Content Consumed: Coachella, Tommy Fury v. Liam Payne, and The Pisces

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Content Consumed

5 min readApr 12, 2023

Goooood morning and happy Wednesday! Wondering when it’ll get warm in Portland again. Signs point to never.

Anyways, in today’s edition of Content Consumed:
🌴 The Coachella preview you weren’t expecting
🥊 Tommy Fury v. Liam Payne (not kidding)
🐠 Book review: The Pisces

Coachella preview

Coachella is this weekend and the weekend after that. Plenty of content to come: fashion analysis, performance notes, and viral moments.

Bad Bunny, BLACKPINK, and Frank Ocean headline the festival this year. But let’s talk about the real stuff: what food and drinks will be there?! Eater gave us all the info. And here’s the thing about the food at Coachella: it fascinates me but I’m so glad I’m not paying $42 for a plate of it.

For the first time ever, there will be a non-alcoholic bar. (Which feels like a fancy way of charging folks $16 for a La-Croix-and-juice.)
OpenTable, Postmates, and a bunch of other food-adjacent companies will be sponsoring hangout areas and foodie events.
There will be speakeasies and in-the-know experiences like secret bars from New York City’s PDT (Please Don’t Tell) and Sonny’s by Attaboy, a Miami Vice-themed bar with slushies.
There’s a sushi speakeasy with a 16-course omakase and sake pairing at onlyyyyy $375 per person!

Sorry, but if you’re at Coachella and you’re sitting down for a 16-course meal, we are on different planes of existence.

Are Tommy Fury and Liam Payne gonna fight?

Ready to watch Tommy Fury beat the shit out of One Direction’s least successful band member?

That appears to be what’s happening this June. If you recall, Fury is a professional boxer who recently beat Jake Paul in their much-anticipated matchup.

When I googled “Liam Payne boxing”, the Daily Mail told me that “Liam is not known to have any boxing experience,” as I suspected.

So tell me again: why would Liam Payne do this? Does he have some sort of kink for being internationally humiliated? Because he keeps doing things that put him in the perfect position to be made fun of.

I get it: it’s a celebrity boxing match, probably for charity or something. We’ll find out more tomorrow. But still… it’s a professional boxer vs. someone who’s never stepped in the ring. It’s gonna be ugly for One Direction’s least-talented ex-member.

Book review: The Pisces

I’m just going to introduce the concept of this bizarre fictional book to you, and lightly trigger-warn it, with a few key phrases:

Merman sex. Dog abuse. Hateable main character. Suicide and self-harm. Love and sex addiction therapy group. Obsession. Poetry.

Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way… I could not put The Pisces down. I devoured it in just a couple of hours, spread across three nights. It was gross and fascinating and frustrating. The main character makes all the wrong, selfish, and immature decisions a person could make. Just when you think she’s hit rock bottom, she keeps going.

And the merman sex… it was a lot. Slimy. If you’re into that kind of thing, you’ll love it. Me? I skimmed those bits.

Because this visceral novel is not just about our main character and her merman. We get to explore the multi-dimensional lives of the other women in her love addiction therapy group as well. It was really eye-opening, the way the author narrated her main character’s spirals and the lives of the other women in therapy. What does love really look like? How obsessive can we be, when we’re in love, before it’s too much? How willing are you to destroy your own life to maintain an unrealistic love?

I’ve been a fan of Melissa Broder for nearly a decade now, from back when @sosadtoday was one of the most viral accounts on Twitter. She’s a brilliant, bizarre, and beautiful writer. Each line in this book could’ve held its own in a collection of poetry. For example:

But the moment she got a text, the moment that glitter reached out to her, she would forget what that pain had felt like. She would want only the glitter. Euphoric recall of past glitter would blind her to the suffering it had caused.

Anyways, it’s an absolute ride of a book. You’ll either love it or you’ll hate it; that’s the truth. My head is still spinning.