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- [00:00]
Jamie Loftus
You're listening to an iHeart podcast. Kick off summer with Memorial Day savings at Lowe's right now. Get five Scott's Naturescapes one and a half cubic foot mulch bags for just $10. Plus get up to 40% off select major appliances and save an extra $50 on every $500 you spend on select major appliances. $396 or more. Lowe's we help you save valid through five hundred and twenty eight mold shopper excludes Alaska and Hawaii. Selection varies by location while supplies last. See lowe's.com for more details. Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card based on the February 2024 Nielsen report I've never felt like this before. It's like you just get me.
- [01:09]
Cliff
I feel like my true self with you.
- [01:12]
Jamie Loftus
Does that sound crazy? And it doesn't hurt that you're gorgeous. Okay, that's it. I'm taking you home with me. I mean, you can't find shoes this good just anywhere.
- [01:25]
Cliff
Find a shoe for every you from.
- [01:27]
Jamie Loftus
Brands you love like Birkenstock, Nike, Adidas and more at your DSW store or dsw.com with comprehensive reports on local schools you won't find anywhere else. Homes.com is the only place to find the in depth info home shoppers want. Very in depth info. Curious about where a school ranks in the state? Look no further. Percentage of teachers in their first or second year? We've got it. Lowest student teacher ratio? No problem. The best cafeteria lunch in the district for your nine year old food blogger. Would it surprise you if we said yes? Homes.com we've done your homework.
- [02:06]
Cliff
Call Zone Media hello and welcome back to 16th minute, the podcast where we talk to the Internet's characters of the day, 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 16th minute and I'm turning the mic over to you, my listeners to share 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 lot of 16th minute listeners. It's been really cool. I just, I don't know, I. I work in 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 Tori and I decided to be annoying at our favorite margarita bar from college until 2am last night. So I feel great. I'm home and I'm happy. And 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, 16th 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 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 underexplored. So things to look out for. The Internet and death, the actual science behind asmr, a genre I've been consuming for a decade and know very little about. Think about how the Internet connects to justice, connects to court cases, connects to incarceration. We're gonna have a time on the 16th 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 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. It was really, really cool and an honor to, you know, have and shape those stories. Thank you so much. 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. Right. Plus I'm a yapper and it's terminal. So this show worked great for me. And so much of 16th 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 because yes, the entire 30 to 50 feral 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. You guys are freaks. I've been walking around with your voice in my ears for the last week and a half and hearing the ways that like 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, promise, promise to never sell you a meme coin. So let me be parasocial for a second. It's really cool to be a small part of your life and I hope 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 hundred or so submissions I received for this episode, I did listen to every single one of them. And if yours doesn't air, you are so valid, etc. But I had to make cuts of stories that were too similar or there were 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 I've heard about the Internet and also some of the saddest. So before we get into your voice memos, I wanted to just share the log line 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 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 90s and a message just titled the Ballad of Funky Kong. The list goes on. And let's be clear.
- [08:44]
Jamie Loftus
So let me be clear.
- [08:45]
Cliff
I, Jamie Loftus, have had a little experience being the niche main character myself. This is in fact happened to me twice in the last 10 years. The first time was in 2015 when I did a pick me performance art project that led to headlines like this comedian slash American patriot selling Shrek nudes to benefit planned Parenthood, which I have nothing else to say. That's exactly what it sounded like. 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. Moving on, I also went Viral Shortly in 2017 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 is butt chugging 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, 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. There you go. And he had encountered the butt chugging Infinite just 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. Yes, it's awful. Yes, it's this increasingly hostile place that is stealing our data, our time. It's 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 chest and you feel seen by the world for a second and it's hard to find an IRL equivalent of that. I can't explain it. You're going to hear a lot of that, but you get it because I've heard your voice memos and you're going to 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. Isn't that nice? 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. But first, we are kicking off our 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 a get. Here's Cliff.
- [11:40]
Jamie Loftus
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 90s where the movie Forrest Gump had just come out. It probably still had aol. And in 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. And a friend and I thought it would be funny to take a picture of me sitting and just blocking the word off and ha ha, half a second of 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 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? 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 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. I would not have been able to handle the 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, in the wild 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.
