I never promised you a happy ending
"Autumn Goodbye", Glitter & Greed, iCarly cookie jar, nostalgic digital cameras 🍪
Good evening specifically to Celine Dion, and happy birthday to the one and only Carly Rae Jepsen. Though we are saying Autumn Goodbye to [Canadian] Scorpio season, Sagittarius season aka. a time to celebrate the impact, life and legacy of Britney Spears, is upon us!!!!
Updates from Nicstalgia HQ:
👩🏻💼 Friendly reminder that you can still Hire Me!!!!!!
📕 Book of Essays accountability post: I’ve been going through all my writing, which has been really fun! Goal is to finalize the list of what will be included and start cleaning up & fleshing out the content by the new year. After that comes designing, printing, and marketing the book in Q1. Would be fun to have a lil launch party for my birthday to kick off Q2! So that’s my timeline. Wooooo!!!
🏃🏻♀️ If you’re in or near Fairfield County, come take pop culture-themed elliptical classes with me! I have a lot of fun themes coming up in December. We do private events too – birthday, corporate, special occasion – so get in touch if you’re interested!
🦃 Next week is our Thanksgiving issue. Will share all about my Fall bucket list and share some tips for compiling one of your own.
🎄 Thursday 12/5’s issue will be the Christmas Movie issue, because yes, I’ve seen far too many of them. I’ll tell you which ones are and aren’t worth the watch. Not doing a gift guide this year, but rather spreading the word about people I know who are making cool things. (If you are one of them, please email me so I can include you!)
🎈 I’ve removed the paywall from last year’s Thanksgiving issue in case you want to watch the 1996-2003 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades in all their lo-fi glory!
ICYMI, last week’s issue included a little Digital Archiving Project update, my My So-Called Life curation for Mise-En-Scène, and links 4u to enjoy. Catch up on these before they enter the archive! 🔐
Huge thank you to Nicstalgia supporters who I will love forever: Janine, Marie, Liv, Mitra, CY, and Chet! 💐💐💐
📲 I’m just a simple girl in a high-tech digital world
🎱 Huge fan of
and . Take a look at the Live Players trend reports while they’re still unpaywalled. Part 2 has a pretty robust addition specifically on nostalgia that I thoroughly enjoyed.I love generational theory and believe cultural zeitgeist insights & commentary can be made without making sweeping misgeneralizations. Sean summarized how I feel about generational constructs best: “[people in the same generation] shared the same delusions and confronted the same realities.”
Also appreciated his interpretation of what I usually refer to as nowstalgia or anemoia, highlighting the contrast between secondhand nostalgia and the compensatory re-consumption of post-Chasm™-gen people living in fear of aging into obsolescence: “If these trends are not promoting newness per se, they are certainly promoting neo-ness. We are dealing with two fundamentally different types of nostalgia here. One involves zoomers looking back beyond the horizon of their own personal experience. The other involves millennials cosplaying their own youth. Personal nostalgia and historical nostalgia are not the same.”
Read Live Players Pt. 1 & 2 here:
📹 As your resident Analog Hardware Expert and catalyst of the Physical Media Renaissance™, I love seeing very Nicstalgic technologies pop up – outside of Urban Outfitters lol. I’ve been watching KICKBACK (née 90sTimeMachine) for a while and enjoyed their interview with Thingtesting.² Their products include a Y2K digital camera and converter, record player, CD player, among others. We need to bring back friction! Human connection! Self expression independent from social media performance! I would love to host an IRL event with them!
🌈 As you know, one of the primary recurring topics in this newsletter is Lisa Frank. I’ve been waiting for the day when I could tell you this news, and it’s finally here: Glitter & Greed: The Lisa Frank Story debuts on Amazon Prime on December 5. I will be seated with popcorn.
👄 Zach from AFunctioningGay has blessed us with another impressive meme carousel to celebrate the 21st anniversary of Britney’s In the Zone album this week! Shoutout to “Over To You Now”, a track released on the Britney & Kevin: Chaotic EP, which was cowritten by two of my very favorite singers – Robyn and Imogen Heap!⁴
🤡 I deeply admire LaKenzie Powell’s level of commitment and dedication in finding this unique heirloom: the McCoy clown cookie jar as seen on the set of iCarly.
🎭 Came across the epic viral video American Girl Doll Group Dance Routine by Sarah (Stephenswodadancer) on YouTube, and I’m obsessed. When the troupe started doing grand jetés, I burst into applause. I was obviously in the generation who experienced AG at its peak (I consider this around 1998 when the company was sold to Mattel for $700 million), but it’s so interesting to consider the Gen Z kids who grew up with this distinctly analog product on YouTube and Tumblr.
⭐️ Addison Rae doesn’t want to play Britney Spears in her biopic and thinks it’s unfair to even compare the two of them. “I support anything and everything that Britney Spears ever wants to do in her life and career.” This is the correct answer!!!!
🗺 I could teach a college-level course on the interconnectedness of Hollywood celebrities and its influence as America’s primary maintainer of status quo systems of power, wealth, and status. A lovely example of one of these six-degree-connectors is music producer David Foster. Abbey Bonadies provided the updated David Foster flow that we all needed.
🌧 This video of Boy Marinho dancing dramatically in the rain to JoJo’s “Too Little, Too Late” was so beautiful, and then I had to go and see an AI-generated version using his likeness, but with John Goodman’s face. Perfect example of the “Not Like That” paradigm. (Like AI is fine but not like that lol.)
🏡 I can’t even act nonchalant about this – if I had kids, I would absolutely build them an entire play village based on a famous pop culture universe. Here’s one of Stars Hollow, and yes, the daughter is even named Lorelai.
🎫 Me, but it’s for one of my Mount Rushmore artists, so it’s fine/dollars don’t count!!!!!!! IT’S TIIIIIIIIIIMMMMEEEE!!!!!
🦋 Social butterfly
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¹ We as a society need to be talking about “Autumn Goodbye” more.
² I’m somewhat of a Thingtesting power user, where you leave reviews on [kinda bougie] products. They introduced me to Heyday Canning and I think also to Goodles, for which I’m forever grateful!
³ For example, Gen Z are buying digital cameras for the first time, and I – a Millennial who has experienced The Chasm™, the realization that I have aged out of the fixture generation of youth culture – am rebuying the icy blue transparent Memorex CD boombox I had as an adolescent just to feel something. (Also because I can’t afford a house.) I talk a lot about this in my Nostalgia Isn’t “Back”…It Never Left episode.
⁴ Speaking of my favorite artists, the other day I asked Chat GPT, “If I hate counting crows, what’s the complete opposite of that, that I would like?” It’s really bad at dates and fact-checking, but it gave a great response here! It suggested Bright, Upbeat Pop-Rock like The Donnas, Paramore, and The Veronicas; Dance-Pop / Electro-Pop like Robyn, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Kylie Minogue; and Female-Led Pop-Punk / Rock like No Doubt and Avril Lavigne. Spot on!