Cheesed to meet you

Read to the end for a NSFW tweet from the official Crazy Frog Twitter Account

September 04, 2020

HOT NEW MEME ALERT: This Little Pepe The Frog Mouse

This little guy is all over Tumblr right now. And even better, it doesn’t appear to be a nazi thing! Just a chill green mouse that’s cheesed to meet you. The original 4chan thread it comes from is about a year old, but it went viral on Tumblr two weeks ago thanks to user themysteriousmurasamecastle. It just seems like people really like this little guy. He has a bashful kind of vibe.

This also adds fuel to my theory that every six-to-nine months Tumblr users become obsessed with something green. It’s typically frogs — the original Pepe the Frog, Kermit memes, Dat Boi — although, not always — Mike Wazowski, Shrek, sexy Luigi. I’ve always wondered if green showed up especially well against Tumblr’s white and blue dashboard and if that had any impact on meme selection. There’s also the fact that the average Tumblr user likes to imagine themselves as a lonely — typically queer — goblin living in a disgusting fetid swamp of content and tends to gravitate towards characters that remind of them of that.

Anyways, expect more of this little guy.

RIP The Michaels Group Chat

If I can peel back the curtain on how the Garbage Day sausage gets made a bit, I keep a big list full of stuff I want to include in the newsletter and then try and stuff as much of it in here before I hit Gmail’s size limit. But I’ve been really dragging my feet about writing the Michaels group chat thing up because I feel like it’s actually really hard to articulate the cultural weight of a Michaels craft store. They feel like this otherworldly boomer liminal space, full of strange baubles and knickknacks from a forgotten past. They’re always found in the same kind of mildly-depressed suburban shopping center. They are both wholesome and deeply off-putting. The air feels slightly lighter in there, like the earth’s magnetism has shifted slightly when you enter. Also, a lot of people shop there incredibly high.

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the group chat functionality the store offered for online shoppers got really weird.

Reporter Jane C. Hu actually entered the online Michals vortex for a Slate article this week and it turns out it was even weirder than the screenshots on Twitter and Tumblr implied.

Michaels was using a platform called TokyWoky to run the group chats. After people found out about it thanks to the viral tweet above, random people started getting elevated to mods and the entire platform seems to have been over-run by insane trolls and spammers. The feature is no longer present on Michaels website and, as of Friday morning, it looks like their TokyWoky page is down, as well.

Oh well, back to getting high in the parking lot.

Garbage Day Sorta Kinda Made It Into A British Tabloid

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a YouTube channel that specializes in “affirmations” that are supposed to help you shapeshift into animals. They’re used by members of the therian community — people who believe that they are spiritually animals and occasionally attempt to unlock that part of themselves via rituals and magic. Here’s an example of a monkey affirmation:

So I didn’t know this, but the hosts of the podcast called This Paranormal Life read the Garbage Day item about the monkey affirmations and decided to try it out. They read out the monkey affirmation live on the podcast. From what I can tell, it did not work.

This morning, The Paranormal Life team DM’d me to let me know their episode ended up getting written up by the UK tabloid Daily Star. For those who aren’t familiar, British tabloids tend to publish a bunch of insane spooky occult shit as if it’s real news in the summers. The real peak of the genre are the “black eyed ghost children” stories that started popping up a few years ago.

I have to say, even though all of this is nonsense that absolutely does not need to be written up like actual news, Daily Star’s headline about The Paranormal Life guys trying the monkey affirmation is really really good.

(If You’re Looking For Another Good Podcast To Listen To)

The Content Mines this week is about QAnon. We’ve been putting off doing a full episode on Q because there are a lot of people who dedicate a lot more time than us to digging through that digital morass and it’s a bit daunting to wade into the fray. But if you’re looking for a good QAnon starting point though, definitely give it a listen! It’s available in all the usual places, including Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, and Pocket Casts. Also, in case you’re really dying for more ways to listen to me scream gibberish, we launched our first Patreon-exclusive episode this morning.

It’s All Kicking Off In The Chuck E Cheese Stream

Earlier this week, the Chuck E Cheese Twitch account raided a Fall Guys stream being run by Jerma985. Chances are, if you’re like me, many of the words in that sentence are confusing! The Chuck E Cheese rat has a Twitch account. Fall Guys is essentially now the most popular video game in the world. And I guess Twitch’s promotion of the Chuck E Cheese brand account has been a little aggressive and it’s become something of a meme among the site’s, uh, enthusiastic user base. Also, the Chuck E Cheese rat apparently streams Fall Guys IN THE SUIT AND IT IS HORRIFYING.

