The joy of Parks and Recreation will never leave me, not even in the dark corners of Twitter. It’s a strange yet reaffirming thought for me and the other 166,000 people who follow the “out of context parks” account.

As its name suggests, the account takes scenes from the beloved NBC comedy and posts them without any context, leaving it up to the reader to interpret the meaning. 

While not affiliated with the network or the show officially, it is still part of a burgeoning trend on the social media platform. Pop culture-based out-of-context accounts have been popping up all over the place in the last few years. 

From iconic TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer to critical faves like The Good Place, from Marvel movies to recent Oscar nominee The Favourite, there are out-of-context pages devoted to all kinds of entertainment.

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The basic principle boils down to the same thing: posting close captioned screenshots without additional comment. The jokes really just needs to be taken at face value and are actually the perfect buffer from a sullen cycle of bad news and bad tweets. 

Why wouldn’t I want to be interrupted by Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt in the middle of my mindless Twitter scroll? As a lover of obscure board games and Adam Scott being nerdy, Cones of Dunshire will always warrant my attention.

Kaysi Long created the Parks account in the summer of 2017. She told Mashable she was inspired by a similar account dedicated to cult favorite Buffy. 

“I thought it’d be fun to do the same thing for a TV show I love,” she shared via email. She noticed the engagement started picking up heavily within the first 6 months. 

Long binged the show and took several screen caps along the way. “I have a ton saved up now so I haven’t had to spend too much time watching it again and again. How I decide what to post is usually pretty random,” she said. The exception is when there’s really something timely to share. 

The allure of out-of-contexts as they pertain to movies, TV, games, comic books or even people (who can say no to even more ways of taking in John Mulaney’s humor) stems from the need to consume content repeatedly and quickly.

It’s also the simplest form of a throwback. 

When I discovered the out-of-context account for The Office, another all-time favorite, I spent a joyous 15 minutes laughing as I recalled the specific details of every post. This post got me so much that I immediately felt the need to revisit the opening of Season 4’s “Money” and listen to the opening music, which is indeed very cheerful. 

The concept of sharing a singular moment of dialogue goes way back. First it was posting quotes or even lyrics without any context on AIM or Facebook, and now it’s as Instagram captions. It’s ~cool~ and fun. 

Twitter out-of-context humor is a whole other ballgame. It can be fleeting and varied, taking the most basic lines and proclaiming them to be entertaining.

For example, @NYTMinusContext tweeted nothing but random verbatim phrases from various New York Times articles. It amassed 205,000 followers in it’s almost 5 years of existence. It’s easy to see why. 

In its more recent wave, this format gets a visual and cultural makeover. The image elevates the comedy, and it speaks to our need of dissecting pop culture at a minute level.

Twitter provides the means to do this easily. 

A scene stripped down to its barest form will still come off as amusing. Emma Stone’s maniacal “Fuck! fuck! fuck! fuck!” is a real mood, regardless of whether or not you’ve seen The Favourite. 

Out-of-context accounts indirectly share a purpose: to reel you in. I started following “out of context bojack horseman” early last year without having ever seen BoJack Horseman. After liking enough tweets, I knew I had to prioritize checking this comedy off of my Netflix queue. 

If just the screenshots were enough to crack me up, the entire show would definitely win me over, right? Reader, it did. 

It proves out-of-context humor can please anyone and doubles as a great way to lure you into learning more about its original source. 

This formula even got an official Netflix stamp of approval. To promote its original witty teen drama Sex Education, the streaming platform created a verified no context account for this extremely quotable show. 

They wanted the scenes to resonate with fans and to make the people who hadn’t seen the show feel the FOMO. It’s a great way to keep the fandom growing, as the account’s 98,000 followers show.

Famed comic book writer Gail Simone, known for her work with Deadpool and Birds of Prey, is a Twitter aficionado who has created several “ridiculous” conversation-starter pop culture hashtags, including #lackofcontexttheater in 2017. 

“I love that you say something absurd, and soon, hundreds, maybe thousands of people who get the joke jump in and add to it,” she told Mashable.

In this case, she wanted to point out the weird writing of comic books that, devoid of contextual panels around it, sometimes hint at mysterious psychosexual horrors and kinks. “There’s an entire 1940’s story where Batman and the Joker spend the entire issue talking about boners, and you can’t help but laugh.”

