is this real
plus woolly mammoth de-extinctification, perfect days, etc. 🦣
depop nightmares
This week, I finally sold a pair of too-small Levi’s I’d had listed for over a year and it reminded me that Depop exists. Depop etiquette somehow hasn’t quite solidified in its 13-year-long existence, so users are always making fools of themselves and ending up as content on other social platforms. Whether it be selling stapled-together sock scraps for $50 as “a top” or publishing an essay in the product description about how petite and tiny they are, people on Depop are always on their bullshit. Here are two bizarre listings I saw this week:
did we learn nothing from jurassic park?
File under “is this real”—for the last few years, a genetics startup called Colossal has been “de-extincting” the woolly mammoth, for release as soon as 2028. They’re in the news this month because apparently, after years spent defending themselves against the Jurassic Park allegations, they’ve decided to take the narrative into their own hands and announced they’re making a docuseries about their de-extinctification efforts.
Why unleash Manny from Ice Age into the modern world? According to Colossal’s flashy but poorly-written website whose text size is wayyyy too small who the hell approved this, “bringing the woolly mammoth back means bringing back a better earth,“ because the animal “was a natural custodian of a healthier planet.” When asked in the comments section where they planned to release said mammoth calf, the official account replied, verbatim, “The Arctic! ❄️” Uh… guys… are we sure you’ve thought this through all the way?
Digging a little deeper on their website, I was not at all surprised to find that a bunch of white men with horrible vibes were behind this weird, virtue signaly business venture. Anyway, I will be seated for the docuseries on how this all inevitably goes wrong.
who up vacuuming they mattress?
This week, the New York Times posted a graphic about preventing your bed from getting disgusting. As someone who recently got a bedframe after two years of not having a bedframe (“bitch you live like this?”), my ears perked up, only to be completely baffled by one of their suggestions, which, see for yourself:
I hope I’m not showing my ass too much by admitting I’ve never vacuumed my mattress ever, much less monthly????
satire detection
peace, love, misinformation
Last week we talked about AI and how it is making it increasingly difficult to gather even the most basic of information—like what is “real” and what is “not real”—about things you see online.
But AI is far from the only thing muddying these waters. From Photoshopped images to celebrity death hoaxes to Nigerian prince phishing scams, not even to mention shit like QAnon, misinformation is a plague that makes the Internet an at best confusing and at worst dangerous place for those who can’t distinguish “real” from “not real.”
One of the final bosses of this is satire. Satire is kicking everybody’s ass. In the world of shortform vertical video content (the TikTok/IG Reels/YouTube Shorts trifecta having the same kind of cannibalistic, redundant content ecosystem relationship to each other that Tumblr/Twitter/Instagram once had for image- and text-based posting), The Algorithm has wrested control of your feed from the accounts you actually follow, so often you don’t have the context to understand the schtick of any given profile before you see their videos. Because of this, it’s easy to take stuff you see at face value and completely miss the joke. And then once you’ve been duped, you become a viral agent, disseminating truths from an alternate reality and roping other people into the falsehood with you.
One time in college, my friend posted a picture of himself and a girl holding a baby with a caption gushing about how proud he was to be a father. All the comments were like “omg congratulations, she’s beautiful!” including one from his mom about becoming a granny that really sold me. My brain did the mental gymnastics to conclude that he was actually starting a family. When I found out the truth (not his baby), I was shocked I fell for it when it was so obviously a joke, but mostly I was just embarrassed that in my stupidity I’d convinced several other people that it was real. I was the viral agent, spreading misinformation! You gotta keep your eyes fucking peeled out here because a lot of people are jesters, but not all jesters wear hats.
straight-up it’s satire
Last week, someone on TikTok said she made cinnamon rolls out of her yeast infection and gave them to her husband for Valentine’s Day.
She even made a follow-up video reporting that she and her husband developed oral thrush after ingesting the pastries that were “made with love from things that came from my body,” warning people not to take inspiration from her previous post and replicate the recipe themselves.
Don’t cry or blow chunks—though it’s kinda graphically realistic, it’s not real, according to creator Kass Theaz’s two-word bio, “satire account.” However, a lot of people in the comments did not click the *checks notes* ONE link it would’ve taken to go to her profile and find out it didn’t actually happen.
She was completely upfront about it not being real if you looked into it literally at all. And still, people took her seriously enough to post this on r/TikTokCringe, only to delete it days later when they found out it was satire. Now that’s cringe.
oh no! you totally fell for it!