If you’ve never heard of Jerma985, based on what I’m seeing on sites like Tumblr and Reddit, he’s really having a moment right now. His real name is Jeremy Harrington, he’s largely referred to just as Jerma, and he was connected to the Vinesauce streamer/YouTuber collective a few years ago.

Earlier this week, the Chuck E Cheese streaming rat “raided” Jerma’s Fall Guys stream. Raids are essentially when one streamer moves their audience over to another streamer’s channel. Jerma’s group chat went understandably insane when the Chuck E Cheese raid showed up. Screenshot via Tumblr user gragshash.

It was all nice and good until Jerma took a break from playing Fall Guys and started looking at memes with members of his audience. He clicked the wrong link and ended up flashing a very unfortunately picture on the stream!

You can watch the full clip here. Needless to say, the Chuck E Cheese gamer rat left the stream very quickly afterwards. We live in a total normal world and the advertising industry is definitely not a completely broken system, becoming more strange and grotesque with every passing day.

I Think We Need To Talk About Herman Cain’s Twitter Account

Speaking of strange and grotesque, I get the sense that while it’s been a fairly big story inside of politics Twitter, what’s been happening to Herman Caine’s Twitter account has been actually too dark and upsetting for normal people to really engage with.

If you haven’t been following the story, Cain tested positive for COVID-19 and was hospitalized about a week after he was photographed not wearing a face mask at a Trump 2020 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Four weeks later, Cain died from complications stemming from the coronavirus. Cain’s Twitter account, however, has continued to tweet.

His daughter, Melanie, has taken control of the account and is using it “to share the information and ideas he believed in.” Which includes tweets like this one that was obviously quickly deleted Monday morning:

Cain’s post-mortem posting isn’t the first zombie account to appear on Twitter, but it is definitely notable for how unbothered its new owners are about turning a dead person’s social media page into a promotional engine.

The account has rebranded itself as “The Cain Gang” and seems specifically focused on sharing links to the conservative news site westernjournal.com and hermancain.com, which is currently syndicating Western Journal videos on its homepage and publishing its own conservative news stories. The connection between Western Journal and Cain goes back to at least 2018, when Cain started an online talk show with them. In the days before his death, Cain was writing in the Western Journal about media COVID scaremongering.

There is something sad, but, I suppose, fitting about Republicans dropping all pretense and turning their dead into literal spam accounts.

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly the horrific callousness of the American right wing’s response to the coronavirus reminds me of and in thinking about the Herman Cain zombie account, it finally dawned on me — Tumblr user grimelords’ 2014 post about the WoW gamer house. It’s a haunting piece of writing and it’s stuck with me for a long time. Here it is:

There’s six guys who live in this flat and all they do all day is play WoW and watch movies. Waking up at 2pm every day and there’s always just someone asleep on the bed near all the multimonitor computer setups. There’s always music playing and it feels like a recovery day every day, padding around blearily in pyjamas or underwear. Old hoodies from defunct school teams. They’ve got this system where they’re selling their excess computing power to companies and hosting all this warez, and they’re stealing the internet from the business next door anyway and getting welfare on top of all that. They’re self sufficient and never go outdoors except to buy more fast food, and even then only in the dark. But then one of them wakes up dead some heavy afternoon. He’s just dead and they don’t know why but maybe the floor covered in fast food wrappings is a clue. They don’t want to tell the cops because of the purgatory den they live in and the illegality that supports it, and as far as they know he never had any actual parents. So it’s trouble. It’s taking a long trip out to the forest and thinking about how stars are so far away for the first time in a long time. It’s sweating in the cold air and digging a hole all night with your brand new shovels to leave him alone in. And it’s a long few days cracking all his passwords to keep his identity and associated payments persisting. Until the rhythm of waking up every day at 2pm to play WoW for nine hours and half watch a movie on your other monitor takes over again. It’s the same as it ever was except now there’s a room no one ever goes in.

And Finally, Here’s A Bad Tweet

This comes courtesy of my friend Ellie. Thanks, I hate it!

Oh, Also, A Programming Note

Garbage Day will be coming out on Monday! It’ll be a short one, but I’ll have a few fun things for you. Have a good long weekend, everyone 😎

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

Reply

or to participate.