Content Blender #1
Consume! Consume! Consume! GIVE ME MORE CONTENT
During the pandemic, I lived in a student house in Manchester with five other people.
That year passed slowly and quickly; the house was four stories tall, extremely dusty, and plastered with green and beige floral wallpaper.
The wallpaper was alright, we thought when we first saw it - a nice change from the stark white paint of student houses gone by. It gave the house a cosy feel; a safe haven to return to, after a rainy cigarette on the doorstep or daily trip to the co-op.
It wasn’t until later on in the year that I started to see the wallpaper for what it truly was: something vacuous and pathetic that was supposed to be pretty, trying and failing to cover up something soulless and crumbling, whilst itself becoming less and less beautiful by the day. A metaphor for our physical form, perhaps, and the fleetingness of it all. I laid my finger against the grooves on the wallpaper and felt myself become one with it, feeling its desperation, almost crying for its plight. In short, I did a lot of acid that winter.
Because it was too cold to go outside and be in nature, we had to make do with the four walls that surrounded us. After a while spent sucking myself into the wallpaper, I decided to turn my energy towards something more productive.
Two-and-a-half hours later, I emerged into the living room with my creation. Hooking up the laptop to the projector, I presented it to our government-mandated lockdown bubble, who were all sat on red leather beanbags on the floor.
Here, I had set footage from the children’s TV show Charlie and Lola to half-speed, muted the audio, and played audio from an episode of Love Island on double-speed over the top instead. Interjected at random were clips from Jeremy Wade’s documentary TV show ‘river monsters’. This was the Content Blender, and it played for much too long on our six-foot-wide projector that evening, before someone wrestled the HDMI cable from my sweaty grip and put on Rango.
Despite negative audience backlash, inside my addled brain I truly believed I had made something amazing. I screen-recorded the whole thing so that, once sober, I could refer back to it, and possibly build some kind of media production empire around it. Unfortunately, I spilled chocolate milk all over that laptop a couple of years ago and the footage was lost forever: I’m only telling you about it now because it’s the origin story for The Softening’s fun new segment: The Content Blender.
The Content Blender: Iona’s weekly content recommendations
For reasons I won’t go into now, I haven’t listened to music for the last three months. Because of this, I missed ‘Brat’ as it happened. Instead, over Instagram I witnessed its meteoric rise, its blaze of glory, the slightly sticky part when someone made it the cover of Kamala Harris’s X account, and its subsequent descent from ‘blaze of glory’ to ‘averagely good summer album with accompanying millenial meme fodder’. This week, I listened to it for the first time, focusing particularly on ‘The girl, so confusing version with Lorde’, which in my opinion is the only part anyone should be paying attention to.
Listening to this song prompted me to start thinking about pride, and public forgiveness, and how rare it is. Enter this piece of content from Robbie and Gary:
‘Shame’ - Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams
For those who don’t know, Gary and Robbie were in a boyband called Take That in the 1990s, then the band split up and they had a decades-long public feud. This song, released in 2010, was their reconciliation. I remember we were on holiday in Cornwall when it came out, and I was in the car with my mum and my sister when it was played for the first time on the radio, and my mum started crying because they’d been fighting for so long.
This week, I listened to ‘The girl, so confusing version with Lorde’ and then ‘Shame’, then I repeated the cycle twice until I was crying (no mean feat given my current dosage of SSRIs).
A few minutes later I called my dad for a catch-up, and we ended up talking about forgiveness. We spoke about how with the world in its current state, we can’t afford to hold onto anger on a personal level, and the ten-minute conversation ended up being the highlight of my week.
Forgiveness goes against all the over-therapised, hyper-vigilant, black-and-white narratives we are currently being fed within society. It is a long, uncomfortable process that mostly feels like you’re walking backwards in the dark, but IMO it’s one of the most beautiful and worthwhile things you can do on this planet.
My flatmate and I have been watching this at a beautifully glacial pace, and as the episodes have floated past, the main thing I’ve noticed is that Peter is the most apt representation of coquette that I’ve ever seen on screen.
This BBC Article From 2016 About Plastic Surgery
Last night I was on a zoom call in the late afternoon, with one day to go until my period. If you’ve read my story about PMS, you’ll know that around this time of the month I enter a last-man-standing battle against my own reflection. After a while of staring starkly at myself in the little box in the corner of the screen, I became so distressed that I had to leave the call early. Convinced that I needed to go into an ugly home, I embarked on what ended up being an hour-long dive into different facial surgeries, most of which cost upwards of £10,000, all of which I had decided I needed. I was a woman possessed, on a downward spiral into the worst parts of the internet. My neck and eyes started to ache, as I scrolled through people posting their rhinoplasty results on forums with the caption ‘I’ve never been so happy in my life’.
