Latest news with #MadLib
Yahoo
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
15 Signs That Are So Absurdly Funny You'll Embarrass Yourself Trying Not To Laugh
Welcome to another weekly roundup of Reddit's funniest signs. They're the way to make you forget about all the stress you had this week! Last week's was hilarious, and today's won't disappoint. Here we go: this is one way to close off a road: Related: all the bright yellow spelling hints, this person still missed the mark: was an actual sign in a classroom and I love that one of the students was sitting on the desk barefoot: is when paying attention becomes crucial: Related: old lady that no one wants to mess with: caption for this one was "lots of accidents here": of sharts, amen to shitting and splitting: Related: here I say!: pertains to more than just corn: the toad!: may be the running joke for a while... Related: in point: yourself a minute or so to get this one: like a Mad Lib, really: finally, LMAO: Have YOU seen a funny sign recently?! Upload it in the comments, and it may be featured in next week's funny signs roundup! Also in Internet Finds: Also in Internet Finds: Also in Internet Finds: Solve the daily Crossword
Buzz Feed
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Hilariously Absurd Signs You Can't Help But Laugh At
Welcome to another weekly roundup of Reddit's funniest signs. They're the way to make you forget about all the stress you had this week! Last week's was hilarious, and today's won't disappoint. Here we go: Well, this is one way to close off a road: Despite all the bright yellow spelling hints, this person still missed the mark: This was an actual sign in a classroom and I love that one of the students was sitting on the desk barefoot: This is when paying attention becomes crucial: An old lady that no one wants to mess with: The caption for this one was "lots of accidents here": Speaking of sharts, amen to shitting and splitting: Here, here I say!: This pertains to more than just corn: Not the toad!: This may be the running joke for a while... Case in point: Give yourself a minute or so to get this one: It's like a Mad Lib, really: And, finally, LMAO: Have YOU seen a funny sign recently?! Upload it in the comments, and it may be featured in next week's funny signs roundup!
Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
My Facebook Algorithm Desperately Wants Me to Give My Baby Up for Adoption. I … Don't Have a Baby.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Shortly after my 28th birthday, something strange started happening. I was suddenly inundated with two unusual, new-to-me sorts of social media ads. 'Musical, happily married, financially secure, professional couple yearn to give your baby a lifetime of unconditional love, music, extended family, beautiful musical home, world travel, limitless opportunities, financial security, sports and so much more,' one Facebook ad read. The image featured a smiling couple in formal attire under a clip art–style garland holding various baby-themed items, along with an email and phone number where I could reach them. Another, on Instagram, showed a grinning young couple, the man embracing the woman from behind, with details about the pair's mutual love for science and s'mores. 'We hope that as we add to our family through adoption we will be able to fill the hole we feel in our lives,' it ended. Clicking on the links led to Facebook pages with names like 'Jane and John hope to adopt 1st baby' or sites with profiles of the same smiling couples and details about their occupations and education levels. I was flummoxed, in part because they read like a Mad Lib of happy family keywords, but also because the existence of 'my baby' would have been news to me. Thinking this must be a glitch in the algorithmic matrix, I continued my scroll. But as I browsed through my feed, I saw, nestled between friends' engagements, breaking news, and the odd dog photo, not only more hopeful couples 'seeking to adopt first child' but also a barrage of ads showing solo women with headlines like 'How to Become an Egg Donor' and 'Best. Decision. Ever.' and graphics that seemed to promise inconceivable financial compensation. The models in this latter group, all young and conventionally attractive, were checking a laptop while holding a stack of papers or typing away (presumably penning an important email) on their phones. They were cosmopolitan women, engaged in running empires or drinking coffee, and apparently far too busy to be using their eggs. I couldn't think of anything in my search history that would have invited this onslaught. They were intensely personal topics, ones I would talk about with a doctor or a partner or a particularly close friend, not at all the kinds of decisions I'd make based on an ad I'd happened to encounter in my online travels. After initial attempts to rid my feed of them failed—when I blocked one account, another would pop up in its place—I decided to take a closer look. As I searched for the families behind the adoption ads, I found that domestic adoption can occur with or without an agency. (The latter is called private or independent adoption.) Most states allow private adoptions, but the specific laws and regulations vary. Where it's legal, private adoption allows prospective birth and adoptive parents to match directly, a process that has evolved over the past two decades. In the early 2000s, couples hoping to adopt relied on ads in newspapers and 'outreach cards,' essentially business cards with their information, which they distributed to friends, family, co-workers, hairdressers—anyone who might be able to help spread the word. Philip Acosta was working for a prominent adoption attorney in New York City at the time and noticed that while state regulators were preventing people from running adoption ads in the papers, there were no similar laws governing the nascent practice of internet advertising. Acosta began creating websites and Google Ad campaigns for families and found 'tremendous success.' His business, the Adoptimist, is part of a cottage industry that sprang up around adoption online, evolving as the internet did to include first search engine optimization, then social media. When the tempestuous swings of the algorithms meant standard, free social media posts weren't getting the visibility they used to, many businesses shifted to ads instead. But some in the industry weren't sold. Digital adoption service Our Chosen Child helps hopeful parents create adoption profiles, adoption videos, and adoption websites. The company does not offer ads—and that's not an accident. 'I've seen some of the ads, and they feel icky to me,' said Wisconsin-based founder Joanna Ivey. 'Because the focus is usually on 'We're kind of a perfect family and we have a lot of money and we can pay your expenses, and, you know, thanks very much for your baby.' ' Ivey, who is both an adoptee and an adoptive parent, believes that these ads can prey on women who are in an emotionally and financially difficult position and center the experiences of the adoptive parents rather than the adoptee. 'Unfortunately, that's where the money is, right? Adoptive parents are paying the bills, so that's where the focus goes,' said Ivey. Adoption advertising is governed state by state, Ivey told me, and that leaves room for a lot of gray areas. 'Being in New York, I'm sure you're being bombarded,' she said, noting that my home state presents a unique situation. New York's atypical adoption laws deter agencies in other states from working with New York families and prohibit an agency or attorney from advertising on their behalf. If a couple in New York wants to get the word out that they're looking to adopt, they have to do it themselves. And while most have the best intentions, with no guidance for how to approach this sensitive topic, the resulting ads can swing from describing how the prospective adoptive parents met to essentially—though not in so many words—saying 'Pregnant? We want to buy your baby.' 'Perhaps there ought to be not only some guidelines but some coursework or counseling before they hit that space,' Ivey said. 'Because a lot of what I see is, you know, kind of creepy and coercive and predatory.' Unlike the adoption ads, which offered a solution to the problem of my (fictitious) pregnancy, egg donation was positioned—bafflingly—as a solution to the (presumed) problem of my finances. One Facebook ad featuring a young blond woman wearing headphones around her neck and carrying a backpack promised up to $72,000 (the qualifier 'with multiple donation cycles' visible only if I clicked the 'see more' button) if I met certain requirements: being 21 to 31 years old, having a BMI under 30, having a high school diploma, being a nonsmoker in good health. Another, of a smiling woman holding a coffee, offered '$60,000 and the life [I've] dreamed of' if I were 19 to 30 with a BMI of 18 to 26, a high school diploma, and 'a desire to help families struggling with infertility.' It was a startling premise and, as I soon learned, one that had rightfully upset the humans who had resulted from ads like it. 