datamoshing

An aesthetic that first appears to be pure and basic Heterosexuals Are At It Again, but becomes increasingly uncomfortable until you finally understand:

these babygrows (onesies) with parental professions on eBay.

An entrepreneurial sort, eBay user “justtheshirt” realized that for some people, the perfect gift for, say, the baby of a beekeeper is a onesie saying “Daddy’s Little Beekeeper.” In fact, the more obscure the profession, the more excited the customer will feel about the representation! So they took a list of All the Professions, and generated a listing for each one. If someone buys a onesie, they can stamp it with whatever the listing said - and make a rather enormous profit, on a £3 onesie, having made exactly one design and used one script. Genius!

The issue is, they didn’t curate the list. Not a single human appears to have overseen this process. So they have inadvertently created some uncomfortably themed babywear, like “Daddy’s Little Maid,” “Daddy’s Little Nightwalker,” and “Daddy’s Little Courtesan.”

The database also contained a massive proportion of obscure Medieval English professions, like “fulker” and “meader” and “whipcord maker.” (The auto-generated listing enthuses something like, “the perfect gift for a whipcord maker - or just for someone who wishes they were one!”)

There are onesies for babies whose daddies are herbalists, muleteers and sacristans.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.02286