A thing that rules: The Animated Advice Hotline

Brooklyn’s The Useless Press launched its newest project yesterday, the Animated Advice Hotline, done by Cat Frazier aka Animated Text.
With the Animated Advice Hotline, users can text Cat a question — 510-962-9372 — and she’ll respond in a wise and animated way. What makes it really great is that Cat is very funny.
We talked to Cat last week about how her weird Tumblr grew from a couple dozen to more than 200,000 followers and why she loves animated text.
“It was originally started as a way for me to express my love for the old internet,” Frazier said in an interview. “Back then, text was always flashy or using GIFs. It wasn’t just, ‘Welcome to my blog’ it was like, ‘Welcome to my blog’ in glitter or moving around.”

“I have the numbers of a lot of followers. They tell me about their day, about their lives. There’s this one girl Jessica I know like IRL,” she said. “It’s become almost a life mission, like I’m seriously considering making it my only thing. It’s kind of helped me see that my voice and my presence is there to help people. A lot of people under the age of 18 follow me so it’s about being responsible and making people laugh too.”
Useless Press is a project by Adrian Chen, Sam Lavigne and Alix Rule.
“We work with our contributors to publish projects that exist outside of today’s endless churn of nearly-indistinguishable online content; that exist for their own purpose, or for no purpose at all,” the site states.