Related Recs

💘

A boy named Ian

He was in eighth grade; I was in sixth grade. We were in our middle school performance of Into the Woods Jr. together (I played Jack—yes I brought the house down with my rendition of Giants in the Sky—and he played the Baker). He called me Smurf because I got blue paint on my face when we were painting sets. He was like five feet tall with a mushroom haircut and loved Bob Dylan and would sit out in front of the car drop off area in the mornings with a little handmade poster protesting the Iraq war which I was also precociously passionate about. Once we were at a sight reading competition off campus (I played viola and he was a cellist) and he pulled a foil wrapped burrito out of his pants pocket and ate it and then folded it into a plane. He was my second biggest customer for choir fundraising candybars (my biggest customer was myself I actually ended up eating basically the whole case). Also a boy named Nick who was assigned as my stand partner in orchestra his first day as a transfer student. I accidentally jabbed him in the eye with my bow shortly after meeting him and apologized profusely, to which he said, ‘it’s okay. That’s my blind eye‘ (not a joke he had cataracts in childhood). we then grew to hate each other with every passing day and would bicker and argue constantly about our ideological opinions on random things. I got called into the principals office for bullying him after I threw paper balls at him but I assured them the conflict was mutual. He had long curly hair and carried a Che Guevara bag and was always scowling just like me 🫶 I eventually realized that I didn’t hate him; I had a crush on him and saw him as an intellectual equal. Middle school is so hard… Pretty much every other crush I had after that was a sick depraved degenerate but I was infatuated nonetheless. in one particular case the obsession was mutual and went on for years and even across the sea and I ended up in a demented love triangle, breaking up two best friends, and ultimately being cyber stalked... Not really iconic mostly just toxic lol 💔

@taterhole

Oct 8, 2024

💋

God this is A terrible story

I was very unapproachable and emitted a foul hostile energy that repelled any boys with good sense in high school who may have otherwise been attracted to me. But there was one boy, S., who really liked me (my mother told me recently: ‘I could tell that boy had no self-respect for dating you‘ LOL and she’s so right). I loathed him and found him to be so profoundly irritating and utterly lacking in refinement or taste but he tried his best to win me over by constantly assaulting me with his boisterous and animated presence. Unfortunately, I was on the court for my cousin’s quinceanera and needed a date, so I finally bit, having no other options and needing to RSVP several months in advance of the date of the event with the name of my ‘escort.’ We started dating before then because why not. My friends threw a surprise birthday party for me at my neighborhood park and after singing happy birthday to me, they all started chanting at me in unison to kiss S., so we went behind a tree for privacy and complied. All I really remember is that his mouth tasted like a burger exactly like the Wet Hot American Summer quote. This lanky string bean of a young man legitimately only ate pizza and hamburgers and only drank Dr. Pepper (I recently heard that he had come down with gout and I can see why). He had a giant collection of dirty Converse shoes, which he kept in a pile and wore to the exclusion of all other footwear, and he called them Chucks. He would write me love letters and I would correct the grammar and syntax in red pen and return them to him. He would talk about the children we were going to have someday and tell me that the song “Maybe I'm Amazed” by Paul McCartney made him think of me; I would tell him that I don’t think teenagers can experience real love. I convinced him to grow a beard to hide his off-putting pointy chin that made him look exactly like the tragedy and comedy masks ‘because it just looks so much better’ which he has not shaved since. 🎭 He ended up having an emotional affair with a pizza delivery girl from Oregon who was probably a catfish on the forums for the television show Psych (which he was obsessed with), which hurt my ego more than anything. After the breakup I burned all of the drawings and handmade gifts he had given me in a barbecue grill. I hope he’s found a sweet simpleton who treats him well and gives him what he needs. That’s the story of my evil past and the boy who gave me my first kiss.

@taterhole

Oct 16, 2024

🫂

MY DAY 1 HOMIE

he’s not a blood family member but he might as well be. a few years back I was in an unhealthy romantic relationship and one day over lunch I was regaling him with my woes and he just told me “I don’t like this for you man. you deserve someone who’s gonna lasso the moon for you.” def snapped me out of my complex of needing to minimize my own needs to win the affection of someone who was content to receive without reciprocating. ultimately I had to figure it out on my own but he definitely put a rock in my shoe about the situation. just this past weekend I was back in town and had dinner with him and he told me about his relationship issues that I wasn’t super aware of and it hit me that we were back in the same conversation but on opposite sides of the table now. I reminded him of how he had helped me with perspective with my ex and it helped him see the parallels between both of our toxic attachments. he ended up breaking things off before I left town. what goes around comes around.

@royallmonarch

May 4, 2025

Top Recs from @royallmonarch

🌊

WATCHING MOVING WATER

just sit still and listen. drink it in.

