Wikipedia claims they’re quite popular.

Now imagine if that was a Lego factory … you’d NEED safety shoes with steel soles for that.

big pair of chopsticks to flip deep-frying stuff,

100% this. I have a pair of metal chopsticks that I use exclusively for frying food, especially small, super sticky stuff like nan gua bing. Most wooden ones here (Germany) have some sort of artificial coating and I’m a bit worried about it melting or releasing chemicals when it gets too hot, so I don’t want to dunk these into hot oil.

You know a dad joke is a good dad joke when you angrily groan while being compelled to still upvote it.

Hmm … you’re right, it does sound a bit too rude. I hereby humbly apologize to any and all bats, flying foxes and other mammals capable of flight who might be reading this and are currently trying to figure out how to type a reply. Y’all are cool. Weird, but cool. ;)

Similar thing with “Easter”, which comes from the name of Ēostre, the Germanic goddess of Spring. The origins of that holiday have nothing to do with Christianity, but the day and name were hijacked by Christians sometime in the mid-2nd century.

“Goodbye” exists because of 15th century chatspeak. It’s a highly abbreviated version of “God be with ye”

More and more relevant by every passing day …

To be fair, in both cases the situation would have been the same: An after-school club with a fictional mascot taken from Christian mythology, protested BY Christians who are ironically the only ones to actually believe that said mascot exists IRL.

Like others have said already: it sells. It’s the same reason why seemingly every single fantasy/adventure game is called an “RPG” regardless of whether or not it contains actual RPG elements, like creating your own character.

I don’t know how anyone thought this was a good idea for a video.

The dumber and more infuriating a video is, the higher the chance that viewers will start arguing with each other and/or the creator, and share links offsite to show others just HOW dumb and infuriating the video is. It’s the entire point of Rage Bait to be as obnoxious as possible to make people interact with the video in one way or another, because the creator gets “paid per click” in ad revenue. It doesn’t matter to those people whether the comments are actually civil discussions or literally every youtuber just commented “f- you!”, because both are worth one click = same amount of cash. Sharing links offsite is free advertisement on top of that.

Long story short, it is deliberate. And the best way to deal with those is to report and ignore them.

I know it is supposed to say “Service Fee” but after reading your comment my brain is unable to read anything other than Service Egg now …

It’s a horse’s nose, with a moustache (the “weird hair”). The other pictures in the link OP provided make it easier to understand for people who aren’t familliar with what horse noses look like. Example:

No idea about personality traits, but there have been studies about what kind of human behavior, especially facial expressions, might be “pre programmed” in our genes. For example, rolling your eyes when you’re frustrated with someone, or raising your eyebrows when you are surprised - that’s something even most blind people do instinctively, despite never having seen it / never learned it from others.

The sad part is that a no small amount of prisons (especially “for profit” prisons) don’t have the end goal of rehabiliting the inmates in the first place. It’s all about cheap labor. They don’t want to change anything into a positive direction.

…so he can have a total meltdown over an internet stranger again? =P

Personally, I like the “alpha as in new software” approach: Alpha version = unstable, missing important features, filled with flaws, prone to breakdown and not fit for the public.

Exactly this. Put any one species into a tiny depressing enclosure with way too many strangers and way too little food, and they will fight and establish a pecking order eventually. This has nothing to do with how the same species would behave in the wild and with enough resources to live comfortably, and the author realized that mistake years ago and is since trying to correct it.

But I guess the entire “alpha male” thing is just too popular with certain people … ahem.

I’m curious: are there any legal definitions for what an ESA is and isn’t allowed? Here in Germany, “Emotional Support Animals” aren’t really a thing. Trained, certified Service Animals are something different, and those do have certain protected rights, like that you can enter a shop or restaurant with your Service Dog and the owner of the respective facility isn’t allowed to deny you entrance. But AFAIK there is no legal definition in Germany protecting ESA’s in a similar way, so if you would try to drag an emotional support warthog or whatever into a place that doesn’t allow animals, the owner and/or employees would have every right in the world to kick you out.

It must be really hard to be an Onion ‘reporter’ these days, trying to come up with ridiculous nonsense that doesn’t seem too far-fetched but is still crazy enough that people know it is meant to be satire and didn’t actually happen. It used to be a fine line between those two sections, but … well … /gestures broadly at everything