'Knowing that you were essentially sold by a biological parent for a spring break or to pay off student debt is not a fun feeling,' Laura High told me. The donor-conceived creator and comedian was not being hyperbolic. These were real examples from ads she'd seen. High, who has been advocating for greater regulation of the fertility industry for more than five years, seemed both outraged and exhausted when I told her about the ads I'd been seeing. She worries not only that these ads make egg retrieval seem as simple as getting a haircut, but also that they're being shared on platforms where teenagers and young adults spend their time, offering them enormous sums of money and presenting egg donation as a viable part of their financial plan. Like adoption ads, they're aimed at folks who are financially vulnerable, an indication of a system that values profit over people at every stage. ' 'Oh, are you out of money? Sell your body parts,' ' High mimicked. 'We view that as wrong when it comes to a kidney. We view that as wrong when it comes to a lung. So then why are we allowing this for sperm and eggs?' One company, Cofertility, takes a different approach to egg donation that tries to address the strangeness of money changing hands. Its ads, just text on a screen, stood out from the myriad others in my feed for their design and frequency. 'How do you expect women in their 20s to be able to afford to freeze their eggs?' one asks. The answer: 'We don't—that's why we created a free alternative.' 'Free' has one major caveat: Half of your eggs won't belong to you. In smaller, lighter font below, the ad clarifies that the company pays for egg freezing and storage, and the donor contributes half of the eggs retrieved. The quid pro quo extolls the benefits of egg donation, noting that I could 'give [myself] the gift of options,' while leaving out certain, less pleasant details of a quite involved medical procedure. 'There is very little real estate,' Cofertility's CEO, Lauren Makler, told me of Facebook and Instagram ads. In its brief moment on your feed, she said, Cofertility tries to focus on fertility access. She sees these ads as less about direct acquisition and more about awareness of the company's existence and of egg freezing and donation as options. I asked Makler how she thought Cofertility's ads had ended up in my feed. The company targets based on age range and gender, she said, and there's no one in particular it's trying to exclude. Cofertility follows the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommendations and the Food and Drug Administration standards for who qualifies for egg donation—women 21 to 34—she said. When I told others in the adoption and fertility industries that I was receiving these ads, they all theorized that there must be something in my search history that had brought the ads to me. Privately, I wondered whether I had also been targeted as a certain type of woman of a certain age. Could my relationship status, a parameter by which Meta allows advertisers to target its ads, have also played a role? Wouldn't a single woman be more likely to be placing her hypothetical child up for adoption? Or be more likely to want to donate her eggs if she's not 'using' them right now? And then there's education level, another Meta-approved ad targeting parameter. How much education a donor has completed not only can be listed on their profile, I learned, but is a common consideration for intended parents. Had a college education unintentionally made me a desirable donor? While Makler didn't include this in the demographics she shared, a blog post attributed to her on the Cofertility website entitled 'How to Find an Ivy League Egg Donor' boasts that 'ninety-two percent of [Cofertility's] donors are in or have graduated from a 4-year college, and the majority (55%!) even have a graduate degree.' Another blog post notes that prospective parents 'can sort donor profiles by education level and learn more about what a donor studied and the type of school they attended.' Other companies go so far as to advertise steeper payouts to donors who've attended some form of higher education. If educated donors were such a selling point, would they not try to attract them in the targeting process? I'll likely never know for sure what landed these ads in my algorithm. In my quest to understand their origin and rid myself of them, I have inadvertently signaled my interest. And the more I engage with them—as I certainly have over the past year—the more I receive. Alas, now more than ever, my feed runneth over with smiling couples, busy women, and requests, in one form or another, for my eggs and baby.
Business of Fashion
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business of Fashion
Can Gaming Go Glam?
