Source: 2016 For Me: Giant Asses, Cancellations, Zara, Black Mold and More Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: January 19, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

I don’t know how exactly it started, but everywhere I look, people are reminiscing about 2016. To be honest, the whole thing is giving fake news. It’s giving astroturf. We were all there in 2016, right? I mean, except for teenagers, but are teenagers really that interested in what all the chopped uncs were doing ten years ago?

Anyway, assuming any of this is even real, or if anyone even cares, I will reflect on what 2016 was like for me

I should clarify that in 2016, I was twenty-six, and I wasn’t a Substack writer, or really a writer at all, in any professional capacity. I had no social media presence outside of a Facebook account where my photos were routinely liked by two people—my mom and any one of my mom’s friends (still not convinced she wasn’t paying a rotating friend every day to like my stuff.) I frequently posted on Reddit but not as “Cartoons Hate Her.” Instead, I posted lots of fake posts on Reddit. I don’t remember all of them, let alone that well, but this was before I got into r/AmITheAsshole. My most memorable troll was probably an overtly novelty account called YourLocalNeckbeard:

Anyway, what else was I up to?

By 2016, I had been married for two years. Keep in mind I was in San Francisco and working in tech (specifically the spammy mobile game advertisement startup world) so my being married at this age was very unusual. I don’t mean that in a “everyone JUDGED me for being YOUNG and HOT and MARRIED” the way every trad person online seems to think hideous hags at the park are judging them for having three adorable, perfectly-homeschooled children at twenty-nine just because they said they “had their hands full,” but my being married definitely put me in an odd spot culturally.

For one, everyone thought I was older than I was, and some of this probably had to do with being married. In San Francisco, it’s weird to be married before thirty, most PMC people marry even later than that. Saying “my husband” immediately aged me by an additional ten years, so along with the usual social ineptitude that made it hard to make friends, I felt like I had to keep clarifying my age to people. One time, I told my coworker I was twenty-six and he audibly gasped, but luckily for him I gave him the “out” of “Is it because I mentioned being married?” Arguably, that could have been another form of social ineptitude.

But the age thing definitely wasn’t 100% husband-related. A lot of people just thought I looked older, and it was a huge source of insecurity for me because nobody could really explain it. I didn’t have bad skin or an unhealthy lifestyle. If anything, I was a bit orthorexic in the dermatology department—already on tretinoin and reapplying 50 SPF throughout the workday due to my proximity to a (gasp) window. Looking at old photos of me from this era, I totally looked my age. But the most egregious case of this—still seared in my mind—was when a Sephora employee had “flattered” me by guessing my age as…thirty. He confessed he really thought I was thirty-five, but wanted to be nice.

So a lot of my headspace in 2016 wasn’t about the rising tide of fascism or whatever, it was about whether or not I was getting neck lines. Huge waste of time and energy, but if it wasn’t that, my OCD would have attached to North Korea or some obscure tropical virus.

Sometimes I can’t even remember what on Earth I could possibly have been stressed about before I had kids. The answer: my ass being too small.

I was obsessed with getting the biggest ass possible with the smallest waist possible. Realistically speaking, I wanted big boobs too, but I was opposed to implants and I knew my boob size was largely (heh) out of my control. But ass? I could do something! I could do many things, in fact!

I had already been obsessed with assmaxxing for a while, but the rise of influencer Jen Selter in the mid-2010s got me hooked. In fact, I studied Jen Selter’s squat videos like game tape, rewinding over her ass from different angles to see if she actually had huge glutes for her body size or if she just had especially deceptive lordosis. The way some anorexic girls might have looked at thinspo, my maladaptive behavior was assspo. I looked at gigantic asses all the time and beat myself up for my ass not being as big.

I didn’t actually “like” her per se, but given my ass obsession, I really liked her body and used it for my fitness motivation. I thought her fake accent was funny. I also secretly liked a few of her songs. I got into the habit of doing very frequent Iggy Azalea impressions for my friends. My husband thought they were so funny that he recorded one and posted it on Facebook. As you can imagine, I freaked the fuck out because I was terrified someone would think I was rapping in support of Iggy Azalea’s blatant cultural appropriation. I then asked a trusted progressive friend if it was okay given that I was “appropriating her appropriation.”

It was another time.