- [13:40]
Cliff
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 as we now have algorithms 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 30 to 50 Feral Hogs fame. It happened to coffee wife. It happened to Dr. Ali Lukes, the smell doctor. And it could happen to you. Here's listener and friend and amazing poet Maya Williams.
- [14:30]
Jamie Loftus
Hi, Jamie. So picture this. April 2022, 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 Keke Palmer being hilarious from Variety's Lie Detector series, genuinely not knowing who Dick Cheney is. And then I have a clip of Tyler Perry on the Variety lie Detector series mimicking Keke Palmer saying, oh, I'm sorry to this man. I don't know who this man is, even though he does know J.J. 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. No surprise. To my surprise, up to 44,000 views is upon the video, 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, Keke Palmer has worked with Tyler Perry before. Maybe it's okay that he mimics her. And then I end up turning off the comments when someone comments, sis, where 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 sing. 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 marginalized genders are trending because of entertainment media and reacting to it, especially people of marginalized genders who are black people.
- [16:28]
Cliff
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 Tessica Brown of Guerrilla Glue fame, in which she was faced with rampant misogynoir even from within her own community. Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain fame also spoke to this in detail in our recent series with him. And this makes me think of a conversation I had recently when I was. Listen to me. I. This makes me think of a conversation I had. 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 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 a 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 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 comment spectacular, how someone looks is always commented upon, whether it's the celebrity themselves or the user. Here's Hayden and Jessica Chastain.
- [18:15]
Jamie Loftus
Hi Jamie. I have one incident where I was sort of anonymously a main character back in late August of 2017. I was checking Twitter during the workday, as one does when it's slow, and saw that the actress Jessica Chastain had.
- [18:36]
Cliff
Tweeted something I found a little bit.
- [18:38]
Jamie Loftus
Inane about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that had happened a little bit prior to that. Something about like espousing nonviolence when faced with a bunch of violent Nazis that want to eradicate your existence. That's. She was one of my favorite actresses and I was already a little bit sensitive to the topic because I graduated from UVA and it was a really special place to me. And up to that point had been the location of like some of the happiest memories of my life that so far, which really had turned sour when.
- [19:11]
Cliff
You know, all of these places that you recognize in the news, which is papered over with Nazis and white supremacists and stuff.
- [19:17]
Jamie Loftus
So I just still to this day 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 that she would see it because she had, I think at that point, like half a million followers.
- [19:33]
Cliff
And who even could handle your notifications.
- [19:36]
Jamie Loftus
At that level, you know? But it was the, the Martin Luther King Jr. Quote about the danger of the white moderate. And I closed Twitter and then went back to doing whatever spreadsheet nonsense I was doing that day. And then I checked back a little.
- [19:54]
Cliff
Bit later and saw that she had.
- [19:55]
Jamie Loftus
Replied and was like a step and.
- [19:58]
Cliff
A half away from calling me a reverse racist.
- [20:00]
Jamie Loftus
And 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 directly and like was doing with other people.
- [20:14]
Cliff
Because I think at some point the.
- [20:15]
Jamie Loftus
Mary sue wrote about it and then by the evening like one of my Twitter friends had sent me an article like the Huffington Post had written about it.
- [20:25]
Cliff
And at that, around that point I started getting a wave of abuse from sort of alt right hyper conservative egg profile stuff.
- [20:38]
Jamie Loftus
And I had linked it originally to the HuffPost article. That was because it was way more mainstream than anything Mary sue had put out. Yeah, so that sort of was it for a while until a few years.
- [20:51]
Cliff
Later I discovered that the reason I.
- [20:53]
Jamie Loftus
Got so much of the right like hyper right wing abuse was because Breitbart had done an article about it. Now that's just sort of a fun fact that Breitbart put a hit out on me and couldn't even do it right because it was just my Star Wars Stan Twitter account. Every year in my calendar there's a little alert for like Chastain Beef Day.
