This Facebook Group Is Dedicated To Unaesthetic Images, Here Are 145 Of The Worst Ones (New Pics)

A gorgeous field of flowers swaying in the breeze. A warm latte with a perfect design swirled on top. An apartment decorated with that signature Scandinavian style adorned with healthy, green houseplants. We all love aesthetics, and there’s nothing like that satisfying feeling they give us.
But in a world of flawless Instagram feeds and websites that were designed to be pieces of artwork, sometimes we need a palate cleanser in the form of unaesthetic pics. Below, you’ll find a selection of photos we’ve carefully curated from the ‘Things That Are Not Aesthetic‘ Facebook page. I’ll warn you right now that you might hate these images, pandas, but we hope you’ll still be entertained by them! Enjoy scrolling through, and be sure to upvote the pics that have value other than beauty.
There’s so much pressure nowadays to have a great aesthetic online. Instagram users curate their feeds and use the same filter on every picture to create a cohesive photo album. TikTokers use filters and editing to portray their lives as more picturesque than an A24 film. We’re all so hyper fixated on things being beautiful and perfectly aligned that sometimes, unaesthetic pics are actually a breath of fresh air. This is something that the creators of Things That Are Not Aesthetic have certainly figured out, as their Facebook page has amassed an impressive 3.3 million followers in only 5 years online.
The account’s intro welcomes readers to “walk into [their] world and become one with the Internet’s demise through an intricate mix of unaesthetic,” and clearly, many Facebook users have taken them up on the offer. The page has shared over 6,100 images over the years and serves as a constant reminder that just because an image isn’t beautiful doesn’t mean that it holds no value. The page shares hilarious memes, funny screenshots and even some wholesome pics that definitely bring joy to followers’ lives, but wouldn’t necessarily end up on a highly curated aesthetic account.
Things That Are Not Aesthetic rebels against what the vast majority of the internet shows us. Sure, we all know that realistically we wake up with bedhead and might be guilty of taking our dogs outside to potty wearing Crocs and sweatpants (clearly, I’m talking about myself). But we’re human! We can’t ever be flawless, and there’s no point in pretending we are online.
That being said, there are valid reasons why so many of us value aesthetics. According to Jodie Locklear, the woman behind Simple Minded, there’s a connection between beauty and happiness. Gallup has found through their happiness surveys that living in an aesthetically pleasing city can actually boost residents’ happiness levels. We also tend to associate the same feelings with our perception of beauty that we do with happiness, such as calmness, appreciation, reflection and hope.
According to some experts, the connection between happiness and beauty actually comes down to economics and evolution. One study from Yale University found that being beautiful can actually add to a person’s overall life happiness by a ratio of about one to ten. The possible explanations cited for this were that attraction comes down to evolution, and if someone is beautiful they are likely to be healthy and therefore happy. And attractive people tend to earn more money, which provides them with more resources and makes it a bit easier for them to enjoy their lives and be happy.
Apparently, it’s also been scientifically proven that attractive things simply work better than unattractive things. In 1995, researchers Kurosu and Kashimura in Japan conducted a study where participants were faced with two different ATM interfaces, one that was aesthetically pleasing and one that was not. Overwhelmingly, participants found the more attractive option easier to use, despite the fact that the only difference between the interfaces was their appearance. Donald Norman suggests that this might be because of the positive impact beautiful things have on our brains. Without having the feel-good effects of looking at something pretty, our brains just can’t figure out ugly things as easily.
As humans, we’re heavily impacted by aesthetics, likely more than we even realize. When it comes to online casinos, for example, using an attractive croupier can make a player more likely to stick around. They see a beautiful dealer as something that adds to the overall experience, and they’re “more likely to play longer and spend more money when they feel immersed in an attractive and engaging environment,” Paul Davies at Player explains. This ties into the same aesthetic-usability concept that the two different ATM interfaces addressed.
The aesthetics of anything can impact our emotions, including buildings and structures. In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton compares how one might feel when entering a McDonalds with harsh lighting, plastic furniture and the bright red and yellow color scheme with how you might feel when entering the gorgeous Westminster Cathedral in London. “Although the Westminster Cathedral has the same principle elements of architecture as the McDonald’s—windows, doors, floors, ceilings, and seats—the cathedral helps people to relax and reflect, where the fast food restaurant causes one to feel stressed and hurried,” Cody C. Delistraty at The Atlantic explains.
