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The Elf Girlfriend Vs. The Gungan Girlfriend

There has been a lot written in the last year about whether or not everything you see on subreddits like r/AITA (Am I The Asshole), r/relationships, and r/relationship_advice is totally made up. (My podcast also attempted to answer this question a few months ago.)

I approach the completely deranged content on advice subreddits the same way I approach pretty much everything I see on the internet — it’s probably fake, but it also definitely reflects some kind of reality and I also just appreciate it for its entertainment value.

But two recent Reddit posts have really pushed my ability to suspend disbelief. First, let’s talk about the elf girlfriend…

This post is very long and tremendously insane. The original text has been deleted, but it’s thankfully been screenshot and preserved by Tumblr user alex-fa-ch. Here are the important parts:

28M and 25F.
The girlfriend loves D&D and Lord Of The Rings.
The boyfriend loves anime. The girlfriend does not like anime (this is important for later).
The girlfriend has started dressing like an elf all the time.
She is also talking like an elf.
She dressed like an elf on a Zoom call with the boyfriend’s cousin who is currently undergoing chemotherapy.
To get back at the elf girlfriend, the boyfriend has decided to dress like Naruto all the time.
He’s also Naruto running everywhere.
The elf girlfriend is very embarrassed by her new Naruto boyfriend.
Now the elf girlfriend and the Naruto boyfriend aren’t talking.

My favorite comment: “Listen man, you made you right choice. Remember Naruto? Would he give in? Would he stop fighting for what is right? No he wouldn’t, he’d find a way, believe it!”

Is this is real? I say, yes. I spent a lot of time hanging out at a Games Workshop at the mall as a teenager and I absolutely know couples that this would happen to. The detail about your elf girlfriend cosplaying on a zoom call with his cousin undergoinng chemo is too specific and grim to be fake.

Is the relationship salvageable? They’re definitely going to break up. But they’ll probably get back together like four months later after bumping into each other at the same steampunk-themed coffee shop.

Alright, let’s talk about the Gungan girlfriend…

This one has also been deleted, but there are screenshots on the @redditships Twitter account. Here are the important parts:

28M and 27F.
They’ve dated for five years.
The girlfriend is a huge Star Wars fan.
The boyfriend is in the military.
She started talking like Jar Jar Binks last spring.
She says things like, “exsqueeze me” and “meesa clumsy.”
The boyfriend took her to a small ceremony celebrating a promotion he got and she introduced herself to a fairly high-up general with, “yousa Bombad general?”
The boyfriend took her on a hike in July and tried proposing to her and she replied with, “okie-day!”

My favorite comment: “meesa think itsa time to starta settinga boundaries ani”

Is This Real? Pretty much the entire comment section has decided this is definitely fake. Most people seem to think this is a direct response to the elf girlfriend post from earlier in the week. I want it to be real, but I think it’s just too much. I mean maybe COVID gave her some kind of personality disorder? But it feels unlikely.

Is the relationship salvageable? If this is actually real, which it almost assuredly isn’t, I don’t see a future between these two. Like the post above, I absolutely know couples who have had similar conflicts to this and those couples really didn’t pan out. He deserves someone who isn’t very clearly mentally unwell and she deserves someone who finds Jar Jar Binks just as interesting as she does.

Here’s A Good Tweet

baby girl da princess @sug_knight

Girls only want one thing and it’s to taste Wallace and Gromit ‘s moon cheese and crackers

New Obelisk Dropped

utahdpsaerobureau

A post shared by UtahDPSAeroBureau (@utahdpsaerobureau)

I love stuff like this! Last week, Utah Public Safety spotted this very ominous silver monolith just chilling in a remote part of the desert. It was spotted by a Utah DPS helicopter pilot. According to The Guardian, who have been all over the mysterious obelisk beat, it’s between 10ft-12ft tall and made out of some kind of unknown metal.

Love it. Yes. We aren’t exactly sure how big it is, who made it, or what it’s made out of. Perfect for 2020!

Here’s a cool twist. Users of the r/geoguesser subreddit have tried to geolocate it. And it seems like one user, who is of course named u/bear__fucker, appears to have found it:

I looked at rock type (Sandstone), color (red and white - no black streaks like found on higher cliffs in Utah), shape (more rounded indicating a more exposed area and erosion), the texture of the canyon floor (flat rock vs sloped indicating higher up in a watershed with infrequent water), and the larger cliff/mesa in the upper background of one of the photos. I took all that and lined it up with the flight time and flight path of the helicopter - earlier in the morning taking off from Monticello, UT and flying almost directly north before going off radar (usually indicating it dropped below radar scan altitude. From there, I know I am looking for a south/east facing canyon with rounded red/white rock, most likely close to the base of a larger cliff/mesa, most likely closer to the top of a watershed, and with a suitable flat area for an AS350 helicopter to land. Took about 30 minutes of random checks around the Green River/Colorado River junction before finding similar terrain. From there it took another 15 minutes to find the exact canyon. Yes... I'm a freak.

u/bear__fucker concluded that the structure must have been installed between August 17th, 2015 and October 20th, 2016. Here’s a link to the Google Maps location.

I think it’s that little dot casting a shadow on the right there.

