The carnal pleasure of eating a shower orange

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Imagining A Guy And Getting Mad About It: COVID Edition

If you spend any time on Twitter you’ve probably seen variations of the same theme bubbling up in your feeds over the last month — people may not want to go back outside after the pandemic. There are a lot of viral tweets pushing this same idea, but most notably, New York Times journalist Nellie Bowles, last week. The idea is that, after a year of lockdowns, people (Americans) will be so traumatized they will never want to go back to normal. Keep in mind that America, by rest of the world’s standards, didn’t even go through a proper lockdown. The COVID shut-in idea traveling around the internet right now is a really good example of a key glitch with how many users, but particularly journalists and tastemakers, tend to use Twitter.

Users of older platforms, like Something Awful, 4chan, Tumblr, and Reddit typically acknowledge that their corner of the web doesn’t represent the whole world. For instance, Reddit, and more specifically individual subreddits, don't regard themselves as a mirror image of society. They tend to understand that they really only represent the culture that exists on those online spaces. But media people, in particular, do act this way with Twitter. A lot. I assume it’s because it’s easier and more profitable to pretend Twitter is a god feed of all of humanity than hiring reporters that don’t live in New York, D.C., and Los Angeles.

So, with a normal group of users, they open up Twitter, spend several minutes reading some of the worst, most idiotic thoughts humanity has ever produced, and chalk it up to the fact Twitter is like catnip for maniacs. But a lot of journalists, particularly very well-paid columnists, open up Twitter, see the same utterly incomprehensible gibberish everyone else sees, and assume it must mean something. 

But it’s not hard to find obnoxious scolds who claim they never plan to go outside again. But it’s not hard to find all sorts of users on Twitter that don’t represent the greater population of the country. For instance, I follow a lawyer who only represents furries.

Plus, the site isn't even that big. It has less than 200 million monthly active users worldwide. Facebook, without taking into account Instagram or Whatsapp, has over 2 billion. But all of this was compounded by the fact that Twitter, over the last year, as newsrooms and TV studios emptied out, essentially became the assignment editor for all of America's media. But Twitter users tend to be younger, more educated, and more urban than users on Facebook. The site is dominated by power users who livetweet SNL, who either are an anime nazi or have been cyberbullied by one, have favorite @dril tweets, and can understand the sentence: “Cinnamon Toast shrimp guy milkshake ducked, but not in the same way Bean Dad did, but more like Cat Lawyer.”

The reality-warping effect of Twitter stupidity was best summed up last January by a Twitter user named @toiletgun: “Twitter is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it.” I mean, the site has produced several high-profile ethical cannibals over the last five years, if you can imagine a kind of person you hate, they're probably using Twitter. But that does not mean that they're somehow indicative of anything beyond that. 

I’m not going to make any predictions here about life after COVID. We, as a species, have experienced an incredible trauma and I’m sure all kinds of goofy things will happen as we begin to recover. Though, I will say, the 1918 flu pandemic ended in April 1920 and The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and is set in 1922. So, perhaps, we’ll be spending the 2020s living like Jazz Age hedonists. Who knows! There are already trend pieces about the "Hot Vax Summer" coming. And you better believe Twitter users are going to find a way to be annoying and awful about being horny outdoors. So maybe instead of being stressed out about a thing that isn't real we all get ready to deal with that?

A Good Easter Tweet

This was sent to me by a reader named Johnny.

The Paddington Bear Redditor

Reddit user u/JaytheChou has spent the last 27 days editing Paddington bears into random movies. I went through his user history and I was hoping there’d be some kind of explanation but there isn’t. Cool!

Something Worth Flagging If You Use Chrome

Wanted to put this on everyone’s radar, in case you hadn’t heard. Google is testing a new ad targeting within Chrome right now. The targeting system is called Federate Learning of Cohorts and it’s currently being tested on millions of Chrome browsers. It works by sorting users into groups and then those user types are shared with various third-parties. The full press release about FLoC can be found here. Google does its best to make it all seem great and not creepy. The press release literally includes the line, “You’re part of a crowd.”

The Electronic Frontier Federation has a good critical rundown of how FLoC works and why it’s scary. The trial lasts until July and EFF estimates there are over 33,000 types of groups that you could be sorted in. Also, in case you were wondering, users and websites do not have the ability to opt-out. Wow, I love being part of a crowd!

A Bad Elon Musk Tweet

Cool Couch For Sale On Reddit

This was sent to me by a reader named Keith. A Redditor based in Flatbush is selling her couch for the price of next month’s gas bill. If you want to click through and read the whole post, you can here. But it’s incredibly long. In fact, it was so long, I got curious and put it into a Google Doc to see what the word count was. The post itself is over 6000 words and it continues into the comment section for easily another few thousand words.

Basically, OP left her stove on while making tea, but she isn’t sure how long she left it on for. She’s terrified that it could have been a really long time, but it also could have been just an hour or two. She is selling her couch to anyone who agrees to blindly pay whatever the bill is.

I went to the comments to see if anyone had read the whole thing and could give me a TL;DR. I couldn’t find a good one but it seems like people who make it to the end are totally engrossed.

One commenter wrote, “I enjoyed reading this and thinking about the anonymous someone out there with a sweet ice cream cat and a perfectly good couch and Schroedinger's gas bill. I hope you have some pleasant Zoom dates, or at least some where the joys of being outdoors in a park are greater than the trepidation of a stranger.”

I have literally no idea what any of that means? Anyways, if any brave Garbage Day readers want to read the whole thing and do like a three-sentence TL;DR, I’ll throw it in Wednesday’s email! Godspeed.

A Good Tweet About Tortoises

An Incredibly Dope Anime Pants Instagram Account

This was sent to me by Garbage Day reader Erika. This account’s Yu-Gi-Oh! pants went viral recently on Twitter. But the account is so much more than Yu-Gi-Oh! pants. I’m 31 years old, so I’m worried I’m slightly to old to wear acid-washed Death Note jeans, but I have been thinking about what I want my post-COVID timeskip look to be and I’ve been thinking about trying to bring back those silk Goku Hawaiian shirts. Feel like those would kill on TikTok right now. Also, should I get one ear piercing?

Another Good Tweet

Redditors Discover A Cool New Way To Eat Oranges

According to a roundup of r/ShowerOrange comments I found on Tumblr, the whole thing is about being able to freely bite into an orange and not get sticky. I guess shower orange eaters think that eating an orange amid the steam and hot water of a shower creates like a really powerful mix of sensations? One user described it as “hallucinatory” 🤷🏼‍♂️

I tried to figure out how common this is and it seems like redditors keep realizing that oranges are great to eat in the shower. It’s like a thing. The subreddit, itself, was created after a user named u/PHOTON_BANDIT wrote about how great it was in a post from 2015:

"Tearing apart a cold fresh orange with your bare hands, just letting the juices run over your body. Not worrying if your going to get sticky, or anything. Just ripping it in half, and tearing into it with your teeth like a savage cannibal who hasnt eaten in a week,” they wrote. “This is the most carnal, ferocious, liberating thing a man can do"

🤷🏼‍♂️ 🤷🏼‍♂️ 🤷🏼‍♂️

I Can’t Explain Why This Video Is Good, It Just Is

P.S. here’s a really good video of a guy eating an orange in the shower.

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