"Peeled Baby Yoda"

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An Interesting Revelation From 4chan’s Music Board

When I was in college I knew these guys who lived in a disgusting house off campus. They smoked a lot salvia and used to dump their blunt guts in a frisbee they kept on their coffee table. They were always either listening to guys-with-beards punk bands like the Lawrence Arms and Hot Water Music, obscure 80s funk songs, Neutral Milk Hotel, Limp Bizkit, or Merzbow. One time one of them boiled a bunch of hot dogs in a big pot of water and then got high and forgot about the hot dogs for a while. After about a week, something that sort of looked like algae started to grow on the surface of the hot dog water.

That house is sort of how I imagine 4chan’s music board, /mu/. The board has a similar race-to-the-bottom culture as the more political communities like /b/ or /pol/, but they focus that intensity to music. Here’s one of my favorite memes about /mu/:

Users put together charts and diagrams of albums and artists to listen to and it usually devolves to a point where all the users basically have to admit they hate music and no longer know how to experience any kind of joy from normal media. Normal 4chan stuff.

Last week, Twitter user @mycelium shared a screenshot from a 2019 /mu/ thread.

Hilariously, Twitter user @tode_man replied, claiming credit for the post and sharing an example of one the totally BS music charts they made.

Three of these are real album covers, one by Rake, one by Supreme Dicks, and one by The Pixies.

A few users in the thread asked @tode_man about his fake ambient album. @tode_man said, “It's just a scarufficore new age piano track slowed down with an ‘ASMR carpentry sounds’ video playing over the top. one guy bought it lol.”

I had to google “scarufficore” and from what I can tell it refers to a music critic named Piero Scaruffi that 4chan is particularly obsessed with.

It’s obviously impossible to prove any of this is true, but I’m going to say this feels real to me.

A Redditor Posted Baby Yoda’s Name Three Months Ago

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not seen the newest episode of The Mandalorian, the real name of Baby Yoda, or “The Child,” is revealed. Skip this item if you don’t want it ruined for you.

Ok.

So on Friday, we learned that Baby Yoda’s name is Grogu. The reactions online have largely been mixed from what I’ve seen. Personally, I like Grogu. It’s cute. It’s original. I will literally never stop calling him Baby Yoda so who cares what his real name is. Mando’s real name is Din Djarin and I have never said that out loud ever.

Three months ago, a Redditor named u/Denim__Dan posted on the r/StarWarsLeaks subreddit about Baby Yoda’s real name:

Well, congrats u/Denim__Dan, you nailed it. I hope there is absolutely nothing linking your Reddit account to your real life identity because Disney is definitely hunting you down right now. (Much like the Empire is hunting Mando and The Child in The Mandalorian.)

u/Denim__Dan actually pulled down his account this weekend, but before they disappeared, he did post a few updates on his original post now:

“Peeled Baby Yoda”

Here’s another Star Wars thing! This absolutely cursed monstrosity was sent to me by a reader named Juan. I hate it so very much. If you click through, there’s a bunch more cursed photos of peeled Baby Yoda. One user asked the OP, @gwenstacying, why their brother decided to “peel” Baby Yoda.

@gwenstacying ominously replied, “To learn.”

Kadabra Pokémon Cards Are Freed From Legal Purgatory

Here’s one more item courtesy of Garbage Day reader Juan. Thank you, Juan! I did not know this, but apparently, back in 2000, an Israeli magician named Uri Geller sued Nintendo and basically blocked the Pokémon Kadabra from appearing in the Pokémon card game. I guess Geller’s whole schtick is bending spoons.

This weekend, Geller lifted the Kadabra ban.

SYFY Wire has some more interesting details about the whole thing. Geller sought $80 million in damages. He believed Kadabra was an “evil” and “occult” and “violent” character and thought the three stripes on his belly were supposed to be Nazi lightning bolts. Wild stuff. For Gen Z readers, it may seem hard to imagine, but from 1998-2001, people were totally convinced Pokémon would either give you a seizure or turn you into a satanist. Now, we all know that the worst thing too much Pokémon playing turns you into is a shiny hunter.

