Everybody’s talking about Tide Pods. You see, last year people starting eating them for some reason, and that reason was mostly as a dare. The “Tide Pod Challenge” was and is the latest dumb and dangerous fad that young people do to kill time, impress each other, and silence their thoughts. Videos of people doing this awful thing to their body—swallowing plastic-encased nuggets of laundry detergent—have gone viral, although YouTube is trying to police them and get rid of the most dangerous ones. Nevertheless, the swirly, two-colored soap modules have become etched in the public consciousness.
They’re the fidget spinners of 2018, in other words, and they’re so much at the forefront of everybody’s minds that even Nature is doing its own Tide Pod challenge. That, or we’re so obsessed with Tide Pods right now that we see them absolutely everywhere, even on weather tracking machines.