Many Such Takes: JD Vance in Drag, Chicken Washing, Uncensored AI, Sorority Rush Videos, Evil Blake Lively, Morose Little Girl Books

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Nara Smith Chicken Washing

Oh no, Nara Smith is getting hate again! I covered the fact that she’s constantly on the receiving end of vitriol in an old post which you can read here. But basically: model and influencer Nara Smith, who regularly posts her glamorous cooking videos, is under fire for not washing her chicken. Apparently she seems like the type who would?

Everyone was quick to inform OP that there is no reason to wash raw chicken, and that the CDC actually does not recommend it:

Chicken-washing has routinely come up as a discourse-starter over and over again…so it’s surprising anyone even agreed to engage with this. It could be worse…it could be the dreaded Christmas tree washing debate of 2023:

JD Vance in Drag

Obviously, Trump made a mistake by picking JD Vance. The VP pick has been plagued by accusations of watching dolphin porn, having sex with couches, and supposedly has a history of following weird groyper loli accounts on Twitter.

Things just keep getting worse for JD. On August 11, Twitter user mattxiv posted that he obtained a photo of JD Vance while he was in law school, wearing an outfit that can only be described as “Midwestern mall goth.” Easily the least cunt any drag queen has ever served.

Here’s the thing: as much as I enjoy making fun of JD Vance, this didn’t seem mockworthy, even though some of the other things that he was made fun of (ie: admitting to having sex with a couch and a latex glove in Hillbilly Elegy) weren’t even true at all. The drag thing actually happened, and…honestly, it makes him seem more likable! Sure, it’s hypocritical to take a conservative, traditional stance about gender and presumably also drag performances while having done it yourself (in his case, it was clearly for some kind of college themed party) but the photos make him seem like a normal person who had a normal college experience. Given how absolutely weird everything he says is, this is somewhat humanizing. I hate to say it, but it’s true!

More college photos kept coming out, none of which were really that bad. It makes total sense that “Republicans against Trump” would have posted the below photo, because to most liberals this just looks like a fun group of college friends taking a silly photo, although JD’s hair and attire is pretty upsetting due to the complete lack of drip:

Like…I’m sorry, getting blackout drunk at parties, wearing terrible drag at a costume party, having female friends who take silly pictures at the urinals with you? These things are actually some of the most likable things JD Vance has done. Liberals, please do not make this your line of attack, it will not work! This is just the Democrat version of the supposedly derisive nickname for Kamala Harris, “Laughin’ Kamala.” Just don’t!!

Uncensored AI

If any of you have used ChatGPT for image generation, you’ll find out pretty quickly what you can’t do. You obviously can’t generate anything wildly inappropriate, but you can’t even generate totally safe-for-work images of public figures, like Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. Well, with Twitter’s AI image generator, Grok, you can do, um, this:

I didn’t want to make anything truly heinous, but I did create a few of Trump that I quite enjoyed: Trump starring in his own Broadway musical:

Trump as the host of his own daytime talk show for middle-aged women:

My personal favorite, Trump on the campaign trail trying to win over a group of Unitarian drum circle players in Vermont:

Evil Blake Lively

You know how some celebrities just kind of seem like assholes, but you can’t prove that they actually are, and you’re in a cycle of reflection constantly wondering if you only dislike them because of some kind of internal prejudice or jealousy? Well, if that celebrity has been Blake Lively, you’re in luck: turns out, she actually is awful!

When I heard that Blake Lively had a disastrous interview, I was ready to give her the benefit of the doubt. I’m not a big fan of cancellations, and although this wasn’t a true cancellation, I hate anything that involves mobs of angry Internet users: see, my reluctant defense of JD Vance’s college photos. But then I watched the interview and it’s somehow worse than I imagined.

TLDR: Blake Lively gave an interview about the movie Cafe Society back in 2016 which recently resurfaced online after she had a different questionable (but less absurdly mean) interview about her recent film, It Ends With Us. Most heinously, in the Cafe Society interview, the interviewer congratulates her on her “little bump” (Blake is pregnant at the time) and for no reason at all, she shoots back, “Aw, congrats on your little bump.” The kicker: not only was the interviewer not pregnant, she was struggling with infertility.

In an attempt to redirect the interview, the interviewer asked about the costumes in the movie. Blake Lively seems offended at the question, asks obnoxiously if anyone would be asking the male cast about their costumes, and proceeds to sarcastically wax poetic about the men’s costume with costar Parker Posey, ignoring the interviewer for a full minute.

In Blake’s defense, I think part of what she might have been doing was purposefully acting sassy in an attempt to emulate some iconic interviewees, like Lady Gaga, who, amid nonchalant ice-chewing, shot back at Anderson Cooper asking her if she was “a hermaphrodite” by saying, “Would that be so terrible?”

Morose Little Girl Books

On August 16th, Twitter user maenadea drew attention to some extremely depressing covers of children’s books (estimated reading level somewhere around fourth or fifth grade) asking why the hell these disturbing books exist. Her mentions were full of former Morose Little Girls (tm) being like, “Wait, those were my favorite books! I love the part where everyone got dysentery and died!”

I had memory-holed these books personally, but as a former moody little girl who loved to wistfully stare out the windows onto my parents’ gloomy, foggy back yard and pretend I was in a creaky British manor, staring out into the moorlands, I completely get the appeal. I mean, I showed up for school wearing a stuffy Victorian-inspired private school uniform which I put together myself! I went to public school and we didn’t even have a dress code! I told kids in school that I was an orphan and I was the wards of my parents, that they didn’t feed me, and that I had to sleep in the attic. Morose little girls need representation! Those books were our representation! There are dozens of us!! Anyway, never before these threads have I felt more understood.

Sorority Rush Videos

Every year, sorority girls post rush recruitment videos on TikTok, usually featuring a large coordinated dance. And these videos always make it to Twitter (I refuse to believe any sorority girl is on Twitter herself) ultimately reaching men who are, for some reason, horrified by the fact that women in college engage in choreography.

The best part of this “controversy” was that it turned out a lot of the men getting upset about these videos didn’t even realize what they were for:

You might be wondering, what the hell did they think the videos were for? And the answer is, most guys thought the videos were thirst traps. It’s kind of funny to see a bunch of men weirdly relieved that women are dancing for each other and not for men (I thought you guys liked being the audience for this kind of thing?) but I can only assume the performance being for men unleashed some deep-seated jealousy issues for guys who assume that the intended audience is actually hot guys, not them. Like I said last week, everything is Virgin vs. Chad.

Best Tweets of the Week

• Trump’s very short and sassy fundraising ad

• This take on people using advertisements from the 1950s as a barometer for what the average person’s living standard was seventy years ago:

  

The burgeoning pro-littering contingent on leftist Twitter:

• The president of the Timothee Chalamet fan club endorsing Harris and Walz, while also coming out as a sixty-something woman.

Check out this Deep Dives into discourse topics of the week: