Happy No Nut November, Kings

Read to the end for an absolutely cursed Halloween costume

First Up, The “Cheesy Flaming Hot Cheetos Turkey”

So I wanted to figure out where this came from and the furtherest I could trace it back was to this post on the group Good Ole Soul Food Recipes. I’m aware I may be in the minority on this one, but I actually think this looks pretty good for the most part. I think the thing that’s really stopping me from 100% endorsing this is the addition of TWO POUNDS OF CHEESE stuffed inside the turkey. The rest looks dope though.

Second, I Am Very Late To “Bidoof’s Law”

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time digging back through internet culture from the last four years and reassessing it. I don’t know why I started doing this exactly, but I feel like everything that’s happened culturally (particularly online) between June 16, 2015 and September 24, 2019 all sort of blurred together. My personal theory about why this happened is that in the immediate chaos of the Global Populist Election Wave, an extremely internet illiterate and wholly unprepared mainstream media scrambled to cover what was happening and a lot of interesting bits of web culture were compressed or forgotten.

Anyways.

I either forgot about Bidoof’s Law or missed it completely at the time, but I love it and I think it’s more important than ever:

will there ever be anything more timelessly funnier on this site than seeing some joyless idiot asserting their stupid controversial worldviews internet toughguy style and then checking their blog and they’re just, completely openly and shamelessly addicted to hentai

It was written in 2017 by a Tumblr user named Bidoof (he roleplays as the Pokémon) and it was meant to be about Tumblr specifically, but I feel like it’s pretty much accurate across all social media.

Oh, Speaking Of An Internet Illiterate Mainstream Media

I’m writing this from London right now. I was back in the country for exactly 90 minutes before I started getting upset about some dumb nonsense thing the BBC did.

Last night, Laura Kuennsberg, the political editor for BBC News, was interviewed about “shitposting” (or as the BBC writes it — “s***posting”). Kuennsberg’s definition of “s***posting” is jawdroppingly incorrect and she has been mocked nonstop on Twitter for it all day today. She seems to think that shitposting is essentially when you share poorly-designed campaign ads on Facebook or something. Here’s the clip:

Because she’s a political journalist in the UK, a bunch of other British political journalists immediately raced to defend her. Based on the rules of UK Twitter, by the time this newsletter goes live the whole thing will have probably devolved into a big fight about class. I’m not going to include all of the Discourse here because like everything to do with Westminster it is both exhausting and tedious, but here are few bullet points on the matter:

  • Shitposting is not like a goofy internet thing. It is an established and complicated way of transmitting information online.

  • It has a literal Wikipedia article.

  • I’ve seen some blue checks arguing that it’s not like shitposting is a particularly serious issue worth caring about — lol half of that Wikipedia article is dedicated to shitposting’s role in political mobilization.

  • Kuennsberg tweeted last night that the meaning has changed: “This is what it’s come to mean in some less cool political circles including among some of the people who’ve told me about doing it.” 🙄🙄🙄

TL;DR:

OK, Now, A Good Meme

So, Someone Carbonated Chicken Noodle Soup

My friend Cates found this really world class Tumblr post. Allow me to walk you through exactly what happened here because it’s a lot.

It all started fairly innocently when Tumblr user fanotastic posted, “Soda is bubbly soup.” Then, another user named cryptictranz replied, “Soup is boring soda.”

You can already probably see where this is going. A few more posts into the conversation, fanotastic decided to go all in:

Oh lol and yes, there are GIFs. And yes, they are disgusting.

FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP! FUN SOUP!

Happy Birthday, Burger King No Nut November Tweet

Uh, Did Anyone Else Know About Former Lives Memes?

I recently came across a big master post of memes by and for people who believe they can access information about who they were in a previous life. The level of specificity in these memes makes me think they are legit. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Gen Z Kids Are Sharing The “Coomer Pledge”

Post-radicalized zoomer nihilists on iFunny and Instagram are sharing this a lot right now. It reached a point where Paul Joseph Watson made a video about it (not linking obvz). The whole coomer meme started on /fit/ back during the summer. We’ve talked about 4chan’s /fit/ board before. It’s a very special place. About every four months or so the community is driven mad by some new hyperfixation and it seems like “not ejaculating” is their mass psychogenic illness of the week.

I assume this is all tangentially connected to the semen retention movement that evolved out of r/NoFap a while back. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but there does seem to be some weird inertia that happens when you have enough men in an internet community. First, they decide masturbating is bad. Then they decide not masturbating makes them more powerful. Then they turn their belief in anti-masturbation magic in a radical (and often violent) identity movement. Weird!

Oh, One Last Fun Thing

I took a line about Goatse from last week’s newsletter and put it in this really cool neural network. Here’s what it spit back out:

For those of you who somehow don’t know what Goatse is, uh, well, plainly put, it’s a really famous photo of a man pulling his anus open. And it’s also, as I learned from this Wikipedia page, a popular joke, which is a kind of viral content.

And so, as you may know, this photo went viral on the Internet, and a lot of people felt a little bit offended by it, and this is, again, why it's such an interesting piece of cultural content. Because we're talking about a very specific thing, which is this specific action.

On the Internet, in particular, you know, what people take offense to is, you know, the most outrageous things. You know, if you, like, say, in the U.S., the most offensive thing about that is—is that this woman's trying to, like, have sex with a goat.

Wow! Sounds just like me. Probably just gonna have the AI write the whole issue next week.

***All typos in this letter are on purpose actually***

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