🍑  🎀  𝐻𝐸𝐿𝐿🍩  🎀  🛡 I have an old bookmarks folder called “bag o’ tricks.” I sometimes read stuff from it when the idea of having to write something feels like getting slowly walloped by a pack of teenagers with a bunch of two-by-fours. In it, I found this quote from the author Mary Karr. ~~ “People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.” ~~ I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’m still on the internet, and this provided some clarity. All the kids wanna jump off cliffs ~ironically~ now, but the internet showed them all the cool cliffs first. Imagine growing up knowing for an absolute fact that there are weirdos outside of your shitty little town who are precisely like you. Must be great, must be terrifying. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5992/mary-karr-the-art-of-memoir-no-1-mary-karr __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ "Do you ever look at the sky and think, I'm glad I'm alive? After I heard Sum 41, I thought, ‘I’m actually alive to hear the shittiest band of all time.’ Which is quite something when you think about it. Of all the bands that have gone before and all the bands that'll be in the future, I was around when the worst was around." — Noel Gallagher, via Sopan Deb ~~ https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/994322665845510145 __—__—__—__—__—__— (ⓥⓘⓓⓔⓞ) “I think I just killed someone in Super Mega Baseball 2?” https://twitter.com/DanRyckert/status/993962220617981952 __—__—__—__—__—__— Please make a racquetball court-sized mural of this poorly conceived Times of London front page, which makes it look like Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz and Lupita Nyong’o adopted each other then instantly joined ISIS. https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/994694546289254402 __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ “There's a house on the corner of Lamont and 19th that has been blaring Sweet Child Of Mine by Guns N' Roses - on repeat - for the last 3 days. I knocked on the door but no answer and the mail is piling up, newspapers piling up so I have the feeling they are out of town and maybe left Sweet Child playing and forgot to turn it off." ~~ https://twitter.com/KateNocera/status/994652786439663616 __—__—__—__—__—__— 🍪  🎀  𝐹🍩𝑅𝑀𝒜𝒯𝒯𝐼𝒩𝒢 𝒯𝐻𝐼𝒮 𝒫𝒜𝒢𝐸 𝐼𝒮 𝒜 𝒩𝐼𝒢𝐻𝒯𝑀𝒜𝑅𝐸  🎀  🍪 __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ “On behalf of all us brainwashed dupes who never questioned the accepted idea of a spherical Earth, I’m throwing in the towel. You win: Earth is flat… Thank you for opening my eyes, really. But also, uh, what the fuck do you want me to do with this information?” ~~ https://melmagazine.com/ok-flat-earthers-you-win-the-earth-is-flat-now-what-c5d78723a0cc __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ “Mitch McConnell’s cocaine tweet is just more proof he’s not an America person.” — an adult man who almost won a Senate primary this week ~~ https://twitter.com/GideonResnick/status/994291271085821952 __—__—__—__—__—__— (ⓥⓘⓓⓔⓞ) “Why does Michael Cohen sound like John Malkovich doing an impression of Woody Allen here?” https://twitter.com/NoahGarfinkel/status/994323777377845248 __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ “Kyrie Irving (on the Chinese internet) is the ‘Flat Mamba’(平曼巴) because of his stated belief that the Earth is flat.” ~~ https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/993883255362420736 __—__—__—__—__—__— From the government-run Twitter account for the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board: “check out today's coib training on the intellectual darkweb, wherein i gesture toward a tank of lobsters + mouth the word 'ethics' repeatedly” https://twitter.com/NYCCOIB/status/993833626059137024 __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ “Harbor seal that made mostly wrong Super Bowl picks dies” ~~ https://twitter.com/barry/status/993848388901855232 __—__—__—__—__—__— My favorite insane person on the internet this week: The guy who believes some guy left his mid-2000s Mustang in the path of flowing lava to collect insurance money. https://twitter.com/UweBollocks/status/993558804762591232 __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ “look Dan, i can accept the premise that a racist ghost is causing the Red Sox to lose all their games, but to imply that this otherworldly apparition would cause them to only lose some of their games is fucking ridiculous” ~~ https://twitter.com/MikeGianella/status/992438681582669824 __—__—__—__—__—__— Arizona state representative: “please educate me as to what a furry is.” https://twitter.com/KellyTownsend11/status/992410730312880129 __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ “Resistance Win! This Artist Was Going To Draw Trump And Putin Kissing, But Was Worried That Seemed Homophobic, So He Had Them Kiss While Thinking About Pamela Anderson” — ResistanceHole ~~ https://resistancehole.clickhole.com/resistance-win-this-artist-was-going-to-draw-trump-and-1825887102 __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ (🅸🅼🅰🅶🅴) “Last week I had a dream and the only thing I remembered about the dream was a poster on a wall so I made the poster and put it on a wall and it was the fastest I have ever made a dream come true and it felt exhilarating like I had solved a mystery.” ~~ https://twitter.com/DanSpenser/status/992431700427902978 __—__—__—__—__—__— ~~ “It's not just that the White House is populated by many bad people, which is true, but they're also very fucking dumb.”—Olivia Nuzzi, White House correspondent ~~ https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/status/994761420842651648 __—__—__—__—__—__— 🍫 ⋆ 🍓  🎀  𝒜𝓃𝒹 𝒻𝒾𝓃𝒶𝓁𝓁𝓎  🎀  🍓 ⋆ 🍫 The official Garfield Twitter account is putting up fan art every day for the next 40 days to celebrate the birthday of America’s biggest feline asshole, Garfield. If you're disappointed with that first sentence as a closer, know that it is also the first sentence in the Bible. Please do not criticize it. The first piece of fan art was created by a completely broken 17-year-old who is a wise enough person to know he should be spending all of his teen years trolling the everliving hell out of the official Garfield Twitter account. What a horrifying nightmare it must be to be a 17-year-old in 2018 and not be sending weird shit to the Garfield social media manager’s DMs. https://twitter.com/Garfield/status/994584016899723264 __—__—__—__—__—__— I had to explain to my fellow nightmare hell beat reporter Brandy Zadrozny yesterday that this is a thing—using Garfield as a torture vehicle to make fun of anyone who enjoys something wholesome but not actually, uh, good that was made from 1980 to 2010. Ten years ago, there was a YouTube channel called Lasagnacat that would make these live-action, dadaist videos that ostensibly had to do with Garfield.
 (Brandy quickly proceeded to ruin it by living in reality and finding the people behind the channel. “Oh no, they’re doing weird kidnapping videos now... and maybe they’re furries?”) 
The channel went silent for nine years, then came back with a video telling people to call an 1-800 number, then “state your name and the number of sexual partners you had, don’t ask questions it’s just a survey.” They then released an extremely high-gloss, FIVE-HOUR-LONG video with everyone’s answers, presented as knock knock jokes. The video ends with a five-minute short film where a fully naked man in a Garfield body paint screams at Jon Arbuckle in the middle of the desert while holding two hands full of living worms. It’s all very normal. In the middle of the video, there’s a guy name Raymond who calls three times to specify how many sexual partners he had. The last time, he talks about his escapades as a teenager on chat rooms with strangers. At the end of his third phone call, you kind of hear some relief in the guy’s voice, talking about how the internet had played around with his brain and his perception of sex and power. He can’t seem to hang up. Here’s a bit of it. ~~ “I don’t know if I want to talk about this stuff anymore. Feels good to get it out, though. All right, I’m gonna hang up. No… yeah. The people fanned out. One girl—this is when I used to be a guy—she would like to roleplay celebrities, but, like, female singer-songwriters then get blackmailed during, like, bad contract negotiations. Not specifically, like, Alanis Morisette or Sarah McLachlan. More contemporary ones. Whatever it was, maybe a few years ago.” ~~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgmoMO66uPg&t=14583s to 4:17:55 I’m aware that this 1-800 number attached to a live action nihilistic Garfield YouTube fan page provided this man with immense relief, but I was in pain laughing at this in the middle of my office, and people were looking at me funny.

This thing has messed us all up in such deeply weird ways. The only way out is to make fun of how deeply confused it’s made everyone who got sucked into it.