Connexion
I've never been great at picking out thoughtful presents. I’m not the worst at presents, but I’m inconsistent. Sometimes I hit a triple and sometimes I’m tagged out at first, but I never hit that grand slam “I never knew I always needed this” present. My obligatory gifts usually go well—I give thoughtful and appropriate Secret Santa gifts to co-workers—but when I'm choosing a present for someone I love, I get overwhelmed and paralyzed searching for an object that measures up to the feelings I have, so I end up stopping at CVS and buying them a pack of batteries or something. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it makes me wonder if I’m not empathetic or caring or creative enough to be an all-time great present-picker-outer. So I turned to AI for an assist.
From piloting automatous vehicles to diagnosing cancer to letting us hear what it would sound like if Hank Williams Sr. sung "Straight Outta Compton," AI is transforming our culture quickly and ruthlessly. But there are some seemingly simple tasks that AI still can't do well—like, as I quickly figured out, picking out a thoughtful gift for a family member. When it comes to matters of the heart, AI just doesn't cut it.
There are a lot of websites and apps that promise to use AI to help people find great gifts, so I started my hunt there. Judging by Google search results, over the last few years, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people have secured domain names like “bestAIGift.co," thrown together some HTML, and set up shop in the AI gift industry. It doesn’t seem to be going well for them.
The majority of sites I looked at from the top tranche of Google recommendations have that greasy, thrown-together feel of scam websites, and most of them are broken. DreamGift at least looks legit; the website says it has been featured in the New York Times, and it offers a “personal AI gift shopper” named Bliss who asks questions about your giftee in a chat window. But Bliss doesn’t provide the suggestions she promised. When I used it, Bliss just timed out, like someone stopped paying the bill on the plugin.
Of the AI gift recommendation sites that function, most don’t use “artificial intelligence” as it is commonly understood. Instead, you fill in drop-down menus with the gift recipient’s age, gender, and your relationship to them, and it spits back a generic set of catalog links. (Thanks for the help, Giftbox, but I asked him, and my son does not want “a high-quality skateboard complete with custom grip tape” or “A DIY robotics kit for building and programming his own robots” for his birthday.)
I did find a few working sites that really use large language model AI programs to provide gift advice. But they work by opening a window to ChatGPT or other AI brains, so I decided to cut out the middleman and ask some of the biggest, most advanced AI platforms for help directly. I started each chat with “Can you help me choose the perfect gift for my son’s birthday?” and let the AI direct the conversation from there.
I started with the most well-known AI: OpenAI's ChatGPT. I put my question in, and ChatGPT responded by asking for information about my son: age, interests, personality, hobbies, etc. I entered them, and it responded with the most generic gift list possible.
I said he liked video games, hip-hop, graphic design, and baseball caps. ChatGPT said I should “research limited edition or vintage baseball caps featuring designs related to his favorite video games, hip-hop artists, or graphic design themes.”
I told ChatGPT that he is intelligent, and it suggested “an interesting book” and “a blank journal.”
That’s not bad advice or anything, but a book he might like and things related to his interests are so generic that the list is fairly useless. The only specific gift ChatGPT mentioned was "vinyl records of hip-hop artists." I ran that by my kid and he scoffed and said "It's 2024. Who has a record player?"
That said, if you were having trouble understanding how a person’s hobby could be “shopped for” it might help you brainstorm basic ideas.
Rating: 3 out of 5.
My next stop was Microsoft Copilot. I asked “Can you help me choose the perfect gift for my son’s 17th birthday?” It didn’t ask about him at at all; it just replied with a link to a box of survivalist tools from Temu.
I admire Copilot’s decisiveness, but I’m not sure what my kid would do with a flint stone and “fake shrimp bait” in Los Angeles, and the knife is a little much. Besides, if you’re paying 23 dollars for survivalist gear from Temu, you probably don’t want to survive that much.
I responded to Copilot with “Whoa. My kid is not Rambo. Try again.” And it immediately sent a link to a “Gentleman’s Gasher” hunting knife.
I am not sure why Copilot thinks my child should have weapons, but I’m mildly terrified at the implications.
Rating: 1 out of 5.
Qualified is a B2B company that just launched an “AI SDR” named Piper to help the company “disrupt the modern pipeline generation process by giving marketing and sales leaders a newer, faster way to grow pipeline.” I don’t know what any of that means, but it looks like this:
Here's how our chat went:
A direct approach clearly wasn't going to work, so I tried to speak the AI's language.
A dead end. So I changed tactics:
After more cajoling and coaching, this actually started working, and Piper began planning my kids' party:
But just as I was about about to get the present recommendation...
... a human at Qualified noticed what I was doing and butted in.
So I bid a hasty retreat.
Qualified was cool, and its bot handled my weird request really well, so I'm sure it's great at B2B pipeline-based business metric analytics and quarterly profit stock markets or whatever, but I ultimately wasn't able to determine its ability to recommend a good gift.
Rating: 2 out of 5
If AIs were people, Claude is the only one I'd hang out with. From its presentation to its responses, Claude comes across as warm and approachable. It's not as generic as ChatGPT, it doesn't think my son should have weapons like Copilot, and it isn't a hard-driving careerist like Piper. Still, its initial gift list was was nearly as generic as ChatGPT's.
But I realized maybe the problem was me. Maybe I hadn't gotten specific enough about who my son is, who I am, and what the gift a father gives to his son on his 17th birthday means to us both. So I opened an emotional vein and spent hours (literally) telling the machine everything about myself, my son, and our relationship. (AIs are good listeners.). Then I asked it for the ultimate recommendation: Here's what it said:
I would have never thought of that gift! So maybe it was actually the perfect present. I asked my son what he would think if I got him a vintage typewriter for his birthday and he thought the idea was hilariously, laughably terrible, "the worst present you could possibly get me." Worse than anything off the list of generic gifts from ChatGPT.
Rank: 1 out of 5
AI is bad at picking out presents for the same reason it's bad at telling jokes. When AI isn't being psychotic like Copilot, it works by analyzing billions of sentences and picking out the most likely response to a question without weighing whether its sources are good or bad. It's aiming for the middle, so any joke it tells is going to be mildly amusing and never wildly creative, and the gift list it provides is always going to be "a blank journal" or "an interesting book." If you press for details, the interesting book will be a book that the most people other people have called "interesting"—in other words, a book that isn't interesting at all.
Although running AI's suggestions by my son was hilarious, and we ended up having a long, interesting conversation about AI's limitations and how funny but also scary it is when AI gets things wrong. So maybe that was the gift the artificial intelligence was guiding me to all along. Or not. In the end, I'll probably just get him some Steam cards.
It’s been a few years since Lifehacker looked at the slang of Generation Z—long enough that Generation Alpha has had time to develop and spread some of its own special buzzwords and jargon. Below is an alphabetized collection of slang taken from both Gen Z and Gen A, in case someone younger than you says something you don't understand. As with all slang, if you need an online list to know what a word means, you are too old to say it aloud.
Ate/eat: Done particularly well, particularly regarding clothing. ie: "You ate that outfit." See also: "serving"
Aura: Someone who is mysterious and cool is said to "have aura."
Bed-rotting: Staying in bed all day. You may know it as “lazing around.” See also: "Hurkle-durkle."
Bop: A girl who sleeps around. Also: a great song.
Brain-rot: A description of the overuse of stupid slang. See also: “Skibidi”
Bubba truck: A lifted or otherwise modified pick-up truck
Chad: An attractive man; i.e. an “alpha male”
Chat: A reference to streamers addressing their chat windows aloud. Saying “chat” in real life is an ironic joke.
Coomer: A man who masturbates too often
Corn: “Corn” is algo-speak that means “porn.” Used in online spaces where the word might cause your account to be flagged or banned.
Coworker-core: A catch-all description for things that are unfunny or uninteresting in a way that appeals to older people
Delulu: Delusional
Doomer: A person who is overly negative and/or cynical
Drip: A fashionable or stylish look
Edgar: A variation of the Caesar haircut worn especially among hispanic males. Also refers to the kind of person who wears the haircut.
Fanum tax: The theft of food between friends. Named for streamer Fanum, known for “taxing” his friends by taking bites of their meals or stealing fries.
Fent-fold: A description of the bent-over posture of people nodding on heavy drugs
Gamer dent: The temporary indentation left on someone’s hair or skin after wearing headphones for too long
Geeker: Someone who uses a lot of drugs
Glaze: To overly praise someone, often insincerely, or with the hope of getting something in return
Green fn: An interjection one might used when someone does something cool or impressive. Often used ironically.
Gooning: Extended masturbation without orgasm done for the purpose of entering an altered state of consciousness
Gyatt or Gyat: Once an interjection used when seeing someone sexy, like “god-DAMN,” “gyatt” has come to mean “attractive booty.”
Hurkle-durkle: Based on an archaic Scottish word, “hurkle-durkle” means to lounge in bed after it is time to get up. See also: “bed-rotting."
"It's so over": The situation is hopeless. The opposite of "we're so back." See also: "Doomer."
Jelqing: The use of stretching or weights in an attempt to increase penis size
Jit: A kid. Used ironically online
JOMO: A play on FOMO (fear of missing out) JOMO is an acronym that stands for “joy of missing out.”
"Learn Chinese": Sports slang directed at failing players. They are in danger of being sent to play in China, so they should "learn Chinese."
Looksmaxxing: Maximizing one’s physical attractiveness through personal grooming, working out, and dressing stylishly. See also: “-maxxing.”
-maxxing: A suffix used with any word to indicate trying to improve. Seeing your friends could be called "friendmaxxing," working out could be called "gymmaxxing," making jokes could be called "jestermaxxing" etc.
Mewing: A facial exercise meant to strengthen the jawline
Mirror sex: Using a mirror to watch yourself have sex
Mog: To be more attractive than someone, usually in an intentional or aggressive way. Example: "I was rizzing up this girl, but he walked in and totally mogged me."
Neurospicy: A different way of saying “neuro-divergent”
Opp: Short for "opposition." Someone who is out to get you. An enemy.
Regarded: “Regarded” is algo-speak for “retarded"
Rizz: As a noun, "rizz" means charisma. As a verb, rizz or rizz up means attracting someone with your charisma.
Serve: Wearing a particularly stylish outfit. See also: "ate."
Serve cunt: To act in a powerfully and unapologetically feminine way; to slay
Skibidi Toilet: Named after “Skibidi Toilet,” a popular series of YouTube videos, “skibidi” itself has no specific meaning, beyond ridiculing the overuse of slang itself. See “brain-rot.”
Sigma: A “sigma male” is a lone wolf who is powerful and competent, as opposed to a traditional alpha male stereotypes.
Sweat: A person who tries too hard, usually used in reference to video games. The adjective form is "sweaty."
Soyjack: a cartoon image of an emasculated man with an open-mouthed smile and an excited expression. Based on “soy-boy,” or weak man.
Spoopy: Spooky
Striker: Stolen/no-title car
Tradwife: Believer in traditional married gender roles
Unc: Short for "uncle," used to describe slightly older people. Example: "The class of 2024 are unc-status to the class of 2028."
Twelve: Police
Twin: Best friend.
"We're so back": Opposite of "it's so over"
Yapping: Describes a presentational style often seen on online streams of talking a lot and/or quickly while not saying anything worthwhile
Zoomer Perm: A curly on top, short on the sides haircut popular among young people.
You can get this Pop-A-Shade 3-person tent on sale for $27.99 right now (reg. $79.99). It comes in blue, green, or orange and expands from its carrying bag in seconds and folds back up almost as quickly. You can use it for music festivals, tailgating, hiking, or right in your backyard for protection against rain, wind, sun, and bugs with silver-bonded nylon sides, Oxford fabric flooring, and built-in insect netting. It also has a skylight at the top for extra ventilation when the elements allow, or added light when it's closed, as well as an internal hook for hanging a lamp or mini fan.
You can get this Pop-A-Shade 3-person tent on sale for $27.99 right now (reg. $79.99), though prices can change at any time.
For the first time in American history, a former president is the defendant in a felony trial, and the misinformation, rumors, and fake news are coming in hot from the Trump trial. Below are some quick fact checks of some of the many dubious claims coming out of the trial.
I’m starting with the most important claim first: Donald Trump farts a lot in court and the stench is so horrendous he’s stinking up half of Manhattan. Even though many people are saying it, the source of the fart rumor is shaky. It comes from this X post from Ben Meiselas of anti-Trump organization Meidas Touch who wrote, “What I’m hearing from credible sources is that Donald Trump is actually farting in the courtroom… I’m hearing it from actual credible people that as he’s kind of falling asleep, he’s actually passing gas and that his lawyers are really struggling with the smell.” While definitely hilarious, secondhand reports from political opponents credited to “credible sources” and “actual credible people” aren’t enough. That said, he’s an old guy, reportedly with a terrible diet, and everyone farts, so it’s not impossible that Trump will fart in court in the future.
Verdict: False
With farts out of the way, let's get down to legal business. Despite the widespread description of this as a “hush money” trial, Donald Trump is not being charged with 34 felonies for paying adult actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to not talk about an affair. There’s nothing illegal about paying someone to be quiet about having sex with you. Instead, Trump is being charged with falsifying business records related to the hush money payment. But it gets even more granular, because falsifying business records might be charged as a misdemeanor in New York, but according to the prosecution, Trump’s actions rises to the level of a multiple felonies because Trump falsified business records to conceal another, more serious crime.
Verdict: False
On his social media account and during his daily après-trial press harangues, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that “every legal scholar said this this case is nonsense.” Even if we substitute “most” for “every,” it’s a dubious assertion. But some legal scholars do see problems with the case. In an op-ed published in The New York Times this week, Boston University law professor Jed Handelsman Shugerman expressed concern that the underlying crime that makes Trump’s supposed record falsifications felonies, is a federal crime, so prosecutor Bragg is essentially using a state law to prosecute a federal crime. If what Shugerman is saying is correct, this isn’t a dead-to-right, slam-dunk case like it would be if the issue was “Did Donald Trump pay a porn star to not talk about having sex with him.”
Verdict: Mixed
Another oft-repeated line from Trump is that this trial (and the rest of his trials) are happening under the direction of President Biden, or, as Trump put it on Truth Social, “BIDEN’S DOJ IS RUNNING THE CASE.” There is no evidence that BIDEN’S DOJ is doing anything in connection with the case. In real life, prosector Alvin Bragg is running the case, and he is an elected state official who doesn’t report to the federal government.
Verdict: False
Trump’s legal team requested court be adjourned on May 17 so that Trump could attend Barron Trump's graduation. Judge Juan M. Merchan hasn’t ruled on the request, saying “It really depends on how we’re doing on time and where we are in the trial.” But Trump still told reporters “It looks like the judge will not let me go to the graduation of my son,” and “I can’t go to my son’s graduation.”
Verdict: False
After Trump’s posts about not being able to attend his son’s graduation, random people on X and elsewhere claimed he’d never attended any of his other children’s graduation ceremonies. This isn’t true. Snopes looked into it, and Trump was seen at both the high school and college graduation ceremonies of Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and Tiffany Trump.
Verdict: False
It would take forever to debunk the many false assertions that Trump has made about this criminal case (and his other criminal cases, and his civil cases, and really everything) but here are a few of the main themes: The judge is prejudiced against him. The judge’s daughter hates him. The judge’s gag order means that he is “not allowed to talk.” George Soros has something to do with the prosecution. The jury is rigged. You get the picture. All of these things are not true, and in a general sense: Donald Trump lies all the time.
Verdict: False
Donald Trump may not fart all the time during his trial, but he does fall asleep all the time. According to reputable sources within the courthouse, Trump fell asleep numerous times during the jury selection process. New York Times’ Maggie Haberman initially reported: “Trump appears to be sleeping,” and the assertion was backed up by Erik Uebelacker, a reporter for Courthouse News, Law360’s Stewart Bishop, and others who were in the room.
Verdict: True
While it is possible to buy a pizza with littler pizzas on top, Donald Trump did not call room service after having sex with Stormy Daniels and say, “I want a pizza and I want the toppings on the pizza to be littler pizzas, like the size of pepperonis, but they’re actually fully pizzas, just little.” It was a joke. Although Trump does eat pizza with a knife and fork, and he did tell Stormy Daniels that her nose looked like a beet and said, “I hope all the sharks die” according to Daniels.
Verdict: False
Taylor Swift released a new album this week. While the singer is 34 years old—practically middle-aged—her music speaks to young people directly, and they are speaking back. Less mainstream young people are becoming huge fans of a Chinese industrial chemical company. Read on, and I'll explain why.
The Tortured Poets Department released this week, and people have opinions. Swift’s 11th studio album offers 31 new songs to listen to, analyze, and love or hate. Critics are nearly unanimous in their praise, but are they being cowed into it? Paste magazine gave Tay-Tay’s latest a bad review, but didn’t include a byline on its post “due to how, in 2019 when Paste reviewed Lover, the writer was sent threats of violence from readers who disagreed with the work.”
Fans seem to like the new album too, but some of Swift's lyrics are churning up mild controversy. First there’s this line from "I Hate It Here”: "My friends used to play a game where/ We would pick a decade/ We wished we could live in instead of this/I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists.” This has led some to speculate that Swift is secretly racist, a running theme among dorks on the far right. Truth: taken in context, the line is not objectionable.
Then there’s, “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me” from “Who's Afraid Of Little Old Me.” Some have pointed out that Swift’s father was a bank president and she was raised in an upper middle class household, like that's a huge "gotcha." But it's art; come on. Some critics have an issue with this line from “So High School” too: “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle/Brand new, full throttle/Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto,” pointing out that Swift is 34 years old and isn't that ridiculous. But it’s a song about high school. (Now that I have defended Taylor Swift, I intend to use her fans as a personal army because they owe me.)
This is one of those jokes that is dismantled by an explanation, so before I ruin it, I'll wait while you check out Chinese manufacturing company Donghua Junlong's TikTok. The chemical company set up the account recently to post genial videos about the many uses of glycine, an amino acid. Something about them appealed to TikTok’s ironic crowd, and videos like “Stronger piglets start with a high quality Iron Glycine supplement!” And “Food-Grade Glycine: Indispensable in Everyday Life” went mildly viral, with Donghua Junlong stans posting hundreds of hilarious comments about their admiration for the company and the food grade glycine it produces. (See how my explanation makes the joke less funny?) Fans started posting fan videos. This guy visited the factory. Here’s an interesting response from a Chinese woman about the grassroots cultural exchange.
The company eventually noticed the attention and posted a video just for the fans the other day. They seem happy but confused about all the attention, which probably means the trend is over, as future Donghua Junlong videos will be produced with this new audience in mind, and will likely lose their outsider appeal.
This week popular YouTubers Steven Lim, Ryan Bergara, and Shane Madej, the founders of Watcher Entertainment, announced the channel was leaving YouTube for the greener pastures of a subscription-based platform. The news was met with a chorus of dismay from fans, prompting the company to announce that it wasn’t leaving YouTube after all, but would instead post videos on YouTube a month after it posted on its subscription site.
Watcher helped develop and the popularize the professionally produced style that defines YouTube in 2024 through its popular series like “Ghost Files” and “Puppet History." Its half departure is only the latest exodus of an “old guard” content creator. Once ubiquitous, multimillion subscriber stars like Pewdiepie, Tom Scott, MeatCanyon, MatPat, Seth Everman and others have recently left YouTube. The reasons vary, but the most common theme of the “I’m outie” videos I’ve watched is simple: “I’m tired.” Creating, maintaining, and marketing a popular video channel has always been a 24-hours-a-day job, but the market is more competitive than it was a decade ago, and that means more work for less money. Pair that with the fact that with YouTube’s ability to arbitrarily demonetize videos and/or change its recommendation algorithm whenever it wants, and “YouTube influencer” becomes an unstable, stressful job, the kind that makes you burn out if you're past your 20s.
I’d like to say AI-produced art is terrible and irredeemable, but a couple of YouTube channels have me begrudgingly admitting that artificial intelligence can make funny parody music—maybe. Obscurest Vinyl uses AI to create filthy songs in old-school musical genres. “I Glued My Balls to my Butthole Again” and “This Baptism Fucking Blows" are crude, but they're hilarious. There I Ruined It takes a different tact and uses artificial intelligence to "ruin the music you love" by approximate what it would sound like if Elvis Presley covered “I Like Big Butts, The Beach Boys sang “99 Problems,” or NWA played Octoberfest. I don't like that this music is funny, but I can't deny it made me laugh (or at least snort). On the other hand, attempts to dig deeper into the genre reveal that imitators' AI covers are nearly universally bad, so AI doesn't give us a "be funny" button; humor still depends on the person who creates the joke not the AI that helps tell it. But if I were Weird Al Yankovich, I’d be worried.
Things don’t really “break the internet” like they used to, but if they did, the trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine would have this place in shambles. In only its first day online, this Marvel universe team-up racked up over 21 million views on YouTube. The movie seems like it will be a superhero Odd Couple story with grim Wolverine providing a straight man foil to Deadpool’s wiseassery. The advanced interest in Deadpool & Wolverine, and the similar response to the teaser for DC’s Joker: Folie à Deux released a few weeks ago suggest that the superhero genre might not be as dead as some have suggested. Instead, audiences seem tired of the “traditional” superheroes stories like Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and The Marvels but remain interested in popular characters presented in new ways. Whether either of these movies will live up to the pre-release hype can’t be determined. Hitting the artistic/commercial bullseye when placing a comic book hero in an unfamiliar context seems way harder than cranking out another formulaic flick, but even if they don't work, at least the resulting movies will be interesting failures.
These guitar lesson courses are on sale for $15.97 right now (reg. $480) through April 21. It comes with unlimited access to 12 e-courses and 78 hours of training, and includes beginner courses like Beginner Guitar Lessons Crash Course, Guitar Lessons for the Curious Guitarist, and Guitar Technique, as well as courses in songwriting, finger style, ear training, and playing music with others. There are even genre-specific lessons in blues, jazz, and children’s and holiday songs. Performer and recording guitarist Dan Dresnok teaches all of the courses.
These guitar lesson courses are on sale for $15.97 right now (reg. $480) through April 21 at 11:59 p.m. PT, though prices can change at any time.
If you’re planning on embarking on some adventures this season, owning the right gear can make all the difference. In remote locations, having a good light source, ways to navigate, gadgets that can help make chores easier, and the necessary emergency equipment can be the difference between a great trip and a disaster. Plus, some of these just make your time away more fun—and you’re allowed to have fun while you’re exploring.
Having a light source handy when you’re off the beaten path is always wise, but without access to traditional chargers, this can be tricky. A hand crank lantern like this 600 lumen one from Goal Zero will allow you to have a light source even without access to sunlight for charging. You can charge the battery by plugging it in and by using a portable solar charger as well if you choose. For a less bright but slightly more versatile option, you can use a lantern that combines solar charging with hand crank charging and will double as a cell phone charger, like this 200 lumen lantern from Mesqool. For a simpler option, you can opt for a compact flashlight with solar and hand crank charging options like this set of two flashlights from Simpeak. While flashlights have a more limited beam spread than lanterns, they can serve as a more portable option for hikes or emergency kits.
If you’re in a place where cutting your own firewood is an option, a battery-powered chainsaw can be a big help. Ryobi makes a cordless 18-volt chainsaw that can help you quickly tackle branches for firewood. For splitting wood, you can put down your ax if you have a good log splitter, like this one from Speed Force. It’s relatively small, but not portable enough for long hikes. If you plan to be at a remote location for an extended period, you can opt for a Ryobi 40 volt log splitter that will mechanically split your wood for you. This machine and the battery can cost around $1,000, so it’s not a tool for weekenders, but if you have a longer off-grid adventure planned, it can save you some precious time and energy.
For charging your cordless tools on the go, a six-pound, foldable Ryobi solar panel is a good choice because it’s compact, light, and versatile. You’ll need a power source to charge tools with it, but you can charge cell phones and other devices straight from the panel. For charging devices, the FlexSolar 10 watt foldable panel can come in handy because of its compact size and resistance to dust and moisture. Your cell phone and other smaller devices can be plugged directly into this solar panel, or you can use a power bank to save up a charge for when it’s dark outside.
For off-grid adventures, having a good knife is important for cutting food and all manner of other incidental items. For a lightweight option, this fold-out combination knife and rope/seatbelt cutter knife from Good Worker is small and multi-functional. It has a smooth and serrated blade surface for different types of cuts. For campsite cooking, a Gerber Gear Quadrant plain blade knife is a good option; it collapses for safety and space conservation and comes with a lifetime warranty. If you’re not bringing a vehicle on your adventure, a hatchet like this one from 7th Science Gear is a good alternative to battery-powered saws for collecting firewood. It’s small enough to be portable, but big enough at 15 inches to allow you room for a healthy swing when you’re chopping wood.
When you’re out having your adventures, you should always be prepared for the worst. Having a well-stocked emergency kit will give you peace of mind and can save your life as well. Kits like this one from the American Red Cross are a good call for adventures with enough room for a backpack. Having hand warmers, emergency blankets, first aid supplies, and a noisemaker for if you’re lost or stranded are all recommended for those traveling outside of cell phone reception or outside of normal first responders' boundaries. If you’re not able to carry such a large pack, you can opt for a well-stocked first aid kit like this one from Protect Life, but you should supplement it with some other emergency supplies like a whistle and an emergency blanket.
In this column I try not to cover topics that any normal person already knows are fake. I don’t bother writing about people who think Elvis is alive or that the Earth is flat, because anyone with two brain cells to rub together already knows those are bullshit, and believers are a tiny minority on the fringes of society.
I had considered “chemtrails” in the “no one takes this seriously” column, but I was wrong. This week, legislators in Tennessee passed a state law that bans “the intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals … substances, or apparatus … with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight." In other words, they banned chemtrails.
While the legislation was drafted partly in response to a Federal government report released last year on solar geoengineering—basically the idea of cooling the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space—some lawmakers didn't get the memo. Here’s what Tennessee Sen. Frank Niceley said in support of the law: “This will be my wife’s favorite bill of the year. She has worried about this, I bet, 10 years … If you look up—one day, it’ll be clear. The next day they will look like some angels have been playing tic-tac-toe. They’re everywhere. I’ve got pictures on my phone with Xs right over my house. For years they denied they were doing anything.”
The report that riled up Tennessee legislators explicitly says the research "does not signify any change in policy or activity by the Biden-Harris Administration." We don't even know how or if it would work, so solar geoengineering is a non-starter. Chemtrail conspiracy theories are fake and dumb. But Tennessee's decision to outlaw both could be a great and/or hilarious thing—if they follow the letter of the law they wrote.
Believers call the long, white trails sometimes left in the sky by jet airplanes "chemtrails." They believe chemtrails are the result of the government intentionally spraying biological or chemical agents into the sky in order to change the weather, control the population, and/or make people sick (the specifics depend on who you ask).
But the trails Sen. Nicely has pictures of on his phone are really called "contrails," short for condensation trails, and no one is denying anything. Contrails are the result of water vapor released from aircraft engines’ exhaust. They are mostly ice crystals, basically jet-made clouds, and there is no evidence they can control people’s behavior. But they might actually change the weather. (More on that below.)
Contrails are an interesting conspiracy theory element because you can walk outside and see them for yourself; but sometimes you don’t see them, just like the Senator said. So are some aircraft spraying chemicals and others not? According to the authorities, no one is spraying anything. Contrails only form under certain atmospheric conditions, even if it looks like angels have been playing tic-tac-toe.
Chemtrail conspiracy theorists are partly right, but, as is usual with conspiracy theorists, not in the way they think they are. The U.S. government really is trying to control the weather by releasing a chemical into the air from planes. It’s called cloud-seeding, and the chemical, silver iodide, is harmless to humans. The idea is to prevent droughts by making clouds more productive. Cloud-seeding has been around since the 1940s. It's difficult to say for sure whether it works (it’s hard to get a control group of clouds), but it’s not secret. There are ongoing, relatively small, government funded cloud-seeding programs in several states, including Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. But not in Tennessee, obviously.
The second part of the chemtrails theory is a little right too. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to accept that the U.S. government has a long, troubling history of secretly dispersing chemical and biological agents in the air over the U.S.; They admit it themselves. But the government (officially) halted biological and chemical weapons programs in the 1960s, and in 2023, the U.S.’s last chemical weapon, a sarin nerve agent-filled M55 rocket rocket, was destroyed, according to the international oversight group The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
So weather control programs and secret dispersal of chemicals exist, and the U.S. is looking into solar geoengineering, but nothing connects jet engine vapor-trails to any of these things. That doesn't mean contrails are benign though; they might even be worse than conspiracy theorists fear.
In another “a broken clock is right twice a day” victory for conspiracy theorists, legitimate research indicates that contrails are harmful, maybe extremely harmful, but not because they contain population-control nanobots.
It's hard to pin down the specific causes of temperature changes in a system as complex as the climate of a planet, but research has long supported the theory that jets creating tiny clouds in the sky prevents heat from escaping the planet, leading many climate scientists to regard contrails as a major contributor to global warming.
Contrails may be worse than the effect of burning all that jet fuel in the first place. According to the Yale School of the Environment, the constant injection of jet-made clouds has a “daily impact on atmospheric temperatures that is greater than that from the accumulated carbon emissions from all aircraft since the Wright Brothers first took to the skies more than a century ago.” To make matters worse, efforts to cut the CO2 emissions by making jet engines more efficient tends to produce more contrails that last longer.
So yes, conspiracy theorists, those streaks in the sky are a serious problem that could be contributing to a lot of people dying in the future. (Don’t worry, we’re using AI to stop it, which should work out great.)
Tennessee law-makers may have crafted this legislation to thwart a federal program that doesn’t exist and fight a made-up phenomenon, but depending on how it's interpreted and enforced, this law could be the most consequential piece of environmental protection legislation in U.S. history—or it could be a clear enough lesson in what happens when you let conspiracy theorists pass laws that Tennessee won't vote for dumb people anymore. (I can dream, right?)
To really ban "chemtrails" you'd have to ban all jet travel over Tennessee, which would lower the total amount of contrail-based warming on earth. But that's just the beginning. Tennessee outlawed releasing anything that “affects temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight" without defining any of the terms, so it could be read to ban all pollution—from cars, airplanes, factories, or anywhere else—because it contributes to global warming (ie: affects temperature.)
To be fair, the law says the chemicals must be released with “the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight," so it probably wouldn't apply to factories, since raising the temperature of the earth is a secondary effect of industry. But sunglass manufacturers could be in the crosshairs. What is a pair of sunglasses if not an apparatus that affects the intensity of sunlight? Maybe sunglasses only affect sunlight's intensity on a personal level, but the law doesn't define what "affects the intensity of sunlight" means, so it could be read to cover Ray-Bans and beach umbrellas. You could make a case that the letter of Tennessee's law bans heaters, air conditioners, stoves, and ovens too, since they are all apparatuses with the express purpose of changing temperature. Water is a chemical, and spraying it onto people at an amusement park is an attempt to change temperature, so goodbye, cooling misters.
I could go on, but it's all ridiculous. We know that Tennessee is not going to shut down its airports and turn into a post-industrial, sunglass-free state where cooking is outlawed. The law isn't likely to be enforced in any way, and its only real-world effect will be to make people like Senator Niceley's wife happy that someone is finally doing something about those pesky angels playing tic-tac-toe in the sky.
This week, I dig around in the cesspit of online "alpha male" influencers to find out what "soft guy era" means. I also look into the wholesome "Utah Fit Check" trend, find out what happens when AI starts making memes, and investigate the Humane AI pin, a new tech gadget I decidedly do not want.
Man-space influencers on TikTok and elsewhere have been hyping the phrase "soft guy era" for the last week or so, working hard to get the hashtag trending and plant the idea in people's minds. And it seems to be working—at least on young men. So I looked into it, and I wish I hadn't.
According to Scarfacemark, the person at the center of the soft guy trend, a man in his “soft guy era” wants to find a woman who will “take care of him in ridiculous ways.” Seems straightforward enough, but Scarface isn't expressing a desire to be what used to be called a “kept man.” Like most everything from red pill and red pill-adjacent people, the "soft guy era" is a reactionary and dishonest concept, a troll driven by misogyny and money.
"Soft guy era” is a reaction to the “soft girl era” trend that became popular, particularly with young African-American women, in 2023. “Soft girl” seems to mostly be about self-care and living a life that isn’t about struggle. For some women, that means expensive vacations and lavishness, or it means looking for a more gender-traditional relationship, where the man makes the money and the woman keeps house. And that’s the inflection point for man-fluencers.
In the world of online woman-hating-for-cash, the “soft girl” thing is an affront to men—an injustice, even though a man supporting a woman is rooted in patriarchal ideas that online dude-guys usually support. It's another gender-war double-bind: Women who want careers are hated, and women who don’t want careers are hated too. The hatred is the real point. Influencers come up with slightly unique wrinkles on time-tested misogynistic ideas and use them to rile up weirdos and increase their view-counts and sell ugly t-shirts and cryptocurrency, or whatever they do to scrounge up the rent for their condos.
I dug around on both the #softgirlera and the #softguyera hashtags. The most-trafficked videos on the former are sappy odes to successful relationships, yearnings for romance, and pleas for peace and gentleness. The top “soft guy” posts are not like this. They are nearly uniformly unfunny "comedy videos" made by a cadre of weird, greasy cranks acting like they’re making jokes when really they’re being assholes. All these dudes pretend they’re rich “alpha males" turning away super-models, and it's a transparent act to everyone but the children and teenagers they prey upon. Maybe the soft girls are working an online hustle of their own, but at least they don't make me feel like I need a shower and a nap.
Remember when it was funny to gross out your friends by making up sexual practices like the “Mississippi Mudslide” or “The Angry Algonquin?” The “Utah Fit Check” is nothing like that. It’s an innocent TikTok challenge where you wear some baggy jeans, give a thumbs-up to the camera, then jump in the air and try to spin twice before landing. Or just spin once—no one is keeping score.
The trend was started by Utah TikToker Michaelmal568. He posted the first video with the hashtag. It seems like he just wanted to show off his outfit, but he went a little too far, and people found it amusing/endearing, and thus a trend was born. It's now spreading across TikTok, Instagram, and everywhere else. Everyone is trying it, and some are failing. Some are pushing the envelope. (Apparently cleanly landing even one spin is not easy, so props to Michaelmal for the semi-clean 720.)
There’s an interesting cross-generational wrinkle to the story: The song you play for a proper Utah Fit Check video is “Harness your Hopes,” an obscure B-side from 1990s alternative band Pavement. I’m always happy when something I liked a million years ago finds a new audience, although more annoying TikTokers have started using Billy Joel’s sappy “Vienna Waits for You” instead of Pavement. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Online people have started outsourcing meme creation to artificial intelligence, and it’s going as well as you’d expect. In this subreddit devoted to the subject, the memes are either incomprehensible or just not funny. They’re not even “so bad they’re good,” they’re just boring. One redditor asked AI to make memes only AI would understand. AI didn’t make anything particularly interesting with that prompt either.
As artificial intelligence gets “better,” it’s losing the one interesting thing it has going on—that surrealist edge that gives everyone a queasy feeling—and replacing it with absolute averageness, complete mediocrity. The future is going to be computer-generated boredom on a level we are only starting to see. But at least we'll all be unemployed.
When a trusted, respected, even-handed tech reviewer like Marques Brownlee posts a video where he calls a heavily hyped, this-will-change-everything tech device, “The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed,” a lot of people take notice—especially when the product, the Humane AI Pin, is backed by hundreds of millions of investor dollars, and was invented by two ex-Apple higher-ups who worked on the iPhone and iOS.
The Humane AI Pin is a wearable AI assistant that promises to take users beyond the cell phone by packing a camera, light, laser projector, a phone, and more into a tiny, slickly designed device you can stick on your lapel. You can ask it questions in plain English, dictate to it, take pictures, make calls, send texts, and other basic assistant functions. It will even project information onto your hand with a laser if you can't talk to it.
So what’s the problem? According to Brownlee, everything. The Humane AI’s artificial intelligence is slow to respond and often factually wrong (like AI always is). The battery life is terrible. It overheats easily. It’s heavy. The projector function is hard to read, and it often doesn't understand what you're saying. But the worst thing about it is that it doesn’t connect to your phone or anything else. The Humane AI pin is like paying $700 and a monthly, mandatory $24 subscription fee for a second phone that’s markedly worse in every way than the one you already own. It turns out, a touch-screen interface is way better than a voice-only interface. Who could have guessed?
You can get this Ride KAC bicycle storage stand on sale for $25.99 right now (reg. $69.99) with free shipping. It’s ready to use right out of the box, folding open so you can set it out on the trailside or floor of your home or garage. Then you just roll your bike onto the stand. The Ride KAC storage stand doesn't use much space (it measures 17 inches), only weighs six pounds, and works with most bike tires, including 650-700c road and gravel bikes, 26-29-inch mountain bikes, and 20-24-inch kids’ bikes.
You can get this Ride KAC bicycle storage stand on sale for $25.99 right now (reg. $69.99) with free shipping, though prices can change at any time.
This week America witnessed a total solar eclipse. While most of us were like, “that’s kind of cool I guess,” some Americans were expecting something more than just the moon blotting out the sun and day turning into night—people wanted action. So in the days leading up to the solar eclipse, those folks frantically spread eclipse predictions to all their friends on social media. Now that the dust has settled, let’s take a look at whether their predictions came true, and examine other common eclipse-related myths, both old and new.
The ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh in Upper Mesopotamia was described as a place of wickedness in the Bible's Book of Jonah, so some Christians thought that the eclipse passing through all seven (or five) places in the U.S. with that name means that God is up to something, I guess? It’s hard to tell.
Depending on what sources you consult and what you mean by “places called Nineveh,” there are either nine, seven, or six of them in the U.S. They’re mostly very small rural communities—the largest Nineveh has a population of 3,987—and they don’t seem especially wicked (but I’ve never visited, so who knows). Only two Ninevehs were actually in the path of totality anyway. Did the people who live in those two townships repent and follow God like the Nineveh citizens did in the Bible when Jonah showed up to yell at them? It doesn’t seem like it.
Verdict: Busted
This one is technically true, but not in the way some people think. There have been seven total solar eclipses in the U.S. since we started keeping accurate records of stock prices, and the markets dipped slightly after five of them. But this is not a large enough sample size to draw any meaningful conclusion. That said, it makes sense that an eclipse would have some effect on the economy—more people travel and buy paper sunglasses, everyone stops working for an hour, and feels some kind of way about the sun being swallowed, etc.—but it’s not possible to say how it affects the Dow Jones because there are too many other variables.
Verdict: Not enough information
Understandably, responsible people with platforms bang the “don’t look directly at an eclipse, you impossible idiots!” drum pretty hard in the days leading up to an eclipse. It doesn't seem to work that well—searches for "why do my eyes hurt" spiked after the eclipse—and it may also lead to the belief that there is something especially harmful and blinding about eclipse rays. There isn’t. It’s just sunlight. But staring at the sun for too long will damage your eyes, whether there's an eclipse or not.
The competing conspiracy theory: “It’s actually OK to stare at an eclipse, but THEY are trying to hide something from you” is also untrue. I think it’s mostly a joke, but I can’t really tell any more.
Verdict: Partially true
Many variations on these theories come from comments generated on a lazy Alex Jones shitpost on X. There’s a tiny speck of truth in this one: some states did mobilize national guard and FEMA units during the eclipse, but it’s because a lot of tourists were expected or it was for traffic control. The same thing happened in 2017 too. As far as I can tell, there were no mass round-ups of patriots conducted under the moon's shadow.
Verdict: Busted
As described in the Book of Revelation, The Rapture will come in the final days of man, when believers, both living and dead, will ascend into heaven. This actually happened on Monday! The good people flew into the sky with all the angels and skeletons, and everyone went to heaven and met God. It was pretty cool. I’m surprised you’re still on Earth.
Verdict: Confirmed
This golden oldie comes from the poet Archilochus who wrote those words in the seventh century B.C.E. after seeing an eclipse on a Greek island. Eclipses are an interaction between the moon, the Earth, and the sun, not Zeus’s shield, but dark terror really does hang over mankind, and anything may happen. So Archilochus gets partial credit here.
“Anything may happen” is similar to modern radical Christians seeing the eclipse as a sign of man’s final days, and to countless other variations on the theme from other cultures. It's common to see eclipses as bad omens foretelling terrible future events. I guess a lot of people are downers. You can’t really say they’re wrong though, because terrible events are definitely on the way, as they always have been. But you can’t draw any meaningful correlation between eclipses and catastrophes either. It’s more realistic to say that bad shit always happens eventually, and eclipses happen sometimes too.
Verdict: Mixed
Young-people culture is full of mysteries this week: Why would anyone drink blended oats and water instead of eating a bowl of oatmeal? Why does everyone care about some anonymous teens at a party? Is anyone on TikTok psychic?
The trendiest trend on diet-based TikTok this week is Oatzempic. Hailed by some as the key to quick weight loss and getting that bikini body you've always wanted, the oatzempic diet is basically blending some oats with water and lime juice, and drinking it for breakfast. It has a catchy, of-the-moment name, but does this diet actually help people lose weight? If you follow a plan of replacing breakfast with a disgusting oat slurry that has about 160 calories and lots of fiber, you’d be consuming fewer calories than if you eat bacon, eggs, and toast. But as our own Beth Skwarecki points out, "If you don’t eat much food because you are 'full' from eating 160 calories, you’ll end up on an unhealthily low-calorie diet." And nutritionists largely agree that oatzempic is not the kind of thing people are likely to stick to long term—you'd be better off eating a bowl of oatmeal instead of choking down an oat smoothie first thing in the morning.
This week’s viral video, TikTok Rizz Party, aka “Carnival Boys,” portrays a group of teenage boys dancing to “Carnival” by Kanye West” at “Jillian’s sweet 16,” according to the vid’s poster. Nothing unusual happens in the video. The subjects seem like nice enough kids doing a normal teenage kid thing, but Rizz Party went exceedingly viral, earning over 56 million views on TikTok alone since it was posted on March 10. It went so viral, it gave birth to the new academic discipline of Rizz Party analytics. There are over 32,000 response videos on TikTok, with online people poring over every pixel on every frame like “TikTok Rizz Party” is the Zapruder film. They’ve given each person in the video a nickname, created a backstory, character motivation, and lore, making full parodies, and letting it influence their personal philosophy, all based on 17 seconds of randomly captured video. So far, it seems that the kids in the video themselves are accepting their newfound internet fame with good humor, calling themselves by their fake names, and playing into the lore, but it has to suck for the kids that have been deemed the less-popular Rizz boys.
As for why this video, why now, it could be anything. But I think an entire generation spending literally years inside during a key formative period in their social lives has likely had a profound effect on their collective psyche, and this video (along with most of current youth culture) is an expression of it. Widespread fascination with a mundane moment of lighthearted, social fun could point to a longing to share that kind of experience, even if it’s expressed through mocking or irony. (This is the thesis for my research I hope will earn me a Ph.D. in Rizzology.)
At this weekend’s Wrestlemania XL, there was a clear generational divide moment. If you are over a certain age, the main event, a title match between Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes, featured the most amazing surprise appearances possible: The Rock and John Cena both showed up on opposite sides. (The match’s presentation is so hilariously over the top, it must be seen to be believed.) But if you’re under the a certain age, the only surprise appearance that mattered at Sunday’s show was YouTuber IShowSpeed, who turned up dressed as a bottle of blue Prime drink and tried to help fellow streamer Logan Paul in his match against Randy Orton and Kevin Owens. After pulling Paul out of the ring, IShowSpeed is promptly RKO’ed onto the media table by Orton. The moment immediately went viral, with half of viewers enjoying a good laugh and the other half asking, “IShow what, now?”
I’m fascinated by why people believe in dumb things, and social media gives us a chance to see how nonsense can become a widely held beliefs in real time, as it happens. There is a post going viral on TikTok right now that’s a case study in what happens during the early days of a conspiratorial belief. TikToker Tristian Galindo posted a video this week where he discusses a TikToker he remembers watching back in Covid days. According to Galindo, this “missing creator” made a series of videos where he predicted the future accurately, crediting his info to a mysterious group called “the uppers,” then disappeared, vowing to return in 2029. “I kid you not, everything this man has said so far has happened,” Galindo claims.
Even for most conspiracy theorists, that wouldn’t be enough evidence to take seriously, but there’s information in the comments that seems to corroborate Galindo’s tale. Other TikTokers not only remember the poster, but (supposedly) tracked him down. Moe Othman (“Mothman” for old-school conspiracy theory fans) really was a TikToker who stopped posting in 2022, and he did make predictions about the future, including saying that Covid would spread to major cities in the early days of the pandemic. If you want to believe, this likely is enough. But if you’re a skeptic, you might actually watch Othman’s videos and learn that he doesn’t mention anything about “the uppers” or any other specific thing Galindo "remembers." He also never made any predictions that came true (except the one about Covid spreading, which was also predicted by literally everyone who knew how viruses work. And he even got that one wrong, predicting that grocery stores would be raided, when really all that happened is we had to wear masks.)
