This is my newsletter #48: Millniece Pinto
Beavis & Butthead and A Bowl of Frosties
Journaling and tracking my mood has been one of the most consistent habits I’ve developed during quarantine. This tiny diary holds all my waking thoughts, from the start of my day till the end. I originally developed this habit to clear my mental fog, but over time journaling has become a retrospective activity that has sparked some of my favourite ideas and successful projects. Today, I’d like to introduce you to First Byte, one of my newest endeavours to come out of months of recording fleeting childhood memories and quarantine observations.
On a perfect morning, I have poured myself a cup of tea, prepared breakfast all the while watching Twitch streamers play a round of Among Us. However, on a bad day, my tea has spilled all over the kitchen table, I have burnt my hand while flipping eggs, and pinged yet another COVID update. On one of these perfect mornings I found myself in front of the TV watching an episode of Beavis and Butthead. As I savoured my breakfast, I mused over my earliest memories of the show. I vaguely remember watching it for the first time, gulping down a bowl of Frosties as I got ready for school.
Amusing myself at the thought of growing up riding the cultural wave of early morning entertainment like MTV Rewind, Luke’s After Hours, Loveline, The Simpsons etc, I spiralled thinking about just how much my meals were centred around good TV shows, movies and music. Don’t get me wrong, I would pick healthy conversations over being in front of a screen any day, but what do you do when all you have is your own company?
Much like everyone else in quarantine, most of my spare time was in front of a screen; TV, cellphone or laptop, sometimes all three running simultaneously. Eventually, the banality of being in quarantine caught up with me and with it came consumer burnout. Conversations around mainstream media got stale. I felt like I was stuck in an echo chamber of Zoom events, Instagram Lives, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney Plus. I no longer woke up searching for the perfect spread of music and TV to kick off my mornings, instead I just had reruns of Friends in the background to fill up the silence of living alone.
I’ve now entered a new phase of my quarantine existence, one that caters to my desire to relive the joy of watching Beavis and Butthead with a bowl full of Frosties. Lately I’ve taken to planning my breakfast around hard-to-find content on the internet. It’s become a unique kind of pleasure to not only revisit memory lane but also discover newer creators on platforms I haven’t explored before.
Until now, I never realised just how much I took creators for granted; especially the ones who have a dedicated, and often forgotten, place in closing credits. The more I spent time online cracking through algorithms, the more I realised the collaborative effort put into creating quality content and just how difficult it is to be ‘seen’ on the internet. Guided by my need to share complementary breakfast entertainment and champion creative expression of all kinds, I found myself creating an Instagram account dedicated to curating content to go with our first bite of the day.
Here is my selection of First Bytes to kick off your day:
To Discover
Gaurav Chugani, Visual Artist
Border-Line Tattoos,Machine Tattoo Artist
Digital zoetropes, Marvelous Media Engine
Alekha, Photographer
Frederick Abeyeratne, Toy Photographer
Azuma Makoto, Flower Artist
To Watch
Robot Chicken, Cartoon Network’s late-night lineup, Adult Swim
Uncle Roger Review Food
To Listen
Mirror - Sigrid
Fire For You - Cannons
What Would You Do - HONNE Feat. Pink Sweat$
Wanna Be Her - june
Space Ghost Coast To Coast - Glass Animals
To Read
I am I am I am, Rohan Dahiya
For Millennials On The Eve Of The Apocalypse, Megha Rao
If you’re an independent musician, filmmaker, animator, photographer, poet, storyteller etc producing content that you think would go well with my bowl of Frosties reach out to me on Instagram @firstbyte__ . If you want to chat or maybe share a fond memory of your first bite, I’d love to hear from you! You can slip into my DMs @mill_niece.