Bluesky Vs. Slightly Curvier Isabelle

—by Adam Bumas

Journalist Parker Molloy has approximately the 200th most popular Bluesky account, with over 230,000 followers (for some perspective on Bluesky, her follower count is right between ESPN and John Green). But earlier this week, Molloy temporarily deactivated her account after it became the center of fierce, angry debates. Which, ultimately, all concerned a barely-noticeable horny Animal Crossing: New Horizons mod.

The mod, in the words of its creator, who goes by usernamecipher, makes the character Isabelle “slightly curvier.” Isabelle is a cartoon dog with a body about half the size of her head, so it’s a little hard to see at a glance. To illustrate the difference, usernamecipher created a side-by-side comparison video and uploaded it to X last week, as they had done with previous, similarly subtle mods to other Animal Crossing villagers.

The X posts for the mods were all tagged “#furry,” which clearly shows their intended audience. Except it broke containment in a major way this week.

On X, the Isabelle mod comparison video got 30,000 likes in two days. It’s easy to see why — it’s simple, and absurd in a way that you can understand even if you’ve never played Animal Crossing. Not to mention, independent analysts have claimed the X algorithm gives a huge boost to videos people watch for longer than 10 seconds, which you need to get the full effect of the “slightly curvier” mod. Plus, the site, even when it was still Twitter, has always encouraged certain styles of reaction, like this Spanish-language post, that read, “the concept of putting boobs on an animal crossing dog 😭,” which received almost five times as much engagement as the original.

But the site since it was purchased by Elon Musk has become a lot more caustic. Beyond the popular hip-fired reactions of surprise and confusion, or the references to other old memes about Isabelle, many popular replies and quote posts called the mod “goonbait,” and used it as an excuse to attack furries and queer people. It all happens on X, folks.

Which is why there was such an uproar when Molloy posted a screenshot of the tweet to Bluesky last Sunday, asking “why though?” Speaking to Garbage Day, Molloy said, “For the first hour or two, the responses were mostly what I expected.” But users quickly started to associate Molloy’s post with the larger abuse happening over on X. “I said I didn't have a problem with furries. People said I was lying,” she said. “I said the mod was just kind of weird. People said I was calling them degenerates.”

Last month, I diagnosed the problem with Bluesky as one of entrenchment. Virtually every user has migrated to the site from somewhere else. Since Bluesky prioritizes personal curation and confines algorithmic popularity to the Discover feed, it’s easy for your entire timeline to look the way you’re used to from back in the day, whether that’s Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook. And Molloy isn’t just a big Bluesky account, her posts stand astride all these communities — she’s a trans woman and prominent ex-Twitter poster who frequently writes about politics and media. The range — and rage — of the reactions to her post show what happens when all these subcultures that usually keep to themselves are forced to share the same reply section. “Old Twitter had its own pile-on dynamics, but the sheer speed of this felt different.” Molloy said. “I saw something I thought was funny and weird, posted about it, and within hours I was being called a Nazi and getting told I should die.”

Some posters turned the “slightly curvier” mod into a pretty good meme. Bluesky’s silent majority of horny cartoonists reacted exactly how you’d expect (they drew her curvier). But for many refugees from X saw an intrusion from the Everything App as an attack. Molloy, amid the pile-on, trying to defend herself, compared the Isabelle mod to pro-Gamergate memes. “[That] was genuinely stupid of me, and I walked it back. But by then it didn't matter,” she said.

The fracas only started to die down when Molloy deactivated her account on Monday, opening it again after less than 24 hours. Since then, another prominent trans woman involved in the discourse, video game journalist Ana Valens, has also temporarily deactivated her Bluesky account. For as woke as Bluesky’s community likes to see itself, it always seems to go after its trans users the hardest.

The punchline to all of this is that usernamecipher, the creator of the mod, didn’t realize any of this was even happening. “The Isabelle mod? I did notice that it had gotten some attention but beside that idk, I kept making other Animal Crossing mods and I kept posting them,” they told Garbage Day.

Which is hard not to see as a pretty damning indictment of Bluesky’s current environment. A whole lot of noise, unnoticed by the person who inspired it all, directly entirely at well-known trans users. It also reflects a perspective that’s more or less the only way to engage with social media and stay sane these days. Focus on your own work, on the online communities you know and understand. Separate your feelings and experiences from people with completely different lives and media diets.