While beautiful things and people aren’t always attainable, some believe that nice aesthetics do bring us hope and something to aspire to be or have. “Beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it,” writes Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas in Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. And this doesn’t have to only speak to vanity. We can work on making our homes more beautiful, creating beautiful pieces of art to hang on the walls and aim to prepare our meals in the most gorgeous ways just for the fun of it! If seeing something stunning will bring us a bit more joy in our days, why shouldn’t we aim for the beautiful?
I can’t help but think that these unaesthetic images that audiences love are the equivalent of someone who has a wonderful personality but would not necessarily win any beauty pageants. We don’t care at all about the physical appearances of our friends and loved ones, we value them for their warmth, love, intelligence and the wonder they bring to the world. So why judge a meme or an image just by its cover? If it makes you chuckle or amuses you, its existence is worth it!
Are you feeling inspired to care less about your aesthetic, pandas? Or perhaps this list is having the opposite effect, and you suddenly feel like your aesthetic is extremely important? Regardless of where you’re at, we hope you’re enjoying these amusing, unaesthetic pics. Keep upvoting all of your favorites, and then if you’re interested in checking out Bored Panda’s previous articles featuring Things That Are Not Aesthetic, you can find them right here and here!
Christian family goes in hiding after being cleared of blasphemy

LAHORE, Pakistan — A court in Pakistan granted bail to a Christian falsely charged with blasphemy, but he and his family have separated and gone into hiding amid threats to their lives, sources said.
Haroon Shahzad, 45, was released from Sargodha District Jail on Nov. 15, said his attorney, Aneeqa Maria. Shahzad was charged with blasphemy on June 30 after posting Bible verses on Facebook that infuriated Muslims, causing dozens of Christian families in Chak 49 Shumaali, near Sargodha in Punjab Province, to flee their homes.
Lahore High Court Judge Ali Baqir Najfi granted bail on Nov. 6, but the decision and his release on Nov. 15 were not made public until now due to security fears for his life, Maria said.
Shahzad told Morning Star News by telephone from an undisclosed location that the false accusation has changed his family’s lives forever.
“My family has been on the run from the time I was implicated in this false charge and arrested by the police under mob pressure,” Shahzad told Morning Star News. “My eldest daughter had just started her second year in college, but it’s been more than four months now that she hasn’t been able to return to her institution. My other children are also unable to resume their education as my family is compelled to change their location after 15-20 days as a security precaution.”
Though he was not tortured during incarceration, he said, the pain of being away from his family and thinking about their well-being and safety gave him countless sleepless nights.
“All of this is due to the fact that the complainant, Imran Ladhar, has widely shared my photo on social media and declared me liable for death for alleged blasphemy,” he said in a choked voice. “As soon as Ladhar heard about my bail, he and his accomplices started gathering people in the village and incited them against me and my family. He’s trying his best to ensure that we are never able to go back to the village.”
Shahzad has met with his family only once since his release on bail, and they are unable to return to their village in the foreseeable future, he said.
“We are not together,” he told Morning Star News. “They are living at a relative’s house while I’m taking refuge elsewhere. I don’t know when this agonizing situation will come to an end.”
The Christian said the complainant, said to be a member of Islamist extremist party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan and also allegedly connected with banned terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, filed the charge because of a grudge. Shahzad said he and his family had obtained valuable government land and allotted it for construction of a church building, and Ladhar and others had filed multiple cases against the allotment and lost all of them after a four-year legal battle.
“Another probable reason for Ladhar’s jealousy could be that we were financially better off than most Christian families of the village,” he said. “I was running a successful paint business in Sargodha city, but that too has shut down due to this case.”
Regarding the social media post, Shahzad said he had no intention of hurting Muslim sentiments by sharing the biblical verse on his Facebook page.
“I posted the verse a week before Eid Al Adha [Feast of the Sacrifice] but I had no idea that it would be used to target me and my family,” he said. “In fact, when I came to know that Ladhar was provoking the villagers against me, I deleted the post and decided to meet the village elders to explain my position.”