Simone didn’t think her hashtag would blow up the way it did but even after a couple of years, the underlying trend holds up. “I went back and read all of the tweets and they made me laugh all over again,” she shared. 

“It’s simply a matter of seeing something familiar and wholesome and imagining there’s more to it.” 

It is funny to imagine an unseen world where Batman is really obsessed with Joker’s constant boners. That’s why folks are so involved with the hashtag. And that’s why they’re so involved with the entire trend of pop culture out-of-context accounts.  

Everyone gets to be in on and enjoy the joke, even if they’re not fully familiar with its genesis.

An Ode to… is a weekly column where we share the stuff we’re really into in hopes that you’ll be really into it, too.

As a girl who spends around six hours a day commuting to and from work, when I first learned about the novel, The Girl on the Train, I thought, “Excuse me? Paula Hawkins used my future memoir title.”

After explaining to my friend how disappointed I was that The Girl on the Train was taken, we started a running bit in which we would jokingly come up with other potential memoir titles extremely specific to me, that I could use should I ever decided to write a book about the bizarre and embarrassing happenings in my life. 

It became a delightfully comical tradition, but it wasn’t until I stumbled upon the @storyofmyfuckinglife Instagram account that I realized just how many deeply relatable book titles there could be in this world.

SEE ALSO: Crush Twitter proves that sometimes subtweets can be good

The @storyofmyfuckinglife account posts drawings of books with hypothetical titles that are so relatable they’ll shake you to your core. The books will call out some of your deepest insecurities while simultaneously reminding you you’re not alone in them, which is what makes the account so charming.

For instance, as much as you might feel like you’re the only person who goes back through emails to manually delete excess exclamation points, the account is here to remind you you’re not. This book titled, I Put Too Many Exclamation Points In This Email And Now I Need To Go Back And Delete A Few So They Don’t Think I’m Full Of Shit, beautifully captures the email editing process.

There’s a book cover to accurately put the Sunday Scaries into words, one to help rationalize why you spend so much time over-explaining things, and even one to highlight all that extra effort you put into impressing your co-workers.

It’s clear this account truly understands people, and it appears to be run by the same geniuses behind @tldr.wikipedia — the sassy social media encyclopedia that posts parody Wikipedia posts — so you can rest assured the content will continually deliver.

If you’ve ever found yourself apologizing to someone instead of saying “excuse me,” @storyofmyfuckinglife gets it. And you know what? This nice pink book cover might help you come to terms with the fact that you try incredibly hard to never upset anyone. 

Though at times the @storyofmyfuckinglife book covers are so ridiculously on-point that they can almost feel like direct personal attacks, they ultimately serve as lighthearted, hilarious additions to an Instagram feed, and might even lead to some helpful introspection.

If you’re ever feeling inspired to create your own book cover, the account takes submissions. But just make sure you keep your potential memoir title to yourself.

Do you hear that? Oh, it’s nothing. Just the rumblings of CHANGE.

Amazon may end a third-party vendor policy that prohibits merchants from selling their wares at lower prices outside of Amazon Marketplace, according to a new report from Axios. The news comes days after senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren unveiled her policy proposal for “breaking up Big Tech,” including Amazon.

SEE ALSO: Elizabeth Warren is coming after AmazonBasics. Why Amazon shouldn’t fight it.

The report comes from a single anonymous source “with direct knowledge of the company’s decision.” Axios claims the decision to change the price policy has been made. However, the outlet has published false reports based on anonymous sourcing before. So the news should be taken with a grain of salt; Mashable has reached out to Amazon to confirm whether it will indeed change this policy.

However, even a discussion of changes at Amazon show how just the specter of anti-trust regulation could already be having an effect. As Axios points out, Amazon changed this policy in Europe in 2013 in response to antitrust complaints. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Con) also asked the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to investigate the “price parity provisions” in December. And perhaps discussions of changing policy just need time to kick around at Amazon — but it sure looks like Warren’s announcement, and subsequent national attention to the issue of monopolies in tech, lit a fire under those Amazon butts.

Pre-emptive, voluntary measures have historically been a way that companies seek to avoid more onerous future legislation. The idea is that companies demonstrate they’re willing to make good faith changes on their own, so they won’t be forced by law to make even bigger changes in the future. We will probably see more moves like this from Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. But if Elizabeth Warren takes her agenda into the White House, or even the halls of Congress, it might not be enough.