Feel-good fuel for your Friday: NASA houseplants, heroic exits, and a wild iPhone hack

“Take everything that’s yours.” Challenge accepted.

He probably expected her to grab the pictures from her desk and maybe a wall calendar. He was tragically mistaken.

u/everybodys-therapist wasn’t just a designer, she was the unofficial backbone of her company. AV setups? She handled them. Big events? She ran them. And when the company refused to invest in decent gear, she brought her own, labeling every piece. (Behold, Chekov’s Label Gun!)

After five years, she was laid off in a “downsizing” to make room for a cheaper, fresh-out-of-college hire. Her boss’s parting words?

“Take everything that is yours, as you won’t be coming back.”

Careful what you wish for, buddy.

With help from a coworker, she swept through the office like Marie Kondo on a revenge kick. Every cable, camera, and mic she’d loaned was hauled out to a waiting truck. Even the AV booth’s catwalk wasn’t spared.

“With every box we loaded, my boss grew increasingly panicked… I felt like the Grinch.”

Reddit went wild. Dozens chimed in with their own stories of gear-grabs and glorious exits. The kicker? Her company didn’t survive the year.

Moral of the story: If someone props up your entire operation, maybe don’t send them packing without checking whose name is on the equipment.

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Ever scroll so hard you lose 10 days?

Five hundred years ago, a pope fixed Easter. Your iPhone kept the receipt.

Open the Calendar app. Start scrolling backward. Keep going. No, further. Like, way further. It’ll take a minute but you can do it, you know you have that doom scroll finger stamina.

Eventually, you’ll hit October 1582, then something wild happens: the 5th through the 14th just... aren’t there. Not a glitch. Not a bug. A feature, courtesy of one very determined Pope and an extremely detail-oriented developer in Silicon Valley somewhere.

See, the Julian calendar was falling out of sync with Earth’s orbit. So Pope Gregory XIII fixed it by slicing ten days clean off the calendar. Easter was drifting all out of whack with when it was meant to be. One papal decree later, and the world lost 10 days. Everyone went to bed on October 4 and woke up on October 15. I wonder what happened to everyone’s birthdays…

Pull out your phone and give it a try, it tickles a very strange little bit of your brain to see it. Call it historical accuracy. Call it a fun flex. Either way, it beats doomscrolling TikTok in bed.

NASA tested 100s of houseplants and these 18 had the Right Stuff

This NASA research is your official excuse to absolutely go nuts in the Home Depot greens department.

Back in the late ’80s, NASA wasn’t just launching rockets, they were studying houseplants. Why? To find the best natural air purifiers for astronauts living in sealed environments. The result: a list of 18 plants that don’t just look cute, they actively clean your air.

These green heroes absorb common toxins like formaldehyde, benzene, and ammonia, while quietly converting CO₂ into oxygen. NASA even had a plant-to-room ratio: one plant per 100 square feet.

Ready to go full space-gardener? Here are a few standouts:

🌱 Spider Plant – Unkillable, and it fights carbon monoxide like a champ.
🌼 Peace Lily – Elegant and hardworking. Just don’t let your cat snack on it.
🌴 Bamboo Palm – Gives tropical spa energy and tackles benzene.
🌸 Florist’s Chrysanthemum – Your best bet against ammonia. It also blooms like a boss.
🌿 English Ivy – An air-cleaning vine that doubles as living wall decor.

Pro tip: Some plants may be toxic to pets, so check before you plant-shop with reckless optimism.

NASA's full dream team includes 18 picks in total. See the complete list before your next Home Depot run.

From the family group text…

Today TikTok offers up a sibling fight in the making. One user lays it out; “where can I get this?! I have a niece being born soon and my sister would hate this”. Warm up for your weekend rager with this toddler who is both learning her ones and twos, and working the ones and twos on a charmingly irritating plastic kiddie-turntable.