- [21:10]
Cliff
In late August 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.
- [21:27]
Jamie Loftus
Hello, 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 2020, which was famously a good and healthy time for all of us. The singer Adele had just lost weight and the account Memequeen made a post that I still have a 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 2020 needs right now. The actual caption says her ex is punching the air right now. Because I was glued to my phone on May 7th of 2020. For some reason I was one of the first commenters. I commented, quote, adele has always been hot as fuck. Stop referring to weight loss as glowing up please. Unfortunately for me, she saw my comment early on and replied to it saying no one said about weight loss. Please don't put words in my mouth, unquote. In the screenshot I have on my phone from 16 hours after the incident. My initial comment had 15,337 likes and hundreds of replies as it does. This all happened very fast and for several hours I 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 her fatphobia, 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 this experience is the carrot photo. Several days before the incident, I had posted a photo to my grid of 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 Memequeen's page decided to comment on. And so I give you the most exquisitely stupid comment a strange 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 approximately 600 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 fatphobic normie 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 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 Dreyfuss go on a homophobic rant at a Jaws event and I tweeted about it and got quoted by multiple news sources. I love the Internet.
- [24:30]
Cliff
Thank you so much Kelly. And when we come back, more of your stories.
- [24:39]
Jamie Loftus
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- [27:14]
Cliff
Back to 16th Minute. 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, Aspen called in about some of the most blood boilingly dishonest clickbait I have ever heard.
- [27:41]
Jamie Loftus
When I was 18 years old in 2018, I was the media spokesperson for Lush Cosmetics, First Trans Rights 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 29 put out a pretty wild clickbait article on me in their beauty diaries titled I am a trans college student and I spend $1,782 a year on beauty products, which was wildly inaccurate since I mostly used free samples that I brought home and also included an $800 top surgery consultation that I'd attended as one of those beauty products. Social media comments naturally 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? Is it true? 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. Refinery 29 did eventually change the name of the article on search engines, so now it comes up as Transgender man. 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. Surgery Consultation is a beauty product again, haunting. It'll never leave me.
- [29:41]
Cliff
Thank you so much for calling in, Aspen. 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 29 headquarters right now. But as other stories sent in demonstrated, not all IRL to Internet encounters are completely doomed. I mean, most of them are, but here are two that worked out rather nicely.
- [30:14]
Jamie Loftus
Hi Jamie and 16th minute folks. My name's Tom Lum. We ran into each other on an episode of Never post. So in 2021 I was working in software development. It was fine, but I just was starting to lose my mind a little bit. And so I saw a job application to work as a writer for SciShow, which is a science YouTube channel that I adore. It was made by Hank and John Green, who also made stuff like Crash Course Vlogbrothers, and I've been a huge fan of all their 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. 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 bees jet lag for science. And then I posted it to my zero followers at, like, midnight and then went to sleep. And then I woke up to 5,000 followers, which was the most I had had on any social media ever. And then the videos started to really blow up, like, to the point where my notifications on TikTok were functionally useless. But 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 Lumb person, and assumed my name was Tom Lumperson. I was very lucky that this all happened when I was in my late 20s and I had already seen many stories of virality gone wrong or going nowhere. Right. You know, 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. Hank Green commented on that original video. And then as I kept doing it, we became mutuals, and then. And then friends. So that was always truly wild, which gives me emotional vertigo if I think about too hard. I also told Hank. I told Hank, you know, a few years later, I was like, did you know about that? He was like, did we hire you? And I was like, no, but that's fine. It all worked out in the end. 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 2017, and I went to the airport way too early, as I am known to do, and sat down at the bar, 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 eavesdropped. And as we were known to do in the late 2010s 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 up on BBC3. George Takei'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, huge thing that had happened at the Cleveland airport with me, somebody who was at the time a journalist working in Cleveland. And it was. 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 wasn't now turning into a private investigator and changing my flights to 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 a little similar plot elements with Grace and Frankie. So that put it on even more.
- [35:01]
Cliff
More eyes.
