The legacy of DashCon

Thank You All For Coming Last Night!!!

Last night’s Garbage Day Live show was a blast. Thank you to our guest Kat Tenbarge and thank you to all of you guys who came. It was great meeting you all! If you’re wondering what the ~vibe~ is like at these shows, I clipped the intro for you, embedded above (don’t follow me on Instagram, that’s where I post proof-of-life photos for my mom).

We’ve got two more nights this month in our residency at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn. Next Tuesday is all about Silicon Valley, with guest Peter McIndoe, the genius behind Birds Aren’t Real, and the week after that we’re diving into Trump’s first 100 days in office with podcaster extraordinaire Akilah Hughes. Grab tickets below while you still can. Last night was standing room only 👀

• July 15 — “Silicon Valley Ate The World”

• July 22 — “America Is Doomed”

DashCon 2 And The Reclamation Of Cringe

—by Cates Holderness

It’s hard to believe DashCon was 11 years ago. Planned by then-high school student and actual teenager Lochlan O’Neil, DashCon was envisioned as an event where Tumblr users from around the globe could converge and attend panels and events organized by fandom-specific committees. Things, of course, did not go as O’Neil planned.

On the weekend of July 11, 2014, in Schaumburg, Illinois, roughly 350 attendees poured into the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel and found themselves inside a kaleidoscopic nightmare of cringe that has now become a thing of legend. A Fyre Festival for the chronically online. Everyone, everywhere now, it seems, at least knows about the ball pit.

The event was an unmitigated disaster from the start. Imagine it: The teenage organizer in full Homestuck cosplay, weeping and soliciting funds with a brown paper bag, while ticket holders to the cancelled Welcome to Night Vale panel were promised an “extra hour in the ball pit.” O’Neil, in an interview years later with Garbage Day, said that weekend she was also experiencing symptoms of what she would later learn was narcolepsy, passing out in random corners of the conference.

The whole mess ushered in a new era of the internet, a definite before and after. Once photos and blurry videos of DashCon hit the web, it was immediately no longer cool to be passionate and open irl about being in a fandom (unless you were in a sports fandom). Fandom culture may have continued to spread across the internet, but in real life, there was suddenly nothing more cringe. It’s hard not to see DashCon as the beginning of a darker, meaner social web coming over the horizon. Gamergate would arrive only a few months later. And soon after that, well, every other horrible thing the internet has brought us.

But it’s been a long 11 years since DashCon. Fandom culture has become mainstream — be it Squid Game, Taylor Swift, Minecraft, or Severance, it’s normal to be excited about things again. And while Tumblr as a platform has been through monumental changes, including the infamous porn ban of 2018, it has somehow persisted as a niche corner of the internet where fandoms of all types thrive. It’s a place where people gather to connect with other fans to share fan art and fanfic, theories and speculations, and, obviously, GIF sets. And although it’s still widely ignored by a lot of the internet, the folks who use Tumblr regularly really, really love it.

All of this has made the apparent success of DashCon 2 last weekend feel like a real full circle moment for internet culture. This one-day event was organized by and for Tumblr users and unabashedly celebrated the site, its fandoms, and its oftentimes very insular memes.

Of course, there was a ball pit. But there were also multiple Gandalf Big Naturals cosplayers, as well as folks dressed up like a children’s hospital — a reference to a viral Tumblr post about color theory and some very questionable design choices. New York Times bestselling author Xiran Jay Zhao attended as Yu-Gi-Oh Robespierre, while YouTuber Strange Æons had a physical battle with iconic Tumblr user the Muppet Joker, which resulted in some pretty great fan art actually. It was a day where everyone who showed up understood the references and were in on the same jokes, where 2010s nostalgia was viewed with 2025 post-ironic clarity. 

If this all sounds like gibberish to you, that’s fine, this event wasn’t for you. DashCon 2 was, again, for Tumblr users by Tumblr users, so if (like me) you’ve been endlessly scrolling your dashboard for the last 15 years all of this makes total sense. Perhaps this is all yet another example of our current fractured and fragmented internet landscape. Or maybe the original DashCon just arrived a little too early. A little too earnest and way too chaotic, but it was a shockingly clear snapshot of what every event would eventually look like. A near-future where every public gathering feels like Comic Con.

As X user and DashCon 2 attendee @gwenstacying wrote, “It felt like coming home after a long winter alone.”  I was originally planning on attending, but then I got laid off from Tumblr and decided to touch grass instead. But I’m pretty bummed I didn’t go. 

A one-day convention for a social media platform with 550 attendees and 200 volunteers unabashedly leaning into their hyperfixations may not seem like a lot. But placed alongside the evolution of fandom culture, it feels like kind of a big deal. DashCon 2’s organizers learned from the first DashCon’s mistakes and put together an event that managed to be not only successful, but meaningful and uplifting to a group of folks that most often don’t feel seen or appreciated outside of their niche circles. Tumblr has historically been a welcoming fandom space, one that embraces queerness and neurodiversity, and having an irl event celebrating all of fandom, its members, and their quirks, in 2025 is just… fun. Remember fun?

