"When The Shit Hits The Commodore 64" - Harriet the Spy
There was a time when I was excited to tell someone about a podcast I was listening to, only to spend more time explaining what a podcast was. Now it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t listen to a podcast, let alone make their own.
What used to be a medium driven by public radio nerds has turned into a glutenous mess. There is too little originality and too many ad breaks. I can’t help but draw parallels between what happened to podcasts and what happened to some genres of punk. Angry white guys adopted Hardcore as a platform to espouse their strict, narrow world view, with a little victimization thrown in for fun. Emo was sprayed with Windex, diluted and turned into a safe, formulaic method to make money.
But I still subscribe. Despite mostly sycophantic interviewers, there are lesser known or forgotten people from punk’s history who rarely, if ever, get to tell so much of their story.
Recently, I was listening to an interview with Jamie Stillman, who before being a successful guitar pedal manufacturer, was an integral part of the punk scene in Kent, Ohio. Things were exciting down there at the end of the 20th Century. Jamie’s label, Donut Friends Records, seemed to have a new record every month. The coolest touring bands were playing shows Jamie booked at the local pizza parlor. He did all of this while playing guitar in Party of Helicopters, and drums in Harriet the Spy.
Stillman was being interviewed to promote the re-release of Unfuckwithable, a record by Harriet the Spy that originally came out in 1997. He was going track by track, offering up anecdotes about each song. When he got to the seventh song, “When the Shit Hits the Commodore 64,” he couldn’t help but start laughing out loud.
Dot Com is for motherfuckers / HTTP ain’t shit to me / If I can’t touch it I don’t want it
You get the idea. The song was making fun of the internet and the people that used it. Not social media, not smart phones, not scrolling. The internet itself. In 2026 it seems ridiculous to mock something so engrained in our daily lives, but in 1997 I was on their side. I thought the internet was stupid too. It seems pointless now to give examples, but I didn’t like how convenience was valued over quality, people were too concerned with the end product rather than the process that got there, and the assumption that just because something is new it is better. Besides all that, I was also annoyed that some of my friends were spending their nights at home on their computers instead of hanging out with me.
Back then it was easy for me to not go online. I didn’t have a computer, I didn’t play video games, and the shit jobs I was working didn’t involve much tech. Then, after a few years, my friends bugged me enough that I registered an email address. I rarely checked it. Once or twice a week, I’d hang up the apron at the coffee shop I was working at and walk over to the downtown branch of the Cleveland Public Library (a wonderful building to visit if you have the chance). I’d run up the stairs to the computer lab. While ignoring the guys watching porn on either side of me, I’d log into my Yahoo account. When the messages seemed important, I printed them out and kept them in a box with all the letters and postcards I got in the mail. The rest of my lunch break was spent sitting in the back room of the coffee shop, sitting on a milk crate, reading the newspaper. The news seemed bleak so I always ended with the comics. I’m not sure why since they didn’t put me in a better mood. When I read Family Circus, Hagar the Horrible, or Beetle Bailey I never laughed and was often confused at why anyone would think it was funny. Somedays I’d bring the paper home and read the comics out loud to my roommates. There was always an uncomfortable silence tainted with confusion. I’d ask them to explain how the strip was supposed to be funny. It was an impossible task.
Twenty five years later, I’m still reading the newspaper. Now, I read it in the morning while sitting at my kitchen table. My daughter sits next to me coloring, drawing, or manipulating Play-Doh. I can’t remember a day in the past year without a newspaper article about AI. Stories about how it is going to make us more productive. Or destroy our lives. Workers worried about AI stealing their jobs. Artists worried about AI stealing our souls. Politicians screaming for laws to be passed to protect us. Techbros saying it’s too late, the genie is out of the bottle. It all seems familiar.
There are big debates about AI which I’m not really interested in being a part of. I think all of it is stupid. Once again we are sacrificing convenience over quality. Interested in the result over the process. Equating something new as something better. But I assume, even for people that are against it, it will trickle into daily life slowly. A compromise here, a convenience there. The internet changed the world by making it more convenient while also making it more lame. That’s what I assume AI will do.
As for my world, I’ve only changed a little. Now, after I read the bleak news and not laugh at the comics, I do the crossword puzzle. It was sitting there the whole time. I just needed to build up the confidence to do it. I’m pretty good at it. When I do get stuck, I don’t look up answers. For me, like most things, the process of doing the puzzle is the fun part. Not the finished result. Seeing a puzzle with every box filled in wouldn’t evoke any joy if I knew it was only because I looked up what was a four letter word for “Room off an ambulatory.”
The other change is reading the comics. I used to read them to my roommates and we’d mockingly laugh at how unfunny they were. Now, my daughter wants me to read them to her. She never gets why they are supposed to be funny and asks me to explain them. I realize this might be my breaking point. That’s how I’m going to end up using AI for the first time. I’ll open up ChatGPT and type in “Please explain today’s Garfield so a five year old will understand why it’s funny.”