- [35:02]
Jamie Loftus
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 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 whatever happened or what became of them. And the answer is, no, I don't. I do not know whatever happened to the shot lady and the gum lady or they're probably gay husbands.
- [35:49]
Cliff
Thank you to Tom and BJ. And BJ's story in particular really stuck with me because it's the quote, unquote, overheard viral Twitter thread was such a moment in like the late 2000 and 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 about how as social media progresses we have this habit of knee jerks 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 ourselves and each other. It's something I have to catch myself doing all the time. But self impure 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.
- [36:45]
Jamie Loftus
Hi, my name is Joel Edmiston, I'm a listener to your show. My cat went viral. Basically my cat went in the bathtub. He went in the bath with water in it and 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 tick. I had tried TikTok at that point but it didn't work out and I deleted 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 gigantic. And I've kept making videos that was in 2021, so I've kept making videos about the cat with water stuff because he does like water and he was a kitten at the time, he's older now. I, you know, record my narrations over top of the videos. I'm like pleased with the account. Does make me feel good because 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 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 negativity is going to be there, but I just wish I didn't care so much. I think it's called concern trolling. When people act concerned for the cat over the smallest details and pretend they're experts or when they're just calling me names or you know, blah blah, blah. And it never ceases to amaze me. This is a cat after all. This is a cat page after all. And, and I can admit that I especially 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 block the person. It's probably good practice, but the fact that I have to read every comment for it. I kind of like scroll past thoughtlessly over the positive ones, but when I see any negativity, it's like, delete. Hi, I go by Sally St. Rose and I am calling in to talk about my tiny viral moment of my fat Spanx 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 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 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 shower caps online. And people went wild for it. I had media companies reaching out to me 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 Peele. It was awesome. I loved the love that Joby got from people. I was like, okay, everyone feels like me. They love Joby just as much 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.
- [40:45]
Cliff
He's so ugly. Really bizarre things.
- [40:47]
Jamie Loftus
But I just, you know, was like, hey, it's the Internet. Not going to pay them any mind. And when he was 11, he passed away from his heart condition. He had HCM, which pretty common in hairless breed unfortunately. But he passed away and it was really sad.
- [41:07]
Cliff
I was hit by grief, really, really hard.
- [41:10]
Jamie Loftus
And I would talk about it a little 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.
- [41:29]
Cliff
I was like, do you not love.
- [41:31]
Jamie Loftus
Him anymore because he's no longer alive? And I did a lot of introspection about what does this mean and why are people doing this? And I had to come to realization, oh, it's the Internet. He was a moment of time for people.
- [41:49]
Cliff
And then that was it.
- [41:51]
Jamie Loftus
And I was putting my feelings onto them of how I viewed Joby, of my world, 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 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.
- [42:28]
Cliff
Thank you to Joel and Sally for their stories. We talked a little bit about Internet pets in our Mu Ding 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. 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, it's an era of the Internet we've explored in episodes like Badger Badger Mushroom in Overly Attached 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.
- [43:32]
Jamie Loftus
I'm a 90s kid born in the mid-80s. 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 arson, plenty of petty theft, just kids being a fucking menace until I was about 10 or so. @ that point my half formed frontal cortex became increasingly aware of the allure of the Internet. But during my preteen years I spent untold hours trying to ignore the 6 o' clock news in the background as I scoured the latest links page on this BB or that year Use Net. It was pure information. Niche interests Someone's hobby, another'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 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? Yes, 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 2000s, advertisements had fully invaded these and all other spaces Websites cost money to host, and many of these platforms, forums and chat rooms and info boards 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 in the ocean of corporatization that has superseded this thing we thought 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 those of us who saw the Internet 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 of every medium and deliver something unique and human in a world increasingly devoid of both those qualities. Hi Jamie, my name is Alex. I love your show. Thank you so much for all the hard work making it. In 2005, 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 newgrounds.com and it got millions of views, thousands, tens of thousands of comments. And I really felt like a main character, like a celebrity. For actually a couple of months, the comments were rolling in. It really spread around the Internet onto all These other weird 2005 websites like Ebaum's World and Albino 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 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 18 year old boy would write in 2005. 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. I think people wouldn't be as nice about this cartoon now, but the fact that they were nice kind of helped pushed me towards my career as a professional animator. I used to play a lot of World of warcraft in the mid 2000s and I was a regular shit poster on my server's forum for about a year or two around this time. It was kind of an open secret that George Fisher from the band Cannibal Corpse played on our server and people were always coming by and asking what his character name was. And at some point someone started saying my character name as a joke. Things started to get out of hand at that point. 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 so awkward. Like I would see my name pop up in the comment sections of George Fisher videos when people are 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 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 to him. I'm sorry, this is all a big misunderstanding and I didn't want anything to do anything in this.
