Mid-Week Five: Aug 5, 2026
this one's heavy on music
Hi Consumers! I so badly wanted to give you a Friday Five last week, but have been in the midst of moving flats, hosting family, and traveling that it just didn’t come together in time. I have so much to say, but I’ll keep it concise for the time being! So here’s a mid-week five, some bits of catharsis, joy, and niche humor from across the internet.
Song: “Nothing Even Matters” has reached certified platinum status on my phone given the number of times I’ve played it over the past decade. And as I sit with my own writer’s block, I’ve since learned Lauryn Hill was facing a massive case of the same affliction when trying to pen this song. She wanted to create a love song somewhere along the lines of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” She penned about 30 songs trying to nail this one. Hearing her producer working on this snap-laden beat set the track in motion, and D’Angelo laid down his vocals in just an hour.
I think a lot about sparks of inspiration, likely because I fumble my own far too often and I’ve been thinking about D’Angelo a lot this past year. He appeared to be so embodied, tapped in to his innate creativity, the divine spark within him seemingly readily accessible from the outside, which was honed carefully, sometimes painfully over decades of hard work.
News You Can Use: Myspace might be making a comeback, and a sweeping wave of nostalgia and excitement coursed through me when social media mostly conjures dread in me. I don’t even know that it’s possible for Myspace to occupy the same cultural footprint it briefly had, and it’s unlikely that another platform will make any of us feel any differently about interacting with one another online. Myspace was the second social media platform I ever used (Xanga was the first, and sometimes writing on here feels like it), it put me onto musicians and artists I still listen to. Sky Ferreira was one of those artists, and connections from Myspace (shoutout Keith!) were how I got into a very tiny show of hers put on in a music rental spot in NYC in 2010.
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Twenty years ago, my friend Kamie and I were fixated on how we could make our pages stand out. We learned basic HTML to make layouts, then decided to start our own page rife with Myspace and Xanga layouts, gifs, icons to use as profile pictures, glittery banners, and the like. It was called “Hollywood Glam” (honestly fitting because Kamie is indeed both hollywood and glam, she is truly one of the best people) and we made decent traction with it. I remember taking digital camera selfies in her backyard which we used to hard launch our actual faces onto the page, fumbling with our angles — not to be confused with the Myspace angles called out in this OG viral video by David Lehre… whose content I loved before he pivoted into cosplaying as a K-pop star, another rabbithole for another Consumed. We also had a moment where we inexplicably capitalized every letter except the ‘i’ and doubled up on random letters and added z’s to our plurals, with phrases like 'TANLiNESZ FADEE; FRiENDS LAST FOREVERR’ atop our pages.
A Birthday Tribute: The delicate, beautiful tenderness in Hanif Abdurraqib’s music writing always stirs something in me and this beautiful ode to Kate Bush is no different. I can’t pick a favorite line here, but this one alone feels like a sermon: “Speaking of beauty, you can commit yourself, entirely, to the seeking of it, and the articulation of it, the pointing at it and begging others to join you in your pointing and you can change the terms of beauty, too.”
First Five Minutes of a Podcast: Beloved consumer sam verdile pulled over her bicycle and left me a voice note urging me to listen to the first five minutes of this podcast episode. I would follow Sam off a cliff, so I immediately heeded her suggestion. I’ve never listened to Trixie or Katya before, stemming from my tendency to avoid funny podcast duos after Desus and Mero parted ways (I’m still not over it). “Born This Way” made quite the impact on me, going platinum on my iPod and taking up space on burned CDs, and in particular the line “you’re Lebanese, your orient” has occupied some valuable real estate in the time since it came out. I’m so grateful someone’s unpacking this all these years later.
Joyful Internet Content:
I love Robby Hoffman and I love people with spatial awareness on trains, which are sadly lacking to a meaningful extent in London. We need to bring this across the pond with David Attenborough and Posh Spice making the announcements, ideally that one girl from Little Mix who blurted ‘BALEGEDE’ as well:
“Not Ready to Make Nice” is one of the greatest songs of all time, and this bridge will always make me emotional!!!
I’ve been thinking about this headstone for days:
And this carousel pairs perfectly with reminiscing on Myspace:
Never ready to make nice,
Roya
MY MAMA TOLD ME THAT IIII WAS GAAAAAY
XANGA! I MISS XANGA