Trailblazers: The First Two Men To Ever Do A Podcast
🍎Apple 🧵Stitcher 🎧Spotify 👖Pocket 📻Overcast ⚓︎Anchor
This week's guests (in order of appearance) are:
Cates Holderness, senior Brand Marketing Strategist at Tumblr
Kalhan Rosenblatt, reporter for NBC News
Kassy Cho, freelance journalist
Julia Alexander, reporter for The Verge
First, A Bad Animal Crossing Thing
This was posted last August, but it’s going around again. The slime and squish Instagram account it comes from appears to SFW, but I still think this is some kind of fetish thing. The sound they make as they’re squished is extremely haunting.
Now, An Actually Good Animal Crossing Thing
Amid the global outbreak of adults obsessing over Animal Crossing, a Japanese company decided to try and work remotely inside the game. According to an English write-up from The Gamer, here’s how it went:
Using the game's chat feature, they were able to discuss talk to each other, sorta.
They all went to the island pier to go fishing together.
The team couldn’t send work files to each other, though.
Nor could they employees discuss anything confidential — no real security features.
Apparently the biggest issue though was that communication kept breaking down because everyone kept forgetting who was who because all their in-game handles were different.
A Lot To Think About Here
This tweet is really just an incredible series of words. It also inspired some excellent photoshops:
I think that last one is a Persona reference? Which, from what I can gleam from Tumblr, is like some kind of Power Rangers dating sim.
A Good Sonic Thing
OK so, in my head canon for this, Kim Ki-taek goes to the basement at the end of Parasite, falls through one of Sonic’s ring portals and then basically the plot of Sonic The Hedgehog happens almost exactly the same, except instead of James Marsden, it’s an extremely angry and confused Mr. Kim.
Some Heavy Thoughts About Spongebob
This COVID-19 edit of the popular Spongebob meme was posted to Tumblr recently. I guess it wasn’t immediately clear though that it was about social distancing. Tumblr user nightsaway had a very different interpretation:
I forgot about the quarantine and, for a moment, thought the joke was that Spongebob and Patrick had passed away and Squidward was simultaneously silently mourning them while internally wishing he had treated them better while they were alive.
The “Bananana”
Here’s a recent experiment from Reddit. It comes from a post on r/pics called “I surgically created a banana-pineapple hybrid. I'll call it a banananas.”
It definitely caused some emotions among the other users. A sampling of some of the comments:
“You were so concerned with whether or not you could you never stopped to consider whether you should”
“Shit is going to get weirder than usual over the next few weeks.”
“They did surgery on a bananana”
“I hate you”
“No religion can save you.”
Help Me Verify This Please
I went to Drake’s Instagram but I can not find any proof that this happened. Please. I’m dying. I need to know. Is this real? I feel like it could be? I feel like Drake is totally the kind of guy who wishes he was the kind of guy to pull off a Vegeta Halloween costume.
An Incredible Documentary About The Game Half-Life
This was spotted by Tumblr user drgertiefremontphd. The YouTube channel Noclip put up a 2-hour documentary about the history of the video game Half-Life. About 45 minutes into the documentary, the host tells a story about he was on magic mushrooms while he was in the back of a comedy club in San Francisco. Apparently, he kept having an auditory hallucination where he was hearing the scientist from Half-Life 1 talking to him. He then realizes it wasn’t a hallucination, the voice actor was actually on stage at the comedy club. Absolutely fantastic stuff.
Let’s See How Russian Facebook Is Handling Quarantine
This Facebook Group is pretty incredible. Its name translates to “Insulation” and it consists of bored quarantined Russians cosplaying as famous works of art. The group actually has what look like EXTREMELY strict community rules. There are 13 of them and they are hilariously intense. Here are some of my favorites — machine-translated from Russian:
1. Post your versions of paintings by famous artists (criterion: Wikipedia page or widget on Google) and museum sculpture (the other is at the discretion of the moderator).
2. Rejected photos on film, animation, photographs, comics, covers and postcards. Photos are taken on posters, prints and other works of great masters, medieval miniatures and posters of the USSR.
7. Forbidden Photoshop: blurry background, filters, pasted faces, embedded background. Correction of color, brightness, contrast, blur of body parts prohibited in clause 4 is acceptable.
10. Please do not send photos of your children / cats / dogs without a suitable picture of the surroundings / props. We also love children and cats, but the group has other goals.
11. Photos with the same tricks are rejected (example: "Lovers" Magritte, "32 cans of Campbell's soup" by Warhol). We will accept the “Black Square” if the idea is unique.
Top notch stuff, everybody.
Finally, Whatever The Hell This Is
This post from Tumblr user johnnypenis has really been blowing up my dashboard this week. I know a lot of you aren’t on Tumblr, but since the pandemic hit, the community there has gotten real weird. Kids are home from school. Older millennial weebs are out of work. The whole site is bumping with seriously chaotic early-10s SuperWhoLock energy. The post above is troubling, sure, but the follow-ups that provided are even worse. I’m not going to attempt to paraphrase them. I think they need to be read in full.
Update #1:
all it’s line are in Italian and it’s name is GUIDO. And everyone knew I was obsessed with Italy in elementary school but they didn’t know why bc I, even as a young autistic child, had the sense to know this was a rightfully so, highly mockable thing. So I would read about cars on IMDB and then one day someone posted a crackfic on the message boards there and it was about this guy getting drunk and beating his wife, and it snapped me out of my fugue long enough to realize how absurd wanting to be Italian was, but then it made me cry really hard and my parents were like ‘hey what the fuck’ and I didn’t have the chutzpah to admit anything so I told them I saw a naked lady online and then they went into the computer and found all the weird south park midi songs I downloaded on lime wire and I thought they were literally going to kill me for about two weeks.
and Update #2:
The reason I was downloading South Park episodes and songs on limewire and frostwire was because I was also obsessed with Kenny McCormick and for school we had to make a shitty little website about a world issue, so I found this free platform that doesn’t exist anymore but it was like a horrible little wix site from the mid aughts, and we based my groups theme on global warming. But when we were done with it I repurposed it as a perosnal site and lied about being a voluptuous blonde 19 year old woman who worked at a fictitious restaurant called the lunchbox, and I just wrote about how obsessed I was with Kenny McCormick and my sister found it and was like what the fuck is wrong with you. But she never told my parents. She also found this 80 page story I was writing about buddy the elf and all my weird skater ocs breaking into the moulin rouge, and at one point I was sick of buddy so I had a herd of buffalo trample him in the middle of a city and it was very tragic but jarring and unexpected. And she referenced a part of the story to me and it made me SO fucking paranoid that I wiped our entire, family shared packard bell computer and got in huge fucking trouble for it.
The whole thing actually has a lot of parallels to one of my favorite 4chan posts of all time:
P.S. here’s my favorite “native species have started to return” tweet.
***All typos in this email are on purpose actually***
Please Stop Making Squish Videos Of The "Animal Crossing" Raccoon