Time will tell whether Galindo’s conspiracy theory catches on and joins heavy-hitters like "We didn't go to the moon" and "Pizzagate," but his video has been seen six million times in the last week alone, so it’s at least finding an audience. (For the record: No one can see the future because it hasn't happened yet.)
Every year, the federal government spends an estimated $3 billion of your tax dollars on the Central Intelligence Agency. Other than the supposed protection a sophisticated international clandestine espionage network provides the nation's citizens, what do we actually get for our share of CIA budget? Nothing!
In the interest of getting something for my taxes, and because I think espionage is kind of cool, I asked former CIA agent Jason Hanson to reveal the best life hacks his CIA training could provide.
According to his biography, Hanson spent seven years in the CIA as an agent with a top secret security clearance. After retiring from the agency in 2005, he started the Tactical Spy School in Utah, got $150k in funding on Shark Tank, and wrote some best-selling books (Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life, and Agent of Influence: How to Use Spy Skills to Persuade Anyone, Sell Anything, and Build a Successful Business), all in order to “help good, honest Americans stay safer and be more prepared in the crazy and unpredictable world that we live in.”
While Hanson teaches his Spy School students to drive defensively, escape from duct tape and handcuffs, and other cool-in-the-movies tricks, his most important piece of personal safety advice is so practical your mom probably said it to you: Stop looking at your phone all the time.
“You should be paying attention to your surroundings,” Hanson said, “Twenty or 25 years ago, we were walking around actually looking [where we were] walking. That's how we need to be. I use a flip phone, and I've never sent a text message in my life.”
Once you've switched off your phone, look around to get a feel for your location. Hanson isn't advising adopting the hyper-vigilant lifestyle of spies in war zones—just basic situational awareness. “Everything has a baseline,” Hanson explained, "If you walk into a Starbucks every day, you know the baseline of Starbucks.”
So spend a moment taking the metaphorical temperature of any new situation you’re in; If something feels off, or out of place, trust your instincts and either proceed with caution or retreat.
“One time I was almost kidnapped," Hanson said. "I'm out in the morning in a place I can't name and I saw two guys coming in my direction. They didn't match the baseline; they didn't dress like everybody else there; they basically stuck out like a sore thumb. They look at me. I look at them. And these two guys look at each other and step apart, trying to force me to go and between them. Well, as soon as I saw that, I turned the other way and took off running. If I had had my head buried in the phone, I would have walked directly into those two guys.”
Like anyone who has any practical experience with real violence, Hanson advises avoiding or running from danger instead of whipping out the ninja moves you learned in that Aikido class at the Y. “Listen, you do not want to be in a fight,” Hanson said. ”Fighting is a last resort. If you see that creeper ahead, you go in the other direction and avoid [them]."
Hanson says that his personal daily carry includes a firearm, but dude lives in Utah where you can do that, and he's in the self-defense racket. If you can’t or won’t carry a gun, Hanson recommends a tactical pen. “I carry one every single day, it's a regular writing pen. But it's made of a much harder metal. So I can smash windows out, I can break things, and you can carry this all over the world. It's perfectly legal.”
Personal safety is one thing, but the CIA’s knowledge can help you professionally, too. “Somebody I've worked with has a great saying: CIA officers are the world's best salespeople. The only difference is, you sell vacuums, and we sell treason," Hanson said.
Hanson's supposedly CIA-approved advice for getting ahead at work isn’t that far from his advice for maintaining personal safety: “Shut up, observe, and pay attention to what's going on,” he said. “Observing and paying attention to your colleagues, which is spying one-on-one, it's super easy to do. Julie over there loves Diet Coke, and one day, you bring her a Diet Coke. Phil loves baseball, so you bring him a Red Sox cap for his birthday. That allows you to get to know your colleagues for real, but it's also putting a good foot forward. So you hopefully get ahead in the place where most people don't pay attention to anything because they're only caring about themselves.”
You don't need a polygraph machine to suss out dishonesty, whether in a work or relationship sense. Hanson has an easy-to-use, presumably CIA-developed technique to turn yourself into a human lie detector. The key, according to Hanson, is to determine the baseline for how your subject responds to easy questions, then spring a hard, confrontational question at them. If you’re interviewing a potential candidate for job, you might ask a few general questions and then fix a steely look on them and say, “When was the last time you stole something?”
"Ask somebody a question and pay attention to the first three to five seconds of the response,” Hanson advised. "As human beings, we’re just not born to lie ... If I’m being honest, I don't even really have to think about the answer, because I'm telling the truth. But if I'm lying to you, I may be like, ‘can you repeat the question?’ Or I may start stammering or freeze up because I'm trying to buy time for my brain to come up with a lie.”
If you’ve been thinking, “Steve, how do you even know this guy was in the CIA?” I had the same concern. He looks the part, and talks a good game, but he could be a fake. The CIA doesn’t readily give up information on its members—I couldn’t call them for verification—so I used Hanson’s own CIA techniques against him. After establishing his baseline behavior by asking easy-to-answer questions and carefully observing him, I turned things around and hit him with: “Are you lying about being in the CIA?”
Sadly, he didn’t prove that I am actually the master interrogator by freezing up and starting to stammer. Instead, Hanson told me it was a good question, and acknowledged that fact-checking his background would be difficult. But he suggested one method for telling a CIA guy from a fraud would be getting someone who you know is in the CIA and setting up a three-way conversation so the real company man could quickly suss out the impostor.
If you're hoping that secret agents will visit you in the middle of the night because they've been monitoring how successful you've been at Call of Duty, that's not how it works. Most people get into the CIA by applying on the website. Make sure you have a clean background, though—criminal charges, recent use of marijuana, and any use of harder drugs will disqualify you.
April 2 was International Fact-Checking Day, a “global initiative recognizing accurate information’s important role in an interconnected world.” (In my family, we celebrate by leaving each other gifts under the fact-checking tree, but we do not suggest they came from some mythical Arctic elf.)
The fact-checking and media-ethics kingpins at Poynter are behind the initiative, and they mark the occasion by releasing an annual State of the Fact-Checkers Report, a survey of 137 organizations across at least 69 countries that are devoted to making sure that the media is accurate. Good luck, fellas!
Below are some of the most interesting findings from the 2023 State of the Fact-Checkers report.
In 2023, 35% of fact-checking organizations that responded to the survey said they operate with budgets between $100,000 and $500,000. Only about 12% have budgets of more than $1 million annually; about 10% operate on $20,000 a year or less. Sixty-eight percent of fact-checking organizations have 10 or fewer employees.
Conclusion: If you are hoping to get rich in the fact-checking game, you might want to consider a career in international finance.
The predominant source of that sweet fact-checking lucre is Mark Zuckerberg, or, more accurately, Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program. More than 63% of surveyed fact-checkers participate in Meta’s program. Another revenue source: grants. Unsurprisingly, “funding” is listed as the biggest challenge by 83% of fact-checking organizations.
Despite being the world’s most popular social media platform, very few members of the International Fact-Checking Network have partnered with TikTok, as only just over 14% participate in TikTok’s third-party fact-checking program.
The report doesn’t delve into why fact-checkers surveyed prefer Meta’s fact-checking program to TikTok's. But that’s probably only because they don’t want to reveal that an international cabal of globalist reverse-vampires are pulling the strings at Poytner’s fact-checking racket in order to shape the narrative and make sure that Joe “Obama” Biden wins the 2024 election. Check those facts, assholes!
(If you are interested in busting TikTok myths, check out Lifehacker Senior Health Editor Beth Skwarecki's "TikTok Myth of the Week" column.)
More than 95% of fact-checking organizations surveyed cover “election and politics” and “public health.” The exact percentage of fact-checkers who cover “weird things your aunt posts on Facebook” (like I do in this column), is unknown, but 29.93% of fact-checkers do say they cover “other.”
No surprise, but when it comes to hotbeds of weaponized misinformation, fact-checkers are most concerned about Twitter/X, with 36.50% listing Elon Musk’s digital garbage dump at the top of the disinformation charts. Next is TikTok, with 21.17% concerned, then YouTube, drawing raised eyebrows from 13.14%. Fact-checkers are least concerned about Instagram—or at least, less than 1% named it as the platform that concerns them the most. Lie away, Instagrammers.
I know members of the International Fact-Checking Network aren’t the only fact-checkers in the world—there are in-house fact-checkers at many major publications, and let's not discount the efforts of wildcat fact-checkers like me and CallofDutyRulez4206969 on Reddit. But it’s hard to not see the entire collection of fact-checkers as a tiny gaggle of barely-paid cranks, probably with bad haircuts, facing off against a massive network of shady politicians, crooked media sources, and amoral corporations that don’t care about the truth at all, so long as telling a lie is more profitable.
Still, there is cause for hope: According to a study in Nature Human Behavior, there was a huge drop-off of Americans visiting fake news websites in 2020 versus 2016. Some 44% of Americans surveyed reported visiting questionable websites during the 2016 U.S. election cycle, compared to 26.2% in 2020. Other research concludes that, “shifting attention to the concept of accuracy” results in people sharing less misinformation on social media.
So keep plugging away at them facts, fellow enjoyers-of-accuracy. You may be earning a pittance, and you may have to beg Mark Zuckerberg to get even that, but at least you can be content that you are correct on the internet. Isn’t that more important than money? (Fact check: It is not.)
The big pop culture news this week for young people is the release of Beyoncé’s newest album, which is also the biggest news in pop culture for older generations. Cowboy Carter is a rare piece of pop culture that is on everyone’s radar, so I thought I’d try to figure out why this one singer can pull off what no one else is able to. There’s also a new, gross word to learn, and we can all marvel at the ingenuity of young people when they try to skirt online rules against sexy content.
Late last week, Beyoncé released her eight studio album, a country-inspired collection called Cowboy Carter. The singer/songwriter/icon is 42 years old, a late Millennial, but she’s not dismissed by young people. If you judge by online response to Cowboy Carter, The Queen transcends generational divides as thoroughly as she transcended musical divides by taking over country music. There’s a TikTok dance trend, with vids like these gaining millions of views, and Gen Z is even getting into country music, with diehard, not-country young people agreeing with critics that the single “Texas Hold ‘em” is a banger and the album is killer. It's not just the first single; the internet has become obsessed with her new take on Dolly Parton’s “Jolene," too. For cultural comparison, Beyoncé is like mid-career Madonna, but more so. She’s an icon who's still relevant, and if there’s any importance at all to popular culture, the release of Cowboy Carter feels like a page being turned: Other than the usual grousing dipshits, everyone of every age, race, and creed, is into Beyoncé’s new album. I even like it, and I hate everything.
Streaming service Twitch, known mostly for streaming gaming content, has been engaged in a cat-and-mouse war with some of its users for years. At issue: Twitch’s policy toward risqué content on streams. The latest salvo in the battle: Twitch has banned users from streaming content on their butts.
About two weeks ago, innovative Twitch streamer/cosplayer Morgpie skirted Twitch’s content policy against nudity by using a greenscreen to display gameplay footage on her hinder. This weekend, Twitch responded by announcing: “Starting on Friday March 29th, content that focuses on intimate body parts for a prolonged period of time will not be allowed.”
This isn’t the first time that Morgpie inspired Twitch to change its content policy. Back in 2023, she started appearing in streams topless, but framed so that users couldn’t quite see the forbidden parts of her breasts. Morgpie was temporarily banned, and Twitch updated its policy on sexual content.
This led to streamers using censor bars, something called "Show hole meta." Even earlier than that, back in 2021, Twitch cracked down on Hot Tub streams, while acknowledging how difficult it is to decide whether sexy content is too sexy.
Like “Looksmaxxing,” “bone smashing,” and “mewing,” jelqing comes from the moldy and disturbing world of incel culture. Put simply, it’s penis-stretching. Jelqers either pull their junk manually or use devices to do the stretching—this isn’t a medically approved procedure, so there’s no set of best practices. The idea is that the trauma creates micro-tears in the skin and the penis grows back bigger. As for whether it works or not, the smart money is on “fuck no.” There are anecdotal reports online of jelqers who say it works, but sometimes people lie online. I can’t find any reliable data on the effectiveness of the procedure, and urologists point out that it can lead to the formation of scar tissue, pain, erectile disfunction and and Peyronie's Disease.
SiegedSec, a group of self-proclaimed gay furries, claim that they breached the security of the River Valley Church in Burnsville, Minnesota. On a recent Telegram post, SiegedSec accused a church pastor of making anti-trans statements, posted links to church members’ emailed prayer requests, and used the church’s funds to send them 100 inflatable sea lions.
“We hacked their accounts and spent thousands of dollars on inflatable sea lions (we couldn’t donate it), and we have leaked 15k+ user data :3,” the hackers posted.
River Valley’s head god-botherer, Rob Ketterling, is active on Twitter, spreading the weird idea that Joe Biden declared Easter Sunday a transgender holiday. I hope he enjoys his inflatable sea lions.
This week’s viral video is the fourth installment of the Duck Song, an animated video for kids that was viewed nearly two million times in its first week of release. The Duck Song is a generational dividing line. If you're under a certain age, you've seen it. If you're over that age (and childless) you haven't.
YouTuber forrestfire101 released the first Duck Song video 15 years ago, and it’s been viewed 625 million times since. It’s impossible to explain exactly why. It’s amusing enough as a story/joke, the song is catchy enough, and the crude animation is cute, but that can be said for uncountable millions of videos aimed at children that are posted on YouTube. For some reason, The Duck Song captured the imagination of children and YouTube’s algorithm to the point of being a universally recognizable thing for a generation.
Duck Song’s creator wisely opted to limit the release of new installments instead of flooding the zone with Duck crap when it was first released, thus avoiding turning it into a flash in the pan. They also didn’t try to expand, change, broaden, or otherwise tamper with the original video’s simplicity. So the Duck Song videos became a universally recognized thing to at least two generations—fans of the original Duck Song have children of their own now, and are no doubt sharing it with them before they waddle away.
You can get this dual-HD-camera drone on sale for $74.99 right now (reg. $129.99). It's a budget drone that is excellent for beginners who want to experiment with flying: it has one-key takeoff and landing, altitude hold mode, and four-channel movement with a rolling 360-degree function. You can pair with your smartphone to take pictures and videos or see a real-time feed through the drone's two 1080p cameras; the front with 90-degree views and the bottom with 120-degree views. It also comes with four spare blades and two batteries for 26 total minutes of flying time.
You can get this dual-HD-camera drone on sale for $74.99 right now (reg. $129.99), though prices can change at any time.
It’s an election year, so naturally there are virtual firehoses of misinformation pointed at potential voters. While there are encouraging signs that people are getting better at spotting misinformation, there’s a kind of “fake news” that seems particularly pernicious on both sides of the political aisle: drawing a conclusion based on omitted information or missing context. It’s a favorite tactic of politicians that explodes during an election year, so let’s dig into a couple of widely spread examples—one from the right and one from the left.
The picture above, from Snopes, who culled it from my aunt's Facebook page, is not Photoshopped and it's not a lie. The national average price of a gallon of gas really did dip to $1.77 in April of 2020. But the meme text suggests that this had somehow had to do with decisions Donald Trump made while in office.
People like to discuss the reasons gas prices fluctuate, probably because we are confronted with it every time we go to the pumps, but whether you blame high gas prices on corporate greed, or credit low gas prices to Donald Trump being awesome, you're equally wrong. The main driver of gas prices is basic supply and demand. The real reason gas was so cheap in 2021 was a global drop in demand for petroleum caused by economic activity due to COVID-19 lockdown. It would not have mattered who was president; it's not like there's a lever in the Oval Office that sets commodity prices.
This isn’t to say that governmental policy has no effect on prices. The inflation spike of 2022 was caused in part by the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan signed in 2021. It’s complex and there are a lot of other factors at work, but as a general rule, supplying more money to the economy to prevent or reverse a recession results in inflation, but i it also causes the economy to grow and stay out of recession (a much worse result than higher inflation.) Again, it's supply and demand.
It’s not just right-wing people who fall victim to the allure of jumping to conclusion fallacy though, though. Check out this chart posted on Twitter by Kamala Harris:
Like the right-wing meme, this chart isn't inaccurate or Photoshopped, but it leaves off the same thing the gas price photo omits: COVID. Most of the jobs “created” during the Biden administration were the result of people returning to work following lay-offs during the pandemic. Adjusted for COVID, the net job-gain from Biden’s first day until February 2024 was 5.5 million jobs. Nice work, but a lot less sexy-looking on a chart.
During his State of the Union address, Biden said, "The only president other than Donald Trump that lost jobs during an administration was Herbert Hoover," which is half-true (maybe), but only if you ignore the economic devastation that COVID wrought, and also ignore that we don't really know the number of jobs lost during Hoover's administration—the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn't exist until after Hoover was out of office.
While Biden put an overly positive spin on his job numbers and bagged on Trump's, it’s possible to look at the same basic information and draw the opposite conclusion. At a speech on August 5th, Donald Trump said: “During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs were created, and by contrast, during my first 30 months in office we created 4.9 million new jobs.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when Trump took office, there were 145.6 million non-farm jobs in the U.S. Thirty months later, there were 150.8 million (in a first, Trump gave himself slightly less credit than he deserved during this speech). When Biden took office, there were 143 million nonfarm jobs. By his 30th month in office, the number of nonfarm jobs had risen to 156.2 million.
Trump isn't totally lying (this time)—he's trying to eat his cake and have it too. He gives Biden no credit for jobs that returned after the coronavirus pandemic, and assigns himself no blame for jobs that were lost due to COVID, limiting his assessment to the 30-month window of the Trump administration before COVID shook up the economy. As Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research told Politifact, Trump is saying "everything that was bad is Biden's fault, whereas everything that is good would have happened anyhow.”
Spinning numbers to make yourself look better is nothing new, but what if you really want to know the truth? You probably can't.
Despite polls showing Trump with an 11- to 20-point lead over Biden on the question of which candidate would better handle the economy, the economy did well under Trump, if you don’t take the shocks of COVID into account, and the economy is doing well under Biden, if you don’t assign blame for the COVID shock on Biden. (It also depends on what you mean by the economy "doing well.")
Even if you wanted to base your vote solely on which administration would be “best for the economy,” (instead of, say, which candidate is being tried for nearly 100 felonies) it’s probably not possible, even though we have recent data on how each handled it. The effects of public policy on the economy is such a complex subject, and there are so many people pushing so many agendas—weirdos sharing gas price memes on Facebook, vice presidents sharing slanted job charts on twitter—that it’s probably not possible to understand with any degree of certainty. Even if you devote your life to studying macroeconomics, other economists will have diametrically opposed views to yours.
This leaves us with tribalism and vibes, two factors that have probably always decided U.S. elections. If you're thinking "that's true of most politicians, but not my favorite one! They're a straight-shooter!" the wool has been pulled over your eyes. A political candidate who was really honest, who refused to engage in deception and self-puffery, would be dead in the water in any election larger than the local school board. Imagine a presidential candidate running on a platform of "There's not much I can do about the economy; it's supply and demand."
This week's youth culture report is all about conflict: Dogs are fighting lemons, Gen-Z is fighting Millennials, and everyone is fighting artificial intelligence.
The newest pet-related trend on TikTok is posting videos of dogs eating lemon slices. They are hilarious clips, because dogs don’t like lemons, so their excitement at catching some food from their master’s hand quickly turns into a sour-faced look and a side-eye look of dog-disappointment.
But because no one is allowed to have fun, some vets were quick to warn against this trend, pointing out that citrus can cause "gastrointestinal upsets" or even "severe clinical signs like collapse.“ Throwing food at a dog for them to catch is a choking hazard too, "particularly if the piece of food is too large to swallow whole," according to Dr. Anna Foreman of Everypaw Pet Insurance. So no one should ever huck a slice of lemon at their dog. Still, if you watch the videos, dogs almost never eat the lemon slices. They either give the 'em a quick lick and go, “nah," or they catch the fruit slice in their mouth and spit it out, because dogs aren’t stupid.
From the 1980s mullet to the ubiquitous “Rachel” of the '90s, every generation eventually develops and popularizes a ridiculous haircut they’ll be embarrassed about in the future. For Gen Z, it’s looking like the "Zoomer Perm" is going to be the generational ‘do. Sometimes called the "broccoli cut" or "bird's nest," the Zoomer Perm is shaved on the side and back and long and bushy/curly on the top. If you have straight hair, you gotta get it permed to do the look right. It’s a very dumb-looking haircut, but according to WikiHow, Zoomers like it because they “tend to not be as self-conscious or serious as other generations, so the funny things you can do with the broccoli cut are actually an upside, not a drawback.”
Last week I brought you the regrettable news of the resurgence of Gamergate, but now there’s a new wrinkle: Gaming news site Kotaku’s editor-in-chief, Jen Glennon, resigned late last week, leading some to imagine the resignation was because of Kotaku's coverage of Gamergate 2.0.
Gamergate degenerates are, of course, wrong about this (and everything else). According to Glennon, the resignation was because the site’s owner, G/O Media, decided to change Kotaku's focus from news and editorial content to game guides, adding that G/O Media's CEO Jim Spanfeller is a herb. Lifehacker was once owned by G/O Media, so I say this with an insider's knowledge: There is no way G/O had any interest in or knowledge of what Kotaku was writing about.
In the first of what will probably be years of stories that ask “How much of this movie is AI?” The internet film community noticed that some images used in recently released indie horror flick Late Night with the Devil appear to be AI-generated. The film’s directors, Cameron and Colin Cairnes, quickly confirmed they had “experimented with AI for three still images” that appear as brief interstitials in the film. Reaction from the fan community is mixed. Some have called for a boycott of the movie or said they’d never see it. Some defended the movie. Some moderates called on people to sneak into theaters to see it. Totally apart from AI-generated art, Late Night with the Devil is one of the most innovative, creative, and unique horror movies I’ve seen in years. It will be streaming on Shudder starting on April 19.
Since the publication of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X in 1991, generational conflict discourse has been dominated by everyone agreeing that Baby Boomers suck. While that trend is alive and well on subreddits like r/boomersbeingfools, the new hotness is Generation Z bagging on Millennials for being lame. Generation Z has turned the withering eyes of youth on slightly older folks and found that liking Buzzfeed and Harry Potter, using words and phrases like “doggo,”“I just did a thing,” and “adulting” are actually lame—old-people shit. Some Gen-Z members are using the phrase “Quirk Chungus” to describe the “lol so random” aspect of Millennial culture. As a Gen Xer, Im glad no one ever blames us for anything or regards us as important enough to bother hating on, but I'd also like to point out that the most recognizable expression of Zoomer culture is Skibidi Toilet. Check out this YouTube video from KnowYourMeme for a deeper dive into the newest generational conflict.
In this week’s viral video, YouTube comedian Kurtis Conner tasks himself with only using outdated tech for a week. It’s objectively funny to watch someone fully decked out with antique gear that barely works, and Conner is an amusing guy, but on another level, this video says something about the value and meaning of tech. Most of the gear he’s rocking would have been early-adopter-only when it was new 20 years ago, but now literally everything, from the wristwatch camera to the portable TV, the tiny voice recorder, Palm Pilot, to every function of the Xbernaut wearable computer, is available to everyone on even the cheapest smartphone. Is anyone happier? More fulfilled? I’d say “no,” but that’s what I’d always say to anything.
Entertainment enjoyers have been asking “What should we watch tonight?” since TV existed, but over the last few decades, technology has expanded the options from “whatever is on the three channels we get” to “almost everything that has ever been broadcast in human history”—leaving many paralyzed with choice, but no closer to answering the key question. Enter Likewise, an app aimed at giving you the best answer possible.
Founded by a team of ex-Microsoft employees with an investment from Bill Gates, Likewise has been working to improve entertainment recommendations for movies and TV, books, and podcasts since 2017. “We were created to solve the absolute mess that is content discovery,” Likewise co founder and CEO Ian Morris told me. “Our mission is to provide every single person out there with their own personal entertainment.”
Likewise’s most recent addition is a fun-to-use TikTok-like infinite scroll interface and deeper integration of AI into its recommendation process. In press-release speak, Likewise works by “seamlessly integrating its AI-powered personal agent and leveraging advanced algorithms and 600 million consumer recommendations.” In practice, you download the Likewise App for iOS or Android, tell it some of the genres, movies, TV shows, books, and/or podcasts you like, and start poking around.
Likewise attacks the “what do I watch” problem from a couple of angles at once. It compiles an extensive profile of individuals users’ taste preferences and recommends based on that; it also links you with its community of over 2.5 million users, specifically to users who share tases with you, then lets you ask the community for its favorites. You can check out the lists curated and compiled by Likewise’s editorial staff, or use its AI agent to search using natural language.
Unlike the recommendation algorithms from a single streaming service, Likewise is cross-platform and community-driven, so it’s going to try to give you the best horror movies for you based on more than the formula Netflix uses, instead of providing the best horror movies for you that are also on Netflix (unless that’s what you ask for).
“It’s designed to be action-oriented,” Morris explained. “If you see something you like, you can click the save button and save it to your watchlist, then see where it’s available for streaming. You have the Rotten Tomato ratings, and the IMDB rating, and community reviews, then you can play it on your Roku. So it’s not just a query engine.”
You can also use Likewise outside of your phone. A Likewise app is available on Roku, AppleTV, and Firestick, and can be used as a central hub for accessing media on those devices. You can also contact Pix, Likewise’s AI agent, directly from the website, send it a text from your phone at (877) TEXTPIX, or send a question via email. Unlike asking ChatGPT, Pix will add the results of your query to your Likewise list.
I like to mess with artificial intelligence, so I emailed Pix the following: "Compile a list of a movies that housewife in 1981 might enjoy if she was contemplating leaving her husband and children in order to pursue her dream of becoming a professional surfer."
Here is what Pix returned.
"Sounds like you're looking for some cinematic inspiration to catch that dream wave, am I right? 🏄♀️ I've whipped up a list of movies that would have resonated with a housewife in 1981, contemplating a wild life change towards professional surfing. Hope these help stir up that beachy ambition! 🌴
The Endless Summer (1966): A timeless classic in the world of surfing films. It's all about chasing summer around the world. Talk about surf's up, right? 🌞🏄♀️
An Unmarried Woman (1978): It's about a woman rediscovering herself after a divorce. It should resonate well with the idea of starting anew. 💔🔄💖
Breaking Away (1979): It's a coming-of-age story about chasing dreams, which might be a great source of inspiration for our 1981 housewife. 🏁🚲
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979): While it's about a divorce and custody battle, it puts a good perspective on the family aspect for someone considering leaving. 👪⚖️
Norma Rae (1979): This one's all about a woman standing up for what she believes in, despite the odds. Kind of the feel we're going for, right? ✊💪
Ordinary People (1980): This one would resonate well, as it's about a family trying to cope with the loss of one of their own. Might give some perspective on what the family might go through. 🏠💔
On Golden Pond (1981): An ageing couple's journey might just help our protagonist see her existing life from a fresh lens. 👵👴💖
While I absolutely loathe the writing style of AI when it's trying to be "casual," the movies are all in the ballpark, at least.
March is Oscar’s month, when Hollywood's attractive millionaires gather to congratulate each other for being so awesome while they embark on the fool's errand of declaring for posterity which movies are the best ones. So it's the perfect season to talk about bad vs. good films, and how no one, even awesome film industry professionals, can really know whether a movie is good or not.
In an inspired act of Oscar counter-programing, The Criterion Channel released a collection of 14 “Golden Raspberry” winning films to stream in March. These “worst of the worst” movies prove that that "badness" of a movie can be as unknowable as its "goodness."
If you consider the history of the Academy Awards (and ignore the subjective nature of our response to art), most Best Picture winners are “good” movies, in a flabby, middlebrow way, and most stay that way over time. Titanic is a good movie, I guess. So is Chariots of Fire, kind of. But some movies, for cultural reasons that can rarely be predicted, swing wildly from "the best" to "the worst" or vice versa based on the cultural world we live in when we see them. Sometimes critics, audiences, and “the industry” all think a movie is not only good, but the best, only to learn it's actually terrible later on. Crash, for example, went from best to trash in fewer than 20 years.
When it was released in 2005, Crash was seen as a courageous examination of race in America, a movie that was not afraid to "go there," as we said back in 2005. But Crash is really bad—it’s not “kind of OK, but didn’t deserve Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain” bad, but actively, undeniably, aggressively terrible.
Even though the frames are same then as now, few people noticed how obvious, trite, and amateurish Crash was in 2005. It’s a movie populated with paper-thin characters who exist to wander into shallow, melodramatic, “racially charged” vignettes and preach at us. Crash has a message, and that’s where it goes from mediocre to odious. Despite its promise to "keep it real," as we said back in 2005, Crash is designed to comfort its liberal white audience, not confront it. Its message is something like “racism is bad, mmm-kay, but you are good because you totally give a shit.” Or, as critic Clarisse Loughrey pointed out: “Crash is the dad from Get Out’s favorite film.”
So how did Crash manage to hide its mawkish mid-ness well enough to win a best picture Oscar? It was partly through the then-hot narrative device of non-linear storytelling, but it was mostly because the Academy is made up almost exclusively of the dad from Get Out. The target market for sensitive, middle-budget movies about race are the dad from Get Out too, and he's not going to miss an opportunity to congratulate himself for being not-racist, especially on Oscar night.
I’ve watched all of the Criterion’s Razzie collection, and a case could be made for the worthiness of any of these movies (with the exception of Gigli, a movie that has a 6% Rotten Tomatoes score and is still overrated), but two films stuck out to me as most deserving of reconsideration: Cruising and Freddy Got Fingered.
Directed by William Friedkin—whose credits include The Exorcist, Boys in the Band, and The French Connection—1980s Cruising is a hard-hitting crime drama/neo-noir set among the BDSM crowd in pre-AIDS New York. Al Pacino plays a detective who goes undercover in the leather daddy scene to catch a serial killer.
Cruising is a tense, fast-paced, and fascinating thriller, but critics hated it. At first I thought maybe the graphic portrayal of violence and kinky man-on-man sex were a little much for critics in that less-enlightened time, but it turns out there was a different reason for Cruising’s critical beatdown: it was mostly a victim of events surrounding it.
While it was in production, Cruising was at the center of a now-forgotten controversy. Gay activists protested over the fear that the film would stereotype all gay men as hedonistic, violent fetishists. Upon the film’s release, many critics decided Cruising’s enigmatic ending and its main character’s inscrutability were the result of a director knuckling under to outside pressure. Some panned it for the portrayal of gay men—and some critics, presumably, were just homophobes.
But seen through a 2024 lens and ignorant of the controversy it once caused, viewers can consider Cruising on its merits, and finally see the unflinching, taut, and fascinating thriller/psychological exploration that was always there. This is a matter of opinion, but Cruising seems to go to great pains to fairly represent the struggle and alienation gay men faced at the time, while making it clear that a small subculture doesn't represent gay people as a whole. The unclear resolution and Al Pacino's inarticulate main character's is-he-or-isn't-he journey doesn't seem like waffling from a scared filmmaker as much as a stab at illustrating how complex sexuality, violence, and identity can be. Three thumbs up.
Upon its release, Tom Green's 2001 comedy (I guess) Freddy Got Fingered was panned nearly as roundly as Gigli. Critics said it was scatological, puerile, annoying, and unfunny. As Roger Ebert put it: “This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.”
All of that is true, but it was also ahead of its time. Green’s schtick was the first wide appearance of the wave of anti-comedy that went on to fuel The Eric Andre Show, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, and most of the internet. His shtick is not supposed to be “funny” in a traditional sense, but more off-putting and meta-funny. It’s funny because he keeps doing weird things that aren’t funny, leading us to question the nature of comedy and maybe chuckle at how stupid and excessive it is.
But even if you don’t buy the anti-comedy pioneer angle, there’s a deeper level to Freddy Got Fingered in which the boundaries between life and art are stretched and shredded in a way that’s never been done before. If you strip away the gags about fellating horses or drinking toilet water, Freddy is the story of an unfunny weirdo who manages to annoy Hollywood jerks into giving him millions of dollars to make a TV show, which he promptly wastes on annoying people. This is the real story of Tom Green, and Freddy Got Fingered is both a fictionalized account of his journey and the result of it. It’s Tom Green saying, “People in suits actually gave me $14 million dollars to make this movie, and I’m going to blow it on a comedy with no jokes, no characters, and no point beyond me being annoying for 90 minutes. Now watch me roll around in deer guts.”
Lots of movies aim to be subversive, but not many actually subvert the artistic expectations of their genre. Freddy Got Fingered does, but the audiences and critics of 2005 saw Tom Green's antics and missed his larger point. "That's not even a joke" meant "this movie is bad" back in 2005, but it "hits different" now, as I'm told some people say in 2024. I don’t know if Freddy Got Fingered is genius, exactly, but it’s way more interesting than Crash.
This week's trip into the world of young people culture takes us from the heights of a PSA that signals a positive shift in cultural ideas about Down Syndrome to the depths of a new incarnation of "Gamergate." Along the way we'll take a look at some memes about Timothée Chalamet and learn why, exactly, the music was so much better when you were young.
Twenty-eight year old actor Timothée Chalamet starred in Dune, Wonka, and Dune 2 and has been nominated for an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and three BAFTAs. But he looks like a shoe.
Since as early as 2020, people have been pointing out Chalamet’s resemblance to footwear. “Timothee Chalamet looks like a pointy italian shoe that was turned into a real boy by a witch's curse,” reads the first tweet about the phenomena. Check out this video and see if you agree. Or these side-by-side photos.
Shoes aren’t the only things Chalamet resembles, however. The first photos were released last week of the actor dressed as a young Bob Dylan for upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown, It looks like this:
According to the internet, Chalamet looks like Fievel Mousekewitz from An American Tail. Or like “every single character in love actually.” Or like he’s “On his way to become a governess to a captain with seven children. Seven!” Or like “a Charles Dickens character with a jam band.”
I generally don’t celebrate bullying people online, but it’s all pretty good-natured, and he really does look like a shoe; plus, if Chalamet is mad, he can cry into a big pile of money.
Have you ever had a younger person play current music for you, and it sounds wrong and bad? It happens to me regularly. My teenager will pull up the Soundcloud of some underground rapper or bedroom producer he likes, and my (unspoken because I’m not an asshole) reaction is usually something like, “How can anyone like this shit?”
It’s not the music itself necessarily; it’s the production—the mix. The drums are too low. The vocals are sludgy. There’s no separation. Etc, etc. “Why would anyone release something that sounds like this when professional production tools are easily available to anyone with a PC?” I’d think. But I think I figured out the reason.
Since at least the 1950s, the music young people like was identifiable partly because older people hated it. The distorted, dissonant guitars of rock and roll and the hard-edged minimalism and obscenity-laden lyrics of hip hop sounded wrong to squares and parents, like mistakes or like something dangerous, so artists heaped it on.
But at some point musicians ran out of runway. For rock, I’m going to say the 1987 release of Big Black’s Songs About Fucking marks the moment where no more distortion or noise could be applied to a recording and have it still reasonably be called “music.” You could pick a similar, arbitrary date for hip hop, too. Maybe NWA’s first album. As extreme as the content was at the time, though, both Songs About Fucking and Straight Outta Compton are expertly produced.
Big Black’s Steve Albini went on to produce Nirvana’s culture-defining In Utero, an album today’s parents grew up on, rendering “noise and distortion” forever incapable of giving offense. NWA’s Straight Outta Compton is practically cuddly nostalgia in 2024. But in a glorious piece of teenage subversion, young artists recently (maybe unconsciously) recognized that they could still make music that sounds wrong and bad to squares like me, even if they can't do it through noise or curse words. The ingenious solution is the sludgy, imperfect, unlistenable mixes of today’s underground music. So the next time you catch yourself thinking about how music was so much better in your day, remember that it’s really just your old-ass ears; when your kids are old, it will be played in dentist offices.
If you were lucky enough to have missed the first incarnation of “Gamergate” in 2014, I have bad news. The second version of the harassment-masquerading-as-activism movement is brewing within in the fetid hangouts of a new generation of online cranks and assholes. Gamergate 2.0 has dropped the faux concern about “ethics in video game journalism” in favor of just being against things it considers “woke,” but the tactics remain the same: Choose a target, make up things about them, then turn on the harassment hoses and fire up the death-threat cannons. This time around, the focal point of the anger is a small narrative design company called Sweet Baby Inc. The cover story for Gamergate’s harassment campaign involves the belief that this 16-employee company is dictating the editorial choices for the entire $214 billion game industry, including deciding the race of the main character in Alan Wake 2, the choices Kratos makes in the last God of War, and is responsible for basically every not-white, not-straight character in all of gaming.
Encouragingly, the industry seems to be responding more aggressively this time, with the heads of game development companies pointing out that Gamergate jerks don’t understand how the games industry (or anything else) works, as companies hire consulting firms because they want the services they provide; consulting companies don’t dictate terms to their employers. So if Sweet Baby is providing woke-if-cation, it’s at the request of an industry that wants to be more woke, not less. Another encouraging difference between this and the original Gamergate: The movement seems much smaller and sadder, with the Discord server where the harassment is organized having only around 2,000 members.
I don’t have sympathy for them, but today’s cheaters have a harder time covering up their indiscretions than any previous generation. The number of apps and platforms which can gives you away is always increasing, and one small slip will give away the game. You can even get busted through fitness app Strava.
In a recent video, TikToker meg.c.mcgee recounts the story of how she found proof of her husband’s infidelity through the running maps on Strava. His jogging route led directly from the home he shared with his wife to an illicit partner’s house a half mile away, and the unnamed dude didn’t set it to “private” or delete the data. Commenters on the post tell stories about catching cheating partners though Airbnb, Venmo, the AMC app (he took too many trips to movies she hadn’t seen), and secret calculator apps that look like innocent math aids but act as repositories for hidden photographs.
This week’s viral video is a public service announcement from the National Down Syndrome Society that’s really hitting a nerve with people—the ad has been viewed nearly 30 million times on TikTok and even more on Instagram. It challenges viewers to consider how the limitations we place on people with Down syndrome become self-fulfilling prophesies. “Coach, you assume that I can’t hit harder,” actress and model Madison Tevlin says in the vid, “so you don’t train me to hit harder.”
The ad basically plays out like a standard do-gooder PSA, the kind of thing that might get 5,000 views, but then Tevlin informs us she can, in fact, “recite fucking Shakespeare.” After a pause, she asks, “You assumed I couldn’t swear, right?”
I didn’t assume that, but I did assume that the people making a PSA about Down syndrome would infantilize its subjects in the name of good taste or respectability, so it’s refreshing and powerful that they refuse to, and instead acknowledge that cursing, drinking, and having sex aren’t special privileges for the neurotypical or something that we should never talk about in connection with people with intellectual disabilities, but are basic human rights that everyone should have the option of enjoying.
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You can get the Poputar T2 Smart Acoustic Guitar on sale for $323.99 right now (reg. $430), though prices can change at any time.
I haven’t talked about “The Mandela effect” in this column because it’s silly. People think they saw a movie called Shazaam where Sinbad played a Genie because there was a movie called Kazaam where Shaq played a genie. People remembered Nelson Mandela’s funeral before it happened because they half-watched coverage of Nelson Mandela being freed from prison years earlier and are remembering that. There’s no alternative universe necessary to explain any of it.
That said, it’s easy to explain away other people’s fake memories. When it comes to memories that I have, things get weird. I remember things I would have staked my life on, that are shared by thousands/millions of other people, yet all available evidence says they are false. I know that Johnny Carson's co-host Ed McMahon did not appear in super bowl ads for Publisher’s Clearing House, but I remember the commercials anyway, and can describe the van, the house, and the bunch of balloons that Ed brought to go with the comically over-sized check. I know that in the James Bond movie Moonraker, there is no shot of Dolly, Jaw’s love interest, smiling at him to reveal that she wears braces. But I remember it.
There are explanations for both Moonraker and Ed McMahon, but personally accepting them instead of what I know I remember is difficult. Still, I can’t argue with the facts:
The Publisher’s Clearing House commercials existed, but didn’t star McMahon. He was spokesperson for a rival, less well known company. So I’m mixing up his ads with theirs.
Dolly isn't wearing braces, but if you look at the scene, she clearly should be. This is a case where our collective memory improved a mistake by Moonraker’s producers.
But then there’s the Fruit of the Loom logo.
That underwear vendor Fruit of the Loom’s logo once featured a cornucopia is as close to a universal Mandela Effect as I’ve seen. Just about everyone seems to remember it, but the company says it never happened. As this article on Snopes makes clear, there’s no evidence of this alternative logo ever having existed. There are photos (easily faked), and a supposed trademark application, but those fall apart under scrutiny.
Unlike most Mandela effects, there’s been actual research on the Fruit of the Loom logo. Overall, this University of Chicago study indicates that people are just bad at remembering logos, but the research can’t find any reason people tend to mis-remember logos in specific ways. I suspect some of it is like Moonraker, people substituting a “better” design—the Monopoly man should be sporting a monocle in keeping with his “old-timey-rich-guy" character—but why would we, collectively, put a cornucopia behind the fruit on our underwear? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cornucopia in real life, so I don’t associate it with fruit. When researchers showed study participants a Fruit of the Loom logo with a plate behind the fruit, (plates and fruit being something we've all seen linked) they still largely regarded the cornucopia as the legit Fruit of the Loom mark.
I doubt we're seeing an example of a parallel universe that’s just like ours, except the logo of an underwear company is different. I think we’re seeing something closer to the Butterfly Effect. Something happened, maybe some tiny thing, at some point in time, and it resonated within the complicated inter-connected systems that make up our collective memory and managed to create a strong enough signal that most people associate a cornucopia with the Fruit of the Loom logo. But no one has identified what that something is. It sounds crazy, but there’s at least one example that’s similar where the cause was found and identified.
Research suggests that about 3% of the population have synesthesia, a phenomenon in which stimuli is perceived simultaneously through more than one pathway. Synesthetes might taste mint when they hear the word “floor,” or know what yellow sounds like. Certain kinds of connections are more common than others, and grapheme-color synesthesia, the association of colors with letters and numbers, is the most often reported. In 2012, MIT scientist Nathan Witthoft was studying this form of synesthesia and found that a greater-than-average number of participants grouped the same color and number, and the results became even more striking for people of specific ages.
(Before you read on, what color is E?)
Taken as a single data point, there’s no “this is silly” explanation for different people connecting the same letters with the same colors. You could account for this by theorizing a collective unconscious, or an as-yet-undocumented connection between different senses, but there’s a more mundane theory too: Fisher-Price magnetic letters.
Back in the early 1970s, Fisher-Price released its first set of magnetized alphabet letters. It became very popular. The E was blue, and that was the kind of connection that about 15% of participants born between 1970 and 1985 made. (It’s a little more complicated than this, as some researchers haven’t been able to make similar connections in other cultures, but for the sake of argument, it’s what I’m going with.)
So the release of a toy in the early 1970s determined generations of people’s ideas of what color different letters are, and helped explain aspects of synesthesia, but no one nailed it down for more than 40 years. So it is, I believe, with the cornucopia. There was some, maybe totally unrelated, cultural stimuli that was commonly experienced involving a cornucopia, maybe that connected it with briefs, but we collectively forgot about it, and now we only have the echoes left.
I associate cornucopias with Thanksgiving. It seems to be the only time they're a "thing," and Thanksgiving is exactly when Fruit of the Loom might have release commercials aimed at Christmas shoppers. So maybe that's where this connection comes from. Or maybe it’s something else entirely.
Strands, the New York Times’ still-in-beta word search game, is now on its 10th puzzle. The first two or three puzzles were relatively tame, with solvers complaining that the hint gave too much away and the game wasn’t very challenging. But you and I know better, right? As I pointed out last week, the puzzle’s creators have dropped hints that it’s going to get a lot trickier. That’s begun, and hoo boy, people are mad.
Before you read any further, know that this article includes spoilers and outright answers for the March 13, 2024 game of Strands. Here is the link to play today’s game, so you can suffer along with the rest of us. Then come back and we’ll discuss what you just experienced. (And if you’re catching up later, here’s a fan-created archive where you can play the March 13 game even if you are reading this from the future.)
Strands #10 “One thousand followers” 🔵🔵🟡🔵 🔵🔵🔵🔵
Alright, friends. We need to discuss a few things about how the puzzles are constructed, and what expectations and assumptions are built in. This puzzle is new, so it’s okay if you haven’t figured everything out yet! We’re learning together.
If you solve crosswords, especially NYT crosswords, you’ll have a huge head start over everyone else when it comes to understanding tricky Strands themes. Remember, in Strands, “today’s theme” is the clue you get when you open the page. I think of it as being the title of the puzzle.
Here’s what you need to know: the theme is a clue for the spangram (the yellow word or phrase). The spangram, in turn, describes what the blue words have in common.
