![]() ![]() I found ittttflkvnascfmkasfmklnas /HBKMKiLFPq One attendee attempted to compile all the banned words so that they could unban them and find workarounds: The banned words included terms like “pubic” and “bone,” which would tend to make discussing paleontology kind of hard. Unbeknownst to them, the virtual Q&A software they used had a built-in profanity filter, which banned certain “naughty” words. Nowhere was this illustrated more beautifully than in a virtual paleontology conference whose software censored the word “bone.”Īs recounted in this Vice article, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) was forced to hold its normally analog event virtually. Rather than pay humans to do necessary work, we’ve instead created software to slowly drive ourselves insane. One consequence of our increasingly automated lives is that I frequently find myself screaming “REPRESENTATIVE!” at a computer, or some such. Paleontology Conference Uses Profanity Filter That Blocks The Word “Bone” Let us now take a stroll through repressed memory lane. It should make you groan at the thought of even attempting to explain it.Īnyway, enough analysis. Those make for great one-liners, but a truly absurd story must have levels. I also mostly stayed away from wild headlines. I kept a few tangential Trump figures and stories on here, but in general, I wanted relive the kind of novelty fun crazy, not the crushing ever-present collective mental illness kind of crazy. Actually, those two factors are probably interconnected.įor our purposes here, I tried to steer clear of the more mundane “crazy” stories, like having a deranged, narcissistic, wannabe dictator for president, his party essentially standing by him through every insane pronouncement, our ongoing kleptocracy, and the senile ineptitude of the supposed opposition party. Partly that’s because no one wants to pay for real reporting anymore and partly it’s because the “top stories” really are that stupid now. Mostly those don’t exist anymore, because the line between the Odd section and A1 has been forever blurred. Publications used to have sections called “Odd News” or “Stranger Than Fiction” devoted solely to these kinds of stories. The only comedy that could possibly do justice to the year Rudy Giuliani has been having is the Three Stooges, and living performers not weaned on Vaudeville just aren’t that good at slapstick anymore. The average day in 2020 was so surreal that it basically made satire impossible. This year left us trapped in our houses, making us increasingly desperate for those escapes, but we can take small solace in the fact that it compensated by providing so much strangeness that it’s hard to tell what even counts as a “weird” story anymore.Įvery day was a circus. Not only do they remind us of life’s rich tapestry, they provide a momentary escape from our own drab existences. “May you live in interesting times,” goes the apocryphal Chinese curse, and rarely has a time lived up to it as in 2020. ![]()
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