A Connoisseur Of Erotica And A New York Times Bestselling Lunatic

Hope you all haven’t been totally annoyed by Garbage Day’s new Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule! Thanks, as always, for reading and a huge, huge thank you for those who have subscribed. If you like Garbage Day and want to support it, click the link below and consider throwing a few dollars in the tip jar. 👇🏻

First, Big Shout Out To The Taco Bell Reddit Husband

I went into this pretty convinced I was going to take the wife’s side (you know, because most men on Reddit are deranged). But the more I thought about this, the more I’ve decided this is actually a great idea. Let’s look at the facts:

1. The coronavirus has made all of us insane.

2. There are no real rules to society anymore.

3. No one, beyond your closest friends and family, will see the inside your house until 2022.

4. It’s his office.

5. It’s his money.

6. It sounds like he got a good deal on the Taco Bell memorabilia by buying it from a local store and not from like eBay or somewhere.

With all of these things in mind, I say go nuts. It’s the end of the world, a plague lurks around every corner, all of our institutions have failed us, the doomsday clock is 100 seconds away from midnight, if you want to turn your house into a Taco Bell, you go right ahead, my friend.

Or, as the top comment on the Reddit thread says:

This Week’s Podcast Is About The Army Recruiting On Twitch

If you’ve been following the story since July, definitely check out the Content Mines podcast this week, available in all the usual places, including Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, and Pocket Casts. Luke and I go through every development that’s happened since the US Army eSports Team tweeted the “UWU” heard around the world. Also, Luke teaches me about the how British military is recruiting people these days — a podcast about the reality show Love Island.

Hot New Meme Alert: GET STICK BUGGED LOL

If you don’t feel like clicking through on that tweet, I’ll explain what happens. It’s a VR simulator where someone is slicing pieces of bread and then assembles them into the shape of a bug and then the bug starts dancing and it says, “GET STICK BUGGED LOL”. There are a lot of examples of this.

I feel like this meme literally just started hitting my ~various content feeds~ like yesterday. Because I’m 30 years old and no longer one with the pulse of culture, I had to look up what was going on. The stick bug itself is from a Japanese tweet from 2018.

The song in the meme is from Bee Swarm Simulator, which is a game made within Roblox, which is a Minecraft-like sandbox game. How did a 2018 Japanese tweet and a song from Roblox combine into one thing? Discord, of course.

The creator of the meme actually left a comment on the GET STICK BUGGED LOL Know Your Meme page, which has now been added into the article. It’s all extremely meta. According to Discord user YeetACookie, it was an inside joke that has spiraled out of control:

From what I can understand, the “caet” thing YeetACookie is referring to is this stick bug meme video on iFunny?

I’ve written about iFunny and Discord a few times now on Garbage Day. Last year, I described Discord as “a second entirely separate internet run by teens.” And a lot of the memes coming out of Discord are pretty funny. And there’s definitely a Discord to iFunny pipeline, which sort of reminds me of the relationship places like 4chan used to have to chat applications like IRC. Things bubble up and out and evolve as they get shared around the internet.

The stick bug meme is NOT a Nazi thing, but because of how online spaces are these days, there’s always the possibility it could become one. For now, though, it’s just a funny thing.

Here’s A Really Good Paleontology Meme Page

This came across my Tumblr dashboard recently and I decided to do a bit of digging and find the page it came from. The Facebook Group is called “Paleontology Coproliteposting” and it’s great. The page has a really good vibe to it.

I don’t really understand what this means, but it seems pretty funny.

Someone Wrote An Erotic eBook About Xi Jinping

Hooooo boy. Even though, this eBook is only $2.99 and appears to be just 21 pages long, I have not read it. According to the “plot” description on Amazon, though, it’s about a waitress in Chicago who, after a chance encounter, starts steamy romance with General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping.

Fantastic stuff. It was written in 2016 and has a 3.3 rating out of 5. There aren’t a ton of Amazon reviews, but they’re almost exclusively trolls. For instance, here’s one from a reviewer named Arthur:

BRB changing my Twitter bio to “A connoisseur of erotica featuring the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China.” The reviews on GoodReads are less descriptive:

If you’re looking for a genuine review of Xi’s The One, a brave user on Reddit’s r/RomanceBooks subreddit has a full rundown. One thing they noted is that apparently Delanie calls him “Xi” throughout the book, even though Xi is a surname smh.

Meet The Bots Of New York

I legit got like halfway through this post before I noticed anything was off when I saw it on Tumblr this week. It comes from a Facebook page called “Bots Of New York” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. All the photos and captions are generated by an AI. But also, like, they’re not that far off from a real Humans Of New York post???

The person behind the page only goes by Botmin and hasn’t done any press anywhere so there aren’t a ton of additional details out there about the project. According to The Bot Appreciation Society wiki, the page is using the GPT-2 language model for the captions.

BRB replacing “a connoisseur of erotica featuring the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China” in my Twitter bio with “I’m a New York Times bestselling lunatic. A Manhattanite. I have no life! I have no career!”

Finally, A Real Bad Twitter Account

Hmm, what do we think? Fetish thing? Not a fetish thing?

P.S. here’s a cool Big Time Rush video.

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