Stuff Is Old Now

First, A Penis Music Explainer

I typically try to keep an eye on like 5-6 weird internet trends going around, waiting to decide whether they’re worth documenting in Garbage Day. It seems like Penis Music has finally reached a point where it’s worth talking about. So here we go! I’ve seen Penis Music memes all over the place lately.

According to Know Your Meme, the phrase was coined by Tumblr user walrusguy last year:

Cool. Great post.

It has since evolved into increasingly nonsensical image macros and GIF edits:

I find this one particularly interesting because I would have definitely thought Steely Dan WAS penis music. This, of course, begs the question — what does penis music sound like? Well, according to YouTube, this is penis music.

Aren’t you much happier now that you know that?

Here’s A Very Informative TikTok

Funnily enough, one of the projects I never got finish when I was writing for VICE’s Motherboard back in 2011 was a story about selling my used socks to men on the internet. They will pay a lot of money for them! Especially when they belong to a 22-year-old. Now, I fear I’m too old to make any real money. As Shakespeare wrote in Richard II, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock…”

The Six Genders

Some Good Furby Content For You

Happy 8th Birthday To “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE I AM”

Garbage Day readers know how much I love this video. It’s pretty much a perfect piece of content. It’s crazy to think it’s 8 years old this week. Here’s a really good Instagram filter to celebrate.

And here’s a great SB Nation article about the video. Fun fact: It took place during the 69th U.S. Open tournament. Hell yeah.

Happy 45th Birthday GamemasterAnthony!

If you’re not familiar with GamemasterAnthony, he’s responsible for one of the most Best Posts of the 00s. On February 28, 2008, he logged on to Badgame forums (we think, it seems there’s some debate around where the original post came from), and announced that it was his birthday:

Damn is it a good post. His birthday has evolved into a weird annual celebration of the old internet. Or as Twitter user @WarrenIsDead wrote last year, “a lot of online now sucks but I do like that gamemaster anthony has gone from an ironic joke to a sort of beatitude in memoriam of our collective lost innocence.”

If you’d like to actually see what GamemasterAnthony’s cinematic universe actually looks like, he’s the author of an massive fanfiction crossover series called Heroes of Arcadia. The main character of the series, Anthony Bault (the Gamemaster’s real name), teams up with dozens of his favorite video game characters from games like Super Mario, the Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mega Man, Pokémon.

My buddy Brian got GamemasterAnthony to review Ready Player One a few years ago. “I thought it was a fun little romp,” GamemasterAnthony told Brian. “Not a blockbuster to change the face of cinema like the Marvel Cinematic Universe has, but a fun little flick to watch.”

And Happy 5th Birthday To The Dress

I had this picture waiting for me when I logged into Facebook today. You might not immediately understand what’s happening here. That’s my friend Cates in the red hoodie and I’m on the laptop, extremely drunk in a London pub, crying with pride over her completely destabilizing global society by posting an optical illusion on BuzzFeed the night before.

I had just moved to the UK and, while it’s hard to remember, I know there was this immense sense of optimism about the internet and technology and what it could do. Eliza Janssen in Junkee this week called it “the last good moment on the internet.”

A lot of people who have written about The Dress are, in my opinion, missing one really important piece of why it was so special. It wasn’t just that the picture went unfathomably viral — it was that someone like Cates was the one to post it! Cates is a completely internet-native true believer. She cares about online communities and has spent most of her professional life fundamentally trying to make the web a better place. Which is something that’s still not valued by the media or tech companies — to say nothing of the fact moderation is also typically a job done by women.

If I had to think about what The Dress’ real legacy is I’d reckon it was the moment the online world and offline world became one. It was like Cates dropped a rope all the way to the bottom of the ocean and suddenly we could see the whole thing and realized it was exactly like the real world. It’s been a long five years since. The world fundamentally feels like a worse place. And it can feel almost impossible to be optimistic about the future, but the fact that someone like Cates could light up the whole planet with a dumb joke is something worth holding on to.

I asked Cates if she had anything to say about The Dress and here’s what she said:

“#TheDress day was the last good day on the Internet. Everything since has been absolute trash. The chaos and strife I caused continues to be one of my main sources of joy. Also I just lost The Game.”

Finally, Professional Cheese Eaters Take Such Massive Shits They Travel With Special Plungers

P.S. here’s a cool recipe for cooking your beloved family pet.