Hello fellow web crawlers! Andrew here. Welcome to today’s edition of web_crawlr.
Our top stories today are about: People being very angry at a dog owner who told a story about how their pet peed in a freezer at Trader Joe’s, debunking claims that the Nickelodeon ‘splat’ logo is modeled after Jeffrey Epstein’s island, an explainer on political compass memes, and a woman going viral for sharing what men’s favorite superheroes say about them.
After that, we’ve got a “Meme History” column for you.
P.S. — If you didn’t take our weekly news quiz yesterday, you still can! Just open yesterday’s newsletter and answer the question. If you guess correctly, you might win a web_crawlr shirt.
See you next week!
— A.W.
⚡ Today’s top stories
🐶 WTF
Viewers slam Trader Joe’s customer whose dog peed in freezer, contaminated $400 of food
After a pet owner shared about their dog’s behavior at Trader Joe’s, viewers became furious at the owner for the video they made explaining what happened.
🔍 CONSPIRACY
No, the Nickelodeon ‘splat’ logo is not modeled after Jeffrey Epstein’s island
A new conspiracy theory involving Epstein Island and the Nickelodeon logo has popped up online after the release of Quiet on Set.
🗳️ MEMES
How political compass memes help plot everything on the internet
🦸 VIRAL
Woman shares what men’s favorite superheroes say about them. Is she right?
Astrology is not for everyone, and enneagrams can be hard to remember sometimes. Now, one woman is introducing a better way to learn about someone’s personality—by asking them who is their favorite superhero.
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💵 From The ‘Debt and Taxes’ Dept.
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🤓 Meme History
By Kyle Calise
Video Producer
Meme History: Disaster Girl
Meme History is a weekly column that dives deep into internet lore to uncover the history of famous memes. It runs on Saturdays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
🕸️ Crawling the web
Here is what else is happening across the ‘net.
🗣️ We’ve all imagined quitting that one job in a blaze of glory, and in a viral TikTok, a former Target Starbucks worker did just that.
🔋 Viewers of this viral video are divided after a customer said you should buy car batteries at Costco.
👖 You’d think a store selling $360 jeans could afford a dressing room with a mirror and actual doors. We’re looking at you, Aritzia.
🐜 The good news is that the roach a Hell’s Kitchen Las Vegas patron spotted and recorded for posterity was in the gift shop, presumably after the patron finished a meal. The bad news, of course, is that it was a roach in Hell’s Kitchen—the celebrity restaurant that’s supposed to be a testament to Chef Gordon Ramsay’s impeccable standards.
👀 “Secret Shoppers” and “Karens” beware. You may find yourselves getting special treatment you didn’t sign up for.
💼 One TikToker is going viral as she tells her story of the shocking way her boss fired her—allegedly without telling her why.
🔊 From the Daily Dot archive: Distorted TikTok sounds hurt marginalized creators—and AI is making it worse.
👋 Before you go
A customer filmed herself asking Chick-fil-A workers to completely remake her soup order because it was not given to her with a spoon.
It escalated into her cursing at staff members of the restaurant chain which potentially resulted in the content creator setting her account to private.
The video was reposted to TikTok by user @sarah_conner1, an account that reshares videos of interactions between fast food employees and customers. In the clip, a woman films herself asking for her Chick-fil-A order to be remade because she had to re-enter the drive-thru line to ask for a spoon, and her soup had gotten cold in that time.
The doors were locked, she said, so she was unable to go inside to ask for a utensil. When she received her order back from the employees manning the drive-thru, she tells them that she had marked the bottom of the soup container, and knew they had simply given the same soup back to her.
“This is the same soup,” she says in the video. “I marked the back of it just in case y’all tried to give it back to me. Also, this is all being recorded, so make sure y’all do the right thing, please. Y’all gave me back the same soup. You know what, bro? Make sure she don’t f*ck with my sh*t though, for real, watch her. I’m not playing with y’all.”
Many viewers suggested that the restaurant employees simply reheat the soup, as they would have done in the same situation.
