Not Really Sure What’s Going On In The Stapling Bread To Trees Community Right Now

First, Let’s Check In On Norway

According to Twitter’s translation tool, the tweet above reads, “Ok, so my little brother has a friend who plays in a Black Metal band. He and the band were going out in the woods and taking a photo for the album cover, but just as that photo was taken our little friend slid in the snow. Here's the result.”

Fantastic.

Not Really Sure What’s Going On In The Stapling Bread To Trees Community Right Now

The post above is exactly what it says on the tin. Really unsure what to do with this content though. As the top comment, from a user named u/thecumrag_, put it, “Excuse me but what the fuck.”

Or as another user, every1getslaid, wrote, “Ok I’ll ask, what’s with the bones?” (If you click through, you’ll see that there’s a bunch of bones in there too.)

For context, most of the other posts in r/BreadStapledToTrees seem to be pretty straightforward. The subreddit has some pretty clear rules about what people can post and I guess this doesn’t violate any of them?

Dying to hear what happened to inspire number 5.

Here’s A Really Good TikTok

The 1975 Released A Video Full Of Memes

I’ll say up front that I like The 1975 and I thought their last album, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, is both a good album and something worth checking out for people who are interested in exploring the emotional and psychological effects of being Extremely Online. I think we’re in a really weird moment where art is struggling to catch up with what technology is doing to our immediate present. The season 2 episode of Atlanta, “Champagne Papi,” or Russell T. Davies’ Years And Years both attempt to tackle this kind of thing, in albeit, very different ways.

Anyways, I don’t hate this song or video, per say, but I do feel like it is constantly bumping into the third rail of total cringe. I’m not 100% clear on why meme content can be so radioactive when dropped into otherwise serious works of art. But I suspect it has something to do with the inherently crude and ugly nature of the way we interact online. Maybe humans aren’t meant to archive and catalog every dumb thing we share with each other. Incidentally, I just read Patricia Lockwood’s piece, “The Communal Mind,” this week and I think The 1975’s Matt Healy should probably check it out if he insists on making this “the internet is making us insane” thing his thing.

A Fun Instagram Account That Turns Memes Into Comics (That Are Actually Funny)

You have to click through to read the whole thing.

The Tip Of An Upsetting And Confusing Iceberg

If you think about it, the internet is full of millions of stories happening all at once and every once in a while one of those sub-plots races by and you get a glimpse into it. In my experience, it is almost always not worth investigating.

I Really Didn’t Want To Deal With The Amy Klobuchar Vore Thing

And luckily, I didn’t have to do anything! The fine folks over at The Daily Dot got to the bottom of it for me. Here are some key things you need(?) to know:

• As we’ve talked about before, fetish art finds its way into Facebook communities more often than you’d expect.

• As Mel Magazine’s Mile Klee wrote earlier this month, “The undercurrents of ‘Klobmentum’ are dark and horny.”

• The Daily Dot’s Ana Valens notes that the original comic isn’t actually a political cartoon about Klobuchar and Trump, it just happens to feature two women who look enough like them to pass.

• The original cartoon is from 2015 and it was created by a DeviantArt user who draws way worse stuff than adult baby diaper vore festish art.

• It was posted to Facebook by a law student as a troll.

Click on over to read their whole excellent investigation.

Anyways, speaking of manufactured outrage…

Let’s Talk About The Sonic Cycle

I tweeted a bit about this, but I wanted to take a sec and break it down here where I have a little more space. I was trying to figure out what the Sonic movie had to do with Birds Of Prey. I kept seeing weird references to them being in competition with each other — even though one is a PG-rated kids movie and the other came out a week prior and is an R-rated action movie.

From what I can tell, it all started when a bunch of DC stans last week started tweeting some variation of, “I took my husband and 2 sons to go and see #SonicMovie and was appalled to hear homophobic slurs used throughout the movie! Luckily #BirdsOfPrey was showing in the next room and my family had a much better experience!” DC stans are notoriously messy and get in fights a lot, so this isn’t super surprising. (I have a theory that a lot of DC stans are also Lana Del Rey stans, who are the most chaotic of all fandoms.)

A mid-tier YouTuber saw the bogus Sonic tweets, collected them as screenshots, and tweeted them out. Which then set off the content cycle we’re now seeing on Youtube. The only other thing I can really find being cited by these insanely angry (of course mostly male) vloggers is a Pajiba story titled, “'Sonic the Hedgehog' is Expected to Make More than 'Birds of Prey' in its Opening Weekend, What Bullsh*t,” but the article came out five days after the Birds Of Prey/Sonic backlash had already begun.

So to summarize, a bunch of messy DC stans started an obvious troll campaign, a bunch of YouTubers either fell for it or just figured it’d be good content for their videos, then drama channels started making their own videos about the fact people are making videos about it, and the content cycle rolled onward. Glad we’re all having fun online.

…Anyways, A Furry Got A Tank

A friend of mine who I love dearly, but will not name here, unless he chooses to reveal himself publicly, sent this to me this week. “So uh, antifa furry twitter has been wriggling in deep discourse about this furry who has 12 cars and a tank,” my friend wrote. The furry is British and, as you can see, has a tank.

P.S. here’s a good conversation about Star Wars.

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