I remember back in the summer of 1995, I decided to be super spontaneous and hop on a one-way train from Montreal to Seattle so that I could finally see my favorite band in the world—Nirvana. I was only 12 years old, but everyone always thought I was much older due to my exceptionally high IQ score of 200, so I wasn't too worried. The two-week journey was grueling, but luckily I managed to win a hefty chunk of change along the way after beating two large Russian men at several rounds of poker (those Canadian trains can get pretty wild). When I finally got to the venue entrance just as the opening band (who happened to be Radiohead) began playing, the door guy narrowed his eyes at me and asked 'wait just a minute there, where's your ticket and ID?' I took the wad of poker winnings from my pocket and slammed it on the table. 'Sold out' the door guy said, smirking at me smugly. I totally was heartbroken. I racked my genius brain for a solution, but nothing came. Just when I was about to give up, someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind. I turned around and almost screamed at the sight of Kurt Cobain himself, standing there like a guardian angel. In one swift move, he grabbed the cash, handed it back to me, and gestured for me to follow him through the entrance. On our way through he looked at the door guy and said 'you're fired, dude.' I got to watch Nirvana from the VIP area and then I spent the rest of the night hanging out with the whole band backstage and they laughed at all my jokes. It was the best night of my life.
There are three kinds of liars on the internet. Those who spread fake news, con-artists who try to scam others, and those who make up laughably fake stories for no good reason. It's relatively easy to lie online, especially with the whole internet and its wealth of resources at your disposal. But some people are very, very bad at bullsh*tting. In the age of 'reverse image search', that stolen image some redditor is trying to pawn off as their own is just one click away from being exposed by internet detectives. And these days it's just as easy to google something as it is to lie, so if you're going to post a lengthy tall tale about your non-existent memories of hanging out with Nirvana, perhaps you should fact-check your own lies first. That way, at the very least it might be an entertaining story.
We've got some amusing and pretty satisfying instances of liars getting called out for their BS on the internet. But it really makes you think—Seeing as we pulled these screenshots from the internet, who's to say that the lies aren't also lies? Anyone could photoshop a fake callout of a fake lie someone told and post it to r/QuitYourBullshit for karma. What if we're all just caught in an inception of internet lies? What if we're actually in the matrix and I'm not even typing this right now? Anyway...here's some content.
Mel_Dawn