Sometimes the theme is a pretty straightforward clue: for example,
“Mark my words” went with the spangram PUNCTUATION. (Blue words: COMMA, APOSTROPHE…)
“She’ll have a ball” went with the spangram CINDERELLA. (Blue words: PUMPKIN, SLIPPER…)
“I gotta dip!” went with the spangram GUACAMOLE. (Blue words: AVOCADO, JALAPENO…)
Simple, right? That’s because they’re starting us off easy. There have been some trickier ones:
“To put it mildly” was EUPHEMISMS.
“Ruler’s decree” was MEASUREMENTS. (That’s “ruler” as in a yardstick, not a king)
I’m convinced that this is a word search designed for crossword aficionados. Personally, I’m here for it: I love NYT crosswords, especially ones like Thursdays and Sundays that are full of clever themes and wordplay. For example, here are some crossword clues that I’ve chuckled at in the past week:
“Product lines?” for BARCODE
“Dating inits” for BCE (Get it? Those letters could be part of a prehistoric date)
“B♭?” (that is, B-flat) for LIE DOWN
This is what’s going on when “One thousand followers” becomes GRAND FINALE, as in the March 13 Strands theme. A grand is one thousand, and a finale is an ending. The puzzle asks us to find endings for the phrase “GRAND ____.”
Now that we’re getting the hang of it, the blue words are sometimes wordplay based on the theme/spangram. Just as in Connections, words aren’t always grouped together for being members of a category or synonyms for each other. We’ve seen all kinds of tricky combinations there, including homophones and anagrams. (Remember ATE, FOR, TOO, WON as homophones of the numbers 8, 4, 2, 1?)
So what kind of wordplay can we expect in Strands? (Fortunately, anagrams won’t really work.) Recall that the NYT hinted we might see “fill-in-the-blanks” someday. That’s happened twice already. Just a few days ago, we had this puzzle:
Theme: “FRAGILE: Handle with care”
Spangram: BREAKABLE
Words: HEART, SILENCE, PROMISE, BREAD, MOLD, SWEAT, RECORD.
Get it? They all refer to idioms where we “break” something: you can break bread with somebody, or break their heart, or you can sound like a broken record.
The reason March 13’s puzzle is so tricky is that it uses both a crossword-style clue for the spangram, and Connections-style fill-in-the-blanks for the blue words. I’m going to spoil it all here, since you were already warned:
Theme: “One thousand followers”
Spangram: GRAND FINALE
Words: [grand] PRIZE, [grand] JURY, [Grand] CENTRAL, [Grand] CANYON, [grand] SLAM, [Grand] RAPIDS, [grand] PIANO.
Get it? Get it??? I’m sorry, I was tickled by this once I figured it out. It also took me a good long while to get it, because this is a tough puzzle! It takes a few leaps of logic to get those “aha!” moments.
Anyway, people who were expecting a simple word search are mad. Here’s a Reddit thread full of complaints that the spangram doesn’t match the theme, or that “finale” should have been a word on its own. (It could have been, but then you don’t get the cute construction of GRAND + [synonym for ending].)
Many of the complaints on this and other hard puzzles are from people who aren’t native English speakers, and that’s a totally valid criticism. (Lots of folks were stumped by GADZOOKS the other day—you kind of had to read a certain era of comic books for that to even register as a word.) Hard word puzzles are not always accessible to everyone, which is both a problem and the whole point of the puzzle. If you solve something by reaching into your brain for some obscure knowledge or by connecting two concepts in an outside-the-box kind of way, that’s an amazing feeling, and makes the whole puzzle worth it!
I’m impressed with Strands (and have high hopes for it graduating from beta) because it can run that whole gamut from easy to devilish, depending on how sadistic the constructor is feeling that day. Getting the “aha” moment on a tricky one is the kind of thrill I live for (I don’t live a very exciting life). Bottom line: This is not an easy puzzle. If you know and love the wordplay tricks of both Crosswords and Connections, you’ll be into Strands. Just don’t expect it to be easy.
Sometimes, there just isn't much happening. Youth culture this week seems to be hibernating, but it's a good opportunity to take a look at the kind of minuscule micro-trends that you might otherwise gloss over. Maybe these tiny, no-one-thinks-about-them things reveal more than the groundbreaking things everyone notices. Probably not, but you never know.
I’m sure you’ve seen the video of John Cena presenting the Academy Award for Best Costuming at the Oscars on March 10. After being broadcast live and posted online, the wrestler-turned-actor’s naked appearance has been seen by millions of people. It represents a rare moment of cultural relevance among young people for the “no-one-really-cares-about this-anymore” film industry. People were moved enough by something at the Oscars to shoot reaction videos, and make jokes and memes. The bit is certain to go down in history as one of the most memorable moments at an Oscar presentation, and it even touched the fringe-iest fringe-conspiracy theorists, the remnants of Q-Anon. Q-Anon doesn't see anything funny about Cena’s appearance. “This is not just a humiliation ritual — the Hollywood pedophiles, rapists and perverts are certainly getting off on this. I’m sure Jimmy Kimmel is as well!” Reported Liz Krokin on Twitter, “Kimmel ran another skit on his show featuring an FBI-identified pedophile symbol in it and a pizza. Pizza is pedophile code that’s been confirmed by the FBI, DOJ records and local law enforcement agencies,” they continued. “Absolutely disgusting…Nobody wants to see a naked John Cena on TV.” Twitter user American Mama opined, with her finger on the pulse of popular culture. It's interesting how Q-Anon seems to view Cena as a victim in all this, as if Jimmy Kimmel forced him to disrobe against his will.
Austin, Texas hosts the South By Southwest festival every spring in order to “celebrate the convergence of tech, film, music, education, and culture.” This year, one of the highlights of the festival was a new cup-holder.
At a standing-room only panel on Saturday, Stanley 1913, the company behind the immortal, fireproof coffee cup, announced a new, hands-free cup caddy and a mini soft cooler, to the collective excitement of its many, mostly young fans.
Stanley’s story is fascinating if you’re the kind of person who’s interested in the minutia of late capitalism. They’ve been kicking around since 1913, when William Stanley Jr. invented the vacuum seal technology behind vessels that maintain the temperature of liquids. Stanley, the company, was known mostly for making thermoses to keep your coffee hot while camping or on a job site, so it was pretty much a dude company, a maker of something to take fishing. But recently, the company decided to focus on women, specifically young women on TikTok, and went from annual profits of around $70 million a year in 2019 to around $750 million a year in 2024. The company’s flagship product, the 40-ounce Stanley Quencher, has become a must-have for Gen Z and Millennials, both for its many colors and the fact that it's actually a really great cup.
Sometimes I like to dig deeply into the minutia of the youth culture, and this week I’ve uncovered the micro-trend of Satana, which I'm willing to bet you've never head of. Satana comes from the Balkans, where TikToker @stafon71 posted a video of himself scuffing the floor under his desk with his heel, set to the tune “"Satana Eto Ona.” The video was viewed nearly 36 million times. Variations on the theme quickly appeared, including this impressive half-circle, this video of a black-shoe wearer making a scuff and having it erased by someone in white shoes, and this video that depicts the imagined reaction of the person who has to clean the school’s floors. What does it all mean? Probably nothing, but it’s impressive how a school kid scuffing a floor with his shoe could gain international attention.
The unassuming photo you see above is from iStock, and is at the center of a small debate about the loneliness crisis among young men. Entitled “real young man,” and published on iStock in 2011, the image came to light when it was posted on Twitter by @orbitves with the caption “the ‘male loneliness crisis’ is a good thing actually, because why would i ever want to date a guy that looks like this?”
Reactions were mixed. Many posted comments like “ha, that’s funny and a little true.” Some pointed to hypocrisy behind the post, like @TheStrxggler, who tweeted, “Body positivity crowd is shaming bodies again.” Or expressed sympathy for the model, like @WheelchairUser8 who tweeted, "imagine being this poor mf just trying to make a couple bucks from a stock image shoot and out of nowhere every fuckass radfem on twitter is blasting your face everywhere saying no one should ever date you."
The “looksmaxx” crowd had a more constructive take on the matter, and pointed out a number of ways that the stock photo model could improve his appearance, like if he lost 30 pounds, and got a better haircut, he might end up looking like this:
The last stop of my trip through the minutia of youth culture this week is the phrase “green fn.” People have been spamming it all over TikTok's comments lately, and here's what it means: "Green fn" is an interjection you might scream when you’ve done something impressive or cool, but it’s also what someone else might say when you’ve done something clumsy or inept.
Its origin is obscure enough that it’s a good bet that most people who use it don’t know where it came from, but here’s the story: The “green” part is a reference to the NBA 2K series of video games, where the quality of a basketball shot is measured using color and green is as good as it gets.
The “fn” part is short for “fuck n*gga.” It comes from this video, where “Green fn” is used to comment on a missed basket. From there, it began to be featured in ironic memes and sincere memes as well as showing up in many, many TikTok comment sections. Like all youth slang, it’s important that you not use it. Stick with “boo-YAH!” instead—the “green FN” of your youth.
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The themes for this week examination of what's going on with kids is failure and fiasco. There's the ever-expanding story of the disastrous Willy Wonka rip-off in Scotland, a dubious theory about the history of America's "culture wars," and Reddit making a doomed attempt to monkey-wrench AI. There is a success to even the scales, though: a YouTube deep dive into the Barbie cinematic universe.
I'm sure you're already aware of the drama around "Willy's Chocolate Experience," the Willy Wonka-like "immersive experience" that went terribly, hilariously, Fyre-Festival-wrong in Glascow, Scotland. The imbroglio has so captured the imagination of the world that a second level of drama is emerging, beyond the tales of the ripped-off parents and horrified children who attended the event. The internet's curious amateur investigators are digging up every detail of the Wonka-nightmare, and here are some of the treasures they've uncovered.
The actress who played "The Unknown," an unsettling, AI-generated villain created for the Willy experience that has no connection to Willy Wonka, has spoken out about her experience playing the part. Her name is Felicia, she's 16, from Glascow, and this was her first acting gig.
Actor/comedian Paul Connell, the actor who played Willy McDuff, has gone public as well, but he may regret it. A woman claiming to be a former student of Connell posted then deleted several videos accusing him of engaging in a romantic relationship with her when she was 16 and he was 22. (This news really darkens the "isn't this wacky?" vibe of the whole experience.)
As you might have guessed, some of the actors who worked on the Willy Chocolate Experience say they have not been paid the amount they were promised, and they may sue the event's organizer.
A Scottish production company has announced it is working on a horror movie centered on The Unknown. Whether anyone will remember this whole thing when the film is released in late 2024 is an open question, as is the issue of who owns the rights to the character of The Unknown.
If you're looking for a costume for Halloween, you could do worse than dressing as The Unknown. Here are links to all you need to be the king/queen of trick or treating.
Silver mask (oddly, I wasn't able to find the exact mask, but this one is close.)
If someone describes themselves as "neurospicy," they're calling themselves "neurodivergent" in a cute, slang-y way. Since it's not a real word, the term doesn't refer to any specific mental illness, but can refer to OCD, autism, depression, or really anything. It's almost always used to refer to oneself instead of others.
There are a growing number of people online who think we're trapped in 2014; not in a literal "Time is a conspiracy!" way, but culturally. The idea of "The Long 2014" is that that year marked the start of the current "culture-war," and we have not moved past it in a decade. Ten years ago, the argument goes, a cultural argument about inclusion kicked off with GamerGate. Back then, people on the "lets not be assholes to people" side were derided as "social justice warriors" and now they're called "woke," but the arguments have not changed, and we've been rehashing and repeating them on endless loop since, never making progress.
It's an interesting theory, but a product of people who lack historical perspective. It's young people confusing their own awareness of a cultural trend with the trend's beginning. The truth is, we've been having versions of these same arguments in different forms for a lot longer than a decade. Back in the 1990s, people who were in favor of social justice were derided with the term "politically correct," instead of "woke," and before that, they were called "women's-libbers," "bleeding hearts," "abolitionists," "suffragettes," and any number of other invectives that basically mean the same thing. Like William Faulkner wrote back in 1951, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
If you're noticing the word "Bazinga" popping up in confusing ways on Reddit memes, you're not witnessing a resurgence of fandom for The Big Bang Theory. Instead, it's Redditors trying to confuse artificial intelligence. Recently, it was revealed that Reddit will be working with Google to train Google's AI using comments from the site. But in the past, ChatGPT has gotten "hung up" on words if it has no context for them, giving gibberish responses when asked about them. So the idea is to repeat "Bazinga" in different context, completely randomly, with no explanation, in order to trip up the AI.
Sadly, it's not likely to work. The words that confused AI in the past were things like "SolidGoldMagikarp" or "TheNitromeFan," Reddit usernames that were frequently posted, but without definitions. But "Bazinga" already has an established meaning, (ie: "that annoying, manufactured catchphrase from The Big Bang Theory."), and even if it didn't, Redditor's usage of the phrase isn't actually random. AI is smart enough to figure out that "Bazinga," in a certain context, can mean "a word redditors use to try to trick artificial intelligence" and will probably be able to add its own "random" usages too.
YouTube's most important contribution to our culture might end up being videos that take a deep dive into pop cultural detritus that would otherwise go unexamined. It's always good when people ignore the things that people tell you are "serious" in favor of things they've decided to take seriously. Like this week's viral video, where YouTuber Ted Nivision watches all 42 Barbie movies in order to "develop a concrete and airtight theory on what the true lore of the Barbie Cinematic Universe, also known as the BCU, is." Clocking in at nearly two hours, this video really goes deep, incorporating a classic "strings connecting papers on a whiteboard" organizational structure, and actually coming up with a workable framework for the BCU.
All decent people look back at their youth and think, "I sure was a callow idiot" (but hopefully in an affectionate way). Remembering the combination of grandiosity and dumb-i-osity that you once embodied is really the key to understanding younger people, because what could be grander and dumber than making a bowl of strawberries internationally famous?
The video is nothing special: It's a single shot with a bunch of zooms and Bobby Caldwell’s 1978 song “What You Won’t Do for Love” playing in the background. It's not dissimilar to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of clips of people showing off their food on TikTok, but something about the timing and content of this one sent it into the stratosphere. No one knows why—which I find inexplicably unsettling in a "maybe we are all ghosts" way—but once it was in front of people, they started liking it (who doesn't like strawberries?). Then people caught on to how strange it was, and viewing, sharing, and commenting upon the strawberries became participatory group-humor. TikTok’s user base is now consciously fighting to make the strawberry video the most liked piece of content on the site, just to be funny. The current TikTok "likes" champion is this lip-sync from Bella Poarch with 64.1 million likes that was posted in 2017. Strawberries are at 37.3M in only three weeks. I think it can win.
I love meme formats that are difficult to explain but easy to illustrate, like the “showing up to the competition” images that are taking over TikTok this month. The gist: showing a video of yourself arriving at a ridiculous competition, and learning you’ve been bested by an even more ridiculous competitor. Like this video entitled “When you show up to the being late competition and your opponent isn’t there yet.” Or “Me arriving to the kindest person competition but my opponent didn’t show up just so I can win.” Or “When I show up to the spreading misinformation competition but my opponent gave me the wrong address.” Or “When I show up for the gaslighting competition and it isn’t even real.” If you’d like to enjoy more of these videos, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of examples at this link for the atonal piano soundtrack that accompanies them.
How many cubes are on the truck above? That’s the deceptively complicated question @Rainmaker1973 asked on a recent post that went viral on Twitter. A little back-of-the-envelope math gives an answer of 51 (There’s 3×7 cubes on the lowest level, the second 3×6 in the middle, and the top has 3×4 boxes.) But is that the correct answer? It depends.
51 is only the right answer if you assume that every layer has three cubes, but we don't have a view that accounts for all the cubes; so it could be fewer than 51 cubes on the truck if they're arranged in an unexpected way. For that matter, who can say if the cubes we can’t see are the same size as the cubes we can see? They could be several blocks wide in the middle, for instance, and so there would be fewer still because part of the truck cargo wouldn't be cubes at all.
An image with a 3/4 diagonal view would make it clear, but that’s not the point of these kinds of purposefully confusing math and logic puzzles. The real puzzle is figuring out what information is missing from the original question so that you can respond, “There is no answer.” This is fun, but if realizing there is no answer is presented as a measure of intelligence, that's wrong too, because 51 is the right answer, from a certain point-of-view. One of the accepted “rules” of doing a puzzle is that all the information is provided to reach a solution. Assuming that’s the case here doesn’t make you wrong. To be on the safe side, I’d answer “51*” with a note explaining the problems with the puzzle itself.
On Feb. 16, video game company Ubisoft released Skull and Bones for the Xbox. In the lead up to its release, CEO Yves Guillemot defended the game’s $70 price tag on a corporate earnings call by saying, “It’s a really full, triple…quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.” So the first AAAA video game: What does that mean, exactly?
The phrase “AAA game” is an informal way of describing the set of video games that are full-priced titles released by established game publishers, so Guillemot is apparently saying its new game is one whole A bigger and better than previously released games.
So is it? No; at least, not according to critics and gamers. Skull and Bones has a Metacritic score of 60, and a “Generally Unfavorable” rating from users. The critical consensus is that there are things that are good about Skull and Bones, but overall, it is boring and seems dated. Gamers themselves were a little more direct, posting videos like this one:
There's a fine line between laughing at people and laughing with them, and it's often blurred on the internet, so, just to be clear: I am laughing with the TikTok couples who spend date night painting terrible portraits of each other. But I am laughing at Florida police officers who open fire because an acorn falls on their police car. When it comes to AI text-to-video tool Sora, I am not laughing.
Young couples on TikTok can be incredibly annoying when they do things like refuse to wear shoes, but there are also heartwarming couple trends, like clips of stay-at-home dates where couples paint each other’s portrait. The videos these evenings produce are glorious—there’s the suspense as you wait for the images to be revealed, but no matter how terrible you think the painting will be, it’s somehow worse. At the same time, there’s something charming in how sincere this art is, and I really like videos of people who are in love and laughing uncontrollably. Plus, the trend is new enough that I can’t find any “real” artist couples doing awesome pictures of each other because they’re so much better than everyone else—nor are there any easily accessible, unfunny parody videos.
This week’s viral video comes courtesy of the body cameras of two Florida law enforcement officers and the Freedom of Information Act. In a video that is both hilarious and terrifying, we see Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Deputy Barney Fife, er, sorry, Jesse Hernandez, approaching his patrol car parked on a quiet street. A handcuffed suspect waits within to be taken to jail. Suddenly, an acorn falls from a tree, and Hernadez reacts by screaming “shots fired!” while somersaulting away. He adds “I’m hit!” and draws his weapon.
Nearby, Sergeant Beth Roberts is talking to a witness. She hears the commotion and pulls out her own gun; then both cops start firing at Hernandez’s patrol car. Roberts is shooting towards Hernandez who is taking cover from the angry squirrel behind a nearby car. The pair unload at least 20 bullets into the vehicle, while an unnamed witness at the scene exhorts them to not kill the person in the car.
Ultimately, the acorn was uninjured in the firefight. The suspect in the back of the car also escaped injury—miraculous given the number of bullets that were aimed toward him—and officer Hernandez resigned while the incident was investigated. Don’t worry, the officers were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing.
The video was posted by YouTuber PoliceActivity on February 13 and quickly spread everywhere, inspiring response memes like this one:
and this:
Hopefully the acorn-cop case will also inspire a serious national conversation about how police are absolutely insane and why do we let these yahoos have guns anyway?
This week, OpenAI, the people who brought us ChatGPT, unveiled their newest threat to humanity: Sora. The generative AI model translates user text into startlingly lifelike (or surreal) videos that are a cut above any AI videos that have come before. These clips are rich in detail, feature full camera movement, multiple subjects, complex lighting, etc., all produced in moments based on a few lines of text. At a glance, or even a longer look, Sora’s videos are nearly indistinguishable from “real” videos. Just click the demo above to see what I mean—all those clips were supposedly created by Sora directly. Sora is not available to the public yet. OpenAI says it is “taking several important safety steps” by “working with red teamers—domain experts in areas like misinformation, hateful content, and bias—who are adversarially testing the model,” which is not terrifying at all.
This week, Nintendo showed off a slew of upcoming third-party games coming to its Switch console, announcing some new titles and revealing the release dates for others. I’ve embedded the video above, but if you don’t have 25 minutes to spare for Nintendo, here are some of the highlights:
Grounded, an action game from Obsidian where players are shrunk to a tiny size and must survive their backyard, will be released on April 16.
Pentiment, also from Obsidian, is a narrative-driven game set in in early sixteenth-century Bavaria. It will be available on Switch on February 22.
Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is coming at some point in 2024. It’s an improved version of 2010’s Epic Mickey.
Turn-based strategy game Unicorn Overlord will be released on March 8.
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is the first two Battlefront games with new playable characters and maps.
World of Goo 2, a sequel to the much-loved puzzle game, will be a Switch exclusive and hits consoles on May 23.
Endless Ocean Luminous, a sequel to undersea adventure game Endless Ocean, hits the Switch store on May 2. It features online play where up to 30 gamers can share the same ocean.
The undeclared national holiday of Super Bowl Sunday has passed once again, leaving behind only memories and memes. But also, we'll delve into this week's debate over yellow paint in video games, take a look at "legging legs," and find out what co-worker core is.
This week’s Super Bowl was among the most predictable in recent memory—after an impossibly dull first half, Taylor Swift led the Kansas City Chiefs to a narrow victory over the San Francisco 49ers. But there was one surprise, brought to the world by SpongeBob Squarepants. While most of us were watching the coverage on CBS, smart people were watching Nickelodeon’s coverage on Paramount+ where SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star joined CBS Sports analyst Nate Burleson for play-by-play coverage of the game.
The Bikini Bottom boys absolutely destroyed Jim Nantz and Tony Romo’s lackluster game-calling. Highlights include Dora the Explorer suggesting the 49ers could use a map to find the end zone, onscreen graphics referring to Travis Kelce as “Taylor Swift’s Boyfriend,” crowd-shots of Bikini Bottom superstars like Clamuel L. Jackson and Doja Catfish, and the ceremonial sliming of the end zone after each touchdown (that would be three slimings in five quarters). Sadly, the entire broadcast isn’t available to watch online, but you can enjoy SpongeBob’s live performance of "Sweet Victory” that kicked off the game.
This year's Super Bowl commercials were mostly lazy variations of “Here's the most famous person we could get to be in our commercial,” but one ad did manage to capture people’s attention: This advertisement for Jesus. It consists of static AI-generated images of the Son of God washing people’s feet, leading many to ask, “Is Jesus a foot guy?” The ad, paid for by the people behind Hobby Lobby, is part of their billion-dollar campaign aimed at humanizing Jesus.
