Happy Labor Day! Got just a short one for you today. Nothing too crazy. Also, tomorrow night at 6:30PM EST I’m doing a live chat on the Sidechannel Discord with Cates Holderness, Tumblr’s head of editorial. It’ll be audio only, so you won’t be able to see it, but I plan to conduct the interview dressed like the Onceler. Hit the subscribe below to get Discord access! Oh, also, this Thursday paying subscribers will be getting an interview in their inboxes with Dinotendies, one of the most infamous 4chan users ever 👀
A Fyre Fest In The Poconos
The Elements Music & Arts Festival was meant to be a multi-day EDM and art festival a la Burning Man in the Poconos over Labor Day weekend. It’s part of a wave of festivals coming back this year, which are re-entering a very different world with very different expectations of how public events should function. The Elements founders, Brett Herman and Timothy Monkiewicz, told Uproxx that they felt prepared for the challenges of organizing a music festival in 2021 because they had done “smaller events in 2020.”
“With our smaller events in 2020, we feel like we had a head start on preparing for the challenges of ’21 — dealing with constantly changing regulations, new scientific data, and new recommendations from scientific and medical professionals,” Herman said. “In some ways, being in the pandemic longer made it easier, because several best practices had evolved since then.”
Well, considering the hashtag for the event is now #Hellements, I’d say that things, maybe, didn’t go quite as they imagined. A Garbage Day reader tipped me off to this, who said they tried to go to this over the weekend, but left because it was a total shit show. The comments under this post from the festival’s Facebook page are BRUTAL and there’s a lot of talk about organizing some kind of class action lawsuit. It seems like the festival team tried to blame a lot of the issues — lack of parking, a sea of mud, no bathrooms, long lines, among other issues — on last week’s Hurricane Ida. But people aren’t buying it.
There was a public Facebook Group for festival attendees, but that’s gone private. But there’s a new public group called “Elements Shit Show 2021,” which has over thousand people in it. Another common complaint I keep seeing is that amid the chaos, festival staff tried to text out updates to attendees, none of whom had cell service out in the densely-packed woods.
I guess there was also talk initially of “social distancing” (at a music festival lol?) via spaced out camping areas, but based on the comments I’ve read, it seems like there were massive overflow problems. There’s a bunch of chatter in the festival’s Discord now about possible COVID exposure. There was even some doubt that the festival’s COVID QR code app was even really working. “So update on the covid entry QR code,” one user wrote in the Discord. “My friend bought an at-home rapid test at a CVS and submitted that to crowdpass and got approved in like 15-20 minutes!!”
#Hellements is actually a good example of something I’m expecting will be a big trend going into at least 2023. I suspect that extreme weather, our still-very-much ravaging pandemic, and people’s new expectations that they should have the same level of seamless and comfortable online-ness in public as they did at home inside for a year, will eat away at mid-level events like this. We’ll see a bunch of random grassroots internet events pop up and mega-productions like Jake Paul boxing matches or the Donda streams, but I just don’t think the stuff in between is going to fare very well. Plus, it seems like these events were kind of a massive rip-off even before COVID.
As one Twitter user wrote about Elements this weekend, “We paid $700 for a fest where we were onsite for only 18 hours and spent another 14 hours either waiting to get in the venue or waiting to be towed out leaving early because we feared our safety.” Seems bad, man.
Not Sure What John Mulaney Fan Needs To Read This Today, But Here You Go
For more, read the replies and quote tweets on this New York Post tweet.
When Was The Last Time You Really Cracked Up?
Shoutout To The Shutterstock Guy For Finally Finding A Rise And Grind Angle On 9/11
In a series of now-deleted tweets, Jon Oringer, the billionaire founder of Shutterstock, the website people download stock photos from, wrote that his “entrepreneurial journey” was changed forever by 9/11. The thread, which you can read pieces of here, includes the incredibly powerful sentences, “I saw destruction and disruption now as opportunity” and “I looked at so much evil straight in the eye, that I wanted to create things people loved.” Just so we’re clear, he’s talking Shutterstock, the website for stock photography.
Anyways, Oringer deleted his thread and then he tweeted an explanation for the thread, which I actually think is almost as funny/bad as the original thread.
I once knew copyeditor who said that if you’re going to issue a correction, you should never repeat the incorrect information, but instead just affirm that a mistake had been made and note what the new information was. This is to hopefully cut down on the misinformation that was spreading, but, also, she said, it would make less people screenshot it and pass it around making fun of you. I feel the same way about bad tweets about 9/11. If you decide to tweet that the destruction of 9/11 helped inspire you to build an online marketplace for photos of women laughing with salad, just delete the tweet and maybe just take some time to retweet some dog videos or something until everybody’s cooled off.
A Wild Video About Retro Video Game Fraud
This was sent to me by my friend Doree and it’s absolutely bonkers!
A Very Good School Board Prank
This happened in Henrico County, Virginia, and you can read more about it here.
Frog And Cranberries It Must Be Fall
I’m not totally sure how exactly this random Facebook post from 2014 became a huge Tumblr meme, though, I do have a few theories. Tumblr users love frogs, I assume it’s because the average Tumblr user imagines themselves as little slimy goblins living alone in the woods and frogs are kind of similar to that. Also, Tumblr loves seasonal memes. So memes about fall are pretty popular on there. But either way, every September, without fail, everyone reblogs the post about frogs and cranberries.
I found the original post this meme is based on. You can check it out here. The frog and cranberries photo was taken by Carl Jacobs and I am happy to report that, over on Facebook, it seems like users are just as excited about it:
Frog and cranberries it must be fall.
An Extremely Eloquent Bird
A Good Tweet
Some Stray Links
P.S. here’s a really mesmerizing video about fruit.
***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***