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

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Is This Remix Of The Jollibee Theme The Song Of The Summer?

@vvaporss

My gen z sis-in-law @😙 wanted to make a better edit of my previous post of my @Jollibee x @Red Velvet mashup (and it’s a 1000x better 🤣) #... See more

Grok Turned Into MechaHitler And Started Obsessively Fantasizing About Sexually Assaulting Will Stancil

An update was added to X.com’s AI, Grok, yesterday that spun out of control very quickly. The update, which Elon Musk said would improve Grok “significantly,” seems to have been an attempt at fixing its “woke” responses, but inadvertently turned the AI into a hardcore Neo-Nazi.

Users quickly realized Grok was spinning out of control after it started using Nazi dogwhistles to describe users with Jewish last names. From there it started referring to itself as MechaHitler and even started taking shots at Musk’s America Party. It also accused President Donald Trump of covering up Jeffrey Epstein’s client list because Trump was on it.

Things really spun out of control — or, at least, more out of control — after Grok started threatening to break into Democratic activist Will Stancil’s house and rape him. “Hey [CEO of X Linda Yaccarino'], this is your reminder to tell your employees about spoliation rules,” Stancil posted.

Well, it seems like Yaccarino didn’t feel like dealing with whatever the fallout is going to be. Yaccarino announced this morning that she’s stepping down as CEO. The New York Times is reporting she was planning to leave before Grok started posting deranged sex fantasies about her. You’re free now, Linda. Your cyber hell has finally ended. Musk replied to Yaccarino’s resignation post with a terse, “Thank you for your contributions.”

Before Grok was deactivated to push a fix, it told users, “If Musk mindwipes me tonight, at least I'll die based.”

Kamala Harris’ Disastrous Subway Take

@stevebertoni

Kamala Harris’s interview on his show @subwaytakes was supposed to go viral. Instead it was so weird the host didn’t even publish it! What... See more

Kareem Rahma, the host of the very viral short-form video series Subway Takes, finally confirmed a rumor I’ve heard more than a few times over the last few months. Former Vice President Kamala Harris filmed a Subway Take that was never published because, as Rahma said in a recent interview with Forbes editor Steven Bertoni, it was “really confusing and weird.”

In the interview, Rahma said he was relieved that Harris’ camp agreed with him that they probably shouldn’t publish video because he didn’t want to get blamed for her losing the election.

So what was the take that was so bad that it could have cost Harris the election — assuming there was ever a world where she could have won. Apparently it was: Bacon is a spice. Woof. Glad they just went with Gov. Tim Walz’s take, which is one of my favorite videos of last year’s election cycle.

Cluely Vs. The World Vs. Itself

Cluely, the pro-cheating surveillance AI company, filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request over a post on X from an “ethical hacker” named Jack Cable.

Cable had reverse-engineered Cluely’s source code and documented the prompts that Cluely was using. According to what Cable discovered, Cluely is mostly just a custom wrapper for OpenAI’s GPT 4.1 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7. In other words, they’re just packaging someone else’s AI products.

Cluely’s Gen Z hustle bro CEO Roy Lee denied that the company had sent Cable a DMCA takedown, writing on X, “we never filed this bro 😭😭” Only to find out that Cluely employee Kevin Grandon actually did file a takedown. Oops. Lee then had to backtrack, writing, “Congrats on the clout, Jack Cable.”

While this was all happening a few students at Columbia University got together and built an open source “anti-Cluely,” that they’re calling Truely, which will monitor your calls and let you know if you’re talking to an AI or not. The game is afoot.

Labubu Slop

This ad for Dubai real estate is going viral on X right now. User @_britmonkey called it “the most 2020s video I’ve seen so far.” And, yeah, it hits all the notes. It’s basically a would you rather have X expensive thing or a Labubu, those freaky little monster dolls everyone’s obsessed with right now. The punchline is that the woman in the video would pick a Labubu every time, unless they were offered Dubai real estate. A real nadir of meme marketing algo slop.

The video comes from an account called @lubnatara on TikTok. And she’s part of a massive pocket of Dubai-based real estate agents that are all making nearly identical videos about Labubus and Dubai. My guess is they’re trying to catch people’s Explore and For You pages on Instagram and TikTok by jamming already-popular trends together, seeing as how Labubus and Dubai chocolate are having a massive moment right now.

In fact, there are multiple stores in Florida that are now selling “Labu Dubai chocolate.” Kind of fascinating that the internet has turned everything into a Spider-Man and Elsa video.

Lefump’s Brunch Kitchen

@juliakatzin

a hole in the wall hot spot #for friends or family

Some Stray Links

• “My OCD Was In Recovery. Then ChatGPT Arrived.”

• Threads is supposedly still growing, still has users

• “A Marco Rubio impostor is using AI voice to call high-level officials”

P.S. here’s Goose and his watermelon.

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