My Internet: Chris Gayomali
The HEAVIES writer hammered out a viral menswear essay in his Notes app.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Most weeks, we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.
Today we welcome Chris Gayomali, a writer, magazine editor, and alum of GQ (where I work). He recently launched HEAVIES, “a spiritual and modern newsletter” about health and wellness that kicked off with an essay about NYC massage spots and Hua Hsu talking about finding his groove as a runner.
Chris is in a Slack in which features editors talk about their writers, gets uncontrollable urges to tweet something stupid every couple nights around nine o’clock, and has a bunch of size M Acronym and Issey Miyake to sell on eBay and Grailed. —Nick
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?
CHRIS GAYOMALI:
2024—all the advanced memes come from Southeast Asia.
EMBEDDED: What shows up on your TikTok For You page?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: TikTok’s algorithm frightens me, which is why I’ve never hopped on the platform. Instead I rely on two or three elder Millennials who occasionally dump their favorite TikToks on their Instagram Stories a few days later. (My IG Explore Page is all hotties for some strange reason and surely must be broken.)
EMBEDDED: Do you still tweet? Why?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Tweeting right now feels completely inessential to anything I’m interested in, but every couple of nights, around nine o’clock, I’ll get an uncontrollable compulsion to tweet something very stupid.
It’s funny. In my Twitter Prime doing big numbers was cake, but now any tweet that gets above 14 Likes feels like mainlining opium.
EMBEDDED: Have you found any good alternatives to Twitter? Do you have an opinion on Threads?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I was surprised that the backend of Substack, where writers are sharing Notes and casually posting all their bleakest thoughts, is as lively as it is. It still feels unfiltered, in a good, maybe healthy, lubricated way, and more like 2015 Twitter than Threads (sad) or Bluesky (sadder).
EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Fourteen hours of daily screentime.
EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Right now the YouTube pie chart is 40 percent Ms. Rachel (for our toddler), 30 percent Muay Thai fight highlights (for me), and 30 percent NeverTooSmall, this cool architecture channel that makes tiny apartment living aspirational. Somehow, that mix signals to the YouTube algorithm that I might be someone who would enjoy watching videos from Andrew Tate.
EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: My wife semi-recently rage-canceled our New York Times subscription, so lately I’ve been getting most of my news from The Daily, WNYC, The Ezra Klein Show, and this groupchat I’m in with my creative group friends, C47 Creative, where it’s mostly links to business stories and whatever is happening with NewJeans.
EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: For some reason Instagram keeps feeding me posts from something called Pubity, which is like lowest-common denominator, FuckJerry-esque online news. This feels sufficient. Pubity feels like it’s written by a bunch of teenagers from the Philippines, or an AI simulating teenagers from the Philippines. That said, being two days late to Hawk Tuah Girl or whatever feels slightly healthier than being plugged in 24/7.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I feel like all the conversations online now are so disaggregated: we’ve been so siloed into our respective microcommunities that there’s no such thing anymore as a daily “main villain,” let alone a monoculture. The last thing I was mad about was a New York Times article that framed raw milk as being proprietary to the right-wing, which is so silly, and to my mind, totally inverted. Raw milk comes from small farms; pasteurization, meanwhile, is an invention of factory farming and big agriculture, necessitated by the shit the poor cows are waist-deep in all day. Raw milk should have the shine that farmers market sourdough gets on the weekends.
EMBEDDED: Where do you usually discover or learn about online trends?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Delia Cai lol.
EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I take a lot of screenshots whenever a friend whose taste I trust suggests something to read or watch. Otherwise, I go into bookstores like Greenlight or Yu & Me and flip through whatever the employees are featuring.
EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I’m working with my friend Tony Wang (he’s the OG brand director of SSense and 032c) on a big report coming out soon about why everything in culture—TV, music, clothes—is so shitty right now, why everything is half-baked. His whole thesis is that mere the act of creating has been hyper-optimized for maximum efficiency; we’ve lost all the necessary friction that allows for subcultures to properly gestate. Drake can swoop in and steal a niche new sound before anyone’s had a chance to really explore it. That’s all to say: We should all be making less stuff.
EMBEDDED: What are your favorite Substack or other independent newsletters?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Sami Reiss’ Snake America, Delia Cai’s Deez Links, laura reilly’s shopping newsletter Magasin, Alec Leach’s newsletter about the fashion industry’s sustainability crisis, and Sam’s Liberation Martial Arts, which brings a really thoughtful leftist lens to combat arts.
EMBEDDED: Do you have any favorite media company newsletters?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I like the newsletters from all the GQ boys :)
EMBEDDED: What’s one positive media trend? What’s one negative trend?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: That kids are ditching TikTok for the Pinterest app because they crave human curation. The negative is [gestures at everything] all the rest.
EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Lately I’ve been going down a Bandsplain hole. The No Doubt episode was perfection—as lovely an ode to SoCal as there ever was. Yasi Salek is goated.
EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I wrote that anonymous viral essay about menswear (which I don’t actually hate and actually think it’s worth critiquing), and watching the fallout was a surreal experience. It was like floating above your own funeral as a specter and hearing honest assessments of what your friends and detractors really thought about you. Had I known it was going to blow up like it did, I maybe wouldn’t have hammered it out in my Notes app after blowing past two of Delia’s deadlines. I also would have tried harder to not contradict myself in two different places.
EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I was gonna say Steve Yeun on IG, but he unfollowed everyone.
EMBEDDED: Who’s someone more people should follow?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: The YouTube channel for Local Bands of Rancho Cucamonga.
EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Björk by a country mile.
EMBEDDED: Have you ever been heavily into Snapchat? Do you miss it?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: IG Stories quickly filled that void for me and I never looked back.
EMBEDDED: When was the last time you browsed Pinterest? What for?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Pinterest is secretly the best social network, especially for finding screenshots and deep cuts of memes with only the vaguest descriptors.
EMBEDDED: Do you have a take on Tumblr?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: At its peak an all-time social network. Nowadays it’s a good place to deposit videos you like and want to find again.
EMBEDDED: Are you in any groups on Reddit, Discord, Slack, or Facebook? What’s the most useful or entertaining one?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I’m in a Slack with a few features editors at other pubs, and it’s the best place to talk about writers and their work—for better or worse lol.
EMBEDDED: How has using LinkedIn benefitted you, if at all?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: LinkedIn has mostly been useful for learning about Nick Thompson’s marathon times.
EMBEDDED: Do you typically start searches on Google, Reddit, TikTok, or another source? Have you found Google’s “generative AI” summaries helpful?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: My eyes completely glaze over Google’s atrocious and too-long AI summaries, which bodes poorly for the company’s future. (I’m also one of those people who applies “reddit” at the end of every search query.)
EMBEDDED: What most excites you about AI chatbots and text and art generators? What most concerns you?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: AI bots are mostly good for generating stern emails to your landlord about withholding rent until the water is fixed, and unfortunately not much else.
EMBEDDED: Are you currently playing any console, computer, or phone games?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: The last game I was really into was Titanfall II and I was actually quite nasty with the Kraber.
EMBEDDED: What is your Wordle starting word?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: TRASH
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I’ve tried to eliminate most of my emoji usage, mostly because someone younger and cooler told me that it’s something that scans as very basic Millennial. But according to my emoji keyboard, my most-used is heart hands.
EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I enjoy receiving voice notes—they feel like little songs just for me :)—but really prefer surprise phone calls from friends above everything else.
EMBEDDED: What’s a playlist, song, album, or style of music you’ve listened to a lot lately?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: The forthcoming Speed album ONLY ONE MODE.
EMBEDDED: Do you pay for a music streaming service, and if so, which one? When was the last time you bought a music download or vinyl record, CD, or tape?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I pay for Apple Music, and the last digital album I bought was from Bandcamp—a live recording of the George Otsuka Quintet performing at the Nemu Jazz Inn in 1975.
EMBEDDED: If you could only keep one streaming service for TV and/or movies, which would it be, and why? In general, do you prefer to get ads or pay more for ad-free tiers?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: YouTube forever!
EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Pay or Dispute, New York City’s surprisingly frictionless iOS app for paying parking tickets. Alternatively: Venmo.
EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: PDFs that get widely distributed by Google Drive.
EMBEDDED: Is there any content you want but can’t seem to find anywhere online?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: When I was in 7th grade trying to act hard at school, I’d go home and spend hours playing this text-based online MMORPG called Gemstone III and later transitioned to a chatroom-based D&D group called Legend of Thembria with some older, dorkier friends I’d met through the former. If Sabin22, JWright239, or VenomDK happen to be reading this, please get in touch.
EMBEDDED: Do you regularly use eBay, Depop, or other shopping platforms? What’s a recent thing you’ve bought or sold?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I’m an eBay and Grailed boy and actually have a bunch of clothes to sell. Hit me up if you are a size M and enjoy brands like Acronym or Issey Miyake.
EMBEDDED: Is there a site you like for product recommendations? How do you decide, for example, which air filter to buy?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: I prefer The Strategist slightly over Wirecutter, mostly because I don’t think there’s a single-best anything on the Internet anymore. But most of the time, I’m getting my recommendations from Reddit.
EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Tony Wang’s forthcoming treatise on hyper-optimization and why modern culture is so shitty, which’ll go online soon!
EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?
CHRIS GAYOMALI: Hitting hundreds of paid subscribers on Substack was very cool. :)
Thanks Chris! Subscribe to his newsletter and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
More My Internet Jerusalem Demsas ∙ Emily Sundberg ∙ Willa Bennett ∙ All
Fantastic discussion. New fan of Chris and Delia. Thank you!