@royallmonarch

5d ago

📴

DETACH from the algo, become an active participant in your own curation, form relationships to music, track your patterns

I consume a lot of music regularly, and a huge part of keeping a fresh diet of new listens going is having enough sources of recommendations that aren’t an algorithm that either 1) reinforces your existing listening patterns, keeping you stagnant in your tastes, or 2) platforms whoever paid enough to push their product to the top, serving you something that may not inherently be of inferior quality, but may not align with your tastes, may not be exciting beyond just being a new release, and realigns your current listening habits to be more in line with what the average user on the platform is also listening to — which socially might have benefits but which creates a homogeneity of consumption that can become bland since you’re listening to something really just because it’s the next product on the assembly line to have its public moment and not because anything about the music actually captured your attention. the current landscape of streaming is designed to keep you at an all you can eat buffet where you take what’s served to you, and as a result a lot of us have forgotten how to look at a menu and order. so what does taking a more active role in your own music curation look like? for me, it’s meant not using streaming as a primary listening platform. I mostly use my local Apple Music library on my phone that I curate with the vestigial iTunes Library framework that’s still a part of Apple Music on my laptop. probably going to find an alternative soon since apple seems to be cutting integration progressively. I like this method because it forces me to choose what to sync to the limited storage space I have, forcing me to take inventory of what I actually listen to and what I can offload. the files I get are mostly from Bandcamp or Soulseek depending on whether it’s available for purchase or entirely unavailable online (as is the case for a lot of electronic music that was on vinyl only, which is where soulseek comes in clutch). I also have freedom here to change the ID3 tags to better sort and organize, rate, change track info, and track my own listening data. Bandcamp and other music purchasing platforms are great because 1) it reshapes my relationship to music away from consumerism and back towards curation. I have to pay actual money for this thing now if I want to use it, so i’m forced to consider its value (usually i’ll stream a release first to gauge my interest). 2) having to spend money helps me to course out my meals so to speak, as i’ll buy a few releases i’ve accumulated in my cart over the month and cash out on Bandcamp Friday when 100% of my money is actually getting to the artist (TOMORROW IS BANDCAMP FRIDAY BTW!!!), and between purchases I can actually chew and savor and digest my last orders, they don’t get swept up in the deluge of new releases. my plate is full until i’m done and then I order more. also for the times of the year like now when new music isn’t coming out as regularly I take time to find older music that I would normally overlook while keeping up with new drops. currently very into early 80s/late 70s music with early digital production, kinda stuff that would evolve into synthpop and dance music. so how do you know what to order? for me, I’m getting recs through trusted curation platforms. whether it’s bandcamp daily, y’all lovely folks here on PI.FYI, friends, or most importantly musicians who I follow on socials that share their tastes through posts, stories, playlists on steaming, interviews, etc. I like this last one especially because it’s kind of like a musical game of telephone. if I like an artist and they share their interests and influences it’s like every layer in this process is stretching my palate further from the sound that I was originally interested in and into a new territory that has some shared DNA but would never have been recommended to me by an algo because there’s no shared category or label between them, only the musical influence and interpretation of it made by the artist. as an example, I was a huge Skrillex stan, he signed KOAN Sound to his label, they collab with Asa who collabs with Sorrow, Sorrow takes huge influence from Burial, Burial makes some ambient adjacent stuff and takes huge influence from 90s rave music and drum and bass and 2000s rnb, now i’m listening to Brandy - All in Me, William Basinski, Aphex Twin, none on whom would get recommended by Spotify to me from Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. LAST thing i’ll say — because in yappin about this i’m realizing how actually passionate about this subject I am: MAKE LISTS! playlists are cool, but they can flatten your music into vague categories of “vibes” and “aesthetics” and encourage picking one-off songs from artists that you never form an active audience relationship with. I make a practice of making my own year end lists of top 25 albums (plus some honorable recs and top individual songs) and keeping them in a notes doc that I regularly update and rearrange over the course of the year. this forces me to consider the actual relationship i’m forming with what i’ve ordered for myself. did I like it in the moment but it didn’t have staying power? is it slowly growing on me? it also encourages taking albums as a whole. maybe I liked one or two tracks a lot but the rest wasn't resonating. that’s ok! maybe I rank it lower but now i’ve actually taken time to consider it, it’s in my library, and maybe (quite a few cases for me) something I ranked like bottom 5 albums becomes a retroactive favorite from that year as my tastes evolve. also 25 albums to take with me from each year is really more than you'd think, i struggle sometimes to even find 25 that I formed a true connection with. I think the biggest thing the itunes era ruined that led into now is the single-ification of music, the ability to separate the hits from the deep cuts. albums are meant to be taken as a whole, and then once you've really sat with the whole you can find what actually stuck. even then I like to keep the whole around because soooo often i’ll write off a track that yeeeears later I come to love. trust the artist, they made it like they did for a reason. aaannyyyywayy TLDR: get recs organically, be more active in deciding your listening patterns, fr*cken pay artists yall, trust the artist embrace the album, really consider what you consume

@royallmonarch

Feb 29, 2024

🚲

GOING ON A SUMMER SUNSET BIKE RIDE

many treats to be had

@royallmonarch

3d ago