So this is the new year
Links 4u, plus addressing the physical media and analog "trend"
HELLO new subscribers! Welcome to Nicstalgia, your Pop Culture PhD and cultural literacy guide to navigate the nostalgia industrial complex. Quick orientation: About Nicstalgia • Website • Instagram. So happy you’re here!!!!!!! 💖 💖 💖
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!! New year, new look, new Paige.1 Compulsory revisit of my favorite New Year’s song:
Updates from me:
ICYMI, last week I shared my 2025 Whimsy Report aka. all the delightful, primarily offline stuff I did in 2025. Enjoy!!
The Nicstalgia Presents: Pop Culture Advent Calendar, which recalled the 20 year anniversary of entertainment and celebrity culture happenings, is fully unlocked!!!! Can’t wait to do more of these fun browser-based projects this year.
My book of essays, which I intended to be my defining project of 2025, is on pause. Once I started working on it consistently, my writing got better. I realized I could actually get paid to write things, which inspired me to write for Not Here to Make Friends and Are.na Annual. Professionalizing my talents is so uncomfortable, but 2026 is about raising the stakes. No dream is off the table!!!!!!!!!
As for 2026’s Nicstalgia projects, I will be doing more archiving work (mainly because my phone apps stop working after I’ve used 99.999% of my storage), continuing My Digital Archiving Project from 2024. (Read about MDAP here and here.) Will also update the digital PMR Zine and make a physical version.
Wanted to show you select niche pop culture/physical media-related items I was thoughtfully gifted for Christmas! I’m screaming and crying because my amazing sister handmade me my very own mini Blockbuster and custom Who Is It? (aka. Guess Who?)!! Gifts from my boyfriend included a Christina Aguilera doll from The Museum of Nostalgia and Don’t Trust The B— in Apt. 23 on DVD. (It was recently taken off streaming. I was so desperate to finish watching, I was this close 🤏🏼 to asking Eric Andre, who was in my fitness class a couple months ago, if he had a copy.)
I’ve seen several olive green jackets with black suede knee-high boots that tie in the back. We’re so back…to 2016. They must have seen my chart!
🎳 I had such a great time at Everything 90s Podcast’s 90s vs. 2000s All Star Edition!!!! I represented Team 2000s, debating why Nintendo Wii is the superior console to Playstation. Watch the episode to find out who won, and stay til the end for a special announcement from Shaleena!! (Watch Shaleena on Nicstalgia here and revisit 90s vs. 2000s Trends on Everything 90s here!)
🎶 Matthew Perpetua is the sole reason I don’t believe in the myth of musical “taste freeze” after age 33. He made awesome pop + dance, indie/alternative, hip hop/R&B, and overall time capsule playlists for music from 2025. (Linked on Spotify, but also on Apple Music. My favorite Fluxblog playlist right now is 100% Pure Love: Dance Pop 1991-1995!!!!!)
📸 Friend of the letter K.D. Kemp has one of my absolute FAVORITE early internet-inspired websites!! If you are interested in physical media, K.D. Kemp’s Complete Guide to Collecting Physical Media is absolutely required reading!! Take this quiz to find out which K.D. Kemp button you are. I’m the camera!
📼 I’m so proud of JD from titanicfan_97 for surpassing 5,000 copies of Titanic on VHS!! The Titanic on VHS museum is officially open in Tarpon Springs, FL. (Read my highly entertaining interview with JD here!)
👄 I’m obsessed with VHS Dates, even though it’s original scripted content mostly featuring comedians from LA’s famed comedic improv troupe, The Groundlings. That being said…how do I audition for this???
🏍️ I was literally laughing out loud at someone’s realization that the owners of the NYC performance rehearsal space Ripley Grier are in fact real people! Basically, a dance studio owner saw a guy on a motorcycle outside of her building in 1982, and the rest is history!
🚗 The best recent commercials geared toward Millennials: Lil Wayne for Alexa+ and Sisqó for Toyotathon.
🥂 From the Bustle archives: Why “The Countdown” Is The Perfect ‘O.C.’ Episode. I wouldn’t give Oliver any credit, but it truly is a great episode.
💿 My algorithm may over-index this because I’m a physical media collector, archivist, and retro tech enthusiast, but 2026 will apparently be the year – or “revenge of” – analog and physical media. Sounds like a good thing at first glance, but I’m not here to say “I told you so” because I “predicted” it. I didn’t. I meaningfully engage with cultural artifacts during every stage of their popularity (and obsolescence) and clearly recognize the unintended consequences of unbridled performative consumption. It’s fueled by the hyper-acceleration of trend cycles on social media – even if that trend is, paradoxically, about offline activities or objects.2 While some takes on this “trend” are bad, framing physical media and offline life as yet another thing to consume and perform, these ones are good:
julia kosub from parasocialization’s you’re not a digital minimalist: “You do not need to buy anything to save yourself from the internet. You need to leave the internet to save yourself from the internet.”
Tori’s Substack from Be Serious with Tori West’s Why Physical Media Shouldn’t be Treated as a Trend: “When physical media is framed as a trend, consumption risks being further mistaken for creativity….when creativity becomes inseparable from its ability to sell, when cultural signals are optimised for engagement rather than meaning, we have to ask whether we’re witnessing artistic expression, or simply a highly stylised mechanism for capitalism.”
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Nicstalgia readers already know that the “New year, new look, new Paige” Degrassi episode refers to the new school year, not the new calendar year, but I still love referring to it to signify a fresh start.
The logic behind the hyper-acceleration of trend cycles on social media is what I call “paintball theory”. I’ve talked about it many times, but it needs to be zhuzhed. Stay tuned…
Thanks for the shoutout friend!! So excited to see all you've got cooking this year! 💖💖 Fascinated by the trendification of physical media and curious to see how that's gonna play out.
Death Cab for Cutie!! As soon as I saw the title to this post I was like YESSSS.
I am one of those people who held on to all my CDs and DVDs from back in the day for sentimental/nostalgic reasons, so I'm pretty happy to see them making a comeback. For Christmas I got a new discman so that I can listen to my CDs at work. I work with a bunch of young Gen Z kids, so no telling if they'll think it's cool or sad 😂 I plan to start expanding on my CD collection this year and perhaps even start collecting cassettes again! I still have both Spice Girls albums on cassette and no way to listen to them currently...hmm.....
I'm so looking forward to reading your book of essays whenever you finish it!!