When asked about their reaction, usernamecipher said, “Whenever a work of mine gets a lot of attention I always want to prove to myself that I can make something clearly better.” That’s a high bar, since their most popular mod, far outpacing anything from Animal Crossing, is a Team Fortress 2 mod changing the Scout into a bunny girl.

A Powerful Vibe

AI Has Arrived For The Manga Industry

The manga My Dear Wife, Will You Be My Lover? is topping the manga market in Japan right now. It’s an erotica comic about a middle-aged couple trying to spice up their marriage. And it comes with a warning label that it was made using AI.

As Kotaku reports, the fact is has an AI imagery disclaimer and is still doing well is the worrying part here. “The reviews aren't that heated either,” well-known mangaka Kazuaki Ishibashi wrote on X. “And it seems like readers don't really care whether the artist is using AI or not.”

We probably don’t have to start freaking out just yet, seeing as how this is, you know, smut, which has a readership with slightly different needs, let’s say, than more mainstream titles. But the X account @AISafetyMemes is tracking the rising popularity of AI-generated content across different sectors of culture and, taken all together, it’s definitely concerning. “The #1 most-subscribed Twitch streamer is an AI,” they wrote recently. “AI is eating everything human.”

General Douglas MacArthur Is The Boogeyman Of Chinese Social Media

There’s a guy on Bilibili, China’s version of YouTube, that is cosplaying as US General Douglas MacArthur. If you don’t feel like jumping over to a Chinese platform, here’s one of his videos uploaded to X.

Explaining the pop cultural fascination with MacArthur on Chinese social media is a little thorny. He’s, basically, one of history’s greatest villains for them. He killed a lot of Chinese communists during World War II and, at one point, wanted to nuke China during the Korean War. So I’d sort of compare this guy’s Bilibili channel to like those old Epic Rap Battles Of History videos with Hitler.

As for the cosplayer, his name is Jim Filbird and according to a video he posted to Bilibili, doing a Chinese video trend called “raise a glass to yourself,” where you basically drink and tell stories about your life, he ended up in China after a few bad business deals. He was then cast as MacArthur in the 2021 film The Battle at Lake Changjin, which was one of the biggest movies in China that year. Now he plays MacArthur on Chinese social media. I am, obviously, desperately, trying to get in touch with this guy because I absolutely need to interview him lol.

The House Always Wins

Polymarket degens are not happy one bit right now. One of the betting pools related to the US intervention in Venezuela did pay out. One we wrote about on Monday, titled, “Maduro out by January 31, 2026.” An anonymous trader made nearly half a million dollars on that one after sinking around $30,000 into it hours before Trump’s raid on Caracas. (More on that in a sec.) But Polymarket has not paid out the nearly $10 million pool on a related bet on the US invading Venezuela. A spokesperson for Polymarket told The Guardian that the campaign to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro over the weekend did not count as an invasion.

Polymarket is, however, opening up betting pools on real estate. Congrats to everyone involved. Glad that have all firmly committed to a second Great Depression.

Regarding that anonymous gambler that cashed in on the arrest of Maduro, something I haven’t seen anyone mention. Unlike Kalshi, Polymarket runs on cryptocurrency. Every pool has a transaction history that lives on the blockchain. And as longtime Garbage Day readers know, cryptocurrency transactions are extremely easy to track. So, you know, enjoy all the insider trading while you can. But if we ever get an administration back in power that cares about financial crimes it’ll be real easy to figure out who was turning these funds into cash.

Reddit’s Chive Man Is Finally Free

The poor soul that’s been cutting chives for ornery redditors for the last few months has finally submitted a perfect cut. User u/F1exican, better known as Chive Lord, posted a photo of perfectly cut chives right before Christmas. “Its not about the size of the pile of chives. Its about the chives of the size of piles in your heart,” one user wrote.

Now, there is some debate about exactly how many days it took for Chive Lord to cut a perfect pile of chives. There was an incident users are calling Chivegate that happened a few months ago, where Chive Lord was having car problems, couldn’t get to work, didn’t cut chives, and submitted a previous day’s chive photo. He admitted it and apologized. It ended up causing a bunch of additional drama over LinkedIn after Kraft’s social team tried to get involved. You can read more about that here.

The reason I bring up Chivegate is that users have basically said that that day didn’t count. Which is important. “Due to Chivegate, I conclude this is actually the 69th officially attempted day and we have achieved perfection,” one user wrote.

A Post Question About Grapes

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a very cool real estate listing.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***