- [48:43]
Cliff
Thank you so much my boys. And when we come back, a few more stories for the road.
- [48:52]
Jamie Loftus
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- [51:27]
Cliff
Welcome back to 16th Minute, the show you write and record in bed with your mom. And here are a few last stories I like to share. So when it came to stories about niche Internet community trauma, there was quite a bit to sort through. 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 consume you without really having the possibility of leaking into your in person life in a meaningful way. An actual second life. Because 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 Hi.
- [52:26]
Jamie Loftus
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 moving forward. Basically, in the early 2000 and tens, I was part of a confession blog for a fandom, unsurprisingly, Magical Girls. So it was magicalgirl confessions tumblr.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 Love of Magical Girls. So one of the things that would happen a lot is misgendering. At the time I was not going by she her pronouns I am now, but at the time I was not. I was going by they them or the demigirl pronouns I had created for myself, which are jijamjir. There was a lot of racist things. In particular because I am half Japanese, people would try to talk about how I wasn't Japanese enough, for example, and things like that. And also on the reverse 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 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 when it's clearly hurting you so much? And my partner at the time also would express very similar feelings. 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, 2015. At the near the end of 2015, 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 out a loan myself. I went with my mother and my brother back to 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 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 much more at peace with my Internet usage knowing 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, they are projecting.
- [56:07]
Cliff
Thank you so much, Aumi. She is also a guest on the Bechtel cast coming up. So jump over to that feed if you run out of episodes here. Next up, a true pioneer, Casey, who is a Disney adult before Disney adults were Disney adults.
- [56:22]
Jamie Loftus
Hi Jamie. 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 2012 and in March 2014 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 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 57,000 followers, which isn't a ton. But for 2015, 2016, 2017, this was pretty big in the Disney realm. I would 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 susceptible 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 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 customer. One time a follower's dad posted a selfie in front of my hotel room door. His daughter found my room and he 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 thing that happened. 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, you know, 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 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 opinions. And the Disney influencers now they have Reddit snark pages and reading that would be the worst. So I'm probably glad that I was one of the early ones.
- [59:06]
Cliff
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 community that became a central part of Bailey's childhood.
- [59:33]
Jamie Loftus
Hi Jamie. My name is Bailey. I am an avid 16th 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 called debate.org spring break of 2016. I was going to a very conservative middle and high school, 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.org in a moment of boredom, but also as an expression of, I guess, wanting to express intellectual Rigor, you know, it was 2016. It was post Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for for president. Now, the structure of debate.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 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.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 I knew him from school. He was a couple 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 this person from age 13 to 16 in different capacities, as friends, as sexual partners, as friends again before COVID happened. And I slowly disentangled myself. Why I'm talking about debate.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 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 16th minute that we the listeners were listening to a future piece of lost media. And that is what debate.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 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 a lot of different music that I now love. It's where I formalized some political opinions that I still have to this day. Debate.org was a fever dream. I guess I'm happy I was a part of it while it was around. I certainly will not be passing on stories of it to my children and grandchildren if they survive on a burning planet.
