Trailblazers: The First Two Men To Ever Do A Podcast
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This week's guests (in order of appearance) are:
Dan Dalton, author of Johnny Ruin
Julia Alexander, reporter for The Verge
First Off, A Very Normal and Relatable Relationship Problem From Reddit
Who among us, am I right, fellas? This comes via the redditships Twitter account. The post and all the comments were deleted, but thankfully we’ve got a backup courtesy of removeddit. Here are two takes from the peanut gallery:
“Honestly, the dude did nothing wrong. She was literally dressed up as the character and role playing as that character. Her reaction is extremely weird and immature. It's not like he said the name of her sister, or some random character, but the name of the person she was pretending to be as they had sex.”
“yes, your girlfriend wore a sexy outfit specified to your tastes and you treated her like a living doll. if you want a living doll role play, you need to ask for her consent before and discuss clear boundaries. there is a huge gap between dressing up for you and being fucked as an anime character.”
Sadly, one of the most important questions in the thread was left unanswered:
I’m gonna guess it was that dinosaur girl from Darling In The Franxx.
Let’s See How Japanese Twitter Is Doing
Excellent.
By the way, if you ever come across Japanese tweets with humungous retweet counts, it’s because the site is used very different there. It functions more like Reddit, where users are mostly anonymous, and it culturally operates more like 4chan. Also, 140 characters — and then 280 characters — can convey a lot more information in Japanese. Here’s a cool piece on it by my friend Daisuke. Also, if you ever want to see all of Japanese Twitter, check out TW Timez, I haven’t used it in a while, but I’m pretty sure it still works for sorting all Twitter content written in Japanese.
A Good Tweet
Someone Trained An AI To Generate Fursonas
This was sent in by Garbage Day reader Bowelfly. Thanks I hate it! The site is called thisfursonadoesnotexist.com and it’s running a grid of AI-generated furry portraits trained by arfa using nVidia's StyleGAN2 architecture. Per the website’s about page:
The training dataset consisted of ~55k SFW images from e621.net (excluded ponies and scalies for now; more on that later), cropped and aligned to faces using a custom YOLOv3 network.
The network was trained for 33 days (3.2 million iterations) on a TPUv3-32 pod.
I know very little about AI or neural nets, so most of that is gibberish to me. But! I do think it’s extremely interesting that…
it was only training with SFW images
and that it excluded ponies and scalies.
Let’s Find Out What Grimes Would Name You If You Were A Baby
My Grusk baby name is Spy Kids 420 The Squeaquel. What’s yours?
Speaking Of The Grusk Baby
There is pretty much already too much Grusk baby content to sort through at the moment, but here’s someone on Twitter that really called it.
Congrats @Vordb! You win nothing except for the pain and despair of being able to see the future while being wholly unable to do anything to change its deterministic path.
Anyways, here’s my favorite Grusk baby meme.
I Found Out Where You Can Buy That Hentai Body Suit
Last week, I wrote about these photos of a guy going grocery shopping in a hentai body suit. And the time I couldn’t find the body suit on Amazon. (I did find an ahegao balaclava, in case you’re looking for one...)
But luckily, my friend Jules found the body suit on French Amazon. It makes sense that you can buy it in France, the country is the third-largest consumer of anime outside of Japan. The country is literally filled with weebs. If you’re looking to pick up one up, it’s €35.00. Not a bad price! Godspeed.
Some Good Quarantine Memes
My friend Chris — the Tumblr user “topherchris” — has been making some really unhinged memes about quarantine life. Now, I could reach out and ask if he’s ok. Instead, I’m going to promote his deeply unsettling work to a larger audience in the hopes he keeps making more. Here’s a new idea he’s been working on: “Tursday”.
I think Tursday could really catch on. Keep up the great work, bud!
Here’s Another Meme We Need To Talk About
This comes from my friend Billy. He dropped it into a group chat I’m in and said, “Ryan, can you please use your weirdo knowledge and explain this to me?” Apparently, a guy he knows from improv shared it on Facebook. Quick aside: It seems like improv comedians are being affected particularly hard by COVID-19. I heard about a disastrous Zoom call my friend was on recently where like 50 improv comedians all went one by one through the grid doing bits at each other. Truly grim stuff.
Here’s the info I have on the meme above. Based on a reverse image search, it was originally captioned, “Don’t steal the catsup from that antivaxxers knees, you satanist fucks!” Unclear why Shrek and Fiona are there, but I’m not complaining.
Imagine explaining this caption to someone from 2007
(via shittynewyorkercartooncaptions)
One More Good Tweet
P.S. here’s a cool TikTok.
***All typos in this email are on purpose actually***
My Grusk baby name is Spy Kids 420 The Squeaquel