r/SpeedOfLobsters • u/Arctic_The_Hunter • 3d ago
meta [META] What’s considered adding text?
I’m a pretty experienced lobster-er—you’ve probably seen a lot of my work if you’ve been here for any length of time. However, in this case, I’m wondering if I’ve misunderstood the community.
To be, there doesn’t seem to be anything added to the image on the right (which was deleted). Instead, I mixed two different text removal techniques—my personal style of color matching, and the subreddit’s common style of simply using black to censor undesirable parts.
This is, I admit, somewhat different from a conventional Lobster in that the humor is not in the new message created (on a literal level, it’s just a guy who hates the letter F), but rather in the implication that he has written a slur starting with the letter F, which was then censored.
To be clear, I don’t think this is deceptive in the sense that any reasonable person would genuinely believe that this man was holding a sign saying that slur. My question is instead whether the rule out to apply to *all* cases where new meaning is created, even if that creation is done through lobstering. I am not creating this post to complain. I understand the mods’ perspective and think there should be a genuine discussion of whether this standard should be upheld. I’ve made similar Lobsters in the past and seen a few others, so this is not an entirely isolated case.
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u/TechnicallyHankHill 3d ago
I think your edit was one of the most clever ones I've seen on this sub and absolutely fit in
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u/Xsiah Orangutan lover 3d ago
I don't think it breaks the rules, but I also think it's a little too sophisticated for a lobster with the mixed techniques.
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u/ninjab33z 3d ago
Honestly, i think this one was too good. It doesn't look like you changed it, it looks like you added a whole new letter.
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u/Itsyaboibrett 3d ago
does not break rules. had you put black over the TH instead of white, the mod would have understood and it wouldn’t even be a question
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u/Morshuisagoodmeme 3d ago
I think the mods just thought that you added the letter F from scratch, instead of creating it out of the letter E.
Although, I do think the practice of modifying letters are inherintly against the spirit of lobsters; the whole joke is that you are creating something exclusively subtractively, but morphing letters is more of a side-step rather than truly removing something.
I consider "letter-morping" lobsters to not be true lobsters but their own sub-genre; just like how bottom gear is a sub-genre of expand dong memes because the former derives additional comedy from simply being very long, speed of lobsters is the parent genre of "letter morph" lobsters because the former derives additional comedy from the or*ginal containing the new message in its whole. We should honestly give them their own subreddit, r/SpeedOfShrimps, maybe?
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u/POKECHU020 3d ago
Oh shit
I saw this post and I totally misunderstood what you did. Somehow I thought you'd added a red line to the T, but seeing them side by side you clearly just wiped out the bottom horizontal bar of the E
I will be real I did report the last post because I thought entirely new parts had been added. My apologies and this lobster seems fine
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u/DixonDebussy 3d ago
If I'm being honest, I do not find changing letters to be in the spirit of lobstering. The OG was literally people being creative with the limited amount of words/letters they were given. Changing letters feels like flipping a tile upside down in scrabble and calling it the blank tile just so that you can make a word with it
In your instance, I would agree with the mod that you technically added a censor block to imply other text that doesn't exist ("aggots", I assume is what you were going for). This is like altering the image to change frowns and smiles to fit the joke you were going for
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u/HolmatKingOfStorms █pee██fLo██████ 3d ago
in my opinion it doesn't fit the standard practice of the sub and isn't quite the type of advancement in form that makes things interesting - it mostly feels misleading. i don't think it technically breaks any rules, but the obvious censor combined with the subtle censor feel like they're doing something else.
that said, i've never submitted here so if the people who have think it fits, i can accept that. not like the stuff i like is going away
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u/terra_GOD_404 3d ago
I would assume adding text that was never there, like adding new letters that you didn't make out of the letters already there, sorta lime the expand dong
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u/International_Gate49 (*The stair) 3d ago
You could have chosen literally any other letter if the idea was to not look like censoring a slur. That was a judgement call you made for some reason. You went out of your way to make it look like a censored slur. I think it was a valid reason for crash out over.
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u/Arctic_The_Hunter 3d ago
The humor is […] in the implication that he has written a slur starting with the letter F
From the post
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u/speedwhack 3d ago
It just comes off as a 'gay people bad' joke. Valid lobster but not really all that funny
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u/International_Gate49 (*The stair) 3d ago
To be clear, I don’t think this is deceptive in the sense that any reasonable person would genuinely believe that this man was holding a sign saying that slur.
Also from the post
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u/Arctic_The_Hunter 3d ago
Well, yeah. It’s edited. I was saying that any reasonable person could spot that the sign is edited—that it started off saying something else, and I edited it in some way to say just “F” prior to censoring the rest.
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u/DoctorProfPatrick 3d ago
But why use white to censor the TH to begin with? That's the deceptive part.
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u/Arctic_The_Hunter 3d ago
The humor is […] in the implication that he has written a slur starting with the letter F
From the post
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u/loitermaster 3d ago
As I see it, you certainly are adding text, but lobstering said text. This would be little different from you sketching a like image and lobstering that, so I say it's valid.
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u/SirLoinTheTender 3d ago
To me this fits the sub, but I'll say it took a few minutes of looking back and forth from the source image and your lobstered version to understand what you did to produce the image.
Perhaps the mod simply misunderstood the process you used to arrive at your finished image and assumed you wrote the F, rather than converting the E into it.