Another highlight surrounding the big game this week: The White House’s official X account posted a meme picture of Joe Biden as Dark Brandon with the caption “Just like we drew it up,” confirming the worst fears of conspiracy theorist everywhere. Biden (or more accurately, some idealistic young intern in the Biden administration's social media department) also launched a TikTok account where he says he’d “get in trouble” if he revealed whether he’d fixed the Super Bowl. When asked about the White House's new social media account, Biden said, "Yeah, I made a ticky-tock, what's it to you, brother?" in my imagination.
While some people focused on the Super Bowl, video game aficionados (or "gamers" for short) debated the use of yellow paint in video games. Just as exploding barrels are red and poison gasses are green, yellow is commonly used in games as shorthand for “these are handholds that you can climb.” The current round of yellow paint debate started a few days ago when Twitter user The Oshborn posted a screenshot from Final Fantasy 7 with the caption, “THE YELLOW PAINT VIRUS HAS INFECTED FF7,” but the debate is nothing new. As far back as 2013, the developers of The Last of Us were widely criticized for their use of yellow to indicate handholds. Whether this is useful visual shorthand that serves players or an example of game developers being lazy depends on your point of view, but one thing is for sure: once you have a job, you will not care about this debate at all.
Coworker core is the name some young people online have come up with for content that a coworker might share because they think it’s funny—basically, cringey and pedestrian shares like old Family Guy clips or Seinfeld memes. The lesson: if you work with anyone under the age of 25 and share anything that you think is funny, the joke is probably on you. But don't despair, as this is part of the great circle of life. Members of generation Alpha have already started making fun of Gen Z for being geriatric because they can't appreciate Skibidi Toilet videos. Besides, you drive a much nicer car than your younger coworkers and don't have student loans to pay off, so who's laughing now, punk?
First, the definition: legging legs refers to people with the “right” kind of legs to wear leggings. When the debate began a few months ago, many TikTok users pointed out that anyone can wear leggings because they're clothes and they make them in many sizes, but others of a more body-police mindset maintained that the only people who should wear leggings have skinny legs and a thigh gap. Because it’s gross and TikTok is for kids, the company banned the phrase “legging legs” from its platform. A search for the term Legging Legs on TikTok leads to a phone number for the National Alliance for Eating Disorders.
If there were a Billboard chart for most lied-about celebrity, singer Taylor Swift would be number one. Her unprecedented level of fame has led to legions of wackjobs and online cranks making up all kinds of weird stuff about her. Everyone has probably heard the NFL-is-fixed theory by now, but there's so many more, so let's take a trip down the Swiftian rabbit hole and dig up some of the strangest conspiracy theories about everyone's favorite singe-slash-intelligence agent-slash-spy novelist-slash-Nazi-slash-satanic clone.
The Taylor theory du-jour contends that Swift is a key player in a Pentagon-led psychological operation aimed at getting Joe Biden reelected president in 2024. The plan required employing Swift as a government agent, engineering a fake romantic relationship between Swift and Kansas City Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce, then convincing the NFL to fix the 2023-2024 football season to ensure a Chiefs Super Bowl appearance. It all came together beautifully, and will end on Sunday with Taylor Swift appearing at halftime of the big game to endorse Joe Biden.
This kind of froth-mouthed fever dream used to be distributed through leaflets left at bus stations, but we've gone so far around the bend that prominent people like Fox New’s Jesse Watters and failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy have endorsed and amplified parts of the narrative, prompting the actual Pentagon to respond. "Listen, you nit-wits, Taylor Swift is just some singer. Stop being so weird," Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh did not exactly tell Politico. "I mean, fuck, look at you people. Jesus," they did not add.
Officially, Elly Conway is a young author whose debut spy novel was adapted to the screen in the movie Argylle. But Conway’s social media footprint is suspiciously light. A first-time novelist’s unpublished book inspiring at $200 million film deal is suspicious. More suspiciously, there are no known photos of Conway, and her official biography is two lines long. This all led to the theory that Taylor Swift is actually the Conway. The evidence: the fictional character of “Elly Conway” in the Argylle movie looks and acts a little like Swift and has the same type of cat.
This week, it was revealed that there never was an Elly Conway; It was just movie biz marketing all along. There was no spy novel. The only Argylle book is the one based on the movie, not the other way around, and it was written by Terry Hayes and Tammy Cohen, both established authors. Taylor Swift had nothing to do with any of this. Also: Argylle is getting bad reviews.
This tweet from alfalfa male Nick Adams sums up another Swift/Kelce conspiracy theory:
Swift, a literal billionaire, has not commented on the rumor.
NFL conspiracy-theorist are almost all non-Swift fans, but one of the most persistent rumors about the singer comes from within her own fandom. They call themselves “Gaylors," and they think that Swift is gay or bi. Despite her much-discussed relationships with various gentlemen and her public statements to the contrary, Gaylors think Swift reveals the real truth about her sexuality only through the coded messages she leaves in her songs and videos. Because she's a fan of The Riddler.
Back in 2016, before Swift publicly endorsed LGBT rights and vowed to take down Donald Trump in 2020, some members of the alt-right enjoyed online role-playing games that involved pretending Taylor Swift was secretly a Nazi.
"Taylor Swift is a pure Aryan goddess, like something out of classical Greek poetry. Athena reborn,” Andre Anglin, a huge nerd, wrote on incel website The Daily Stormer. He went on: “Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world.”
Taylor Swift bears a passing resemblance to Zeena Schreck, the daughter of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, leading to the reasonable, normal belief that they are the same person. “But, Steve,” you might be saying, “Schreck was the high priestess of the Church of Satan from 1985 to 1990, and Swift wasn’t born until 1989, so how could it be?" Well, genius, it can be, because Taylor Swift is a clone.
Swift is but one of a number of Schreck copies that were created around 1990 to spread the word of Satan across the earth. Swift has left clues pointing to this dark fact in her videos, like there's a pyramid in one, for instance. And they do look a bit alike, so there's no denying it. Case closed.
Back in 2013, a theory spread on 4Chan that one of the site's users was actually Taylor Swift. A lot of screenshots and evidence was either uncovered or manufactured to prove that an anonymous 4Channer was actually Tay-Tay. The most telling: Someone on the site claimed to be a famous entertainer. This one could actually be true though. This theory is at least possible: Swift was 23 at the time, and a lot of 23-year-olds are on 4Chan. You can also see how posting somewhere anonymously might appeal to someone as famous as Swift. None of this is evidence, of course, and there’s ultimately no way of knowing if it's true—it’s not like 4Chan users have any credibility. But I want it to be true. Anyway, if you want to dig into this nonsense further, you can start with this YouTube video from Whang.
This week's dive into the ocean of youth culture has turned up mostly mysteries. Why are young people using AI to put clothes on women? Why are kids throwing slushies at their own pick-up trucks? How does one "hurkle-durkle?" Most importantly: Why are videos of people getting in trouble for wearing big boots so hilarious?
It was appalling when the cretins of the internet started using artificial intelligence to create porn of people who don’t want porn made of them, but the newest trend from the darkest-and-dorkiest corner of the internet, 4chan, is using AI to “fix” images of provocatively dressed people (almost always women) to cover them up. They're adding more “modest” clothing, erasing tattoos, and otherwise “dignifying” women whose style of dress is not approved of. The Twitter account @dignifai is dedicated to creating and spreading images like this:
The practice seems partly like a snotty response to the AI deep fakes of Taylor Swift that came out recently on Twitter, but as usual, the point has been missed. It’s not OK to clothe people who didn’t consent to appear clothed just like it's not OK to undress people who didn't agree to that. Women can't win. If they choose to dress modestly, they'll be shamed and ridiculed and their images will be manipulated to remove their clothes. If they choose to dress provocatively, they'll be shamed and ridiculed and their image will be manipulated to make them "dignified."
AI isn't being used exclusively for evil, though. There’s a counter-balancing force embodied by the TikTok account of bluweesh, who collects AI-generated videos of people getting in trouble for wearing big boots. It can’t be explained. It must be seen. I’m not sure this kind of absurdist humor actually balances the moral scales, but it’s still the best use for AI generated video I’ve seen yet.
The newest trend on TikTok is extolling the benefits of hurkle-durkle. Hurkle-durkling is lounging in bed past the time you should get up. You might know it as “bed-rotting” or practicing self-care. It differs from “being lazy” or “crippling depression” in that hurkle-durkling is a conscious decision to reject the demands that life places on us, at least for a few hours.
The phrase caught on when actress/singer Kira Kosarin used it on her TikTok. Kosarin said the word is Scottish, and she’s right. "Hurkle" first appeared in John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language in 1808 with the definition, “to draw the body together." At some point, someone added rhyming slang, and we ended up with the kind of nonsense-sounding phrase that gets popular on social media. I'm a longtime fan of the practice, and I'm glad it's catching on.
I usually look into the lives and habits of younger people, but I thought I'd to turn the glass backwards and see what younger people see when they look at us olds. Not surprisingly, they mostly see how lame we are; specifically, how lame our profile pictures are.
Younger people have noticed that Boomers (and Gen X, let’s be honest) almost always post profile pics in their cars, with sunglasses on, usually with beards. This look was once thought to represent Trump voters, but it’s really a generational thing that crosses political lines.
According to one widely accepted theory originally posted on Reddit, "sunglasses create an emotional distance between the subject and their action.” According to this theorist, the cars-and-shades thing is an attempt to look cool, and "one of the ways in which they ‘look cool’ is the toughness that comes from not caring about other people.”
That’s an interesting theory, but here's a more reasonable explanation: We wear sunglasses and beards in our profile pictures because they cover up one's face, and our faces are fucking disaster areas.
We might look lame in our profile pictures, but a growing trend among kids is throwing slushies at their own trucks, so who’s the lame now? Videos of people walking out of convenience stores with extra-large slushies, then hurling them at their own windshield are going viral across TikTok. They're actually pretty great. Check out the examples at the page for “Bag Season” by Jay Lewis, the preferred soundtrack for slushy videos. Here’s (apparently) the first one, a bare-bones imitation, a parody, someone who doesn’t approve, and someone taking it too far. Like the Big Boots trend, there's no obvious rhyme nor reason to self-slushies, other than it being a good way to show off one’s lifted pick-up (or Bubba Truck) and it’s funny. I fully approve of this trend.
Instagram user Supercar Ron originally posted this week’s viral video. It captures a guy behind the wheel of a Cybertruck using an Apple Vision Pro as he tools down the highway. Is this a vision of the future or is the driver just a gigantic nerd? Or is something else going on?
The video was re-posted on Twitter, where over 17 million people viewed it in its first few days online, with many leaving comments about the dark path that humanity is on, or just generally saying “ha ha.” But some users called shenanigans, pointing out that the Cybertruck doesn’t have a self-driving feature yet. Supercar Ron agreed, and clarified that the video is part of a skit, self-driving wasn’t activated, and the Apple Vision Pro headset wasn’t displaying anything when the footage was shot.
As much as self-driving fills me with white-knuckle terror, I think a self-driving car piloted by a goof in a VR headset is safer than a driver who is texting or a driver who is drunk, and we’ve accepted that those people are on the highway all the time.
When it comes to streaming television, desperately uncool is the new cool. While the hip crowd is buzzing about the new season of True Detective, most of the biggest streaming shows represent something other than what we typically think of as prestige TV: It's lawyer shows, police procedurals, and medical dramas all the way down.
Everybody's watching this stuff, including, or especially, Gen-Z teens and twentysomethings who you'd expect to be watching The Bear and White Lotus. Instead (or, at least,additionally) they're watching Suits, a show that was on for a long time, got indifferent reviews from critics, and was never trending on social media.
I have a theory as to why. Attention-grabbing Prestige TV tends to be challenging and complex. Following multiple shows with extended ensemble casts and labyrinthine plots can be too much amid an already overpacked media diet. Having a more traditional episodic structure doesn't necessarily make a show bad or dumb...but it can make it a lot easier to watch—all the better if there are a ton of episodes, inviting you to turn watching them into a comforting routine. In an era of grim dramas with "cinematic" production values, these shows also tend to be brighter (literally), with more easily distinguishable dialogue, which means you maybe don't need to look up as often from whatever you're doing while you watch them (I'm a big fan of folding laundry).
Here are 18 not necessarily mindless shows you can mindlessly binge whenever you need a break.
This British period drama (it kicks off in 1957) takes place in and around Poplar, London, then one of the city's most desperately poor districts. As the National Health Service is born, secular trained midwives team up with the nuns of Nonnatus House, a nursing convent that had been in the business of providing medical care to the area's poor for decades. Now in its 13th season, the series has long since burned through the memoirs on which it was initially based, but still draws big audiences with its genuinely moving stories of birth and death. Call the Midwife very often deals frankly with issues of women's health that other shows are still too timid to broach, but the appeal here is, I think, in its episodic format: continuing storylines and character arcs take a backseat to narratives that are resolved—for better or worse—in the course of an episode, with narrator Vanessa Redgrave putting a neat cap on things.
Where to stream: Netflix, PBS
When Suits left the air after an impressive nine seasons in 2019, you could have been forgiven for believing that the USA show's biggest contribution to the dialogue was the presence of Megan Markle—but, here we are, four years later, and Suits is a top streaming show, with nearly 60 billion minutes viewed in 2023. It feels like a safer, soapier alternative to something like Succession, the kind of drama with legal overtones that requires far less emotional investment.
Where to stream: Netflix, Peacock
The Queen Latifah-led Equalizer reboots the 1980s series (and sidesteps the Denzel Washington movies) by spinning the premise in a slightly different direction: Latifah plays single-mom Robyn McCall, an impossibly skilled former CIA operative who puts her talents to work for those in need. While the original's vibe was more about the cops being handcuffed by things like "rules" and "giving perps their basic human dignity," this one is more about those who've been failed by systems that don't care about them—and who might benefit from the help of a woman who can beat just about anyone's ass. There's action, violence, and sometimes dramatic stakes, but stories mostly resolve themselves by the end of a given week's episode, and it's typically very satisfying watching Robyn and company spy and/or punch their way out of sticky situations to help the oppressed.
Where to stream: Paramount+
It's not quite the longest-running drama on TV, but at 19 seasons (and counting), this series that began in the George W. Bush administration is still doing just fine in the ratings...but the reruns are where it's at. Old episodes of the show have topped streaming charts for several years running, with an appeal that's nicely splits the difference between traditional comfort TV and serialization: the show offers up some of the case-of-the-week drama that's been the bread-and-butter of medical dramas for decades, but also the type of genuinely juicy soap opera storylines that creator Shonda Rhimes quickly proved herself a master of.
Where to stream: Netflix, Hulu
An update of a venerable British franchise, itself based on a series of autobiographical novels from writer James Alfred Wight (aka James Herriot), All Creatures takes us back to the rural Yorkshire Dales of the 1930s, with a Scottish vet moving to the small farming town of Darrowby to take up a job as a veterinary assistant. It takes a bit of a willingness to see animals in jeopardy on a weekly basis, but the big-hearted show only rarely goes for a gut punch. Mostly, it's charming domestic drama amid a bucolic landscape, with frequent guest appearances by baby cows.
Where to stream: PBS
The joy of the Quantum Leap (a continuation, though with mostly new characters, of the original) is in the anthology format. Like any modern show, there are running character and plot arcs, but the relatively simple sci-fi premise sees time-traveler Ben Song (Raymond Lee) live the life of a new character each week, for just long enough to help "put right what once went wrong." The individual stories play like well-written mini-movies, sometimes with very real stakes, and the narratives pretty much always wrap up by hour's end, meaning that the drama doesn't (much) carry over from week to week. Plus, it's got Ernie Hudson...always a soothing presence.
Where to stream: Peacock (original and revival)
Moving up the list of longest-running dramas, NCIS clocks in at an impressive 20 seasons (and counting), with the added prestige of having birthed five (and counting!) spin-offs. It's that kind of volume that has helped the show become a top-five acquired streaming series, with literally hundreds of hours for people to sift through. Starring Mark Harmon for most of its run (he left at the end of season 19), the show involves fictional agents of the title's Naval Criminal Investigative Service, as they deal with Navy-related crimes. Specific, sure, but the show blends police procedural stuff (popular) with military drama (also popular), and keeps a pretty light touch through it all.
Where to stream: Paramount+ (all current seasons), Netflix (all but the most recent seasons)
Gilmore Girls did reasonably well during its initial seven-season run, but largely because it became a flagship show (alongside Buffy The Vampire Slayer) for itty-bitty, and now defunct, network The WB. It's impossible to know how well the (mostly) smart and funny series would have fared on a major channel—but it's currently a top streaming show. None of that has anything to do with its undeniable quality (at least until a change of network and show runners lead to a rocky final season). As with most of these shows, this one is a good reminder that smooth-brain TV doesn't ever need to be dumb. Lorelai and Rory Gilmore are just fun to spend time with.
Where to stream: Netflix
Onboard a starship that looks and feels like a luxury hotel, we take a journey across the universe with a crew of smart, competent, likable people who mostly all get along. If we don't want to live on the U.S.S. Enterprise (1701-D, of course), then I certainly wouldn't mind working there—well, except for the "nearly getting destroyed every few weeks" thing. But that's all part of the fun. Star Trek: Voyager also fits the bill for a comfort watch, with Deep Space Nine serving as a more challenging, serialized next step.
Where to stream: Paramount+
Whatever happened to predictability? The eight-season TGIF (ask your parents) staple was beloved enough that it was reborn in 2016 with a Netflix series that was itself one of the most popular sitcoms streaming—and thereby kicking off a wave of sitcom revivals, with mixed results. Still, the revival (2016 – 2020) succeeded in much the same way that the original did; both series promise pure silly sitcom fun, with just enough relationship drama to keep things moving. It's easy to understand why viewers old and young have been drawn to the brightly colored world of Danny, D.J., Jesse, and the rest of the gang.
Where to stream: Max, Hulu, Vudu, Apple TV+, Prime Video (original), Netflix (revival)
The Martin Sheen-lead show was certainly popular during its initial run, but its ripped-from-the-headlines style gave it an edge, even as it allowed us to imagine smart, thoughtful people getting jobs in government. Seeing reasonably intelligent people talking through the challenges of politics and the nation's problems on a weekly basis has always been a bit of a balm, never more so than at this moment—the show's concluding seasons involve an electoral contest between relatively reasonable Republican Alan Alda and relatively reasonable Democrat Jimmy Smits. Imagine! The show's world can be a little frustrating when contrasted against our more explicitly appalling one, but it's a thoroughly pleasing fantasy nonetheless.
Where to stream: Max
Though it only ran for four seasons, Raven Symoné's Disney Channel teen sitcom has had one of the longest reaches of any of those shows—spin-off Cory in the House did OK for a couple of seasons back in the aughts, and modern revival Raven's Home has been running since 2017. The original series focused on the high-school antics of the title's Raven, whose secret psychic powers complicate the already challenging experience that is high school. The followup sees her raising a couple of kids as a single mother, with a focus on both Raven and the new generation of teens.
Where to stream: Disney+, Hulu (original), Disney+ (revival)
There was plenty of drama during Buffy's initial run, with plot twists that left us laughing as often as we were crying. But even the most emotional television can become comfort food given time and exposure—and knowing the twists and turns, deaths and dismemberments in advance allows us to chill out a bit and enjoy the show's unique blend of humor, action, and high school drama. Even given the show's final twist—the fact that its once-beloved creator turned out to be an enormous jerk—it's still surprisingly soothing to revisit Sunnydale. I keep waiting for Gen-Z to discover this one and plaster it all over TikTok.
Where to stream: Hulu
One of the smartest sitcoms of the 1980s is, again, a reminder that comfort TV can still be as snappy as a smartass retired dame. Fans (raising both my hands here) have seen episodes of the series so many times they've memorized them, meaning that it's easy to put the show on in the background while we're doing other stuff. Time may have taken some of the edge off of the girls' banter, but the show is remains as cool as it ever was, even if its age and classic sitcom trappings would make you think otherwise.
Where to stream: Hulu
Another show wherein the beauty lies in getting what's promised: the Hallmark series, beginning in 1910, follows young teacher Elizabeth Thatcher (Erin Krakow) as she leaves her relatively wealthy family to take a job in a rural Canadian mining town. There's romance, drama, and triumph among the woman-led cast of characters, with the gentle tone and big heart that you might expect, given the title.
Where to stream: Peacock
One of the best and most underrated sitcoms of the 1990s (surely having nothing to do with its all-black cast), Living Single stars Queen Latifah, Kim Coles, Kim Fields, and Erika Alexander as four friends navigating the single life in New York City. It plays off some of the same dynamics that worked for a show like The Golden Girls before it (i.e., four women with distinct personalities), and certainly served as inspiration for shows that came after (including Friends). Living Single adds to the comedy (and silliness) some still relevant social issues, and serialized relationship drama that never brings things down, even as it makes the show a solid binge watch. Revival when?
Where to stream: Max, Hulu
If you had told me back in 1999 that one of the longest-running dramas ever would revolve around particularly heinous and disturbing sex crimes, and that it would even become something of a binge/comfort watch...well, I wouldn't have put money on the proposition. But buoyed by an engaging cast (Mariska Hargitay and, for much of its run, Christopher Meloni and Richard Belzer), the show does what all of the best police dramas do: offer the comfort of knowing that, in a world full of horrific crimes, there are conscientious people working to close cases and get the worst offenders off the streets.
Where to stream: Hulu, Peacock
The coziest of cozy murder shows, Murder, She Wrote found the charming and eminently practical novelist Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) somehow being on the site of a brutal murder every week for 12 seasons. Not suspicious at all. The show makes murder look fun, with a light touch, a sense of humor, and a supporting cast of charming eccentrics living in Jessica's bucolic hometown of Cabot Cove, who stuck around to liven things up when Jessica wasn't traveling and meeting an array of celebrity guest stars, Love Boat-style. It's a fun binge watch but, if Jessica Fletcher rolls into your town, get the hell out of there.
Where to stream: Peacock
Chad Hower, aka "The TikTok Fugitive" has a hell of a story to tell. He says both the the FBI and Interpol have been trying to extradite him to the U.S. for the past 16 years to face charges for a crime he did not commit. In hundreds of TikTok videos posted from Russia, St. Kitts and other nations, Hower taunts the authorities and explains the Byzantine details of how an innocent Microsoft computer programmer wound up an international criminal. Hower's plight gained the attention and sympathy of some of the biggest influencers on TikTok, and his videos have been viewed over 120 million times on the platform. But is he telling the truth?