Over the weekend, Geller tweeted an apology to Pokémon fans and also, you know, promoting his website 👀.

He also posted a truly wild video where he opens a 20-year-old suitcase full of Kadabra merch he collected for his lawsuit.

I feel like this whole thing is actually a pretty lame apology and I think it’s also interesting that I’ve never heard of him, but I have heard of Kadabra. Weird how that worked out! And I also can’t help but think about how he essentially took away a cartoon character from an entire generation of children for the mortal sin of lovingly nodding at his likeness.

But more than anything else, I’m just distracted by how much I want that suitcase full of unopened 20-year-old Pokémon merch. Holy shit.

It’s All Kicking Off In The New Zealand Political Betting Community

I also did not know about PredictIt until this week. The site is run by the Victoria University of Wellington, but it has an US office in Washington, D.C. It’s technically an educational project, but it allows commodity futures trading. During the 2016 election, it had about 100,000 traders.

And during the lead-up to the 2020 election, the Marker Medium publication called PredictIt “a haven for political junkies looking to make a buck.”

Well, according to a tip I got from Twitter user @spamofthemic, the site is having a bit of an issue with the 2020 election results.

The way the site works means that no one new can buy into any of the markets once they reach 5,000 participants. So all the the election markets are locked in. But PredictIt continues to give Trump a chance of victory in every race. Which means the traders are stuck in a state of perpetual meltdown.

I guess PredictIt had big pocket of Trump-supporting traders. From what I’ve read, the site has attracted a fairly large right-wing audience over the years. The comment section under this market listing that @spamofthemic is a MESS. It’s just full of Trump supporters spamming Pepe the Frog pictures, terrible MAGA tweets, and completely unfounded conspiracy theories of voter fraud.

What’s really funny about all this, though, is I’m not totally sure the majority of these commenters are even traders. PredictIt uses Disqus for its comment section, which means anyone can comment. I think the open PredictIt markets have just been sucked up into the MAGAsphere’s post-election information war. It’s still showing Trump could win, so it’s become another place to flood with shit.

There’s a Fyodor Dostoevsky short story I think about often called Bobok. It’s about a man who goes into a graveyard and hears all the dead bodies talking to each other, trapped inside their graves. The corpses bitch and moan and gossip and endlessly replay the miseries of their former lives. Trapped underground, the ghouls refuse to accept that nothing they care about matters anymore. The world has forgotten them, but they cannot forgot the world and the petty indignities that befell them while they were still alive. Their obsessions keep them trapped in a perpetual and unnecessary state of post-mortem agony.

Anyways, just musing about literature! No connection to anything currently going on in American politics right now.

The Utah Monolith Left

Per The Guardian, my main source for up-to-the-minute mysterious monolith news, the silver monolith that was discovered out in the middle of the Utah desert earlier this month, has vanished.

If you haven’t been following this, a silver monolith about 10-12ft high was discovered by the Utah Department of Public Safety Aero Bureau in an extremely difficult-to-get-to area of the Utah desert. According to Reddit user u/bear__fucker, the structure was installed between August 17th, 2015 and October 20th, 2016. Here’s a Google Maps link to where it used to be. Also, a YouTuber also went out to touch it last week.

Now, the monolith is gone! Uh oh. The Bureau of Land Management Utah has told reporters that it was physically removed by an “unknown party”. Spooky stuff.

Genuinely making things even weirder, though, is that all of the Instagram photos of the monolith that the Utah Department of Public Safety Aero Bureau posted have also been taken down? And now all the comments on their account are from people asking where the monolith pics went.

Right-wing mega-tabloid and the world’s biggest purveyor of nonsense, the Mail Online, “reported” this week that a new monolith has been spotted in Romania, but that seems like a load of bull shit to me. But who knows, maybe Utah was just phase one?

I still think this is probably a marketing stunt. Here’s a good tweet that one of my followers sent me.

P.S. here’s a good song about Nick Jr.

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