There seemed to be no end in sight. My 10pm bedtime was becoming a pathetic pipe dream, and my frazzled soul could take no more. Then, in a move that some would describe as a ‘rock bottom’, I found my fingers typing ‘does plastic surgery actually make you happy’ into the Google search bar. I clicked on the first result I saw, which was this BBC article.
I have my own myriad of issues with the BBC, but when you’re drowning, you’ll take the arm of anyone who offers.
The piece, which is written by an anonymous man, is fairly unremarkable in and of itself. It didn’t turn my life or my views upside down, but at that moment in time, it stopped me in the tracks of my 10pm descent into hell, gently prompting me to close my laptop, and get out of my head and into the reality that surrounded me. For this reason, it has earned a place in this week’s content blender.
One of two newsletters I’m recommending on this week’s Content Blender. To read one of Princess Babygirl’s pieces is to have the weight taken off a train of thought you keep getting stuck on, and to be taken along for the ride as it accelerates deftly into different fields that had never occurred to you. A hot, intelligent and stretchy brain massage.
OH OH W KO_OL ft Jasmine & Amar
I am currently both overwhelmed and saddened by Spotify (I still use it, but reserve it for when I know what I want to listen to). Real people, playing the songs that are making them happy at the moment, is much better for my soul.
OH OH was one of the first shows I returned to once music was back in my life, and the selections never fail to scratch the exact right part of my brain. I’m trying to break the habit of thinking I know best all the time, so always listen to shows all the way through and hear everything the DJ has to say - but if you’re pushed for time, I’d most recommend from 32:30 to the end. It was on whilst I was doing the washing up, and got to experience the transition from Tinashe’s ‘Nasty Girl’ into Texas’s ‘Inner Smile’ just as the high from having finished the washing up kicked in. Hand on heart, a better experience than doing a whole gram of cocaine.
Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Chicken Scarparelli
My current level of executive functioning is batch-cooking two separate meals per week, resulting in eight or ten meals which are frozen and eaten throughout the week. Whilst this is definitely not perfect (spending most of my disposable income on meal deals), it is an improvement on a few years ago (buying a tub of Boursin and eating it by the teaspoonful over 2 days).
One of the meals I am currently batch-cooking is this recipe for braised chicken thighs. The pages of this YouTube video are well-worn by me - I know exactly what point he starts talking about Anthony Bourdain’s views on garlic presses, and when he burns the chicken in real time - and it still brings me a sense of serenity every time I balance my laptop on the toaster and cook alongside him.
Not difficult, one pan, and freezes well, especially if you cook a big thing of rice with it and put it all in a box together.
This song plays at my work, and every time I hear it I absolutely have to do a little dance, and I get in trouble for dancing every time, because I’ve not quite got the hang of doing it in the CCTV blind spots. I have fantasies of compiling all the CCTV of me dancing to this song, and making a music video from it - I would absolutely do this if it wouldn’t breach about a million GDPR laws / get me fired probably.
‘Wash My Hair In The Sink’ - Asa Riah’s Darkhouse
Very simply the best thing I’ve read in ages. My number one recommendation in the blender. 10/10, incredible writer, follow their Substack if you haven’t already.
Tommy And The TVs - The Man Who Fell To Earth
On that fated night in Manchester when the Content Blender was born, we watched The Man Who Fell To Earth.
The film made me think about lots of things (too many things, arguably - I actually ended up in a battle with my own psyche for almost 60 solid hours that night, but that’s a story for another time) - and one of the things it made me think about was was how technology is fucking crazy, dude.
This scene haunts me every day. When we were trying to decide whether to get a TV in the living room of our flat, I played it to my flatmates. ‘This will be us if we get a TV’, I said jokingly, but they didn’t find it funny, and actually demanded that I turn it off halfway through.
Joking aside, technology is fucking crazy, dude. How do we stop ourselves from turning into Tommy? Alternatively, should we just lean into the dopamine-riddled oblivion of it all? Is my phone secretly trying to kill me? Am I ever to wed, or shall I remain alone forever, with nought but my little lamb to keep me company? These are normal questions we all ponder regularly.
This allows me to introduce The Softening’s second new segment, coming soon: Touch Grass. Touch Grass requires some audience participation, and so I’m asking you to send me your problems and your worries - preferably existential and fundamentally unanswerable, but concerns about whether or not the boy you like likes you back are also welcomed. In Touch Grass we will work through these questions tenderly and gently.
Please send your problems, worries and wanderings to dm4hct@gmail.com. Or, message me on Substack or Instagram.
Iona x
(P.S. if you’re enjoying my work, please consider buying me a coffee to say thanks. I appreciate it so much!)