Content Consumed: Linewives, bucket bunnies, and Gisele Bündchen
Happy Thursday! Last night and this morning I was in a terrible mood. You know when something keeps persistently bugging you and then you hit a breaking point with it? Finally happened. But, we move on and we get better.
In today’s edition of Content Consumed, let’s discuss…
🧨 Niche Internet drama: Linewives vs. bucket bunnies
🔮 Gisele’s cleansing her life of Tom—no, literally
🛍 Goodwill’s online store and “dopamine gifting”
📲 Is Fizz the next Facebook?
Quick note: I’ve made it a goal to reach 200 followers on this Medium and 200 followers on the Content Consumed Instagram by the end of October. Help me get there!
Okay, I’ll bite: What’s a “linewife” or “bucket bunny”?
Am I late on this? I don’t know. Or really care. All I know is I’m finally diving into this niche Internet drama.
Linewives:
The dedicated wives of lineworkers (who service power lines) who sometimes compare themselves to military wives and police wives.
Bucket bunnies:
The women who “bounce” from bucket to bucket, sleeping with traveling linemen, like those working to restore power in Florida right now.
Okay, ready now? The drama began when Florida woman @emilyhosein1 (who does not self-identify as a bucket bunny but is been called one) posted a TikTok showing her Tinder feed full of young linemen in town to restore power post-hurricane.
Do you hear that…? The linewives are coming!
TikToks from thirsty ladies like Emily (no hate!) have forced linewives to take a break from their busy schedule of being a linewife to make TikToks explaining how hard being a linewife is.
Example: In one TikTok, a woman solemnly packs her husband’s suitcase with jeans and sweatshirts with the caption, “unfortunately, if you are a linewife you know what i’m doing right now.”
Have you ever had to pack a suitcase?! Or make a lunch?! Or attend an event without your husband because he’s traveling for work?! You don’t understand!! Alas, a man traveling for work while his wife holds down the fort is an easily recognizable trope.
The funny thing is, the drama isn’t even about cheating or affairs: it’s that bucket bunnies ~do not have what it takes to be linewives~.
I don’t think I can write anymore about this. Not today. Read this Jezebel article for the whole scoop if you wanna.
Gisele’s winning already
The divorce lawyers have been hired, the ring is off, and Gisele Bündchen’s SUV has been energy-cleansed of all Tom Brady’s bad vibes by a healer with Palo Santo essences.
Apparently, Gisele spent about 40 minutes in a CVS after this cleansing, which really just makes her more relatable. Who doesn’t do emotional retail therapy in a local drugstore? Let me tell you, the CVS on 3rd Street in Portland has seen me at my worst.
A favorite bit of mine from Gawker this morning:
She’s cleansing her aura, she’s dropping the dead weight, and she still looks amazing. Brady, on the other hand, looks more like a skeleton every day, and for what? To lead the Buccaneers to two consecutive losses, likely with many more to come this season? You either retire the hero or play long enough to be divorced in Tampa, Florida.
Vanity Fair, meanwhile, says it was one big argument that made Gisele say enough is enough. Perhaps over Brady’s choice to “come out of retirement after almost 40 days and 40 nights wandering the Floridian Peninsula”?
As I wrote about a couple weeks ago, Gisele recently expressed her unhappiness in an ELLE interview. Specifically: the danger of football concerns her, she doesn’t enjoy the media narrative that she’s the one begging him to retire, she would like him to spend more time hands-on with the children, and she has a lot she wants to work on personally.
Shoppin’: Goodwill’s online store and “dopamine gifting”
Two stories from the retail world this week!
First up: Goodwill has opened their first online marketplace. It’s called GoodwillFinds and the profits will help fund its community-based programs across the U.S. to provide professional training, job placement and youth mentorship, according to NPR. It launched this week with 100,000 items available. I took a look at the website (you’re welcome, #journalism) and was pretty impressed with how clean it looks and how easy its UX is. I guess my expectations were low. And it seems to be getting quite a bit of traffic already—I clicked on a $98 Prada bag that said it was available and received a quick “sold out” message.
Next, we’re all “dopamine gifting” this holiday season. You may have heard of “dopamine dressing”, a.k.a. sparking joy through the clothing you wear, like bright colors and shiny accessories. Now, we’ll be giving each other kaleidoscopic gifts in all the Secret Santas and White Elephants. “This playful and mood-boosting holiday aesthetic represents a fresh start, reminding us to celebrate in ways that bring us happiness, and to spread cheer well beyond the new year,” Etsy says in their trend report.
Other trends from Etsy’s report include “enchanted forest”, “aprés ski”, “pearlcore”, “kitchen kitsch”, and “new age rituals”.
Is Fizz the next Facebook?
It’s been downloaded by 95% of Stanford grads. Its user interface looks like a Reddit-YikYak combo (#tbt). And the origin story intrigues me. Tech Crunch reports:
Last fall, Rakesh Mathur stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, waiting for his daughter to come home from a frat party at Stanford.
“She walks in at 2:30 with just a big, beaming smile. There’s no apology or anything like that,” Mathur told TechCrunch. “She says, ‘Papa, I met the next Mark Zuckerberg!’”
The founder of 10 startups and a longtime investor, Mathur isn’t naive. It’s a big declaration to call a 20-year-old at a Sigma Nu party the next big social media founder (and nowadays, the Zuck comparison may not be the most flattering). But by the end of the weekend, Mathur was all in. He invested $750,000 into Fizz, co-founded by Stanford dropouts Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer, and then joined the company as CEO.
It’s anonymous, college-only (like Facebook used to be), and already at Rice, Elon, Dartmouth, Wake Forest, Chapman and Tulane with plans to expand to more than 1,000 campuses by the end of next year.
On Fizz, students can publish anonymous text posts, polls and photos, which classmates can upvote or downvote. Users can DM each other if they want. It’s supposedly less sus than YikYak since you need to have a .edu email to sign up. Like Reddit, they’ve also got moderators.
It seems like a copycat app to me. But one that’ll work because it’s based on other successful apps.
And that’s it for this Thursday! See you all tomorrow.
Lots of love,
Casey
