Forested internet | The slut gnomes of false Berlin | Chanty Beluga | Telephone slide | Goth robin
This week in phraseology
Hello there! This fall has been a mixed bag, with an anniversary celebration, an evil cold virus, family game night (this round: Horrible Therapist1), and the raising of the giant skeleton in the front yard, an event that brings me deep joy because I know my friend’s skeleton-obsessed five-year-old is gonna lose her mind when she sees it. I am also baking deb perelman at Smitten Kitchen’s pumpkin cinnamon rolls for the first time and will report back on the results. (Update: they are incredible.)
Pretty typical middle-class suburban fall stuff. Question: It’s totally normal to not be able to talk about your life and work with a friend without crying in your local coffee shop, right? Seems super okay! Very American! Anyway, my friend pointed out that I’m in deep caregiving and work burnout, and wouldn’t you know it, he was right. Naming that burnout clicked something in me, and I felt like I could finally take my foot off of the gas pedal in my brain (which is almost always in “pedal to the metal” mode) and gain some mental breathing room. (It’s cool to mix metaphors when you’re in burnout; it’s okay, I checked.)
Major upsides: I’m super privileged to have access to good mental health care and I’m not in crisis. Burnout just hits different. I know because I was there during COVID. You’re pushing yourself to run up a steep staircase, but it feels like when you try to run in dreams and your legs are so heavy they won’t do what you want, AND despite all your effort, you keep falling back a few steps for every one you gain. So you push yourself back up a step or two, repeating this cycle over and over and over until you finally hit bottom and can’t muster the energy or the fucks to start back from that bottom step.
I don’t know what any of this means for me, because I’m currently exploring that mental breathing space. I’m sharing this because that’s what writers do. Maybe you’ll see yourself here and think, “I too cry at the coffee shop! And at my monitor! And scream in my car! And maybe it’s burnout and maybe I can find help with that.” Like I said, it all feels very American and Of This Era.
On to the reason we’re all here! If you’re new here, I’d like to say I don’t always make things this weird, but I’d be lying if I did. This week, we have a viral slap-happy comedy bit, chonky playground slides, a fierce wee bird, and more. Let’s get to it!
1. Forested internet
This phrase came from longtime Wordpecker superfan Rebecca, via the Wordpecker Phrase-O-Matic Submission Machine, also known as “a Google Form.”
Forested internet appears in the essay I dream of quieter computing by Henry Desroches, a beautiful bit of writing about longing for the old internet:
I’m thinking of quieter computing. Everything these days is glass and refresh rates, is clouds and cloud-shapes, is brought to you in feeds and in troughs. It’s hard not to pine for a forested internet, an imagined one of searching and finding, of patient and aimless wandering.
I knew I’d love Henry’s work when I saw the banner across his blog:
TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE.
I appreciate his point that we can’t go back, but we can work to make things better. I know being online before social media existed and blogs became infested with popup-ads was fun. I also met some of my best friends by telling jokes on Twitter, including the pal who diagnosed my burnout like some sort of cappuccino wizard. Things were never perfect and they are worse, but there’s still hope to bring back some of the good that existed.
What do you miss about being online in the before times?
2. The slut gnomes of false Berlin
This phrase comes from the land of The Extremely Online (::raises hand::), except it was not on my radar. This is because I avoid being on Bluesky, which I’ve taken to calling The Bad News Place. I know I can tweak my feed and just follow bird and gardening accounts, but I don’t care enough to bother.
Here’s the deal with this phrase: In late 2023, someone who has since deleted their account posted this on Bluesky:
A great capture of the Jeopardy! cadence and one of those posts almost guaranteed to make the rounds in meme screenshots on Threads and Reels.
In September 2026, these categories appeared on the actual show:
Turns out the extremely online Ken Jennings was the culprit who talked the show’s writers into adding these categories. Nice work.
I have deeply disliked Jennings for some of his past tweets, including one that made fun of people in wheelchairs (that’s a hard no, Ken), but it seems he publicly apologized for those “jokes,” triggering my oft-cited quote for 2026, “It’s not much, but it’s not nothing.”
3. Chanty Beluga
Here’s another extremely online reference that I probably missed because I’m not in the right online bubbles. As much as I write about memes, I’m not on social that often and not on that many platforms. These days, I mostly hang out in a couple of Discord groups, a Slack friend group (yes, really), and flip through IG stories while pooping.
If you’re not familiar, Chanty Beluga is a recurring bit created by comedian and actor Courtney O’Donnell. She came up with the character name late at night while filming the upcoming movie Stephanie, Bride to Be, and her fellow cast members thought it was funny. Can’t you picture it? Working together for eight or 12 hours until you’re so slap happy that everything you come up with is funny? I know I’ve been there. I love that this is getting so much play; it’s one of those bits that gets funnier the more you see it come up:
4. Telephone slide
No real commentary about this except that it’s a lovely combination of weird and cool that feels very Japanese to me, despite knowing embarrassingly little about Japanese culture. Taken from a 2018 blog post awesomely titled Interesting Japanese Playground Structures #12 – Telephone Slide, originally found via Group Hug.
Interesting Playground Structures #12 implies the existence of 11 other “interesting Japanese playground structures.” Well, I checked and there are 49 and counting on the Tokyo Fox blog, including Panda Slide and Squid Park.
6. Goth robin
Wordpecker reader Tonya sent this one in and you could hear my squeals of delight across the entire Midwest. This is not only great because it features an extremely cute birb, but it’s a feel-good story, too. Native to New Zealand, the black robin was down to one remaining breeding pair until conservationists worked to bring them back. This year, they also won the popular Bird of the Year competition, which you may know from past controversies such as the year a bat won and another time when John Oliver successfully tried juicing the vote for the pūteketeke.
Bonus Nuggets
1. So sorry to do this to you
Have you seen the memes going around comparing RFK Jr.’s face to recalled foods? Well, I’ve curated a handful of the best ones for you. Turns out the account making these memes is run by the Democratic party. TBH, I didn’t know they had it in them.
How about you guys stop dicking around in Canva and support progressive candidates and their broadly popular policies instead?
2. Ever wonder what I’d be like if I was a dog?
Now’s your chance to find out. Fun fact about me: I super-extra hate the Liberty Mutual jingle because it’s not really a jingle, it’s just people singing the word Liberty three times. Ask my husband about this and watch his eyes deaden as he relives the trauma of my rants. Singing the company name three times is the creative equivalent of ending an essay with “and that’s what I did on my summer vacation.”
Validation is mine! Meet Piper, aka Toni in dog form:
That’s it for this edition! Remember to keep making it weird, and stay furiously curious.
I asked my therapist if she’d played Horrible Therapist and she deadpanned, “Oh yeah; we have that in the breakroom here.” She totally rules, in case you were wondering.
"Bizarre little men" LOL