In a bit of beauty industry news that could read like the result of a very niche Mad Lib: The actress Chloë Grace Moretz and the pop star Rina Sawayama have created a cyberpunk cosmetic line, called Godmode, catered toward female gamers. The label is the first to launch from Closer Brands, the incubator beneath the UK-based Closer Group, The Business of Beauty has learned. Godmode's first collection comprises five products, including a cool-toned highlighter called Genesis Glow that approximates the pallid blue light cast off by screens; it will debut in early June on a direct-to-consumer website. On Tuesday morning, the brand teased an 'unlock' code on its founders' Instagram channels as well as its own, and intends to keep the exact launch date a secret for now. The launch reflects a broader effort on behalf of the beauty and fashion industries to engage female gamers, a growing segment of the population aided by the pandemic. While plenty of beauty brands have collaborated with popular coed games like The Sims or Roblox, Godmode seeks to integrate the two worlds more fully, creating a cast of characters and a universe of lore through marketing and a makeup collection. Godmode, itself, is not an actual video game or affiliated with one. 'Female gamers are everywhere,' said Mark Loy, the founder and executive chairman of Closer Group and the founder of Spring Studios. 'But brands barely speak to them.' Gender parity in the gaming population has narrowed significantly in the past few decades; in the US about 53 percent of gamers identified as male, 46 percent as female and 1 percent as non-binary, according to a 2024 report from the Entertainment Software Association. When it comes to preferences, however, there are some distinctly gendered trends; while about half of men who game play 'live service' titles like Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto, nearly 70 percent of women prefer mobile games, according to a 2024 Deloitte survey. The brand's first drop, Genesis, includes the Genesis Glow Highlighter, which approximates the pallid blue glow of a screen's light. (Godmode) Godmode achieves a more unusual milestone in the beauty industry as the first brand of its era to be fronted by not one but two celebrities, though Loy is reluctant to use the c-word. 'It's important to us that it's not seen as a celebrity brand,' he said. With celebrities or without them, Godmode will need to create something more explorable, more tangible and more playable than gamified product drops paired with hyper-lush marketing imagery to gain and maintain credibility with its gamers. 'Rina and I have the ability to build a new world for beauty that isn't just, 'Oh, you like this product, buy this product,' right?' Moretz said. A Perfect Match The realm of video games, only a handful of decades old, has historically been a place where brands go to meet men: the cult bar arcade game Tapper was a branded effort from Anheiser-Busch, and brands like Mercedes-Benz have more recently sponsored esports leagues and made its S-Class available in Mario Kart. Fashion and beauty companies, by contrast, have only recently entered the category. In 2020, MAC Cosmetics gifted a batch of 12 makeup looks to users of The Sims, which has also offered paid expansion packs sponsored by H&M (in 2007) and Moschino (in 2019). Meanwhile, a number of brands including E.l.f. Cosmetics and Givenchy, and most recently the fragrance and flavors conglomerate Givaudan, have created minigames for Roblox, the online game with 90 million monthly average users. Givaudan's 'The Garden of Memories,' in which players help a cute woodland creature craft perfumes, has logged about 60,000 players since it launched in France in January. Many of these are attempts to hook young consumers, rather than consumers who game, which has required a carefully calibrated approach by Closer. Godmode crystallised in 2023, as the incubator sought out celebrity partners. Moretz and Sawayama were deemed a perfect match for the gaming-inspired brand — the former had expressed interest in working on a beauty label to her agents at CAA, while the latter is an ambassador for Playstation. The two met for the first time in New York when they convened to shoot promo photography. Co-founder Chloë Grace Moretz appears as Chroma, her Godmode alter ego, with makeup by Daniel Sallström. She is partial to the brand's Level Up Lip Liners. The uncommon dual-founder structure was not lost on the greater public when news broke earlier this month that Moretz and Sawayama were collaborating on a beauty line. A representative example, from X: 'I don't think I would have put them together, but hey, good for them!' The co-founders corral audiences from different fields of the entertainment industry, but are also passionate gamers themselves, they told The Business of Beauty. Sawayama is a fan of tycoon-style titles like Two Point Museum, while Moretz enjoys open-world roleplaying games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy XIV. 'Once I realised how much you can customise and go deep into this character lore and create your own story, it's just a whole different form of gameplay,' Moretz said. A promotional still from Godmode's launch film animated by the production company All of Us Here. (Godmode) Loy pointed out that the two are 'emotionally and financially invested' in Godmode, but declined to elaborate on the partnership structure. He also hinted at forthcoming collaborations that could see Godmode entrench itself in the world of gaming beyond a product that is 'rebranded with somebody's IP.' There will also be immersive spaces, similar to the ones Closer has designed for brands like Louis Vuitton and Miu Miu. For the brand's debut, the co-founders will reveal their Godmode alter egos, with the brand's product drops — beginning with 'Genesis' in the summer, and another planned for the fall — released as chapters of an intergalactic series. 'If you're not a gamer, it's hard to understand the fantasy,' Sawayama said. Sign up to The Business of Beauty newsletter, your complimentary, must-read source for the day's most important beauty and wellness news and analysis.
