Just wiped out Tomato Town

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The Real Story Behind The Lola Bunny 4chan Post

During the right-wing Lola Bunny hentai-pocalypse a few weeks ago, following the announcement that the character would be redesigned for the new Space Jam movie starring Lebron James, I wrote about an infamous 4chan post from 2017.

Screenshots of the post have kicked around the internet forever. It was originally posted to 4chan’s /co/ board for comics and cartoons. Here’s what it looks like:

I wrote that I thought I had discovered where the photo came from, a Disney collector named Victor A. Ramirez. The mystery, though, was whether or not Ramirez was the one who posted a photo of his room on 4chan. I am extremely excited to tell you that I finally have the full story. I DM’d with Ramirez last night. Here’s what actually happened.

Ramirez runs a Tumblr called The Lola Bunny Collection. He used it to aggregate Lola Bunny fan art and share his own Lola Bunny merch. Ramirez said his Lola Bunny collection started back in 1996, when he was hanging out on UseNet.

“One user said, ‘I wonder if they’ll make a bunch of stuff based on the girl bunny.’ I decided to see if there was and yes — thanks to the Warner Brothers Studio Stores, then JC Penney, Venture, Walgreens, McDonalds, and so on. It became a quest to find more of this bunny,” he said. “Our collection has about 2,700 unique items — not counting the duplicates.”

He said he didn’t find out that someone had taken one of his photos from Tumblr and posted it on 4chan until March 4, 2021. “It was flattering that the photo made it to 4chan, but some of the comments have been malicious and upsetting. The photo was taken out of context to fill someone’s meme and get laughs, I get it. It’s a collection. Everybody collects something,” he said.

As more users found his Twitter account earlier this month, he says he’s doubled his followers on the platform. He said he’s trying to answer as many questions as he can, but is doing his best to ignore the trolls. “That’s life in social media,” he said.

The question is…what does he think about the new Lola Bunny design? “I love it!! The new design shows more of her athletic side,” he said. “I can’t wait for Warner to release a trailer soon! I really don’t see what the problem is with her new look. She’s always been cute and she’s still CUTE.”

Another internet mystery finally solved.

Time For A Tomato Town Explainer

The song embedded above is titled, “Chug Jug With You - Parody of American Boy (Number One Victory Royale),” and it was posted in 2018 by a YouTuber named Leviathan. Leviathan’s song opens with the line “Ten kills on the board right nowjust wiped out Tomato Town.” It’s sung to the tune of Estelle’s “American Boy”.

Tomato Town was a place in the game Fortnite and the “Chug jug” was a healing item. Both are no longer in the game.

According to Know Your Meme, this tweet featuring a joke about the band Death Grips was the beginning of the meme this year. It’s unclear why it took three years for the video to blow up like it has, but I suspect it’s probably one of those things where college students remember something embarrassing they watched as a tween and then turn it into a semi-ironic joke when they start getting older. Pretty sure I went through a hardcore semi-ironic Homestar Runner phase when I was about 19 (Homestar Runner rules, though).

There are Tomato Town song parodies everywhere right now. Here’s my personal favorite. It might be the best video I’ve ever watched on the internet.

Twitter Finally Deplatforms Memphis

On Sunday, Twitter briefly banned the word “Memphis”. This meant that any users that tweeted the word, they were suspended for 12 hours. Why did Twitter ban users from using the word “Memphis”? I’ve seen rumors and guesses as to why, but Twitter Support hasn’t released any explanation.

Twitter Support is just calling it a bug. That’s too bad. Twitter should ban more words. Like all of them. Imagine: you tweet any word or number or piece of media, you get suspended for 12 hours. Finally, the perfect social network.

Speaking Of Twitter…

Why is #TheCumPipe trending? It’s one of those promoted tweet things where you give people the option to tweet something with a hashtag. The image is a meme from Mario and it looks like this:

I suppose the fact that #TheCumPipe is trending above the #ThePissPipe and #TheGayPipe means it’s the one that’s currently winning. I tried to figure out who started the cum pipe campaign, but the hashtag was moving too fast this morning. Anyways, which pipe will you choose?

A Really Good Question, Courtesy Of Reddit

This was sent to me by a reader named Cassidy. It’s a truly breathtaking sequence of words and I recommend you go read the whole thing. The TL;DR here is that a woman is dehydrating tomatoes, but her daughter is about to give birth. The woman wants to know if she could continue dehydrating the tomatoes inside her husband’s truck as they drive six hours to her daughter’s house. She’s also bringing their pet parrot.

