Tabs Worth Keeping Open
Shelley Mulshine is nineteen, Swedish, artificially red-haired, and has somehow already assembled the life most people spend their entire twenties working toward: her own parties, modeling income, a large internet following. Stockholm produces this type with some regularity—people who treat their own image as a working medium—and she knows exactly what she’s doing with hers. Her audience is there mainly for the legs and the face and I won’t pretend I’m above any of that, but she’s also built something real, which isn’t nothing.
Luise from Dresden is sixteen and posting photos of her blonde hair alongside dispatches about friends and family, wishing her readers a beautiful morning with a sincerity that’s impossible to manufacture. There’s a specific early-blog quality—pre-performance, pre-brand—that you can’t fake, and she has it completely intact.
Alex Sim-Wise is twenty-eight and the specific kind of woman who makes you want to go home and be better at things. She’s a model who will absolutely destroy you at Pokémon. She plays Super Mario, she raids in World of Warcraft, and she’s apparently still waiting for someone who can keep up with her across both disciplines. I can think of worse requirements for a person to have.
Luca Borowski is also sixteen, from a town called Moers, and her blog is entirely herself—running across fields with friends, painting her face like a cat, eating Toffifee. It sounds like nothing and it is exactly what a personal blog should be. She has great socks, and I mention that as a serious observation rather than a throwaway.
Then there’s Laura, who fronts Deine Jugend, a German post-punk band, and co-runs a blog called The Fucking Fucks with someone named Woxy. The photos are good. The videos are better. The whole operation has a specific kind of we-know-exactly-what-we’re-doing confidence that’s rare online, where most people are visibly performing competence they don’t have. Laura is not performing. She’s just doing it, and occasionally that’s enough to make the whole internet feel like it was worth the trouble.