lofi Joe Rogan beats to relax/study

A quick programming note: I have an interview coming next Thursday that I am VERY excited about. It’s with my favorite YouTube musician, Skatune Network! We talk about using the DIY power of the internet, what ska’s decades-long legacy of anti-racism means in 2020, the art of the perfect emo cover, and tons more. I’ll definitely share a few quotes next week, but the full interview is for paying subscribers. Hit the button below if you want to check it out!

The Flight Simulator Community Is Out Of Control

The amount of completely fucked up nonsense that people have done inside of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 in just the three short days it’s been out is actually astounding. Chances are your feeds are full of weird screenshots and clips of planes without much context. For instance, I didn’t realize that the game uses map data from Bing. Here’s a good explanation from VG247 about what the game is doing:

Which means players have an almost-accurate almost-current facsimile of the real world to fly around in. And it, of course, should come as no surprise to anyone that people are using that incredibly sophisticated simulation to be completely horrible.

For instance, a lot of players are flying to Jeffrey Epstein’s island. Which is pretty bad! I would argue though that this tweet a Garbage Day reader named Steve sent me is by far the worst thing I’ve seen so far though.

The fact the game has an uncanny valley map of the world has also given players a lot of glitchy weirdness to document. For instance, Melbourne has one frighteningly tall weird skyscraper. And Buckingham Palace shows up as an apartment block. One thing that does show up correctly though is…

…Groverhaus From Something Awful

So if I did know about Groverhaus before this week, I had completely forgotten about it. It really wasn’t on my radar until my podcast co-host (and, I guess, friend) Luke Bailey sent me the above tweet.

If you want to hear a good rundown of the flight simulator madness and a complete deep dive into Groverhaus, you can check out this week’s episode of The Content Mines. It’s available in all the usual places, including Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, and Pocket Casts. For those of you who do not want to listen to my horrible voice bloviate into a microphone, here’s a TL;DR of Groverhaus:

• In 2006, a Something Awful user named Grover decided he and his wife were going to add an addition onto their house completely by themselves without any professional help.

• The initial design was drafted up on MS paint.

• The entire construction project was an insane disaster.

You should take some time to explore the whole project. Here’s a Twitter thread with a bunch of pictures and if you’re looking for more Groverhaus content, here’s an Imgur folder with even more pictures. Oh, and here’s the MS Paint design I was talking about:

I Am Not A Fan Of The TikTok Willy Wonka

Apparently, there is a TikToker named Duke Depp who has been cosplaying Willy Wonka on the platform. His account has over 7 million followers because we have reached the end-point of modern culture and nothing means anything anymore. Oh, I haven’t fully investigated this, but TikTok Willy Wonka also appears to have an OnlyFans. Taylor Lorenz has a good (cursed) thread on Twitter about this.

Making things worse — if you can believe they could get worse — according to Michelle Rennex over at Junkee, not only are people extremely revved up over this guy, there’s a whole trend of people making thirst videos about the Johnny Depp Willy Wonka just in general. No thanks!

“Meaningwave” Is Maybe The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Seen I Love It

lmao so there’s this YouTube DJ called “Akira The Don” and he makes a type of music he’s calling “Meaningwave”. Meaningwave, as best as I can tell, is (bad) lofi hip hop beats with soundbites from people like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Elon Musk on top of it. If you really want to hear it, here’s a link. It’s so dumb and awful. I’m obsessed.

According to the Meaningwave website, “Meaningwave is an ongoing musical epic story and psychotechnology developed by Akira The Don with the aim of helping listeners to achieve their potential in this lifetime.” Also, you might be shocked to hear this, but it seems like this whole bit is actually just a set up to sell screen-printed apparel lol.

Anyways, all of this rules. It’s a perfect cynical distillation of the men’s rights self-help industrial complex. Smoke DMT, awaken your masculine vibrational energy, listen to Ableton stock plugin YouTube EDM, and buy merch. We are the cosmos made conscious. We are the universe experiencing itself. And we are buying $55 shirts with Jordan Peterson on them.

Here’s A Good YouTube Channel For Amateur Botanists

A Garbage Day reader named Christopher sent me this. The conceit behind the channel is really good. It’s called Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't and it’s basically really informative videos about how to grow plants presented by an extremely gruff Italian-American guy from Chicago. We have to stan!

The Yale School Of Art Let’s Any Student Edit The HTML

This was spotted by Twitter user @garius. If you want to experience the site in its full glory, click over here. If you’re wondering WHY the Yale School Of Art’s website looks like this, there’s a nice handy explanation in that orange box on the left:

This is really cool! A completely unrelated aside, but a bunch of kids in my high school became obsessed with pranking each other with Meatspin. Meatspin is website with an animated GIF of pornstar spinning their penis around with a counter at the bottom of the screen that counts “spins”. They had a competition to see how long they could keep it up on library computers before they were caught. One kid I knew made it to 1000 spins before he was finally caught and suspended. The whole thing though culminated in one kid hacking into a computer in the computer lab and replacing the Windows startup screen with the Meatspin penis.

Anyways, I’m sure the Yale School Of Art’s completely editable website will be fine.

Here’s A Good Tumblr Ask

(via eridone)

The “Poggers” Guy Is A COVID Denier

Trying to figure out if the above tweet could fit into a line of a 2020 version of “We Didn’t Start The Fire”. I am aware that there is A LOT of confusing words in there, so let’s take them step-by-step.

“Poggers” is a Twitch emote. It looks like a surprised Pepe The Frog. The “Poggers” reaction, itself, is a riff on an older Twitch emote called “PogChamp,” which is a picture of pro Street Fighter player Ryan Gutierrez, who goes by Gootecks. Both emotes are used as a way to convey hype. And yes, the “pog” does reference pogs from the 90s.

Earlier this week, Gootecks slammed the mayor of LA on Twitter, after the city turned off TikToker Bryce Hall’s utilities because he threw a massive 21st-birthday rager last week.

I’m not going to embed any of Gootecks’ tweets here because they’re full of bull shit about hydroxychloroquine and reference incorrect pandemic death rates. He even linked to Gateway Pundit! It’s a bad scene all around. People are now calling Gutierrez a “WeirdChamp,” which is a reference to another Twitch emote. Look, if I try and define every piece of Twitch slang involved in this story, we’re going to be here all day.

If you’re worried about having to retire “PogChamp” from your internet vernacular, though, don’t fret! Twitch fans claim that Gutierrez actually hates being remembered for the “pog” emote. I haven’t been able to find him saying anything publicly about this, but either way now people are spite-pogging him for being a COVID denier.

And Lastly, Here’s A Really Informative Reddit Post

(via r/todayilearned)

P.S. here’s a good TikTok in Latin.

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