The village elders were already influenced by Ladhar and refused to listen to him, Shahzad said.
“I was left with no option but to flee the village when I heard that Ladhar was amassing a mob to attack me,” he said.
Shahzad pleaded with government authorities for justice, saying he should not be punished for sharing a verse from the Bible that in no way constituted blasphemy.
Similar to other cases
Shahzad’s attorney, Maria, told Morning Star News that events in Shahzad’s case were similar to other blasphemy cases filed against Christians.
“Defective investigation, mala fide on the part of the police and complainant, violent protests against the accused persons and threats to them and their families, forcing their displacement from their ancestral areas, have become hallmarks of all blasphemy allegations in Pakistan,” said Maria, head of The Voice Society, a Christian paralegal organization.
She said that the case filed against Shahzad was gross violation of Section 196 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which states that police cannot register a case under the Section 295-A blasphemy statute against a private citizen without the approval of the provincial government or federal agencies.
Maria added that Shahzad and his family have continued to suffer even though there was no evidence of blasphemy.
“The social stigma attached with a blasphemy accusation will likely have a long-lasting impact on their lives, whereas his accuser, Imran Ladhar, would not have to face any consequence of his false accusation,” she said.
The judge who granted bail noted that Shahzad was charged with blasphemy under Section 295-A, which is a non-cognizable offense, and Section 298, which is bailable. The judge also noted that police had not submitted the forensic report of Shahzad’s cell phone and said evidence was required to prove that the social media was blasphemous, according to Maria.
Bail was set at 100,000 Pakistani rupees (US $350) and two personal sureties, and the judge ordered police to further investigate, she said.
Shahzad, a paint contractor, on June 29 posted on his Facebook page 1 Cor. 10:18-21 regarding food sacrificed to idols, as Muslims were beginning the four-day festival of Eid al-Adha, which involves slaughtering an animal and sharing the meat.
A Muslim villager took a screenshot of the post, sent it to local social media groups and accused Shahzad of likening Muslims to pagans and disrespecting the Abrahamic tradition of animal sacrifice.
Though Shahzad made no comment in the post, inflammatory or otherwise, the situation became tense after Friday prayers when announcements were made from mosque loudspeakers telling people to gather for a protest, family sources previously told Morning Star News.
Fearing violence as mobs grew in the village, most Christian families fled their homes, leaving everything behind.
In a bid to restore order, the police registered a case against Shahzad under Sections 295-A and 298. Section 295-A relates to “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs” and is punishable with imprisonment of up to 10 years and fine, or both. Section 298 prescribes up to one year in prison and a fine, or both, for hurting religious sentiments.
Pakistan ranked seventh on Open Doors’ 2023 World Watch List of the most difficult places to be a Christian, up from eighth the previous year.
Morning Star News is the only independent news service focusing exclusively on the persecution of Christians. The nonprofit’s mission is to provide complete, reliable, even-handed news in order to empower those in the free world to help persecuted Christians, and to encourage persecuted Christians by informing them that they are not alone in their suffering.
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What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem

It’s now two years since Facebook changed its name to Meta, ushering in a brief but blazing enthusiasm over “the Metaverse”, a concept from science fiction that suddenly seemed to be the next inevitable leap in technology. For most people in tech, however, the term has since lost its luster, seemingly supplanted by any product with “artificial intelligence” attached to its description.
But the true story of the Metaverse’s rise and fall in public awareness is much more complicated and interesting than simply being the short life cycle of a buzzword — it also reflects a collective failure of both imagination and understanding.
Consider:
The forgotten novel
Ironically, many tech reporters discounted or even ignored the profound influence of Snow Crash on actual working technologists. The founders of Roblox and Epic (creator of Fortnite) among many other developers were directly inspired by the novel. Despite that, Neal Stephenson’s classic cyberpunk tale has often been depicted as if it were an obscure dystopian tome which merely coined the term. As opposed to what it actually did: describe the concept with a biblical specificity that thousands of developers have referenced in their virtual world projects — many of which have already become extremely popular.
