The internet comes to life above a urinal in a brewery

A short story about writing on bathroom walls, the effects of being too online, and there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, it'll be a home run, and so that'll make it a 4–0 ballgame.

One of the things I struggle with—even though I haven’t worked in local TV news for a decade—is a constant desire to vacuum up information. Back then, I needed to pay attention to everything that happened everywhere because I had fill a daily newscast with interesting stories. I also wanted to sound smart in pitch meetings. At first, finding information meant watching the news, reading newspapers, scanning blogs and (somewhat) rational message boards, observing the actual world around me, and constantly calling up folks who knew things. It was a somewhat healthy media diet. But over time, all of those things were surpassed by a constant scrolling of feeds. As I incessantly scanned the Internet for good stories, I also came across a lot of stuff that was not relevant to real life in any possible way. There’s a tiny bit of signal out there, and a lot of noise that consists of Simpsons screencaps, entire movies posted one clip at a time to Instagram Reels, and dril tweets.

When you’re constantly Hoovering up that much stuff, you gain the ability to speak Internet in a way that sounds like a foreign language to normal people. Hence, while I continue to be fluent in current events, I am also a de facto meme ambassador. This is why I continue to think that the greatest moment in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade history came when Rick Astley popped out of a float to sing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” I saw it live, got visibly giddy, and then had to explain to my family why it was a cultural milestone that Rick Rolling had broken contain. They still didn’t get it.

We all live in filter bubbles now, and I do my best to make sure that mine contains a diverse and useful amount of information. But we’ve seen how Facebook has changed our parents and grandparents, and how TikTok and Twitch are shaping the lives of the young’uns. This is why Halloween costumes are so niche now. There’s a very fine line between clever and confusing.

Anyway, I realize that this is a ton of setup for the gloriously stupid thing that I encountered over the weekend: