Good afternoon, evening, or morning, depending on wherever you are right now. It's that time again where we have no choice but to sum up a week's worth of interesting and/or enraging online conversations. The internet has been generous recently, and there are a range of topics here for your perusing pleasure. Let's get started.
Bring Back Sugared Almonds
I'm clearly out of the loop when it comes to all things health influencer. I knew there were plenty of pretty young women on TikTok doing weird things like drinking onion water, but I thought we had moved past the general insanity of wellness culture back when Deliciously Ella got cancelled in the mid 2010s. Apparently not! Disordered eating is still fashionable, baby, and you don't even get to escape it on your literal wedding day.
This was the message that a lot of people got after one TikToker went viral for everything she consumed when she got married. Ominously declaring that “nothing went undocumented”, she revealed everything had been sugar free, and that anti-bloating pills were provided to all guests after lunch. The ED wedding (as it was branded by some) caused a massive argument over how healthy or appropriate the whole thing was. No matter the calorie count, it is kind of sad to not even have one day off.
When You're in a Lying Competition and Your Opponent is Yeonmi Park
It's pretty difficult to find people in the western world who will give an opinion on Kim Jong Un's dictatorship other than North Korea = bad. In most cases, it's more like North Korea = so bad there is literally nowhere worse on Earth.
Nobody knows this better than Yeonmi Park. The Youtuber and activist has cultivated a sizeable net worth through her harrowing tales of growing up under one of the notorious regimes on the planet.
There is one tiny problem: it's likely that a lot of them aren't true. The legitimacy of the Yeonmi grift has been questioned for nearly a decade, including by fellow defectors. Even to the untrained ear, stories that claim North Korean parents feed mud to their kids until they die of mud poisoning sound kind of outlandish.
In recent weeks, the internet has been admiring her dedication to increasingly wild stories. It's turned into a meme used to satirize both Yeonmi's recollections, and various other places where people live. If Joe Rogan believed it, why shouldn't we?
Competitive Hornyposting: Oscar Winner Edition
As actors who have arguably had two of the best careers in recent memory, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have no need for another accolade to add to the trophy cabinet. This week, though, avid fans of both went head to head on Twitter to try and bestow on them exactly that.
Things got heated when a poll that was cast to settle an argument at a wedding went viral. Who was hotter when they were younger? Both sides brought some strong arguments to the table, and it was a close fight. De Niro won by the tiniest decimal point of a percentage, but don't expect that to settle the score for good.
Some Tattoos Can Never Be Regretted
A true testament to the short-sightedness of the human race is that so many fail to understand that when we get a tattoo, that thing is stuck to us for life. Laser removal and cover ups are painful, multi-million dollar businesses, but there is at least one tattoo regretter out there who has no need to resort to them. Why? Because he may have been inked with Reddit's favorite tattoo of all time.
User u/Lewbular just wanted advice on an appropriate cover up for the ink he had gotten at 19, a text tattoo saying “shrimps is bugs”. However, people weren't very helpful; they couldn't understand why somebody would want to erase such a great message. The numerous funny reactions to the post on r/TattooDesign quickly caught the attention of the rest of the internet, leading to even more approval of the unorthodox idea. Could this be the next birds aren't real? Time will tell.
Here ends another edition of the roundup. Don't be sad, we will do our best to scrape every social media platform for its most ridiculous controversies next week, too. See ya soon!