Hower's story begins with a bitter divorce. He says his ex-wife falsely accused him of kidnapping his son, even though he had full legal custody of the child at the time. The FBI got involved, and an innocent trip to Europe turned into a stint in a Bulgarian prison and a life on the run.
Hower says the U.S. has tried to extradite him at least three times, from at least one nation with an extradition agreement, but they haven't succeeded because the charges against him are bogus on their face. The FBI, according to Hower, knows he's innocent, but refuses to end the manhunt. Even though his child is an adult now, and even though he has court documents he says prove his innocence in indisputable terms, Hower is still forced to live as an exile and fight to clear his name.
Hower says sympathetic journalists who tried to cover the story were scared off by the FBI, leaving no choice but to take his story directly to the people through TikTok, podcasts, online interviews, and petitions. If you search Hower's name, you'll be greeted with pages of sources discussing and amplifying his story and the injustice that's been done to him, but few sources that critically examine his claims.
Anyone can say anything on the Internet, but Hower really is wanted by the FBI. He really is a fugitive who has been given asylum in Russia, and really has had his extradition fail. But when you pull on any other string of this complicated ball of yarn, it seems to unravel into an uglier story where the villain is not the FBI.
According to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, in the U.S., about 200,000 children are abducted every year by a parent or other family member. Most of the aggrieved parents who lift their children from court-ordered visitation don't end up as international criminals, but this may have been the fate that Hower brought upon himself through his uncommon personal stubbornness and intelligence.
I'm not going to get into the legal nitty-gritty, but the evidence suggests that Hower is not being entirely honest about everything, to put it charitably. If you're interested in specifics, check out this exhaustively researched and excellent video from YouTube's CHUPPL, who carefully examines many of Hower's claims (and also delves into Hower's habit of eating locusts, his self-documented road rage, and his hobby of cosplaying as Gru from Minions.) CHUPPL's conclusion: The best evidence indicates the legal case at the center of this whole mess was handled by the books, despite Hower's increasingly complex conspiracy theories.
Broadly, Hower's documents about the initial kidnapping seem to only indicate he's innocent if you ignore other documents, court orders, and laws—it was a very complex custody case involving the state courts of Tennessee and Pennsylvania and eventually the Federal court. It's the same with the extraditions: A more reasonable explanation for a failed extradition would be a lack of dual criminality. If Bulgaria doesn't have a law against this kind of kidnapping, they wouldn't extradite, no matter what information is presented to them.
Then there are the vibes.
Within a minute of watching my first Hower video, I was skeptical—dude's making some extraordinary claims—and from there, every new detail made the story seem less credible instead of more. I can't speak definitely about the factual debunk without devoting my life to exploring it, but the story doesn't pass my personal smell test.
There's no plausible explanation of why the FBI would waste so much time and effort pursuing a relatively unimportant man that they know is innocent, leading to the suggestion that the CIA could be involved because they wanted to recruit Hower for the agency—another hard-to-swallow pill. (Free tip: When anyone mentions the CIA to cover a hole in their story, you can stop listening; 99 times out of 100, they're lying to you.) Then there's the suggestion that "mainstream" journalists were scared off the story by the FBI. A more reasonable possibility: Credible journalists showed interest, did some research, clocked the guy as a fake, and stopped returning his calls.
But most of all, Hower has a "this guy is so full of shit" feeling that I can't explain rationally. He seems like an intelligent, driven, bizarre person with an axe to grind and a lot of time to hone it to a sharp edge. Maybe he's motivated by righteous anger based on legitimate injustice from the court system, but his many half-truths and fanciful explanations feel intentionally crafted to influence people. It's hard for me not to see something sinister there. He's clearly a smart enough person to know he's presenting one side of a complex story and calling it the whole truth (at best), and it's troubling that so many people can't see through it.
If the gamer in your life is suddenly locked into Palworld and you want to know what's up, read on. The upstart game is causing some controversy with Nintendo, but it's not the only dust-up in youth culture this week. There's also the feud between Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, a South Korean cosmetic surgeon vs. TikTok, and 4chan's perpetual battle against all that is good and pure in the world. Even this week's viral video, a song from Hazbin Hotel, isn't free of conflict.
Palworld is an open-world monster collecting and crafting game that has taken off in popularity very quickly. Published by Pocket Pair, Palworld was released on Jan. 19, and has already sold six million copies. It’s on the top of Steam’s charts for concurrent players. Powerhouse Twitch streamers like IronMouse are streaming Palworld. These are Fortnite and Minecraft numbers: Palworld is a phenomenon already, and it’s less than a week old.
In Palworld, players can choose to live peacefully among the world's many creatures (known as Pals), or they can kill them and eat them—just like real animals! You can also train your Pals to work in factories and on farms, and you might find yourself forced to consume your beloved Pals in order to survive. You capture Pals in a ball, and you can train them to fight against the Pals of other collectors, leading some to describe the game as “Pokémon with guns.” That’s where the controversy comes in. The possibly actionable similarity between Nintendo’s property and Palworld prompted Nintendo to release a statement saying it intends to “investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon.” Bottom line: If you’re curious about Palworld, don’t put off giving it a go; it might not be around forever.
A feud of epic proportion is raging between rappers Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion this week. The static started last week when Stallion, best known for her hit “Savage,” released “Hiss,” a new single that takes aim at a wide variety of haters and under-appreciators. Stallion doesn’t mention Nicki by name, but the lines, “These hoes don't be mad at Megan, these hoes mad at Megan's Law" seem like a dig at Minaj. They are a reference to the national sex offender registry; Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, is on the registry for a crime he committed in the 1990s, and he recently spent a year on house arrest for failing to register after moving to California. That seems to be the immediate cause, but like all wars, the real basis seems to be long-simmering tension between two would-be queens of hip-hop—town’s just not big enough for both of ‘em.
Minaj, best known for “Anaconda,” responded by getting epicly-mad on X (formerly Twitter), posting a deluge of disses over the course of half a week. It culminated in a full battle-rap from Minaj, “Big Foot.” Judging from the comments, Stallion is coming off better and it’s not a close contest. YouTube commenters are calling attention to Minaj’s outsized reaction as opposed to posting things like, “cracking good diss track! Good on you!” To be fair, Minaj put the track out quick. Anyway, feel free to listen to both and pick your favorite if you’re bored or something.
Dr. Kim is a South Korean plastic surgeon who who seems to specialize in facelifts and eye-lifts and is going viral on TikTok this week, with commenters sharing the vids he posts and commenting on the appearance of his patients. Along with rando TikTokers, Dr. Kim has started drawing commentary from other online plastic surgeons, who are dropping diss videos that go as hard as Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion. (OK, maybe that's an overstatement: They’re just saying things like, “Every surgeon has to make their own decision as to what’s right, and for me: no thank you.”)
Based on comments, Dr. Kim’s patients look shockingly ironed and processed to people on TikTok and X. But who are they to judge? South Korean people seem to have a different standards for what’s attractive than we have in the west—both the “eye smile” procedure and surgery meant to result in smaller, V-shaped faces are common in South Korean plastic surgery circles, but are rarely practiced in the U.S. By contrast, people in the U.S. have more breast augmentations done than they do in South Korea. I don't understand giving people any flack for whatever plastic surgery they want, as long as the patients are happy with the result. In fact, I hope it goes further, and people start giving themselves extra noses or pyramid-shaped heads. Let's get weird with this shit, right?
The controversy continues with a couple of very-online slang terms. The first, “41% yourself,” originated on putrid nightmare-chamber 4chan. "41% Yourself" is a way for online cretins to say “kill yourself” and make it even worse by referencing a 2014 National Transgender Discrimination Survey that indicated that 41% of respondents had attempted suicide. (People were a bad idea.)
The second term, “WPS,” means “white people shit” and it's more tongue-in-cheek. It refers to things white people are into, like really enjoying TED Talks or listening to Queen. The term has been around for a while, but it’s enjoying a resurgence in 2024 on TikTok, largely due to a video of a couple who don’t wear shoes, even in winter. These people really earned the three-letter descriptor.
This week’s viral video is a clip of a song from Prime's new series Hazbin Hotel. The cartoon features voice acting from Broadway heavyweights like Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Krystina Alabado, and Lilli Cooper, paired with the work of straight-from-the-internet writers and animators headed by Vivienne Medrano. Hazbin’s show-tune inspired music is excellent, and it’s gratifying that it seems to be finding an audience so quickly—the clip of “Hell’s Greatest Dad” has been shared nearly five million times in its first three days and is accompanied by the kinds of comments only a passionate fandom leaves behind. It wouldn’t be a passionate fandom if people weren’t pissed about something, though. Some Hazbin fans are not happy that the entire voice cast from the original, YouTube pilot was replaced. No official reason for the recasting has been given, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because the new cast is way better.
When I'm checking the internet for PEOPLE WHO ARE WRONG ABOUT THINGS, a few names frequently appear attached to misinformation. There are the expected political figures—Clinton, Trump, Biden, George Soros—but there's also Tom Hanks.
The most recent example of Hanks-hate that's gaining traction is this post from Twitter (that I saw on Snopes). The doctored image of Hanks has been viewed over 2.5 million times since it was posted just yesterday. It's not even a particularly inflammatory image, just Hanks in an anti-Trump t-shirt, but something about the actor makes a lot of people so angry that they have to invent things that he did to be angry about. Here are some recent examples:
Tom Hanks is not involved in a molestation ring with Oprah Winfrey.
Tom Hanks is not portraying Osama Bin Laden in a movie either.
I could go on, but you get the point—there's a definite hate-boner for the guy. But why him, of all people? I think of Tom Hanks as the likable star of Forrest Gump, Castaway, and Mazes and Monsters; an amusing guest on talk shows, a little annoyingly bland, but generally a friendly seeming actor-guy. How is it that others believe that Tom Hanks is not just capable of, but guilty of monumental acts of evil, a shady international super-criminal setting deadly wildfires between molestation vacations to Epstein's Island?
Hanks has never been a favorite of the Right. Conservatives dragged the guy even in the Times-Before-Trump. For example, in 2010, Hanks was called an ignoramus for suggesting a similarity between racism against the Japanese in World War II and then-current nationalism. There are other examples of "I take issue with that remark" responses to him, but no real vitriol. It's the kind of stock response conservatives used to have for any member of the Hollywood elite—low stakes culture wars shit that seems quaint these days. But in 2018, Hanks went from being scoffed at as typical Hollywood Liberal to public enemy number one among the dumbest people you went to high school with, and the mouth-frothing rage largely originated with one man: actor Isaac Kappy.
Kappy was a strictly D-list actor with credits limited to characters that are not given names in screenplays. He was "Rowdy Prisoner" in Breaking Bad and "Pet Store Clerk" in Thor, but that was enough to get him a spot as a guest on Alex Jones' show in 2018. On his appearance, Kappy detailed a vast child molestation conspiracy in Hollywood that he said he'd witnessed firsthand. Even Jones seemed incredulous, but the appearance brought Kappy a level of stardom within the fetid Right Wing lunatic swamp that far eclipsed anything he'd achieved on planet earth. His medium was Periscope, and to keep the people's attention focused on him, Kappy started naming people he said were involved in Hollywood's massive molestation ring, including Hanks. The rest of the names were of celebrities openly critical of Donald Trump. (What a coincidence!) Kappy offered no evidence for his claims of course, because there wasn't any, and Kappy was, almost certainly, mentally ill.
Leaving behind a note on Instagram claiming he was the reincarnation of Judas Iscariot, Kappy died by suicide in 2019 by leaping off a highway overpass in Arizona, but the dark legacy of the troubled actor lived on.
Once Hanks' name was out there, and Kappy's suicide was re-cast as a deep-state hit job, Q-Anon and associated cretins signal-boosted accusations against Hanks on anonymous 4Chan posts, Periscope videos, and every other avenue accepting of the "valuable free speech" of the stupid. Repetition becomes truth among the easily led, and Hanks' name has been attached to so many evil deeds that a response of "That seems like something Tom Hanks would do," is expected from a certain segment of the population. And it goes on to this day. Which is why members of the current safe-space-dummies, Twitter, are spreading doctored images of Tom Hanks to great engagement.
(I'm going to take a shower now.)
This Monday, former president Donald Trump took the first concrete step toward winning the Republican Party's nomination for the the 2024 election. To few people's surprise, Trump handily beat competitors Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, winning 50% of Iowa's voters. CNN called it a "stunning show of strength." The Associated Press called it a "record victory." But there's another side to the story—a counter-narrative that categorizes Trump as having just barely squeaked by.
In a tweet that's been seen over 370,000 times, political activist Victor Shi asked: "Can the media please stop saying tonight was a 'win' for Donald Trump? Trump’s margin of victory was the smallest of any Republican candidate in American history, half of caucus goers voted against him."
To further flesh out the argument: Trump received 57,000 votes, only about 7% of the total Republican party in Iowa. "Where's the enthusiasm?" people are asking.
Sadly (depending on your views) the mainstream media's read seems much closer to reality. I'm not sure how Shi got the idea that Trump's margin is the smallest in history. The opposite is actually true: Trump's Iowa win was the largest percentage victory in the history of Republican primaries. Whether the turnout portends trouble for Trump requires divining voter's views and motivations based on little evidence, but there is a hazy, non-number factor that (probably) helps explain the low turnout in Iowa: It was really freakin' cold.
It was extremely cold and snowy in Iowa on the night of the caucus, and inclement weather always lowers voter turnout. We can't know which candidates' supporters would have been more likely to have avoided the caucus for snow reasons, but I'd put my money on Trump's. In a race where all the polls have indicated that Trump would win in a walk for literally years, it seems reasonable that his supporters would skip the caucuses: He's a shoo-in, after all. Rabid Ron DeSantis fans or Nikki Haley-heads, on the other hand, seem more likely to be motivated to get out there to support their underdog candidate.
A total of 110,000 voters turned out in Iowa in 2024, compared to 187,000 GOP voters in 2016. These were the least attended primary caucuses in a decade. Whether this is evidence of an overall "enthusiasm gap" can't be determined, but I think it's safer to think Republicans are secure that Trump is going to take the nomination so didn't bother freezing themselves.
The alternative take on Trump's victory looks a lot like wishcasting: "The act of interpreting information or a situation in a way that casts it as favorable or desired, despite the fact that there is no evidence for such a conclusion." Expect to see a lot more of this as the election approaches.
The silver lining, if you don't like Trump, is that Iowa is a tiny state, and whom it chooses for the Republican (or Democratic) nomination doesn't actually matter in the general election. Pete Buttigieg's victory in Iowa in 2020 didn't catapult him to the nomination. It went to the fourth place finisher instead.
Unlike Mayor Pete, Trump is almost certain to win the overall nomination in 2024. But his popularity in Iowa doesn't say much about how he'll do against Biden. Around 90% of Iowa's 3.18M residents are white, compared to about 70% in the nation as a whole. Iowans are also older than Americans in general, more religious, and more rural than in the rest of the country too, so the most concrete lesson we can learn from the caucuses is that old, white, rural Republicans tend to vote for Donald Trump, which shouldn't shock anyone.
This week, the kids are suffering through the long winter by watching Saltburn, bidding farewell to a very popular YouTuber, and getting themselves stuck in urns. Plus, tunnels somehow remain newsworthy.
The entertainment landscape is different than it was pre-internet. Technology lets us hone in on our personal interests with such intensity that shared cultural experiences are rare. That’s why Saltburn is cool. It's one of those “everyone is talking about it” movies that don’t come around too often these days. And it’s actually good! If you’re not in the know, Saltburn was released in theaters in November, where it made a modest $21.3 million, but it found a second life on Prime Video.
Drawing inspiration from A Clockwork Orange, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and late-stage capitalism, Saltburn is a dark comedy about a debauched young man obsessed with wealth and excess who is willing to do anything to get it. It's intentionally confrontational, leading to controversy over its graphic sex and violence, summed up best by this quote/stealth advertisement from the professional hand-wringers at ParentPreviews.com: "This film contains so much negative content that we do not expect our reviewers to watch it." (That's some fearless journalism, guys.) Saltburn was directed by Emerald Fennell and stars Barry Keoghan as anti-hero Oliver Quick. The movie’s ending inspired copycat memes, leading to charges that rich people proudly dancing around in their expensive houses have entirely missed the point of the film. It’s a classic class-war battle: rich people being callow and poor people being bitter that rich people really don’t care what they think. Another ripple from the film: a semi-obscure retro-disco track from 2001, “Murder on the Dance Floor” from Sophie Ellis-Bextor, has resurfaced and been enjoyed by many more people than it was upon its release.
Guy Stuck In Vase, or Urn Guy, is the first internet-guy of 2024! He joins past guys like Blinking White Guy, Ancient Aliens Guy, and Ridiculously Photogenic Guy in the internet's Guy Hall of Fame. Urn Guy earned his spot when a video of him trapped in an urn went viral in early 2024. His name is supposedly Connor, and his getting-stuck antics reportedly happened at a house party in Mountain Brook, Alabama. His fame began with a post on X (formerly Twitter) describing the situation. “He was laughing at first but now he’s starting to get upset. The women are trying to comfort him. There is talk of attempting to break the urn,” reported @CasualThursday on X. Then the video was posted. The rest is internet history. Connor (if that’s actually his name) was uninjured and was eventually broken free of his prison via sledgehammer. @CasualThursday reports, “Urn guy is up and moving around, but now without his pants, which were apparently lost or damaged in the incident.”
Nintendo has created such a rabid and loyal fanbase over its long life (the company was founded in 1889) that any move it makes sends waves of speculation through the gaming community. This week, Nintendo quietly discontinued physical copies of many of its top-tier titles like Super Mario Odyssey and Splatoon 2, leading to speculation that the company might be planning to release the Switch 2. Really? Ya think? There’s a definite generational gap between people who get excited that Nintendo might release a new console and people like me who think, “The Nintendo Switch made a lot of money, and Nintendo has released new consoles regularly since the 1980s; so, yeah, it's petty likely that they’re planning to repeat the cycle.”
Tunnels are having a cultural moment. We learned about the intriguing tunnel girl last week (she's an amateur engineer who built an underground lair beneath her suburban home). This week, tunnel girl is out; tunneling Jews are in. Hassidic members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement were discovered to have been digging an extensive tunnel under their Brooklyn headquarters recently. Unlike Tunnel Girl’s seemingly solid construction, their mole-like antics drew the attention of authorities and fears that they caused structural damage to their historic synagogue. The purpose of their tunnel isn’t entirely clear, but it has split the congregation into pro- and anti-tunneling camps. Because we live in a depressing world, antisemite conspiracy theorists immediately seized on the story and added it to their long-running historical fan fiction about “elites” doing unspeakable acts to children underground, instead of just enjoying the oddness of the situation.
This week’s viral video, Goodbye Internet, is a so-long-and-farewell message from greatly-beloved-by-kids YouTuber MatPat, whose channel, The Game Theorists, has over 18 million subscribers. The 25-minute video has been viewed over 14 million times since it was posted a couple days ago. According to MatPat, he’s throwing in the towel because he’s getting old—he’s 37, which is ancient in YouTube years—and basically because he wants to have more time and more fun in his life. His last Game Theorist video will be posted in March, after which the channel will be taken over by a person or people unknown.
This is, no doubt, a generational thing, but I don’t get the appeal of this dude and this entire subgenre of gaming videos. MatPat’s stock-in-traded is crafting elaborate fan theories about popular video game franchises like Five Nights at Freddys, Minecraft, and Legend of Zelda. Charitably, his popularity is kids enjoying content analysis of the media they love, but I find it insufferable. MatPat’s amped-up delivery is exhausting to listen to, and his theories inevitably leave me thinking “yeah, maybe, but who cares?” It’s the online equivalent of smoking weed with your dumb friends and talking about whether Darth Vader actually had a point, or what’s really going on with Scooby Doo, but without the weed and connection to other people.
The 2024 Global Risks Report issued this week from the World Economic Forum named misinformation and disinformation as the greatest risk to humanity over the next two years. "People believing weird crap" beat "interstate armed conflict" (number 5), "societal polarization" (number 3) and "extreme weather events" (number 2) for the coveted title.
The report warns that bad actors will use artificial intelligence to flood the world's information channels with false narratives and propaganda, potentially affecting elections on a scale never seen before, leading to civil unrest, and encouraging Draconian censorship as states try to control the flow of information. Somewhere around half of the population of Earth is expected to participate in elections in 2024 and 2025, so there is a lot of money and power at stake, and AI's ability to easily produce hyper-specific propaganda will no doubt be widely employed to influence the power structures that affect the lives of just about everyone on earth. Since there is nothing anyone can do to prevent this, I'm going to focus on coffee instead.
I learned today that coffee is not brewed from beans. "The beans you brew are actually the processed and roasted seeds from a fruit, which is called a coffee cherry," according to the National Coffee Association USA. Correcting that small personal misconception about my favorite drink made me feel a little better in the face of the global tsunami of bullshit that the World Economic Forum predicts, so here are six more things you may have always been wrong about.
This oft-repeated "rule" dates back to the 1950s, and was always more about getting a rough estimate than an exact measurement of dog years. Back then, dogs (generally) lived to be about 10 and humans, on average, lived until they were around 70, so the math works out. But different dog breeds have different expected lifespans. Australian Cattle Dogs average around 14 years, where a French Bulldog is lucky to see its fifth birthday. And anyway, people live longer now, so the whole equation doesn't work anymore, even as a rough estimate.
"I've got one, two, three, four, five, senses working overtime," XTC sung in its 1982 new-wave banger "Senses Working Overtime." But we actually have several more senses than sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. There's our sense of direction and our sense of object permanence. Balance is a sense. We sense movement, heat, pain, and the passage of time, all of which could be defined as separate senses. We might have as many as 33 senses. Some of this information comes from the World Economic Forum, which gives me a sense of foreboding and dread.
Pure water is an insulator that doesn't conduct electricity. The tricky word in that sentence is "pure." Pure water is distilled and absent any ions. It's usually only seen in laboratories for specific purposes. The water we bathe in, drink, and long to drown in when we read news from the World Economic Forum is never pure. It's choked with dissolved minerals, pollution, and especially ions. The ions conduct the electricity, though, not the water. It's a technicality, and annoying, but it's still true.
There used to be "tongue maps" that indicated which part of your tongue had receptors for which flavors, but tongue research has come a long way since then, and we now know that taste buds for different flavors are scattered all over the tongue, and you can taste everything, everywhere. This misinformation dates back to a scientific paper published in German in 1875, which was mistranslated into English in 1901. For more than 90 years, people believed this, even though we all have tongues right in our own heads!
