Many Such Takes: Baby Registry, Parking Spots, TikTok, Victorian Complaints, They/She

The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free

Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to. If you see yourself featured here and you don’t like it, simply send me a Substack message and I will happily remove, no matter who you are or what you said.

For previous issues of Many Such Takes, see this tab on my main page. Many Such Takes will always be free, so please become a free or paid subscriber to see more every Sunday! Also, I realized that MST was being auto-paywalled after 4 weeks and some free subscribers said this was misleading because I describe it as “always free.” So, I hear you: the entire archive of MST is free now!

ALSO!! Please fill out my survey for singles. It is open to all American never-married singles who date the opposite sex at least 50% of the time.

Baby Registry

We got a great Main Character this week in the form of an account that was already pretty big (I feel like most Main Characters have risen from near-obscurity, such as Dr. Smell.) Anyway, this week, a woman posted that inviting someone to a baby shower while prompting them to purchase gifts from the registry is rude.

Classic “I don’t owe you anything” syndrome—in this case, literally! It’s giving Reddit. Apparently expecting wedding gifts is also verboten:

But the plot thickens! Perhaps in an attempt to backtrack off the original assertion, the poster admitted that she does purchase gifts from baby registries, but only if nobody asked her to. It’s not that complicated, guys. Just link to the baby registry, but be super sly about it in a way that makes it clear you don’t actually expect or want gifts from that registry.

More details emerge…the baby shower in question is being thrown by someone she “barely knows.” I have questions!

I’m split on this—obviously, I disagree (if I find out a friend is pregnant, I ask for the registry so I only get them something they want.) But I think in this case, the original tweet wasn’t thought out very well, and she wound up backtracking but didn’t want to apologize, so she had to “clarify” that she actually always buys a gift off the registry BUT only does it when the gift isn’t expected (yet the registry was built for…some reason, I suppose.)

This QT has the potential to be an evergreen tweet response:

Parking Spots

I promise you this isn’t a specifically pregnancy-themed issue this week, but we also another great tweet on this general topic where a user noted that pregnant women are avoiding using reserved parking spots in case someone wants to steal their baby:

Those suffering from True Crime Brain were quick to point out that avoiding these parking spaces to evade “traffickers” was smart:

In one case, OP responded by asserting that vending machines—or getting in a car at all—is significantly more dangerous:

I get it, as a neurotic and anxious mom—but I’m terrified of cars in general, so at least I’m consistent.

Victorian Complaints

This one is just a bit goofy and fun. Earlier this week, a tweet prompted people to share their most “boomer complaint,” such as “babies don’t wear socks enough and nobody drinks enough wine” or their most “millennial complaint” such as “People judge me for having a no-iPad policy for Arya, my pitbull.” But then someone asked Twitter users to share their most Victorian complaint.

TikTok

Everyone is writing about the TikTok ban, and Many Such Takes is for the weird stuff that you might not have seen or noticed, so I won’t dwell on it, but I will post a few of the funniest takes related to this development. First of all, RIP TikTok:

Many of the loyal TikTokers have fled to Chinese app RedNote (official name: Xiaohongshu.) Now we get to see amazing things like this:

By far, the biggest RedNote-related revelation is that a bunch of Americans are “discovering” that China is a utopia where nobody has to work 40 hours a week, everyone owns a nice home, groceries are affordable, and police are your besties. But most importantly, they don’t have to deal with propaganda.

But of course, that’s what they want you to think. Speaking of they…

They/She

Look, I’m pronoun-friendly. I’ll use whatever pronoun you want and if I have to pick between pronouns in bio and pussy in bio, I’ll choose the former. But this week, we got a great story about an email from a classmate who has they/she pronouns (fine) except you’re only allowed to use the “they.” Why is “she” even mentioned if it shouldn’t be used? Who knows!

Honestly, this reads like a Tumblr parody troll, but I’m choosing to believe it’s real.

This shit just makes me nostalgic, man. Bring out your chevron skirts and mint green wedge sandals, it’s 2014!

Intentionally and feministly,

CHH

Other Happenings/Funny Tweets

• This take on the new Robbie Williams biopic, Better Man:

• This absolutely amazing Trump flashback:

• This made me actually laugh out loud:

  

• Yet another example of the trad stuff actually being a humiliation kink.

  

  • Speaking of humiliating your spouse, this happened on LinkedIn:

  

• I randomly saw this person on my TL talking about crimes against the youth, so naturally I had to read the rest of the thread to figure out what they were talking about.

The rest of the thread:

• A funny take on the sexist comics of yore:

• An author got caught using a ChatGPT prompt in their novel. Ironically, this is probably more publicity than this author would get any other way.

  

• This interesting observation about Trump’s portrait:

In case you missed it…

I wrote about some drama between a WFH mom and a bunch of wackos who thought she was evil incarnate for hiring a nanny for some of the day. Enjoy!