hazel

“Are you from Tennessee? 'Cause you’re like… really hot.”

Rumor has it, if you say “a algorithm” three times, Hazel has a aneurysm.

Did you find that socially isolating at all? On one hand, and probably more a thought from my adult brain than something I would have agreed with back then, one doesn’t want friendships that are predicated on such things. On the other hand, it sure looked like they were having a lot of fun playing Pokémon, whereas I didn’t know the first thing about it. It would have been an easy thing to use as common ground.

Watching your friend’s Tamagotchi while they’re away sounds almost humiliating though.

My sister and I, aged 9 and 6 respectively, were sitting in the car waiting for our father to grab a couple of things from the supermarket. My sister pointed at a girl sitting on a bench outside the store playing with a Tamagotchi. I’d never heard of it. My sister described it to me, and I liked the idea a lot. It sounded like this thing would be my friend, and I didn’t have a lot of those.

“Tell mum and dad to get you one!” I remember this phrasing, because it made me uncomfortable to even think of telling my parents to do anything for me. It bothered me that she felt it was acceptable to demand things like this. I did ask my father though, and he heaved a sigh before relenting. He’d bought one for one of his children, so he knew he couldn’t deny the other one. Maybe that’s why my sister thought I was in a strong position to be demanding.

At the toy shop, my father asked the store clerk for a Tamagotchi in a defeated and despairing way. “Oh yeah they all want those bloody things now, don’t they?” I can’t remember the exact quote, but I remember the two grown-ups agreeing that these Tamagotchi things are stupid and annoying. It was very clear that I was pushing my father into doing something he didn’t want to do, and enduring something he found bothersome in the future. I stood there in shame as he paid for the thing I was now pretty sure I didn’t want.

In my bedroom that evening, I pulled out the little tab that isolated the battery, and the Tamagotchi sprung to life. It didn’t feel like a friend at all. It felt like a dirty little secret. I played with it for a few minutes, but I just felt so guilty. By the next time I picked it up, the battery was almost dead. I wished so much that I had never asked for that thing.

I don’t think I experience 90s nostalgia in the same way as the majority of my peers. I remember the feel of the 90s, but all of these little toys and gadgets were things my parents despised, and either refused to have in the house, or begrudgingly allowed in very small doses while making their contempt for them very clear. Maybe that was for the best in a lot of ways, but it boxed me out of the 90s childhood that many seem to remember very fondly.

Avoiding character ambiguity is a very cool and normal thing to do.

This is precisely what I meant, and I’m glad it came across. 💙

I judge entire neighbourhoods on how amenable cats are. If a cat chilling on the footpath is pleased to meet me, then I’m calm. If a cat sitting 50 meters away from me responds to my friendly greeting chirp by backing under the nearest car with flat ears and a sunken tail, I assume the humans around it are garbage people and I need to get out. Cats are to the streets as frogs are to the rivers.

I don’t think we’re capable of looking very far afield, to be fair. Space is pretty big. I read that somewhere.

Honestly. What are the chances that in the entire universe, there is no ecosystem that has led to the evolution of an organism indistinguishable from our Earth cats?

Rule 2 seems to negate most of the defining characteristics of the MAGA movement, no?

People ask why I triple every recipe. This is why.

Tell us about this book.

Ew, girl I can still see your eye craters. Get some fillers or something.

I want this, and although there isn’t always a perceptible difference in audio quality, there sometimes can be. It depends on the content, and I’d rather sometimes stream audio at an excessively high bitrate than always lose the high–end definition that I could have enjoyed where it exists.

All my life I’ve been getting into disagreements with people who believe that because they can’t tell the difference between A and B, I must not be able to either. I find this immensely frustrating.

Excellent comment. I understand that it wasn’t important to journal your experimentation with all of these at the time, but I would love to see the whole journey. Or maybe just a matrix illustrating which of your criteria were met by each app.

they felt hurt because they did not think my enthusiasm was genuine

I can see myself encountering this issue, and the other person would be right. My enthusiasm is very often fake. My “I’m really enjoying this” face is the one you see in my avatar. Faking reactions to things is how I go through life.

The Internet will never forget you.

I hope this happens so I can hop on the fake ex market early. I’ll insert you into my fictional dating history at a rate of $50 per month that we were supposedly together.

I have tried, and writing my last comment actually brought a lot of repressed rage out. I’ve been too lenient on my friends and family who continue to use things like Facebook and X, because I didn’t want to be that opinionated, ideological snore who won’t shut up about how Facebook is the world’s most prolific purveyor of hate speech, propping up the Trump administration, Israel, LGBT hate groups, the Rohingya genocide, housing discrimination, abortion witch hunts, blah blah blah. But the thing is that these are true things, and people should be appalled enough to never touch a Meta product again, even if it means teaching an elderly family member to learn a new group messaging app.

So I’m back to being a loudmouth bitch who scolds people for using Facebook. And X. But I probably don’t stand a chance with Google.

We wouldn’t need so many damn laws to prevent shitty companies from doing shitty things if we could just become the kind of society that doesn’t support shitty companies. The cookie thing is a great example of how a well–intentioned regulation made the internet an even more irritating place to be.