Hello from London. I'm here for a conference this weekend run by the folks at ZEG, the group I work with every year in Tbilisi, Georgia. If you're in the city and looking for something fun to do tomorrow, consider checking it out.

The prep for this trip to the city I called home for most of my 20s was different than usual. Typically it's just fishing out old adapters and trying to figure out how many different kinds of jackets I can fit in a carry-on bag. Though, ever since the Brexit referendum I've become used to the idea that London will never be exactly as I left it. But this is my first trip to the UK since the launch of the country's confounding and idiotic Online Safety Bill. And I had some pretty serious questions about how my digital life would interact with it.

I tried googling it and all I got was an AI summary about how to travel with a CPAP machine. Apparently, OSA also stands for Obstructive Sleep Apnoea. Oh well. We planned for the worst.

Garbage Day's editorial team works on Discord, so we had a couple contingency plans for if I had trouble signing in. A few years ago, I dictated an entire issue of Garbage Day over the phone to Adam while I was in the woods performing at a musical festival lol. But most of our stories usually include content from X, Bluesky, and Reddit. And at this point, almost everything I do on my phone involves some kind of user-generated platform. I didn't know if I'd have to scan my passport to use any of them. And I didn't know if that would even work. Countries around world are a lot less hospitable to guests these days.

So far everything has been mostly fine. I checked most of my usual haunts and all of them are working properly. The only site I noticed any difference on, funnily enough, wasn’t X or Reddit, but Bluesky, which works as it does in the US, but direct messages are blocked by an age verification window here.

Out curiosity, I pulled up a few sites on the rougher corners of the web to see how the OSA was impacting them. 4chan works fine. UK’s media regulator Ofcom has fined the site £20,000 already, but they continue to ignore them. I also checked Pornhub — FOR WORK — and it’s blocked by an age verification window asking you to sign in with your Google, X, or Discord account. No one should ever do that! Don’t do that!!!

But to put all of this in perspective, the last time I had to consider anything like this was my 2019 trip to China. Where I spent a week coordinating with my editor entirely on encrypted messaging apps, dodging any form of WiFi, and still using the internet with the assumption all of it was being monitored anyways. Which is why I'm confident that almost no one in the US and the UK pushing for age verification laws really understands how different the internet feels when someone can see what you're doing. And any politician or pundit promising you some easy solution for "keeping your children safe online" is being lied to or lying to you.

There are murmurs that the British government is trying to figure out a way to block VPNs in some way next. Though if they tried to, that would give the whole game up in a way. Unlike China, which moderates their internet at the state level — and is then, of course, enforced by platforms and the country’s hypernationalist troll army — the UK’s OSA has put the onus on service providers to do their dirty work for them. A totalitarian clampdown of personal freedom in the form of a passive aggressive set of suggestions and fines. Very British.

But it’s all quite fitting in a way. The United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum in the summer of 2016 was the first domino to fall in the global far-right populist wave of the 2010s. Ground zero for the end of one kind of democracy and the sketch pad for the new democracy-ish form of politics still being born. And this ridiculous internexit they’ve thrust upon themselves has dropped them into similar territory yet again. Here a new form of internet is coming into focus. One I fear, like Brexit, will soon take root in countries all around the world.

So, uh, I guess, enjoy Pornhub as much as you can while you can still visit it.

Here’s Frank

Phan Is Real

—by Adam Bumas

Dan Howell and Phil Lester were two early YouTubers, who were early to the now-common practice of creating a joint channel to capitalize on both fanbases at once. The Dan and Phil channel was an enormous success, leading to multiple tours, a BBC radio show, and a titanic amount of shipping that has been now shockingly revealed to be true all along.

The “Phan” ship started more or less when the joint channel did, but peaked in the mid-2010s, when it was the second-most-reblogged ship on Tumblr in 2015 and 2016. Since they started in the earliest days of the internet, they’ve been constantly bombarded with speculation and fan work from their shippers, which they’ve frequently talked about as a source of stress. It’s a fascinating cross-section of how parasocial relationships have shifted over the past two decades.

On Monday, Dan and Phil uploaded a video where they revealed that they’ve been in a relationship since they started working together in 2009. Both of them had already come out as gay, but the confirmation is still earth-shattering. For context, regularly just behind Phan in those Tumblr Fandometrics lists was “Larry Stylinson” — so by at least one metric, this is bigger news than if Harry and Louis from One Direction turned out to have been secretly dating.

Who Snitched On Who?

—by Adam Bumas

On Tuesday, Politico published some genuinely sickening Telegram groupchats from members of the Young Republicans. The leaks have led to firings, disavowals and apologies, a level of consequences it's rare to see for any Republican in 2025.

But some people think even that's too drastic, like Vice President JD Vance, who wrote on X "I refuse to join the pearl clutching". In general, the very right-leaning conversation on X seems to have focused on finding someone to blame for leaking the groupchats to Politico in the first place. A fashy Pop Crave-style account called AF Post has accused Gavin Wax, President of the New York Young Republicans, but some other reporters have denied this, with one blaming Brilyn Hollyhand — who’s actually not some kind of forest pixie, but a teenager who’s trying to become the next Charlie Kirk.

Podcasts Are Going To Netflix

—by Adam Bumas

This week, Netflix announced a deal with Spotify to show video podcasts from Bill Simmons’ Ringer network on the streaming service. This is one of many recent partnerships Netflix has made with creators who usually put their videos on YouTube — like last year, when they agreed to syndicate The Amazing Digital Circus.

Vulture’s Nick Quah predicts this might “move Netflix and YouTube significantly closer in terms of how they feel and what they are”. Both companies are definitely trying to position themselves as literally the only thing you should use your TV for. YouTube just had a big Hollywood Reporter feature about this initiative, which conspicuously leaves out its simultaneous quest to choke itself with disturbing AI shorts. Will Netflix air the sad AI cats next?

Amazing Things Are Happening On Ashton Hall’s Instagram Feed

—by Adam Bumas

It’s been a while since we checked in on Ashton “Morning Routine” Hall. The former football player got millions of new followers this past spring for his bizarre, Saratoga-drenched expressions of hustle, success and masculinity. But since then, he seems to have reinvented himself as a comedian, with his recent videos emphasizing humor and storytelling over any kind of advice.

The whole “lifestyle guru for men” angle is now more or less window dressing for someone who described himself in the original viral video as an “internet entrepreneur”. He’s gone where the money is, and he seems to understand that he hit it big thanks to his sense of physical comedy and absurdity. Each of his videos makes sure to include some strange quirk like a cooldown avocado or a bunny companion.

A Good Soup Post

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s everything but beeves feathery.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***