First, I love the message at the top of the comment section from one of the r/cars mods which reads, “Don't bother reporting this - it's not coming down. This is important stuff.”

If you’re curious about the answer, I found one serious attempt to help the original poster. “It will likely leave an odor for a few days but nothing permanent,” u/Lucky7ac wrote. “Tomatoes don't really have a powerful smell like garlic or onions. And if for some reason dehydrating exacerbates the issue (which i would guess it would actually weaken the smell) just buy a can of Oziom car spray or any other auto ‘scent bomb,’ and that will eliminate the scent pretty well.”

Good to know!

A Fake Person Fake Sings

On Friday, I wrote about the Wombo.AI app that everyone is using. It turns pictures into moving videos of people singing. The video below is incredibly unnerving. It’s a face generated by The Person Does Not Exist, which uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) to create faces of completely fake people. Then the Wombo AI makes him sing.

There’s another fake face fake singing in the thread if you want to go check it out. The weird thing about the AI-generated face AI-singing is that it looks almost more natural than when you put a real face in the AI. Which feels like a possible endpoint to all algorithmic content creation, eventually the fake thing is optimized to look and sound and feel better within the algorithm than the real thing.

Here’s The Entirety Of Bee Movie Done In ASMR

This video was created by an ASMR YouTuber named Gibi ASMR. I have not listened to it. ASMR videos feel like someone is pushing their fingers into my brain and literally make me feel physically uncomfortable. But judging by the comments, it’s a pretty good video for people who are into this sort of thing:

• “You did it. You crazy son of a bee you actually did it! It's real! Great job everyone!”

• “This felt like Avengers endgame but with asmrtist”

• “Pro tip: if you’re syncing this and the movie, mute the actual movie. Makes it 10x better”

Ben Shapiro’s Sister Talks About Video Games

Ben Shapiro’s sister Abby has a Twitch channel called YAFGaming she does with her husband. Per the channel’s about section, “We love America’s founding ideals, freedom, and the Conservative Movement!” Shapiro and her husband play games and try and analyze their themes through a pro-conservative lens. It’s a fairly new channel and is not a very popular, it only has about a thousand followers.

Recently, Shapiro played through the game Bioshock. You can watch the stream here. Shapiro loved the game! They spend about an hour playing the game and talking about how interesting the game is politically.

This is very funny. The Bioshock franchise is a scathing parody of Ayn Randian objectivism. Shapiro and her husband try to acknowledge that the game has a “leftist perspective” at the top of the stream and they sort of tie themselves into knots trying to argue that Bioshock is actually proof that the world needs conservatism. The fact that Shapiro played through the game while talking about how great libertarian values are was not lost on folks. Excited to see what game they play next. I hope it’s Metal Gear Solid!

The Federalist Dude Will Sue Anyone That Shares The “Mommy Milky” Screenshot

Over the weekend, a Twitter user posted a screenshot that seemed to show Sean Davis, the co-founder of right-wing news site The Federalist, tweeting the phrase “mommy milky”. The screenshot was fake, but that didn’t stop the phrase “mommy milky” trending on Twitter. Davis told Mediaite he’s planning legal action against people who shared it.

Dog In The Matrix

This is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a dog and he’s in The Matrix.

The Snyder Cut Is Coming…

Reviews of the movie are finally dropping today. The movie finally drops on Thursday. It currently has a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes. The previous version has a 40%. My favorite review I’ve read is this one from Polygon which has some pretty huge bombshells about the movie in it, namely that it seems to be a Cyborg story, first and foremost, and that it does not seem to be both parts of a Justice League duology, but instead, just a very long version of the first half of a Justice League movie. Which seems insane to me???

Karen Han over at Slate wrote a defense of the Snyder Cut, arguing that it’s huge and dumb, but actually very fun. Most rviews I’ve read say the main thing is that the movie is full of slow-mo. And even Gizmodo’s io9 was positive about it. Though, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw over at The Daily Dot warned that there’s about an hour of exposition about what Mother Boxes are, which sounds like literal torture.

I recently watched the entire DCEU with my podcast co-host Luke for our Patreon-exclusive movie podcast. If you’re interested in listening to two people struggle to watch all of the DC movies that have led up to this week’s release of the Snyder Cut, definitely check it out.

P.S. here’s a good video about getting vaccinated.

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