Actually Cool YouTube Thing

I’ve been writing a little bit lately about the weird conflict of what YouTube is and what YouTube was and what YouTube could be. I feel like the platform is the least coherent of any of the major social networks right now. Facebook and Twitter provide, more or less, a semi-universal experience. If you have a Facebook account, you’re probably in a few groups, there are probably some weird arguments happening in those groups, friends on your news feed have probably shared some right-wing memes, and you probably see a bunch of really exhausting video content. If you have a Twitter account, you probably talk to a bunch of other people in your industry or fandom or both and you’ve probably been attacked either in a big way or small, by strangers, for something you did or didn’t say. YouTube, though, feels fractured.

There’s a gulf between the YouTube that YouTube wants to project to the world — an infinite MTV populated by semi-brand-safe, but fairly messy, young influencers — and the YouTube most of its users experiences — islands of different interests and hobbies with far-right misinformation and grifters waiting to prey on them in the recommended videos section. But there’s also a stark difference between how its various users experience the site. It’s likely that you and I will never see the same YouTube. Also, the less said about the company’s abysmal failure in handling disinformation around the 2020 US presidential election the better.

But this is all prologue to say, I really liked this Billie Ellish project YouTube released this week!

YouTube Music @youtubemusic

What’s cooler than @billieeilish’s Bad Guy hitting a billion views? Thousands of fans & creators covering it on YouTube. We’re celebrating their beautiful, bizarre, & hilarious covers in the world’s first infinite music video. Play #InfiniteBadGuy now → billie.withyoutube.com

If you haven’t taken some time to mess around with it, it basically uses thousands of YouTube covers of Ellish’s “Bad Guy” to create an endlessly interchangeable music video. It’s extremely cool and gives me that kind of specific “I love humanity in all its weirdness and earnestness” frisson that YouTube, at its best, can give you.

This one project can’t and won’t fix the platform, but at least it gives people a glimpse of what the site could actually feel like all the time if it started emphasizing its community again.

A Porn Bot Gave Parasite A 5-Star Review On Letterboxd

I spent a little bit trying to find “Milan Miller” on Letterboxd this morning, but sadly, I think her account has been pulled down. I came across this screenshot on the ribs505 Tumblr blog. “Milana” describes herself in her Letterboxd bio as, “I love the morning male boner! I will meet!” And she gave Parasite a 5-star review. We have to stan.

While her account may be gone, Milan’s influence has not. I came across this Parasite review from Tuesday:

Really Good Piece Alert!

marianne eloise @marianne_eloise

i spent the last three months fully immersed in the history of decaydance, a truly unique label with a scene & ethos all its own here's the result: the history of decaydance as told by @petewentz, @TravieMcCoy, @GabrielSaporta, @TheSpencerSmith & more thefortyfive.com/interviews/dec…

I’ve been following music writer Marianne Eloise for a while now. She’s a must-follow if you, like me, are still struggling with your mid-00s scene phase. Her feature from last week, an oral history of Pete Wentz’s Decaydance, is absolutely wild. It’s a really interesting look at how pop culture completely reinvented itself during the Myspace era.

It also furthers a theory I’ve had for a while now that Fall Out Boy (and maybe Pete Wentz, specifically) is possibly the most culturally influential thing to happen in rock music in the 21st century, but because their fan base was, and still is, mostly teenage girls, people still won’t acknowledge it.

Anyways, this quote from former Panic! At The Disco drummer Spencer Smith about how the band first met Wentz aged me like 1000 years:

We had three demos that we foresaw being recorded fully with live drums, but we didn’t have the ability to do that, so I think Ryan just had GarageBand, which was revolutionary at the time. We put these versions of songs on PureVolume, the SoundCloud of the era, and then we posted that link in Pete’s LiveJournal, hoping either fans would click on it or that he would ask us to go on tour. He actually listened to it and used AIM to reach out to Ryan.

Here’s Just A Good Ass Video

Russy KGB @RussellHFilm

the only good thing I saw on the Internet today

Looking For Some Pre-Thanksgiving Internet Weirdness Tonight?

For the last few months, I’ve been streaming on Twitch with some really amazing people — Glitch’s Jenn Schiffer, The Verge reporter Bijan Stephen, and comedian Mark Vigeant. Our show is called Hoobastank2 and it’s kind of like if you combined a Japanese game show with a TED Talk. The screenshot above is from our Halloween special (Hoobaween obvz) where I cooked and ate a candy corn pizza. It was very oily and I didn’t like it.

Tonight, we’ll be streaming a Thanksgiving special! If you’re looking for something to stare at for a couple hours, come hang out. We have two really great guests tonight — Giant Bomb’s Abby Russell and Adam Conover from Adam Ruins Everything. It starts at 8pm EST and should go until at least 10pm EST.

And, Finally, A Good Santa Meme

Anna 🏳️‍⚧️⚢ @Anna1312__

This was sent to me by a reader named Rachel. It’s REALLY good. I hadn’t really been following this, but it seems like Santa denier memes are really popular right now. I was browsing a bunch of them this morning and I love them. Here’s another good one I stumbled across.

President-Elect Gabriel Syme🇻🇦✝️🇺🇸 @gabrielsyme08

Imagine being a Santa denier lmao

P.S. here’s the most well-written TikTok I’ve ever seen.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***