I got married in 2014 and really began reexamining my extremely twee fashion sense after going on my honeymoon in Greece and witnessing a bunch of stylish and sleek Europeans, with a notable lack of ModCloth and fun novelty buttons shaped like birds. For example, this was how I dressed for my job at a six-person startup in a WeWork in 2014:

As you can see, I was into bubblegum pink long before the Barbiecore craze of 2023, so while I may seem “dated” now, I maintain this was just always one of my favorite colors.

A few years later, I made a comic to illustrate all the fashion trends of this time:

One interesting thing about 2016 fashion (which arguably started a few years earlier) was the end of the business casual clubwear look and its far more youthful successor—quasi-boho, Coachella-core, Kylie-core, all of the above. Naturally, this intersected very annoyingly with my fear of looking old, as I shed my cobalt blue scuba peplum blazers for off-the-shoulder crop tops, chokers and cutoff shorts.

But there was another wave of aesthetic, which was basically the seeds of the boring-as-hell late 2010s minimalism, championed by brands like Madewell and Everlane (to be clear, I like Everlane sweaters, but they could never be accused of serving cunt.) A lot of women in San Francsico in 2016 were not dressed remotely like they were going to Coachella, especially during the day. But they were dressed like this:

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the drag-inspired makeup that was popular with most young women, completely agnostic to setting, from work to nightlife to a gynecologist visit. I was always a bit scared to do the “full beat” because I knew there was a decent chance that the copious layers of setting powder would make me look older, but I do distinctly remember feeling bare-faced unless I had drawn a second pair of completely different lips over my lips. Yes, even for the beach or pool.

But we didn’t know that yet.

One night, my husband and I were in bed hanging out when I noticed the unmistakable smell of mildew. He told me I was “imagining things” and I went under our bed to find a suitcase COMPLETELY COVERED IN MOLD. At this point, I was like, “You can’t deny the mold thing anymore,” and he insisted it was dust, not mold. I did what any mentally ill person would do and immediately tattled on him to Reddit, who told me I should divorce him because he was gaslighting me about the mold.

Later, I noticed a dusting of fuzzy gray mold behind our bed and behind our sofa, and at this point my husband admitted it was mold but also thought I just needed to wipe it down with some rubbing alcohol and it would go away. I returned to Reddit, and they immediately asked if I was the same girl who posted about the moldy suitcase. I denied it but asked for a link to it because “maybe that girl and I could share tips,” figured that was what a totally ignorant person might say, and then I quickly logged into the first mold throwaway username and deleted the previous post to cover my tracks. The Reddit hivemind informed me they knew exactly what I was doing and that I “needed help.”

At this point, my husband was willing to involve our landlord. He showed up, took a look at the apartment, and told us the solution would be to just have our windows open…all the time. I guess this would have been to the liking of our almost-AirBnB customer, but I did not feel great about sleeping at night on a first floor San Francisco apartment with the windows ajar.

My breaking point (although you could argue this already passed) was when I was cleaning the kitchen and I noticed a weird black stain behind the fridge. Like a mother lifting a wrecked car to save her child, I suddenly developed superhuman strength and I was able to pull the entire fridge away from the wall without any help. There I saw a fridge-sized block of slimy black mold that nearly reached the ceiling and GOD KNOWS HOW LONG IT WAS THERE. We resolved that we would have to move immediately. Thankfully, we were able to get the mold tested and it apparently wasn’t toxic, but it was disgusting and nobody apologized to me.

Okay, last one.

You might notice that I haven’t mentioned Trump very much here. And I agree- there has not been NEARLY enough talk about Trump for the past ten years.

Also, I’m also a bit embarrassed, because like many delusional libs I thought Trump posed absolutely no threat to our political system. I thought his initial run in the Republican primary was funny, and mostly chalked it up to a publicity stunt for a new line of Trump Watches or something. Imagine if you were watching the Democratic primaries for 2028, and one of the “candidates” was Mr. Beast. Actually, it would have been even weirder than that, because we didn’t have Trump as President yet. I feel like today, if Mr. Beast ran for President, a lot of people would take it pretty seriously because anything can fucking happen. But back in 2016, politics were pretty boring. If a celebrity was there, we (or at least I) assumed it was a joke.

In fact, I even rooted for him, mostly because I thought people like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz were “far more dangerous,” given that they were so much more electable. LOL. Thank goodness I wasn’t on Twitter at the time, or I would have had to take a Swann Marcus sabbatical for at least a year.