When he lifts up his shirt and you see that Trucker Belly !!

Happy Labor Day, everyone! Please do not read this newsletter. Instead, go outside. Look at a tree or some grass or something. Maybe speak some words at another person. Enjoy your life!

For those of you that insist on sticking around, some content.

First Up, This Truck Thing

A few Garbage Day readers have asked me to investigate what exactly is happening here. I can confirm that this is NOT Transformers fetish art. In case that was something you were wondering.

This image comes from a Facebook Page called “The Only Way Is Trucking,” although it has since been deleted. I assume because the whole internet has been dunking on it the last few days. Although, someone shared another DIFFERENT pregnant woman truck photo to “The Only Way Is Trucking” over the weekend.

I put both images into a reverse image search and did some clicking around discovered a pretty huge European trucking Facebook community. The trucks are specifically Renault trucks it seems. It’s a whole thing. Pregnancy truck pics appear to be especially popular with French and Bosnian truckers.

Unfortunately, I’m not any closer to what exactly the thousands words are that this particular pic is speaking. I guess it’s just a trucker thing! I will say though, trucker memes are amazing. Tag a trucker, baby!

A Sea Shanty Group Plays Sea Of Thieves

If you’re unfamiliar with Sea Of Thieves, it’s a multiplayer game where you ride around on a pirate ship. It’s kind of like Eve Online. The game’s huge open world has allowed people to do a bunch of fun stuff. Like last year when Polygon writer Cass Marshall rode around saying “hewwo” to other players. (If you’re looking for more stuff to read about “hewwo,” here’s a Garbage Day from last month that covers it.)

Last summer, The Longest Johns, a sea shanty group from Bristol, England, rode around Sea Of Thieves singing actual shanties. The result is both hilarious and sounds gorgeous. I totally missed this until I saw it come across my Tumblr dashboard this week.

A few months ago, Fanbyte profiled The Longest Johns. It’s a fun read! Apparently it was particularly hard at first to get players to stop shooting cannons at them long enough to serenade them. If you’re looking for more things like this to read, Kotaku writer Lee Yancy’s articles on Eve Online are some of my favorites. Particularly, his feature from last year on the plot to blow up the Keepstar battlestation.

If You’re Looking For A Good Podcast Episode

My buddy Hussein had me on his Extremely Online podcast — Ten Thousand Posts — to talk about my favorite post of all time: The Bodybuilding.com forum thread about how many days of the week there are. We didn’t really get into that as much I thought we would have though. Instead, Hussein got really fixated on hentai and I guess we sort of babbled about that for an hour.

An Extremely Good Twitter Account

If this is the first you’ve seen Crazy Optical Illusions you might be a bit confused. The account takes well-known optical illusion pictures, removes the illusion, and then tweets them without any explanation. Here’s another example:

(It’s just a rabbit. There is no duck.)

It seems like people are slowly catching on to the bit, but not everybody has and the replies are hysterical.

I’m also a huge fan of the people in the replies playing along.

An Extra Garbage Day is dropping later this week

Every other week, I’ve been sending out bonus issues of Garbage Day to paying subscribers. Those of you who have thrown a few bucks in, thank you so much. It’s been a super fun to put together interviews with some people I’ve been dying to talk to. A few weeks ago, I interviewed one of my favorite QAnon/online extremism researchers, Sarah H, or @nezumi_ningen on Twitter. And most recently, I interviewed my favorite YouTube musician, Skatune Network. This week I’m talking to Tomo Kihara, a developer who built a fascinating web app called TheirTube, which allows you to simulate the algorithmic recommendations of someone else on YouTube. We had a great conversation about YouTube, online rabbit holes, and how to make the internet fun and playful again. If you want to check it out hit the button below and it’ll hit your inbox on Thursday!

Finally, Here’s A Tweet I’ve Been Thinking About

P.S. here’s a real bad TikTok about Harry Potter fanart.

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