Nikocado Avocado’s “Social Experiment”

Every once in a while I get asked at a party or an event some variation of the question: “How do you spend so much time looking at the internet without going insane?” Which tbh is something I almost never think about and never quite know how to answer. I try and minimize my exposure to gore and try (and usually fail) not to take things too seriously. You know, it’s just a job.

That said, there are corners of the internet I do actively ignore. The main one being what I’d call freak show content. Things made by people who seem genuinely unwell, usually shared or watched by people who are gawking at them. Which is why I’ve been, of course, aware of the YouTube creator Nikocado Avocado, but have refused to watch anything he’s posted over the years.

Nikocado, real name Nicholas Perry, is ostensibly a mukbanger, a genre of video that first got popular in the late 2000s on Korean streaming platforms like AfreecaTV. Typically, mukbangers are young women that eat impossible amounts of food on camera and it’s not exactly a fetish thing, but it’s also not not a fetish thing. Like so much content online.

Perry’s big innovation in the world of mukbang, if you’re comfortable calling it that, was figuring out how to combine eating a lot of food in a gross way with peak 2010s YouTube drama and clickbait headlines. As Mel Magazine wrote in a 2021 feature on him, Perry “built an online empire by being outrageously fake.” He started feuds with other YouTubers and seemed to be having a new emotional breakdown every week. He also once posted a photo of his inflamed butthole on OnlyFans. ANYWAYS… he revealed this weekend that his content was even faker than we previously kew.

In a new video titled, “Two Steps Ahead,” Perry explains that he’s actually been posting old content for the last two years while he worked to drop the 250 pounds he gained from years of extreme eating online.

The video is long and rambling and he spends most of it talking like The Joker while, naturally, slurping down a big plate of food. And while you should take everything Perry says with a massive grain of salt, it does seem like parts of the Nikocado Avocado project were a lot more deliberately disgusting, both visually and thematically, than his “fans” assumed. Perry also seems to be reckoning with what exactly his popularity means after years of attracting millions of viewers by being an outrageous troll. In another video posted over the weekend to his second channel, Perry says, “I don’t even know if people like me.” (The definition of internet popularity is a big question for everyone right now it seems.)

Perry is calling his Nikocado videos a “social experiment,” something that some fans had actually guessed years before. But the overwhelming response to Perry’s big reveal is a lot more users befuddled as to what exactly the social experiment was and who the subject of it was. Was it to see how profitable it is to debase yourself online? Was it to see how long it would take you posting extreme content before your viewers started begging you to stop for fear that you might die? Or is this new video just another layer of the onio— avocado? Another way to mine his life for content? The answer to all these questions is probably “yes”.

The thing I found most surprising about Perry’s weight-loss video was that he’s just… coming back to do more mukbang content. Robbing the whole thing of seemingly any greater meaning. But it’s also a damning indictment of YouTube’s limitations. Even by trying to break the cycle and trolling your audience for, in this case, literal years, you’re still stuck inside of it. All forms of engagement, good and bad, lead you back to where you first started: more content.

Here’s hoping he at least pivots into being a personal trainer or something.

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Brian David Gilbert Keeps His Promises

On Embeds

So I’ve been having some conversations with readers lately about X embeds. As more and more users leave X — or in the case of my Brazilian readers, are blocked from logging in — I’ve received a bunch of messages about how X embeds in Garbage Day don’t really work like they used to. I’ve also seen some complaints that by embedding X posts I’m supporting Elon Musk. An argument I find less compelling, but I get it.

I already use screenshots, rather than embeds, when talking about content from accounts I don’t want to amplify, like the newsworthy posts from the site’s various white nationalists. But I’ve continued to use X embeds in most other cases because, first, and more importantly, I think it’s good to send users back to the original post. Even if X is a garbage dump, there are still users using the site to post funny stuff and I want them to get engagement. And, second, there are some copyright issues that embeds can navigate a bit better.

But these aren’t the biggest of deals and I can change things up if you guys are passionate about it. Embeds are effectively rendered as screenshots when they’re emailed out anyways. Use the poll below and let me know what you’re thinking.

Fandom Is Getting Weird(er)

A slew of celebrities have come forward recently begging their fans to respect their boundaries and be less weird. Most notably, Chappell Roan has asked her fans multiple times to stop being so obsessive, threatening to leave the industry if they don’t stop stalking her and harassing her family.

The band MUNA over put out a similar request on their Instagram Story over the weekend. As did Boys actor Valorie Curry, who said on her Story that a fan crossed the line with her at Comic-Con Northern Ireland.

As for why it seems like fans are getting worse all of a sudden, it’s likely that many artists and celebrities are actually just getting more comfortable addressing the issue. Pervy Comic-Con guys are not a new phenomenon.

Though, I did see a good point made in a tangentially-related X thread about why fans of the streaming comedy platform Dropout are getting a little intense. “It stresses me out how much making it big in any industry seems to depend on cultivating a quasi-religious zeal in the people you are selling things to,” one user wrote. Which I think is an important dimension at play here, as well.

Celebrity Number Six Has Finally Been Discovered

One of the internet’s longest-running lost media stories came to a conclusion over the weekend. The Celebrity Number Six mystery, as it was most commonly known, was based on a four-year-old Reddit post from a user named u/TontsaH, who was trying to identify all the celebrities included on a piece of fabric they had.

Users started filling in the list of celebrities, but no one had ever been able to identify number six on the list. Well, it turns out it was a photo of Leticia Sarda, a Spanish model, who even posed in a photo for the subreddit.

If you’re looking for another good lost media mystery, you should check out the Everyone Knows That podcast. Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas worked on it and it’s a lot of fun.

The Internet Archive Lost Their Appeal

Four huge publishing companies filed a suit against the Internet Archive back in 2020 over the site’s Open Library digital book rental system. If you’ve never used it, there are — soon to be “were” — hundreds of thousands of used book scans on there that users with an account could “rent” for a few days at a time.

The Open Library was expanded in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. One that is, to be clear, still happening and spiking again literally right now.

Publishers sued the Internet Archive, calling their digital library piracy. And the Internet Archive lost the suit last year and filed an appeal, which they lost last week.

I’ve actually been a big user of Open Library over the last couple years. I recently used it to rent a book that wasn’t on Amazon or any other seller’s website. I really needed it during recent personal health issue and my ability to quickly rent it and read it helped me tremendously. And the idea that all of that is being sued into oblivion because publishing companies want slightly more money is a tremendous shame. Oh, and it will, assuredly, lead to more piracy.

Crazy Taxi: Tim Walz Edition

So this is a real mod you can download and play. It even includes a “snowy Minnesota environment” and a new polling place drop-off location lol. Also, if you aren’t in the loop on Tim Walz’s love of the Sega Dreamcast, you definitely need to check out this excellent Star Tribune feature where they tracked down his old console.

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “Russia Aimed Propaganda at Gamers, Minorities to Swing 2024 Election” (Again)

• “I’m Worried The Robot in Astro Bot Isn’t Attractive Enough For Me To Enjoy”

• “Bluesky grew by 50 percent over the past week”

P.S. here’s a good meme.

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