"Opening a wildly corroded can of Spider-Man Pasta from 1995: a thread. (1/5)"
Appears in this episode
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:
Julia Furlan, reporter and podcast host working for Vox Media
Katie Notopoulos, senior reporter for BuzzFeed News
My friend Geoff, just, like, a normal person
First, Let’s Check In On Men
If you aren’t quite sure what you’re looking at, this is a “Jawzrsize Total Transformation Kit” and it apparently costs $99.99. The one pictured above only has the “Beginner Blue Pop N Go,” but according to their website, there are four? An Intermediate Green Pop N Go, Advanced Blue Custom Fit, and an Elite Green Custom Fit. Your next question is probably why anyone would need this. Well, “jawmaxing” or “gummaxing” is a pretty big Incel thing. I’m not going to link to their board, because it’s all deranged nonsense, but here’s what a typical jawmaxing thread looks like:
This is, of course, like all incel-related concepts, just a twisted version of “face gains,” which is pretty big on bodybuilding.com’s forum (one of the last best dark corners of the internet). Here’s a good Mel story about face gains for those interested. Anyways, I’m not sure I trust _incelinside up there. Gonna buy the transformation kit and see if I can work my way up to the Elite Green Custom Fit before quarantine is over or I get crippling TMJ and need surgery.
Now, Let’s Pick Apart The Oil Graph Video
Alright, there is a lot going on here. So I’m going to take this slow because it’s a real rats nest of content.
The graph is the price of oil. Duh. It cratered this week (or last week? All weeks feel the same now.) and people celebrated by making a bunch of memes about it because we all have brain damage.
Now, the song that’s playing you may have heard all over the place recently. It’s called “Caramelldansen” by Swedish music group Caramell. Except, it’s not the original “Caramelldansen” — it’s a remix. A lot of people have mistakenly thought it was a nightcore remix of the song, but that’s not true either. Nightcore btw is a popular YouTube meme where people speed up the pitch and time of a song by 10-30% so it sounds like something you’d hear on Dance Dance Revolution. You can usually tell it’s a nightcore remix because the art for the video is a hot anime babe. My personal favorite of the genre is this nightcore remix of a screamo cover of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop”. I don’t want to talk about it.
Anyways, as I said, it’s not a nightcore remix. It’s actually a remix done by the DJ Speedycake. Also, it’s not the original dance for Caramell’s song either. I can’t find a clip, but the original dance that went to “Caramelldansen” was featured in the background of a scene in the movie The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. The swinging hip dance that the anime girl is doing in the oil prices video is called a “Popotan dance,” which named for a Japanese erotic dating simulator. In 2007, someone took the opening scene of the game and set it to the Speedycake remix of “Caramelldansen” and voila.
Now, I should note: There’s a big Tumblr post about “Caralmelldansen” that goes around a lot and for some reason, one of the users in it said Speedycake is dead. He is not.
Right, so that’s the song and the dance. Honestly, not sure which anime the girl is from. But the pallbearers in the corner are actually a lot easier to explain. The footage comes from this BBC video. They’re from Ghana and Benjamin Aidoo, who leads the dancing troupe, told the BBC, “Do you want it solemn or do you want a bit more of a display? Or maybe you want some choreography on it?” Hell yeah.
There you go! All of that to explain one Twitter video. Modern culture is fine.
Here Are Some Really Good Horse Owner Memes About COVID-19
Excellent.
A Good Reddit Post
(via r/funny)
Another Good Reddit Post
It’s an old one, but I just saw it and the internet is a non-linear space. So It’s new to me. Here’s my favorite answer:
Ok, so let's assume that there is no outdoors, only the man-made structure of a mcdonalds, connected via the exits to other mcdonalds. We can also assume that humans are not an intrinsic part of mcdonalds, but are inserted as part of the 10 million of each animal. Let's assume that the animals are comfortably distributed, grouped in breeding populations, occupying mcdonalds within a radius of a central, "starting mcdonalds". Let's assume that each mcdonalds has a full store of fresh food at the start of the scenario, but it does not replenish magically. Once a mcdonalds is empty, it stays empty.
We must ask, is there electricity, and are the mcdonaldses all wired together, or are they cut off? Are the lights on any kind of timer, or are they all manual and static? The big question here is: are there mcdonalds with multiple floors? And if so, are there more than one "plane" of mcdonaldses? Can you travel up and down infinitely, is there a "floor" level of mcdonalds, or is it just one thin, infinitely wide layer of mcdonalds?
Naturally, these variations will be vital in determining 1) which species have a high chance of surviving the first few years and 2) What long-term selective pressures will emerge after the initial bottleneck event.
If there is a floor level, and the mcdonalds extend upwards as well as outwards, then it will eventually fill up with soda, sewage, and waste from higher levels. The "starting" mcdonalds will be buried and lost relatively quickly, the vile ocean that drips from each level downward and then spreads, pouring out in every direction, along the infinite soggy bottom layer of Mcdonalds.
Now, in our dimension, Earth is only so big. You can only walk so far before something blocks your way, or you're back where you started. The Sun and geothermal energy introduce energy into the food chain, which becomes chemical energy for plants, herbivores, carnivores, etc. This is the basis for biological competition. But in Mcdonalds, these rules go out the window...and into the adjacent mcdonalds.
I think you would see that the nature of an infinite plane which always has more resources if you walk far enough, things would evolve to either be fast enough to get to the next unlooted Mcdonalds first, rushing in as loners, or swarming through as a stampede on a perpetual warpath. Any life that stays close to the starting point, or lives in de-stocked areas is going to have to be very efficient with the energy they have, because any "new" energy introduced to the ecology is solely through miraculously unspoiled big macs, cold fries, and soda slime bogs and rivers from the more and more distant untouched McDonalds, or alternatively through the electricity or flowing water of the building, if they have any.
I'd have to say that while these evolving organisms may look superficially familiar to us, we'd find that they'd quickly start to behave very differently, adopting new strategies to survive, and thrive in an infinite McDonald's.
A Very Bad TikTok
A Very Good TikTok
Irish People Refuse To Rat Out Matt Damon For The New York Times
Not sure if you’ve been following this story, but Matt Damon is stuck in Ireland due to the coronavirus. The Irish have really embraced him as one of their own. Apparently, New York Times reporter Heather Murphy decided to hop on the Facebook page for the Irish town Damon is locked down in, hoping to get some quotes about what it’s like to have the famous actor around town.
Well! It turns out the residents of Dalkey have become quite protective of Damon. The replies are pretty amazing.
For what it’s worth, Murphy ended up writing the story and it’s very adorable and worth a read.
An Update On That Ant LARPing Facebook Group
So last week, we took a look at the incredible Facebook Group, “A group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony”. I’m excited to say I have an update for you! I should note, that because the group is private, I’m not able to 100% verify this, but according to Tumblr user one-time-i-dreamt, they were able to get into the group and make a post. It did not go well!
If anyone’s in this group and can give me more updates on what’s happening in there, let me know! Let’s get a spy in the colony.
Some guy opened a can of Spider-Man Chef Boyardee from 1995
These photos have been doing the rounds on Facebook for the last couple days and I finally figured out where they came from. It turns out they’re from Dinosaur Dracula, a blogger who writes about 1980s toys, 1990s candy, holidays, and other kitschy stuff. Look, I’m going to warn you. These are absolutely awful. Scroll with caution!
You can check out the full thread here.
P.S. here’s a hedgehog doing American Ninja Warrior.
***All typos in this email are on purpose actually***