Hello!

This week I've been thinking a lot about this TikTok meme where a country music song plays and the singer sings "How the hell you spell showfer" and then a reply comes "Chauffeur" and then the singer sings "Ooo fancy pants rich McGee over here, fucc you." The audio is used when people of different economic classes have disparate experiences. You can watch lots of them.

But the audio itself was created by an AI that some people made explicitly to turn text into songs of various genres. I do not know how this works, but it apparently isn't that complicated since there are now many similar tools. Parallel to this is the very long tradition of websites and social media accounts that repost screenshots of funny things that happened on the internet. Now there's a new crop of social media accounts that convert those funny things that happened on the internet to AI-generated songs (often superimposed over people playing Minecraft or Subway Surfers because it helps keep people from getting distracted and swiping away).

An account of that sort found a 2020 Twitter thread (shown below) that was created entirely by accounts that have now either been privated or suspended, but lived on because of those websites that post screenshots of funny things. The video actually contains a bunch of such pieces of content turned into country music, but the "Showfer" one got used in a clever way by someone and is now viral on TikTok and Reels.

This makes me think about a lot of things, but a big one is ownership. Obviously, the people who wrote the original Twitter thread are not getting any credit or any benefit from their words going viral and creating a lot of value for mega-corporations. In fact, I've seen lots of people believing that the "Showfer" song is a real country music song created and hoping they might be able to hear the rest of it!

It makes me think a bunch of other things too, but they all kinda boil down to, "culture is extremely weird and confusing and it is very strange to be an individual inside of an unrecognized superorganism."

Hank

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This Week in Stuff

• A pelican flew onto the field during a San Fransisco Giants game and quickly became our MVP.

• Summoning Salt made a nearly 2-hour video on the history of Tetris world records.

• Hank tweeted about the proximity of Vancouver, WA, and Vancouver, BC, and became a trending topic for uncovering “Vancouver confusion.”

• The Pitch Drop Experiment, the longest-running laboratory experiment, is livestreamed. The experiment began nearly 100 years ago!

• Joey Brink has a YouTube channel dedicated to playing film scores and pop songs on tower bells.

Please send us stuff you think we should feature to [email protected]

What’s John Reading?

I've just read a book written by a Nerdfighter! It's called A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton, and it's about hypochondria, a disorder that shares a lot with OCD and other forms of obsessive thinking challenges. I loved the book--it's a wide-ranging, relentlessly curious cultural history exploring everything from John Donne's hypochondriacal writing to the author's personal life with hypochondria since recovering from cancer. The title comes from a phenomenon in early modern Europe where many people came to believe that parts of their bodies were made of glass and therefore exceptionally fragile. Someone might develop a belief that their buttocks were made of glass, or that their heart or some other organ was. Crampton explores how our particular obsessive fears are a response to our historical moment, but the underlying impulse seems near universally human.

Commercial flights have become significantly safer in recent decades

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

According to figures from the Aviation Safety Network, in the 1970s, there were about 6 fatal airliner accidents for every million commercial flights. This meant about 1 in every 165,000 flights ended in a fatal accident.

As the chart shows, this figure has dropped steadily in the last 50 years. According to the latest data, it is now about half a fatality per million flights. This means that, on average, it now takes more than 2 million flights for a fatal accident to occur./

Our World in Data is a UK-based non-profit organization that publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. You can find more of their data insights here.

The Northern Lights

Lots of We’re Here readers saw the northern lights last week! Thank you to everyone who sent us photos.

This Week at Complexly

Journey into the gravity-defying, sunlight-harvesting world of a plant cell, and take a tour around a busy, life-filled animal cell with new Crash Course posters in both English and Spanish! Available now!

Liquid nitrogen (LN2) might slow down a T1000 for a bit, and it definitely helps make yummy ice cream during a classroom demo, but it has a lot of applications you may have never considered. Maybe one day it'll help astronauts stay clean, or even power your car!

Some Games to Play!

Scrabble Tetris (by carykh)

SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress.)

If you post your results on social media, we’d love it if you post a link for folks to subscribe to “We’re Here” (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/subscribe)

Download Gubbins on iOS or Android!

Your Favorite Breakfast

As anticipated, we are all passionate about our favorite breakfasts. Some folks sent us recipes and we want to share them with you! If you make any of these, let us know how it goes. We are sharing these as they were sent to us and we haven’t made them, so consider this a breakfast adventure!

That’s all, folks!

We want to know what you love most about where you live. Do you have amazing food? Do you have beautiful views? Do you have peace and quiet? Let us know!

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