There are many ways to “fall for it.” The majority of the reactions to the Yeast Infection Cinnamon Roll saga were of disgust, which was definitely the intended response, and then relief once they found out it was all a joke. But depending on the topic being satirized, sometimes “falling for it” can reveal an uglier side of the viewer.
This is especially prevalent from male commenters tripping over themselves trying to make fun of a female comedian, who they don’t realize is telling a joke they’re too dumb to get. It must be at her expense, always, because there’s no way a woman would be able to access a higher level of satirical understanding than a self-proclaimed but also literal troll of a man with total proficiency in Rick & Morty. People doing cringe impression videos often get this reaction, as if they themselves somehow don’t know it’s cringe and as if that’s not the whole premise of the video?
The main question behind content like this is “Was this created in earnest? Or was it made as a joke about this being created in earnest?” and sometimes, this line is blurred to the point of disappearance.
real or not real: when you literally can’t tell
I’d like to end this segment talking about Millaze. If you’re not familiar, Millaze is a singer-songwriter whose non-traditional and honestly terrible-sounding music has people tearing out their hair wondering if it’s actually in earnest or if it’s just one big joke.
She claims to have classical vocal training and understand the technical aspects of music that are either completely missing or mangled beyond recognition in her songs, a credibility that she attempts to leverage against the haters who are very blunt with what they think of her work. In this situation, despite (and perhaps because of) Millaze never having labelled herself as a satire artist, lots of viewers believe she can’t possibly be being serious.
No matter what people say to her, no matter how they try to give her advice about how to improve, she has resolved never to change who she is, which—it’s kind of inspiring. In the pre-Internet world, someone like Millaze wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell at gaining recognition for her music, but today, on social media, attention is all that matters, and eyeballs that hatewatch are indistinguishable from eyeballs who are true fans. Is Millaze a genuine aspiring songwriter whose music sounds like that as a stylistic choice? Or is she yet another jester in the court of fools? What do you think?
Enough about satire—earnestness is in!!! Ivan and I saw Perfect Days this weekend with AMC A-List and earnestly earnestly earnestly I loved it. It’s the story of a taciturn yet swagged out middle-aged man named Hirayama who lives alone except for a collection of tree seedlings that he cultivates in his apartment. His days consist of a well-worn routine in which the smallest moments, like choosing a cassette tape to listen to on his commute to work or his sandwich lunch break in a tree-shaded park, are made beautiful in the way they come together to construct his life. He works as a bathroom cleaner servicing the Tokyo Toilets Project, an enviable public toilet offering in Shibuya that boasts 17 facilities, each designed to look less like a bathroom and more like a modern art installation.
Throughout the film, Hirayama reads, dreams, listens to music, takes black-and-white film photos, and appreciates the world around him and the spontaneous little interactions that balance the structure of his routine. Kōji Yakusho’s performance as Hirayama was so nuanced and beautiful—the character is charismatic, vulnerable, and honestly just such a cool fucking guy. Definitely worth the watch!
Watching: Society of the Snow (2023), The Color Purple (2023), Nyad (2023), Perfect Days (2023), Nimona (2023), Elemental (2023)
Reading: Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
This week’s enrichment activity is brought to you by this tweet:
Idioms are the spice of language. Why say something boring when you can say something fun? These are a few of my personal favorites:
Hole in your shoe, hole in your sock (if you don’t fix a problem now, it’ll turn into another problem later)
Let’s pull over (we should get out of the direct flow of traffic, usually said on the sidewalk)
He is from Bob’s Burgers (referring to someone with no chin)
It all comes out in the wash (don’t stress small amounts of money with friends, it’ll end up even over the course of your friendship)
Let’s switch gears (we should do something else)
Catch you on the flip (see you later)
These are some I think we should start using:
Tesla Mode (when you’re spacing out just autopiloting through life and this results in you making critical mistakes. as in “sorry I broke the bong, I was in tesla mode.”)
She hasn’t left the cave (as in Plato’s Cave, derogatory in reference to someone you think is fundamentally unaware of things considered obvious to others)
A knockoff that thinks it’s a replica (self-important thing of shitty quality)
I feel like a Sim (forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do to keep myself alive/maintain my environment)
Go eat rocks (fuck yourself)
What are your favorite idioms? And what are some new ones you think we need?
Also, from last week, here are three bingo boards I received from Claire, Cece, and Amy if you wanna see if you get bingo on any of the! Thanks for playing <3
youtube shorts mentioned 💪💪💪