While the House of Representatives is stuck in a hellish series of endless votes that resolve nothing, their grandchildren are welcoming the new year by memeing a weird dog breed, offloading worthless NFTs, and lying to their parents about dead celebrities. But at least they don’t have driver’s licenses, so we know they are safe from watching online porn…in Louisiana, anyway.
Meet the newest meme dog: the borzoi
Move aside, Pomeranians, Shiba Inus, and Corgis: There’s a new dog sheriff in Memesville. Borzois are taking over the internet. Also known as Russian wolfhounds, these pups were originally bred as sighthounds for hunting. They’re athletic, loyal, and even-tempered, but that’s not why TikTok likes them so much. The key to the breed’s adorability is their comically elongated faces, topped with big, expressive eyes that make them resemble all kind of different objects in a uniquely poignant way. They look like soap dispensers, pencils, doorstops, anteaters, floppy socks, and slices of pizza. They look hilarious with eyebrows. But mostly they look kind of vulnerable and sad. Borzois are the ultimate meme dogs, until the next breed comes along.
Why are kids telling their parents their favorite celebrities died?
If your kid or some other young person in your life tells you that your favorite famous person has died, don’t fall for it. Telling your parents their favorite celebrity has keeled over and filming the reaction is a trend that’s been catching on over the last week or so on the TikTok machine. For the record: Elton John, Barack Obama, Jennifer Anniston, and Donald Trump are very much alive, in spite of the videos showing adults’ anguished reactions to their deaths. I like a morbid joke as much as anyone, and it can be funny to see how upset people get over the supposed deaths of people they’ll never meet, but on the other hand, these videos are essentially mocking people for having emotions, and that’s not cool. It’s especially not cool when you tell your parents that a friend of theirs (who happens to be famous) died, as happened to actress Angela Bassett recently.
Company buying worthless NFTs
In what is perhaps a fitting coda to the entire NFT saga, a couple of entrepreneurs have started a company that buys worthless NFTs so that people who invested in digital goods can at least unload them and write-off the losses on their taxes. The firm is called Unsellable and it will buy any NFT purchased on the Ethereum blockchain, regardless of the quality or rarity, for the equivalent of one cent, then send you a receipt so you can prove to the IRS that you actually did invest a lot of money in digital magic beans. They will not, however, sell you your NFT back for two cents. So far, they say they’ve purchased 5,000 NFTs and are a little vague as to what they’re going to actually do with them. Since this takes place in the world of NFTs, there’s a chance it could be some kind of scam or boondoggle. Shocking, I know.
Louisiana’s new porn law raises serious questions
A new state law went into effect on Jan. 1 in Louisiana that requires websites that host pornographic material to verify the ages of the people accessing their sites. Instead of clicking yes to the question “Are you over 18?” Louisiana porn-enjoyers who try to access sites like Pornhub will have to provide ID that proves they are adults who want to masturbate. In practice, that means setting up an account with the service AllPassTrust and sending ‘em a copy of your drivers license. While Louisiana promises it won’t collect or store user addresses and phone numbers, it’s making some people nervous. Who wants their name on that list, right?
There’s also the issue of the law’s vagueness. It states that sites that contain more than 33.3% pornography are required to verify ages, but defining pornography beyond “I know it when I see it” seems impossible, not to mention determining what sites are more than one-third porn. There’s a lot of porn on Reddit, but is it a 33%? How about Twitter? If a site puts up two mundane photos for each naked one, is it required to verify IDs? I know The South does things a little differently, but I’d be surprised if this law isn’t challenged in court quickly. There’s money to be made, after all. (Also, what’s to stop young people from using the most reliable porn site around, Google Images?)
Viral video of the week: “playing every single frogger game just to feel something”
YouTuber Noodle maintains an engaging channel where he talks about video games through homemade paper cut-out puppets. This week, he dives deep into the history of Frogger by playing every iteration of the series in the aptly titled video playing every single frogger game just to feel something. I didn’t even know there were any Frogger games beyond Frogger, but it turns there have been a ton of weird and mostly terrible attempts to bring the franchise to more modern game systems, including a Legend of Zelda style outing called Frogger’s Journey: The Forgotten Relic and a truly horrific 3D platform called Frogger: The Great Quest.
I know video game characters are just collections of pixels without human emotions, but there’s something sad to me about most modernizations of older game stars. I picture Pac-Man as a Norma Desmond type, alone in his ‘80s mansion, drunkenly reminiscing about when he was the biggest star in the world, wondering how Mario has managed to stay relevant for so long, and drunk dialing Ms. Pac-Man and hanging up.
