The Discord Wrote A Garbage Day Issue

Read to the end for the tweet that won the Discord’s Best Tweets Bracket

December 23, 2022

I want to start by saying I did not force them to do this. I swear! The Garbage Day Discord asked if they could, collectively, write something for the newsletter and I spent weeks trying to come up with an easy way to organize a project like that. I never came up with a good solution, so, instead, I just set up a room in the Discord and kept it open for 24 hours.

There were a couple rules, most of which were thrown out the window pretty fast, but the end result was something chaotic and magical and there’s an argument to be made that my Discord has become better at capturing the spirt of this newsletter than I can. There’s no possible way I could fully condense the entirety of what they came up with into a single email, but here’s my best attempt.

If you want to join the Discord (and get tomorrow’s paywalled weekend edition, as well) hit the green button below.

To kick things off, here’s a very wonderful message that Sigafoos wrote:

Before I subscribed to Garbage Day I saw Ryan say this was his favorite place on the internet and I was like "okay sure I'll pay the guy for his writing and maybe check in on the Discord once.” But it's really something special here. Look at all the Secret Santa stuff. Look at it! And all the love, support, and advice we give each other. Even when we disagree on something, we understand the other person is arguing in good faith and generally find common ground. So I guess what I'm saying is: thank you all, and I guess to our Internet Dad for making this place, and I never want to go anywhere else so I'll just read Garbage Day as "dispatches from the surface" while we huddle here in our bunker.

Here Are Some Good Ass Links

Here’s an absolutely mind-bending fan cam that katato shared.

And here’s a really good old website called Squiggle. misoks dropped in the Discord, writing, “I found this website over a decade ago by idly typing the URL into a browser and it has remained unchanged since then. I check on it every few months and it always brings me joy. The internet needs to go back to this.”

Also, here’s a good website for random geometric designs that johnmorton shared.

TaffyBirb said this is the only game she plays.

After you’re done playing that, check out this great quiz that joy thinks everyone should take.

And laughterkey found a replacement for drewtoothpaste’s old LiveJournal image generator. “I check in on it every now and then because its feels like a living relic,” she wrote. “Many of the images are Russian. There's frequently NSFW content in the mix. You can tell the platform has fundamentally changed from what it used to be, but it still works and people still use it and there's something endearing and fascinating about it to me.”

A Really Good Twitter Bot

This was submitted by 10F, who wrote, “The California DMV vanity license plate bot has been giving me life lately, and I also think it's a great example of the fun, entertaining, and purposeless Internet we're losing (until the next thing comes along).”

Why Do Crunchy Moms Love Bone Broth Hot Chocolate So Much?

This was a question asked by ppyajunebug and, interestingly enough, not something I had ever heard of before. Here are two examples of what we’re talking about.

I guess the main thing is that you just put bone broth in hot chocolate. That’s the whole deal. I guess they think the collagen in bone broth is a superfood. But my main question is why you need your hot chocolate to be a superfood. Just drink the chocolate!

“They all make this and insist it's the best hot cocoa you've ever had. I REFUSE to believe it, but it's EVERYWHERE,” ppyajunebug wrote.

A Very Silly Wrestling Podcast Clip

“I watched this for the first time a few days ago and it made me laugh so hard I cried. You don’t need to know or care anything about wrestling (I don’t) but it’s just unbelievably funny,” DanGio said.

An Extremely Powerful Algorithmic Playlist

Every Noise At Once is super cool. It’s a scatter-plot of different music genres from Spotify. I spent a while playing with it this week and learned all about the differences between various Eastern European microgenres of EDM. Very cool.

“Have fun clicking on genres like 'king of prism', 'russian witch house', 'mathgrind', and 'hauntology’,” ilanawexler wrote.

Now Is The Perfect Time To Watch “One Man’s Trash”

“I think it is a beautiful metaphor for this Discord and Ryan is Gethard and we are all Mantzoukas. Thank you all for being one of the best parts of my life during the hell of the pandemic,” carokenwo wrote.

This is probably one of my top 5 favorite internet videos of all time. If you’ve never watched it, don’t do any prep. Go in totally blind and just let it enfold. It’s incredible.

Some More Good Links

“I still keep a link to this article explaining the ‘escape room’ genre which kind of changed (a bit) of the way I look at Spotify's algorithms,” Carthorsepower wrote. “There were only about 1800 ‘genres’ when this was written, there are nearly 6000 now.”

a1973fordpinto shared this super interesting Nation piece about the America Online era.

And, finally, azeldraws dropped in this absolutely wild New York Times piece about the elaborate art hoax (performance art project?) from the artist behind the Tom Hanks-based Banksy project, Hanksy. “Stodgy art world is big mad, but this seems fun and slightly brilliant. He’s saying a lot more about contemporary internet culture than the article lets on,” azeldraws wrote.

Here’s An Incredibly Good TikTok

This is mattbrown’s favorite TikTok.

A Terrible Turkey Named Tom

“I adore this silly little Discord,” Molly wrote. “Y'all have been real friends through the past few years, I've flown out to places to meet you kids (including London TWICE), got a kitten out of this. Y'all are seriously the best. And so, have my favorite video of all time, an 11-year-old YouTube video of a lady reporter getting chased by a turkey. The best part is the mail truck.”

They did not, thankfully, all post feet, but Mitch posted this nice message:

The internet will continue to splinter, perish, balkanize, or radicalize this season. Yet we all blissfully find solace in one or many of the channels of the Garbage Day Discord. (If you're reading this in the newsletter, please come join us. The water is fine and we're a (mostly) welcoming bunch.) There has been an oft-stated truth in the Discord that the reason we have managed to chug along thus far without a major Incident is because, for the most part, we all belong or belonged to numerous other online spaces and therefore have a sense of decorum and idea on how to Be Online, Together. I know few people’s real names and even fewer faces, but more than most other places I hang out online, there is a true feeling of community and camaraderie across the many channels and threads I try and keep up with. Ryan has accidentally figured out that the secret to building a successful community is to filter for those who have an existing interest in the idea of online communities and how they have a place in our day-to-day lives. I hope to continue to see this group of weirdos thrive and grow until Ryan eventually is forced to bring in paid help to keep the ship running. Warm wishes to everyone reading this, may your next year be an improvement upon this one.

One More Good Video To Take Us Out

“I recommend the YouTube channel SiIvaGunner, which posits itself as a channel that posts video game music but all of the tracks are altered in some way. It's very Neil Cicierega,” Rowsdower92 wrote.

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

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