The Monday Media Diet with Cydney Hayes

Cydney Hayes (CH) is a culture writer I enjoy. Her Substack essay went wild and occasionally pops up out of the blue in Notes. Check out Openworld. Have a great week, CJN

Tell us about yourself.

I’m Cydney Hayes, a culture writer in San Francisco. Last year I published stories on underground AI clubs, queer parties with famous injury lawyers, and gamerwave music. In the fall I also put out a new zine called LET ME COOK about food, cooking, and consumption with some other SF writers. I also have a blog called OPENWORLD, formerly known as Discussion Candy, where I write about California and parties and myself and about how I’m generally always confused about what exactly I’m doing on the internet. I don’t really have a niche, I’m just obsessed with the sublime. If I think it’s transcendent in some way, I’ll write about it.

I hate cilantro. I’d love to one day pet a fox. In late 2023 I wrote a viral critique of Substack that still makes the rounds every few months. In high school I was in a Hoodie Allen music video.

Describe your media diet.

I read a lot of magazines and zines. I like The Baffler, Harper’s, n+1, The Drift, and I read most of the December issues of Heavy Traffic and The Creative Review. For zines, there’s a range. I read a few that are pretty professionally put together, like Cake Zine, Famous For My Dinner Parties, and 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which publishes extremely technical articles about the computer underground, and I frankly have no business reading it. But I love stuff like that. Then I also just pick up random handmade zines all the time.

I also read a lot of local publications. The Chronicle, SF Gazetteer, KQED, 48 Hills, Mission Local, the Bay View, the SF Standard. Unlike basically everywhere else, local news is alive and well in San Francisco, mostly because there’s a lot of money here, and rich people like to back media ventures. But to be fair, there are also a lot of indie publications here, too. I try to keep tabs on them all. New ones pop up all the time.

Online, I read the viral articles from New York mag, Vanity Fair, Substack newsletters, etc., because I want the context for the discourse. I love lore. In college, I watched all of Gilmore Girls and all of GIRLS just because I wanted to read the takes from real-life writers dissecting if Rory and Hannah are good or bad journalists. I also love Mikhail Klimentov’s (non-Substack) video game industry newsletter, ReaderGrev.

I also love the radio. It soothes my decision fatigue. I listen to KEXP in San Francisco, or if I’m in the South Bay I listen to 93.3 La Raza or KDFC Classical California.

What’s the last great book you read?

Underworld by Don DeLillo, especially the prologue.

What are you reading now?

Underworld, which I’m pretty close to finishing, and Freeman’s Best New Writing on California. My partner and I are also listening to the Lord of the Rings series on audiobook.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

Usually when I pick up a magazine, I’ll flip through the book and just look at the layouts. I get a lot of design inspiration for my own zines and other projects that way. I’ll also notice the physicality of the book—how heavy is the paper? How are they using spot gloss? How is it bound? How a work of writing, or whatever, is packaged, it can really influence how you experience the content inside it. In publications with more sophisticated artistic visions, there’s some world-building. There are conceptual arcs. The best media is usually the most immersive.

After that, depending on how long the publication is, I either just read straight through it, or jump around and read the articles that sound the most interesting to me.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Gabriel Winslow-Yost’s writing on video games.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

My 13-year-old cousin put an app called Locket on my phone where you can send photos to a widget on your friends’ home screens, like a little picture frame. That one’s cute. I also have another app called Airbuds, which is pretty similar, except it’s music instead of photos. Airbuds will also periodically give you data insights about your music habits, and I honestly feel like it’s more accurate than Spotify at this point. I think the key with both those apps is only keeping it to one or two friends you’re sharing with.

Plane or train?

Train. I like taking the scenic route whenever possible. It gives me time to just look out the window and think, which I guess you can do on a plane, but I like watching the landscape change as you move through a country. It grounds you in time and space. It’s very enlightening to see the way nature fits together. I also kind of think we owe it to our own sense of reality to travel through it. If the trip is long and inconvenient, it should be long and inconvenient.

What is one place everyone should visit?

The world’s largest ball of twine in Cawker City, Kansas. Or Confusion Hill off the 101 in Mendocino County, California. I like feeling insane, so I’ll pay ridiculous fees to stop at roadside attractions. They give one the sense that there’s a wacky little capitalist behind the whole operation, and that the operation is always on the brink of ruin. I love it. It makes me feel very American.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I got a fish recently, an albino honey gourami that looks like a little piece of raw chicken. His name is Tooty, though my partner wants to call him Charlie, but mostly we just call him The Fish. We love him. We got him off a Facebook marketplace post so we know very little about him, so I’ve been trying to learn more about what might make honey gouramis happy. I ended up deep in the fish forums—there’s a site called Fishlore, which I found to be pretty helpful, but then there’s r/fishlore on Reddit where people complain about how the Fishlore mods are very militant about what can and cannot be posted on the forums according to the Fishlore laws. The online fish community is very fraught. Fortunately, the fish content on YouTube is less of a police state. There’s a creator named Alex Kao, a.k.a. WorldofWhasian, who makes the most informative, cinematic videos showing how he sets up and maintains all these beautiful fish tanks. He approaches aquascaping with such precision and care, and he keeps all these living things alive and happy, and he films and edits all these extremely high-quality videos. This guy is really an artist. Would love to link with Alex Kao. (CH)