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You can see this lack of clarity in many of the mass tech headlines attempting to describe the Metaverse in the wake of Facebook’s name change:
In a widely shared “obituary” to the Metaverse, Business Insider’s Ed Zitron even compounded the confusion still further by inexplicably misattributing the concept to TRON, the original Disney movie from the 80s.
Had the media referenced Snow Crash far more accurately when the buzz began, they’d come away with a much better understanding of why so many technologists are excited by the Metaverse concept — and realize its early incarnation is already gaining strong user traction.
Because in the book, the Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world that’s simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools that are integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology. In other words, it’s more or less like Roblox and Fortnite — platforms with many tens of millions of active users.
But then again, the tech media can’t be fully blamed for following Mark Zuckerberg’s lead.
Rather than create a vision for its Metaverse iterating on already successful platforms — Roblox’s 2020 IPO filing even describes itself as the metaverse — Meta’s executive leadership cobbled together a mishmash of disparate products. Most of which, such as remotely working in VR headsets, remain far from proven. According to an internal Blind survey, a majority of Zuckerberg’s own employees say he has not adequately explained what he means by the Metaverse even to them.
Grievous of all, Zuckerberg and his CTO Andrew Bosworth promoted a conception of the Metaverse in which the Quest headset was central. To do so, they had to overlook compelling evidence — raised by senior Microsoft researcher danah boyd at the time of the company acquiring Oculus in 2014 — that females have a high propensity to get nauseous using VR.

Contacted in late 2022 while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, danah told me no one at Oculus or Meta followed up with her about the research questions she raised. Over the years, I have asked several senior Meta staffers (past and present) about this and have yet to receive an adequate reply. Unsurprisingly, Meta’s Quest 2 VR headset has an estimated install base of only about 20 million units, significantly smaller than the customer count of leading video game consoles. A product that tends to make half the population puke is not exactly destined for the mass market — let alone a reliable base for building the Metaverse.
Ironically, Neal Stephenson himself has frequently insisted that virtual reality is absolutely not a prerequisite for the Metaverse, since flat screens display immersive virtual worlds just fine. But here again, the tech media instead ratified Meta’s flawed VR-centric vision by constantly illustrating articles about the Metaverse with photos of people happily donning headsets to access it — inadvertently setting up a straw man destined to soon go ablaze.
Duct-taped to yet another buzzword
Further sealing the Metaverse hype wave’s fate, it crested around the same time that Web3 and crypto were still enjoying their own euphoria period. This inevitably spawned the “cryptoverse” with platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox. When the crypto crash came, it was easy to assume the Metaverse was also part of that fall.
But the cryptoverse platforms failed in the same way that other crypto schemes have gone awry: By offering a virtual world as a speculative opportunity, it primarily attracted crypto speculators, not virtual world enthusiasts. By October of 2022, Decentraland was only tracking 7,000 daily active users, game industry analyst Lars Doucet informed me.
“Everybody who is still playing is basically just playing poker,” as Lars put it. “This seems to be a kind of recurring trend in dead-end crypto projects. Kind of an eerie rhyme with left-behind American cities where drugs come in and anyone who is left is strung out at a slot machine parlor or liquor store.”
All this occurred as the rise of generative AI birthed another, shinier buzzword — one that people not well-versed in immersive virtual worlds could better understand.
But as “the Metaverse” receded as a hype totem, a hilarious thing happened: Actual metaverse platforms continued growing. Roblox now counts over 300 million monthly active users, making its population nearly the size of the entire United States; Fortnite had its best usage day in 6 years. Meta continues plodding along but seems to finally be learning from its mistakes — for instance, launching a mobile version of its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds.

Into this mix, a new wave of metaverse platforms is preparing to launch, refreshingly led by seasoned, successful game developers: Raph Koster with Playable Worlds, Jenova Chen with his early, successful forays into metaverse experiences, and Everywhere, a metaverse platform lead developed by a veteran of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
At some point, everyone in tech who co-signed the “death” of the Metaverse may notice this sustained growth. By then however, the term may no longer require much usage, just as the term “information superhighway” fell away as broadband Internet went mainstream.
Wagner James Au is author of Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For
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