Forbes
01-04-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
The United States Does For Housing What Singapore Had For Cars
There is a great article in the New York Times about Singapore's policy on cars which makes it prohibitively expensive to own and drive a car. I thought it would be a great interesting to take the article and roughly replace the word 'car' in the article with the word 'housing' and 'Singapore' with 'the United States.' Reading the article with the lens of housing falls into the category of Hubert Humphrey's ad deriding the idea of Spiro Agnew as Vice President as 'it would be funny if weren't so serious.' The article, titled, Why Driving in Singapore is 'Like Wearing a Rolex, is replete with opportunities to call out the similarities with how we handle housing in the United States. It starts with the headline itself. Why Housing in the United States is 'Like Wearing a Rolex.' Here's a really good language swap from the article. Here's the original paragraph. 'Singapore, an island city-state that is smaller than New York City, charges drivers thousands of dollars just for the right to buy a vehicle. The price of the permits, which were introduced in 1990 to limit pollution and congestion, rises with a car's value.' Here's my Mad Lib version. 'New York, an island city that is bigger than Singapore, charges people who need housing thousands of dollars just for the right to buy or rent a home. The price of the permits, and zoning which was introduced in 1920s to limit greed and profiteering, rises with a home or apartment's value.' There's even the hard luck story so common in housing stories in the United States. There's the story of Joy Fang who bought an old Hyundai three years ago for $58,000, 'nearly twice the price the pre-permit price of a new model of that sedan.' Shocking. I'm not even going to link to one of the thousands of stories that highlight how much a person or family is spending on renting a home or buying one. Here's the Times about Fang's car. 'Each month the couple pays about $1,400, or more than 10 percent of their household budget, for the car, the permit, and other expenses like road taxes, fuel and parking. To offset the cost, they cut back on eating out and traveling.' Here's my version, doctored up for housing in the United States. 'Each month the couple pays about $4,400, or more than 30 percent of their household budget, for the house, the zoning permits, and other expenses like property taxes, other taxes, and parking. To offset the cost, they cut back on eating out and traveling.' But here's the big difference between the hassle of owning and driving a car in Singapore and housing in the United States: in Singapore there are substitutes. Another subject in the Times story says, 'We're not sitting in traffic for two or three hours just to get to work.' The resident of Singapore articulates that 'having an efficient public transport system also makes it easier for Singaporeans to not use a car, and he takes it himself when he needs to go downtown.' There is no substitute for housing. If a public policy taxes and regulates a commodity to the point that it is far too painful to buy and own it, but offers alternatives, then people will likely give up the commodity. In the case of Singapore, the Times story notes, 'There is little reason for many Singaporeans to own a car. Most residents rely on an expanding and affordable public transportation system that stretches across the island. Even long journeys cost less than 2.50 Singapore dollars, or about $2, and ride-hailing platforms such as Grab are plentiful.' The substitute for owning a home in the United States is renting, but what is the substitute for renting? There isn't one. When poor people are pressed because housing is too expensive, they're faced with the same challenge Fang describes, cutting back on other necessities or trying to effectively manage limited cash flow. To me, it is clear, Singapore decided to constrain the ownership and operating of a car for policy reasons – climate change, infrastructure savings etc. – but it also created an off ramp (pun intended) for people to find alternatives to owning and operating a car. Zoning and other regulations, taxes, fees, and fines for housing in the United States function just like the limits on car ownership in Singapore, except that public policy here has failed to provide any alternatives. Instead, if we follow the analogy, we create limits on owning and renting a home, then we limit the supply of subsidized alternatives with even more regulation making the cost of Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) housing, for example, prohibitive too. Imagine if Singapore did what it has done with cars but limited ridership of public transit, produced very routes, and created waiting lists for a trip. Whatever one thinks of Singapore's policy, applying it to housing through zoning and regulation is misguided at best and at worst, a cruel punishment for people who earn less money.