- [63:45]
Cliff
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 ex, right? Thank you so much for sending in your story. Okay, I saved the sticky stuff for last as I am wont to do. As many of you might know, about half of the first year of 16th 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 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 tremendously healing and cool thing. It was the first time I felt like in control of what was happening in a long time. But suffice 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 strengths. I'm very lucky to have 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 to someone has felt the same way you have and that it sucks and then it doesn't really get better, it just gets different. And for people who aren't 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. There are still good corners of the Internet and so I really appreciated these stories about the Internet and processing grief. Here's Jake.
- [65:57]
Jamie Loftus
Hey Jamie. My name's Jake. Personally. I am 26 years old and I started I guess interacting with the Internet and a real consistent way I would say starting I was like 7 or 8. Honestly I do have a very specific memory that feels just like significant somehow in a way I can't really put words to. I in fifth grade had a friend pass away and it was honestly a pretty traumatic accident. He drowned. And I have a very distinct 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 serif font back when it was a functional search engine too. 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, I'm a grown adult now. I've done my fair share of therapy and processing outside of that experience, but it always looking back, has struck me as, as maybe novel to this era that I immediately went on the Internet to, to cope with grief at such a young age. Anyway, maybe I'm just, maybe I, maybe I'm inflating my own importance here a little bit. Anyway, love the show.
- [67:44]
Cliff
I want to hug baby Jake so much. And to close us out, here is Ben.
- [67:50]
Jamie Loftus
Hey, how's it going? My name's Ben, and in the early 2010sish, I was a main character, minor main character on Reddit for a couple of days. I was a senior in college, 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 visit him a couple of weeks earlier and say goodbye. And if even then he was determined, even if they cart me up there in an ambulance, I'm going to that graduation. But it was clear he was not making. Making his way across the. The house to the bathroom, let alone the trek up to central Minnesota from rural Iowa. So while I 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 us together as part of this process of graduating in this time of transition and even 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 60 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 FL. 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 2010s, 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 R pics. And they pretty quickly shot up to being the top post on the sub. And then quickly after that turned into the top 10, 15 posts of Reddit. And obviously that comes with like a deluge of comments. It's less Imposing then than it is now. Obviously, it's not coming to my phone. 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 gonna die in the middle of all of this weight hanging 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 taking tests and writing papers didn't. To distract me from it all. So it was a good distraction. And most of it was positive. Right. There's obviously edge cases. You had your militant atheist 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 put my grandfather and I 60 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. I, like I said I dressed like my grandpa in the photos. And so Macklemore's thrift shop 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 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 going on on the Internet started reaching out. There were only a few of them. The only one that I actually talked with was the only one that I could verify kind of was a real person, and they were a blogger at the Huffington Post +50 section. 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 major process in grief, philosophizing about family and what we leave behind and the impacts on, on, 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 I. It's something that I'm glad is there for me to revisit, you know, until the day some executive turns it into a piece of lost media. I don't think at 22, 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 was at this moment in time, as you know, kind of my entire world is shifting in addition to losing my grandpa is a nice thing to have, it's a nice artifact to have of who I was.
- [73:21]
Cliff
Thank you so much to Jake and to Ben. And on that note, you thank. We close out this chapter of 16th 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 has done to us and to the planet and will continue to. We're gonna keep talking about it, but until next time, this is Jamie Loftus and you are listening to a future piece of lost media talk soon. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater and pet shout outs to our dog producer, Anderson. My cats fleeing Casper and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye.
- [74:33]
Jamie Loftus
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- [75:28]
Cliff
Does friendly have a taste? If it does, it's probably like hello's peppermint flavored anti plaque and whitening toothpaste. Brush away plaque, show tartar who's boss and remove surface stains to naturally whiten. Hello's thoughtful and flavor forward products make brushing your teeth feel like a confetti filled bathroom dance party. So say hello to hello with the always cruelty free never tested on animals toothpaste that's made to spread smiles. Visit helloproducts.com and let hello add some everyday yay into your life.
- [76:01]
Jamie Loftus
Spring is here and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well groomed lawn delivered, but you can get a chicken parmesan delivered. A cabana? That's a no. But a banana? That's a yes. A nice tan? Sorry, nope. But a box fan? Happily, yes. A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app. For details Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, you're listening to an iHeart podcast.