📍you just had to be there
a week in the life of the VeryOnline™
You are cordially invited to this week’s brew of High Tea, your dispatch of 🔥 internet culture served piping hot. This week: our obsession with FEWOCiOUS, the creator to career pipeline happening on RecRoom and we’re overwhelmed at the latest release from royal & the serpent.
Drink up! 🐸☕️
p.s. if you’re not a paid subscriber, here’s what you missed from this week’s Bucks Fizz: our Thursday dispatch covering the best of TikTok’s unsigned and emerging talent.
🥂 UCKERS, Peach PRC & Chloe Moriondo
🎶 we’re listening to: yuuuhhh let’s get into it. This week is all about the takeover of the TikTokers (bear with us). When we say 18-year-old Nessa Barrett is going to be a superstar, we mean it. Shedding the skin of her 2020 meme-worthy “i’m in paaaaaaain” debut, Nessa’s graduation to “la di die” with fellow TikToker (and actual like, real life musician) jxdn is a bop, averaging 420K Spotify streams 😏a day since its release on Feb 19.
Next up: royal & the serpent. Building on the immense success of unofficial Gen Z anthem “Overwhelmed”, which soundtracks 4 million TikTok videos, Royal & the serpent (aka Ryan Santiago) is back with another banger. Don’t sleep on “i can’t get high” 👇
Honorable mentions:
📺 we’re watching: The World’s a Little Blurry (duh). Essential viewing for anyone as utterly, entirely mesmerized by Billie Eilish as we are. No more spoilers from us, just go watch it...and prepare to ~feel something~. Cop your Apple TV free trial to watch (and don’t forget to cancel, lol).
💖 we’re obsessed with: FEWOCiOUS. That’s the tweet. We’re all eyes on 18-year-old FEWOCiOUS following his most recent sneaker collaboration with RTFKT. All three editions ($3k, $5k and $10k) sold out within the first seven minutes. ICYMI: that’s $3 million in seven minutes, direct to fans, without the support of any major brands. And to top it all off, especially if you didn’t manage to cop a pair, there’s a Snap lens you can try out for size. One. To. Watch.
💫 we’re reading Eugene Wei’s American Idle. Now y’all know that we eat, sleep, reference, repeat TikToks til we’re insufferable, *our colleagues all nod*, but allow us to introduce you to the daddy of all Tok breakdowns, enter: American Idle. Expertly curated in the style of a TikTok FYP (no, we’re not kidding), Eugene guides us on an in-depth breakdown of the what, how and whys of the platform with many a 🔥take on the importance of network effects and cross-collaboration within the zeitgeist. Here’s a couple of our favorite quotes below:
“But the beauty of TikTok's FYP algorithm and the Discover page is that you don't have to create a TikTok from scratch. The vast majority of TikToks are riffs on memes and trends that other users originate. It's no shame to be a 1 to n TikToker. Many on the platform achieve their first viral hit riffing on an existing meme.”
“This is why TikTok's network effects of creativity matter. To clone TikTok, you can't just copy any single feature. It's all of that, and not just the features, but how users deploy them and how the resultant videos interact with each other on the FYP feed. It's replicating all the feedback loops that are built into TikTok's ecosystem, all of which are interconnected. Maybe you can copy some of the atoms, but the magic lives at the molecular level.”
🍃 we’re following: The Mint Fund. Like the rest of the online world, we’ve been giddy with excitement seeing digital artistry finally getting its time in the spotlight this week (thank u, NFTs 🦋) but one particular project had us phrogs stamping our lil webbed feet. MintFund, the brainchild of crypto masters (SIRSU @ The Well, Carlos @ Forefront, Jess @ SeedClub, Zora Team), is a community project created, “with the sole purpose to build a support network for all artists (with an emphasis on helping BIPOC + LGBTQIA+ communities) interested in bringing their art into the world of NFTs/cryptomedia.”
Follow and support their first 35 artists here 👇
💸 we’re excited about: Okay, it’s happening, everybody stay calm: yesterday RecRoom became a career. Announcing their Creator Compensation Program, the social gaming platform now allows creators to exchange their in-game tokens for cold, hard, ca$h (a la OGs Roblox and Second Life) with the goal to give out $1M USD in 2021. As our High Tea old-timers know, we’re a sucker for all things creator economy, especially as it relates to in-game virtual assets and we can’t wait for this job to become as ubiquitous as “IG Influencer” in the coming months. Stay 👏tuned 👏.
☕️ we can’t live without: our Chamberlain Coffee. Our gal Emma Chamberlain is not only a Z icon (our unfiltered 👑) but she has vowed never to leave us high and caffeine dry. Chamberlain Coffee and its infamous steeped coffee packs (iykyk), is now the official cure for Monday morning blues (soz, we don’t make the rules 🤷♀️).
Okay, you made it. Now you can go back to Billie (and no, we’re not going to tell you how many times we’ve watched it already 😌)
ttyl,