, of course.
What’s your relationship with Facebook?
Nonexistent.
Are you on any other platforms, new or old?
Just Discord and every dating app ever created.
What about online forums like Reddit – are you a user?
I’m more of a very casual lurker. For some reason, it’s a platform I just never really got into, but I am weirdly impressed by people who are in deep and know how to navigate it to find all the hidden gems.
Who is the person that follows you that you’re most excited about?
At this point, I’m now mutuals with pretty much every writer and comedian I’ve ever loved, which is the most exciting. But if I had to name some particular standouts Tara Reid is the first person who jumps to mind. OG Maco, Sonja Morgan, the Eve 6 guy, and Fug Girls are all close seconds for sure.
Have you ever made a meme or had a proud viral moment?
I’ve made more terrible memes than I can count. I think it’s a little weird when people are proud of viral moments because to me they always seem like such a fluke. But that said, when I sent the tweet that accidentally led to me quitting my job at the NY Post, I was pretty proud of that.
And it didn’t go crazy viral or anything, but this summer I made a TikTok about Leo DiCaprio’s girlfriend turning 25 that I think is one of the more solid jokes I’ve ever made.
Are you interested in the Metaverse?
As a gag? Absolutely. As a viable concept for the future of social interaction? Hell no.
What about NFTs?
If you enjoy swapping jpegs with your pals for thousands of highly-volatile imaginary dollars, more power to you. I think the larger concept of putting creative works on a blockchain is really interesting and could have a lot of incredible ramifications for artists, especially digital ones. But, personally, I’d rather just own a physical painting.
What is your phone?
This feels like an existential question about the nature of humans’ relationship to their technology, but I think you’re just asking for the make so: iPhone 11
Your most used emojis?
😅😩💕😈
Your YouTube go-to?
I watch an ungodly amount of H3 every week and I’ve seen everything Trixie & Katya have ever done. I’ve also been really into Juno Birch playing The Sims lately and I always enjoy a good fast food rant from Delta Work.
Your favourite or most-played Spotify playlist?
My best friend and I are working on a TV pilot set in the early 80s, so we made a playlist with songs from that era to try and capture the mood and it turns out there were a whole lotta bops back then, so I listen to that quite a bit.
I’m also a fan of Spotify’s “Hip-Hop Classics Party,” “All Out 2000s,” and you can never go wrong with Lil Kim radio.
What’s the best streaming service?
Oh god, how are you supposed to choose that? I guess in terms of consistent, quality options – HBO Max. But if you want pure, unbelievable quantity, especially in the totally mindless department, you gotta go Netflix.
Podcasts! There are so many of them. Tell me your thoughts, and favourites… and where and how you listen to them.
Generally, I just don’t think every single person needs to have one. We’ve reached our saturation point. And while I’ve been a longtime podcast enthusiast, I don’t know what happened, but at some point during the pandemic I just totally fell off and have yet to fully regain my interest in them. It doesn’t help that because I play podcasts while I work, so I’ve basically trained myself to treat them as background noise.
That said, I’m still a regular listener of Who? Weekly, Celebrity Book Club, and Baby Geniuses. Occasionally, I’ll also dip into the Call Chelsea Peretti and Professor Blastoff archives. These days, I always listen to them on my phone while I’m riding the subway or taking long walks around my neighborhood.
Newsletters are the future, apparently. How many do you subscribe to? And how many do you pay for?
Apparently! I actually subscribe to embarrassingly few newsletters for someone who writes one and has a million friends who write them. Let’s see, I get boring shit like the New York Times and Axios every day, but I don’t count those.
I subscribe to Ann Friedman Weekly, Samantha Irby’s “Bitches Gotta Eat!,” Allie Jones’s “Gossip Time,” Blackbird Spyplane, and Tyler Watamanuk’s “Sitting Pretty.” And I only pay for three of those! Shameful, honestly. I’m about to reexamine my entire life.
Do you game? What do you play, and how often?
No! I have very little hand-eye coordination!
How do you shop online? Do you have favourite sites and/or apps?
Chaotically. Here’s the thing, I’m shopping all over the place, all the time, and I pretty much hate everywhere I’m shopping. I feel like it takes browsing 100 different random sites just to find one semi-decent thing to spend my money on. The Ssense sale is forever intriguing, albeit bankrupting. And The Real Real and I are locked in an eternal love-hate battle. I think they’re an absolute disaster site that mislabels and mischarges for pretty much everything on there, but it’s also the only place I’ve found that consistently carries anything I like.
How many emails do you typically receive in a day?
Between my personal and work email, probably like 300? Conservatively? And I look at every single one. 99% of them are trash though.
What’s your email sign off?
Depends on the tone of our correspondence, but I usually go with a “Thanks!”
If I sign off “Best” that’s pretty much the closest I get to saying “Fuck off.” Lately I’ve been experimenting with just a “<3” which I think really sums it all up.
What was the last screenshot you took?
I took a screenshot of this tweet from Jaden Smith that says, “I Was Sitting With A Group Of Friends Once, Mix Of Guys And Girls, And They We’re All Talking And Laughing Telling Stories, Then They Looked Over At Me And I Was Fully Sobbing Silent Tears, Like Fully Crying.” I think it’s pretty clear why I needed to immortalise that in my phone.
What was your screen time last week?
This is an extremely personal question. I’m usually between five and six hours which doesn’t make any sense to me, but is apparently factual. When I get that weekly screen report notification, I like to use that time to reflect on all of the great American novels I could’ve written if I just wasn’t so addicted to this stupid device.