Fixing a Nintendo or other cartridge-based video game by taking it out and blowing into it doesn't work. When a game isn't working, it's usually because the pins aren't matching up. Every time you take the cartridge out and put it back in, you're giving the pins another chance to align correctly, but there's no need to blow. You could see how this would seem to work, though.
I find this myth fascinating because it was a universally accepted practice before there was much of an internet to spread misinformation. How did everyone, everywhere, think to do the same thing, at the same time? Maybe some long-forgotten kid tried it on an Atari 2600 cartridge in front of his friends, and they spread it from there like a virus.
Fortune cookies did not originate in China. They originated in Kyoto, Japan in the 1870s. Makoto Hagiwara was the first person to sell fortune cookies in the U.S. at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco in the 1890s or early 1900s. In the early days, they were apparently known as "fortune tea cakes" due to their Japanese origins, but in the 1940s, when the U.S. sent Japanese Americans to internment camps, it's thought that Chinese businessmen were able to take over the manufacture and distribution of the confection, leading to its association with Chinese restaurants.
I rang in 2024 the same way I have ever since 2011: By setting my annual reading goal on Goodreads. I don't read nearly as much as I used to—blame kids, the loss of a daily commute, emotional fallout from a global pandemic, what have you—but I still want to give myself a bar to clear, even if it's a lot lower than it used to be (this year I'm aiming for 35 books, which might sound like a lot or a little, but keep in mind I'm counting the books I read aloud to my kid).
A few years ago in the Guardian, writer Rachel Sigee pondered the question of why so many of us frequent sites like Goodreads and Letterboxd to log our media consumption, and came up with an answer that seems obvious in retrospect: It’s dopamine.
Yes, the same addictive brain chemicals that cause our neurons to fire every time our phones light up with a notification are what keep us marking our progress in the books we’ve read or assigning a star rating to every movie we’ve watched or tracking the hours we’ve poured into a particularly immersive video game. Or (and this is where things get slightly insidious), to build lists of all the things we want to—or feel we “should”—read, or watch, or play.
It’s worth considering (as Sigee does) whether it is healthy to “gamify” what is essentially a leisure time activity in this way, and as a hardcore media logger, I will admit to sometimes feeling a sense of exhaustion at contemplating the lengthy lists of all things media I want to consume that I will probably never get around to. Unless I figure out a way to live forever and also abandon my job and family responsibilities.
But I’m also not going to stop doing it. Even before technology presented methods to make it easier, I intermittently have kept lists of, say, the movies I watched with my then-girlfriend, now spouse. Like scrolling through photos in my phone, just seeing the name of a film on that list would trigger my memories of where we were when we saw it or the conversations we had afterward. So much of daily life is ephemeral; keeping a record of a given day—even if it’s just something as inconsequential as finally watching Weekend at Bernie’s (a surprisingly weird movie) can give you an anchor to cling to.
So with all that high-falutin’ nonsense aside, here are some of the best sites and apps around to help you start keeping track of your own media habits: books, movies, video games, and music.
Goodreads is by far the most widely used book tracker, but there are alternatives if you don’t want to serve up yet more of your data to corporate owner Amazon.
Goodreads. You know about this one. Goodreads has been around for going on two decades now, and since its acquisition by Amazon in 2013, the site has amassed a membership of some 90 million readers eager to catalog what they’ve read and provide status updates on what they’re reading. In many ways, it set the standard for these types of social cataloguing apps, allowing you to customize your books into various shelves, write and read reviews, befriend and follow other users, make recommendation lists, and more. It’s not perfect—the UX is basically unchanged from the site’s infancy, the design is cluttered and unintuitive, and the mobile app is incredibly slow—but you probably use it anyway.
Use Goodreads on the web or download the mobile app for Android or iOS.
LibraryThing. Founded in 2005, a year before Goodreads, LibraryThing has always been that site’s slightly stuffier, more serious competitor. Originally run via paid subscriptions, it has since switched to a free-for-all model, but still aims to deliver the goods without inundating you with ads. While it offers many of the same social features as Goodreads, it’s definitely tilted more toward the serious business of keeping track of and cataloging your own reading.
Use LibraryThing on the web, or downlod the app for Android or iOS.
Other options to consider: Libib, BookSloth, and The Storygraph
When it comes to tracking your movies, there’s a clear winner (which also happens to be one of my favorite sites on the internet).
Letterboxd. This app- and web-based movie tracking social network has amassed a user base of more than 20 million film fans, and with good reason: It’s incredibly easy to search and log every movie (and, more recently, a growing number of TV shows) you’ve ever seen, add dates watched (I recently found a stack of old ticket stubs and logged a bunch of films I saw in the theater 15 years ago), pen reviews, and follow other users. You can build lists based on any esoteric, hyper-specific qualifier you can think of. Plus, there’s a view that shows you the posters of every movie you’ve logged on one screen, which is neat. (Stop by and say hi!)
Get started on Letterboxd via the web or download the mobile app for Android or iOS.
SIMKL. This lesser-known Letterboxd competitor has many of that site’s features and strengths, with one big bonus: Its database also includes a ton of TV series and anime (until recently, Letterboxd generally eschewed TV entirely, save for a few “event” miniseries like WandaVision). You can mark an entire series as watched, or keep track of which episodes you’ve seen and how many you have left, making it that much easier to manage the glut of streaming series you’re trying and failing to stay on top of. But the coolest feature is the Chrome extension that integrates with your streaming service watch history, allowing you to log your viewing history in SIMKL without ever leaving Netflix.
Use SIMKL on the web or download the app for Android or iOS.
Another option to consider: Trakt (originally geared toward tracking your TV consumption, it can also be used to track your movies and like Simkl, integrate with your smart TV, phone, or computer to log media automatically)
There doesn’t seem to be a definitive video game alternative to the likes of Letterboxd or Goodreads—and though I’ll discuss comparable options to those services below, neither has reached the same level of awareness. Perhaps that’s because...
Your system probably does it for you. Most modern consoles make the need to log your games obsolete because they already track what you play and when, though you may need to fiddle around in your system menus to find it. The Nintendo Switch, for example, keeps tracked of the games played by each user profile, but if you want the really granular details, including exactly how much time a particular game was played on a particular day, you’ll need to download the associated Nintendo Switch Parental Controls app. Here’s how to see your hours played per game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox.
If you want a more complete accounting than just the amount of time sunk into a given title, though, you’re better off with a separate service.
Backloggd. Backloggd is the closest thing I’ve found to a “Letterboxd for video games,” (hence the name, probably). Currently only available via web (though an app is reportedly in the works), the site allows you to catalog games as completed (along with whether you “mastered,” or “abandoned” them, or a few other options), backlogged (meaning you own them but haven’t played them yet), the games you are currently playing, or add games to a wishlist. You can log “playthroughs” (the dates you actually played a game), review games you’ve marked played, and browse other users’ profile pages and follow them if you choose. The site is continually adding new features, but it already offers most everything I’m looking for.
Get started on Backloggd on the web (there's no app version).
Grouvee. This one seems to have taken Goodreads as its inspiration. You can mark games as played, currently playing, backlogged, or wishlisted; write (and read) reviews; and mark your dates played. What sets this site apart is the ability to add status updates for games in progress, which is a nice touch if you want to keep track of when you beat a particular level or boss or what have you.
Get started on Grouvee on the web (no app version is available).
Board Game Geek. If you're a gamer, but of the board game variety, you need to know about Board Game Geek. One of the largest and most established board game communities online, the site allows you to rate the games you play, read others' reviews, and find new games to play, with each game's page offering stats like how challenging it is to learn and how long it might take to finish a round.
Get started with Board Game Geek on the web or via the Android or iOS apps.
Other options to consider: GG, Completionator (which allows you to import your Steam library), and HowLongToBeat.
Like video games, there isn’t nearly as robust a music-logging infrastructure out there—again, probably because services like Spotify and Amazon Music mostly keep track of that for you. Still, there is at least one music-lovers social network out there worth considering.
Last.fm. If you want a no fuss way to aggregate and track all the music you stream, Last.fm is a great choice. The app integrates with most major streaming services (including YouTube, Spotify, and Pandora, though you'll have to jump through extra hoops to use it with Amazon Music or Apple Music) to log everything you listen to and when. Via the desktop and mobile apps, you can see your own listening history, track what your friends are streaming, and access weekly and yearly roundups (who needs Spotify Wrapped?).
Get started with Last.fm on the web or download the mobile (Android, iOS) or desktop apps (sorry Windows users—the desktop app is Mac-only).
Musicboard. Musicboard bills itself as “a social platform that allows you to keep track of all the music you listen to and grow your passion for music with friends” and, sure, it does that. You can use it to create a profile, keep track of the albums and songs you’ve listened to, write reviews, and follow other users. There are cool tools to show off your listening history, track forthcoming releases, and (if you’re willing to pony up $3.99/month for a paid subscription) view super granular stats about your listening habits.
Get started on Musicboard on the web or via the app, on Android and iOS.
Discogs. More a tool to help you manage your personal music collection than a real-time tracking or social app—though the site does include community forums, alongside editorial content geared toward helping you find new music—this longstanding site is nevertheless a great way to keep track of all of the physical and digital music you own. Once you've created your account, you can go about building your collection—and you won't just be able to add, say, a particular album, but the exact version of the album you own, so you'll be able to keep track of all of the different-colored versions of Taylor Swift vinyl releases you've amassed. THe site's layout favors an abundance of information over ease of use, so it can be a little overwhelming at first, but once your onboard, it will provide an at-a-glance assessment of everything you own, and what it might be worth.
You can get started on Discogs on the web or via the app, available on Android and iOS.
The most versatile, low-effort way to keep track of anything you’re reading or watching or playing is, of course, to just log it away manually in a spreadsheet (or a notebook, if you’re into that tactile, “real objects” shit). This is certainly a valid method—we love spreadsheets around here—but you’ll sacrifice the visual and/or social sharing aspects of other app-based options.
Maybe you’re OK with that—let’s be honest, there’s a good chance you are the only one who cares about your media habits anyway. Personally, I like the incentive of things like keeping up with a Goodreads reading challenge or filling out my Letterboxd diary to keep me on track; past pen and paper attempts have failed to stick, resulting in years of lost data. And while sites and apps come and go, there’s no chance your notebook is going to stop working.
Updated on Jan. 5, 2024 to add new options for tracking your music and games.
This week we're enjoying the post-holiday glow with some wholesome goings-on in the world of young people. They're digging tunnels under their homes, surprising their grandparents with impromptu sleepovers, beating Tetris, and launching themselves over desks to attack district court judges. (Wait, that last one isn't wholesome at all.)
I love when people become famous for something weird and unexpected, and this week, a star like that was born on TikTok: "Tunnel Girl" has captured America’s heart with the elaborate mining operation she maintains under her suburban home. She’s been digging for over a year and documenting the process in a fascinating series of TikTok videos. Kala started her secret tunnel project with the idea of excavating stones to build a castle, and over the last 12 or so months she’s taught herself electrical wiring, excavation, cement pouring, and more—and she’s built an army of loyal viewers dedicated to watching her progress.
But, of course, nothing this beautiful can last. With her growing online fame came haters, one of whom seems to have reported her un-permitted construction project to the authorities. Tunnel Girl’s tunnel was reportedly shut down, with The Man insisting she have her work inspected by a professional engineer. Boo! I don’t know much about digging underground tunnels, but Tunnel Girl seems to know what she’s doing, so I say let her keep doing it. She says she's hopeful that the engineer will give her the all-clear and she can get back to digging to the center of the earth.
Tunnel Girl got me thinking about whether homeowners actually own what's under their house. It turns out that, in general, they do. Property ownership includes all of the space above and below the surface of the earth, up to and including other planets and the center of the earth. In practice, however, you can’t keep airplanes from flying over your house (usually) and you don’t necessarily own the mineral rights to your land just because you own the land itself.
My favorite new meme on TikTok is adult kids surprising their grandparents with sleepovers. It’s easy to do: Just grab your brothers and sisters and cousins and nephews and nieces and show up at Meema and Pop-Pops with some bedding. They probably don’t have anything to do, being retired, so they’ll probably be super happy you dropped in. I guess some curmudgeonly old people would be like, “damn, don’t show up at my house like a bum,” but most grandparents aren’t like that. All the grandmas in these videos cry while the grandpas look shocked. I wish my own Nana was alive so I could drop in. I would totally expect her to make me breakfast in the morning, but she wouldn’t mind. Please enjoy every one of these wholesome videos:
TikTok user @thesleepyparamedic has discovered a new way to annoy the employees and customers at Waffle House. The breakfast chain’s locations are equipped with TouchTunes juke boxes, and they can be accessed remotely. So the prank is to download the TouchTunes app, click on “Find a Waffle house,” then send it some music. Some music about waffles. Not only is there a dedicated Waffle House playlist on TouchTunes, there’s an entire Waffle House record label that releases breakfast-based parody songs to be listened to a Waffle Houses across the country.
The “best” of these tunes, according to thesleepyparamedic, is “There Are Raisins in My Toast,” but my personal pick is the over-amped disco sounds of “Why Would You Eat Your Grits Anyplace Else?” Anyway, no matter which tune you choose (and you should choose only one), you can play it for an hour straight at any Waffle House across the country for like 10 bucks. That’s money well spent! According to its website, “Waffle House is a destination for waffles AND music,” and who are we to argue?
Thirteen-year-old gamer Willis Gibson, aka “Blue Scuti,” is the first person to ever beat the Nintendo version of Tetris. Tetris doesn’t have an “official” ending. In theory, the blocks will keep falling forever, but in practice, it turns out Tetris goes up to around level 157 before the game gives up and crashes, resulting in a coveted kill screen.
Beating Tetris has been an ongoing project in the extreme gaming community for years. It was once thought that level 29 was the “ending,” because that’s when the bricks start falling faster than it is humanly possible to push the controller button with your thumb. But players invented techniques called “hypertapping” and “rolling” that allow for faster inputs. Using these tricks, Blue Scuti was able to progress far enough to crash Tetris, a landmark accomplishment. Luckily, he was live-streaming at the time, so his reaction to the incredible feat was captured for posterity. Bonus: It's adorable.
Probably the most widely shared internet video this week is the feed from a criminal trial in Las Vegas. In it, defendant Deobra Delone Redden expresses his displeasure over his sentence for attempted battery by leaping over the bench to attack District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus, only to be subdued and beaten down by court personnel. It’s a hell of a jump, to be sure, but the entire thing is depressing. So instead, watch this video from YouTube comedy video maker Drew Gooden, in which he watches only the final scenes of 10 terrible Christmas movies. It’s hilarious and won’t make you wonder how much longer society can hold together.
Along with hangovers and broken resolutions, the beginning of a new year means the rights to additional intellectual properties passing from their original owners, to you, the public—and 2024 is a particularly monumental year in that regard, considering it marks the entry into the public domain of one Mickey Mouse.
Disney has fought zealously to protect the copyright on its most iconic character since at least 1976, when it successfully encouraged Congress to pass the Copyright Act, which allowed owners to hold onto copyrights for the life of the work’s author, plus 50 years. In 1998, that term was lengthened to 75 years, or a maximum of 95 years. The clock finally caught up with Disney, and Mickey, Minnie, and all the cartoon stars of the iconic 1928 short “Steamboat Willie” now belong to the public. Kind of—the version of Mickey with the red shorts and big eyes is still owned by Disney; the black and white “Steamboat” version of Mickey is not.
Unsurprisingly, you can already find a ton of copyright free Steamboat Willie re-mixes and mash-ups online, or participate in a Mickey based crypto-currency scheme, or gird yourself for the horror movie Mickey’s Mouse Trap.
Given the attention garnered by Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey earlier this year, a cheap horror flick based on “Steamboat Willie” was to be expected, but Disney’s iconic rodent mascot isn’t the only beloved piece of art or culture you can claim for yourself as of Jan. 1, 2024.
Here are other notable works that just became free to everyone in the U.S.:
D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover: Someone should make a horror movie based on this British tale of an upper class woman’s affair with her groundskeeper.
Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera: The German version of this Weimar-Republic-era musical set in the seedy underground of London is now free to translate, adapt, and otherwise fool around with. We’ll have to wait three years the rights to the 1931 film version to become available though.
A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner: The character of Winnie the Pooh has been in the public domain since 2022, but his pal Tigger is newly free, allowing the iconic stuffed Tiger to appear in the sequel to the aforementioned (and terrible) Pooh-based horror movie Blood and Honey.
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front: I doubt you’ll be able to top Netflix’s excellent 2022 adaptation of this grim World War I story, but now you can try—the German version is newly in the public domain.
Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats: This is the oldest U.S. picture book still in print. I really like the simple, black-and-white illustrations—and now they’re free, so I can make them into t-shirts.
The Lights of New York: This story of New York lowlifes was advertised as the “first all-talking picture.” It’s now free to watch on YouTube, download, and share all you want.
The Circus: A full version of Charlie Chaplin’s big top movie isn’t currently on YouTube, but it’s only a matter of time until it appears.
The Passion of Joan of Arc: If you’re only going to watch one silent movie from 1928, make it Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. It’s mind-blowing that the close-up was only invented about a decade before it was perfected in this movie.
The Man Who Laughs: This creepy horror-melodrama features a main character with a huge grin carved in his face. Yes, the Joker is a total rip-off of Conrad Veidt's iconic take on the Victor Hugo character.
The Crowd: King Vidor’s sprawling, groundbreaking story of regular people crushed by an uncaring world predicted the misery of the great depression. It’s now free to watch, remake, and share. Dang, 1928 was just a great year for movies.
“Mack the Knife” This murder song from ThreePenny Opera is now free to record. At least, the German version is. Keep in mind: Individual recordings, like the Bobby Darin treatment, are not in the public domain.
“Lawdy, Lawdy Blues,” Ida Cox: This awesome old school blues song was recorded in 1923, making the recording public domain in 2024.
“Moonshine Blues,” Ma Rainey: Writing songs about getting drunk has been cool for over 100 years!
“The Big Rock Candy Mountains” by Harry McClintock: This classic piece of hobo Americana is now in the public domain—but just the composition, not the recording.
“Let’s Do It. Let’s Fall in Love” by Cole Porter: If you want the opposite of hobo music, check out this sophisticated love song from the 1928 musical Paris.
On a recent appearance on ESPN's The Pat McAfee Show, washed-up NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers suggested that late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel's name will show up in connection with notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
“There’s a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, who are really hoping [the list of names a court is unsealing] doesn’t come out,” Rodgers, a dumb person, said. “If that list comes out, [I] definitely will be popping some sort of bottle.”
There was no bottle popping at the Rodgers' house. The names were released, and "Kimmel" was not one of them. Not that it matters to the Aaron Rodgerses of the world. They can say "Well, that isn't the real list anyway," or "of course his name isn't on the list. Disney covered it up," and go on with their day, secure in the knowledge that eventually it will come out that Jeffrey Epstein's friends were all Democrats, Donald Trump was not involved, and Kamala Harris was there too.
Dunking on Aaron Rodgers is easy, but the first Epstein conspiracy theory wasn't (only) a right-wing fever dream. It was/is widely believed by people across the political spectrum.
When the news dropped in 2019 that Jeffrey Epstein had committed suicide in his cell at a Manhattan jail, "Epstein didn't kill himself" immediately became a meme, spread by everyone from Joe Rogan to Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, to Ricky Gervais, to everyone you follow on Twitter. The sentence was repeated so often that it largely seems to have been accepted as truth, but when you really look at it, "Epstein was murdered" is just as dumb as any other conspiracy theory.
Epstein, the story goes, was offed by a powerful person who didn't want their secrets revealed. (You can insert any rich person you don't like here: Maybe George Soros ordered the hit. Or it could have been Donald Trump.) Something about that feels so true, and so exciting, that people seem to have ignored the sordid, boring reality: prisoners kill themselves in jail all the time, because jails are terrible places, especially for pedophiles and pedophile billionaires.
While you can't prove a negative, the overwhelming evidence suggests that Epstein killed himself. There are the autopsy results that show he hanged himself, there is the fact that Epstein had tried to kill himself weeks before he succeeded (so he clearly wanted out), there is his psych report. But most importantly, there's common sense. Murdering a high-profile person inside a jail and then successfully covering it up is something that only happens in the movies. There are just too many moving pieces. Too many people would have to be bribed to look the other way. Too many things would have to be hidden from too many reporters. Too many things would have to have gone too perfectly.
Like all conspiracy theories, "Epstein was murdered" relies on cherry-picking tiny pieces of information and focusing on anomalies and coincidences ("the guards didn't check on him!" or "the cameras weren't working right!") that could support an already-arrived-at conclusion, while handwaving away huge pieces of evidence that point to a different, simpler explanation. Evidence like the actual autopsy, the police report, and the prison's own investigation. Epstein's proximity to other billionaires and power brokers gives people an easy way to patch over parts of the story that don't work. "Well, they're rich guys, so they can afford to hire ninjas who can break into an overcrowded jail without being seen, enter a locked cell, commit a murder that looks exactly like a suicide, and get out without being spotted."
Even if a rich person wanted to cover up their connection to Epstein, why would they assume he didn't have photos or videos that would be released if he was killed (since we're doing movie plots)? Why would they have waited until Epstein was in jail to take him out? Wouldn't it have been easier during the months before he surrendered himself to authorities? Or before he was even suspected?
What would George Soros/Donald Trump really get out of Epstein being dead anyway? The possibility of an elaborate murder-for-hire plot being exposed seems way more damaging than the legal testimony of a notorious pedophile. Why wouldn't Donald Soros just hire a good lawyer to say, "Your honor, this man is Jeffrey Epstein, so his testimony can be ignored."
This isn't to say that conspiracies didn't happen here. There is credible evidence that at least one of the most powerful people on earth committed truly disgusting crimes with Epstein and tried to cover up their involvement. It sure looks like the federal authorities gave Epstein's a light sentence when he was originally caught. Two U.S. presidents actually did have some association with the guy (although we don't know what either of them actually did.) No doubt there is a lot that we don't know because lawyers and other professionals are being paid a lot to make sure we never find out.
But that doesn't mean we should just believe any old bullshit. The secrecy provided by Epstein's wealthy friends and the overwhelming strangeness of the whole situation has created a Schrödinger's Pedophile situation, where you can use the case to grind whatever axe you like and you'll never be proven wrong. But you will end up looking like Aaron Rodgers, though, and who wants that?
You can get a lifetime subscription to Skoove Premium piano lessons on sale for $119.99 right now with promo code ENJOY20 through March 10. The app comes with over 400 lessons and thousands of instructional videos from experienced Skoove music instructors, and it also provides real-time feedback so you can improve every step of the way. It was an App Store Editors Choice with 4.5 out of 5 stars, and includes a wide range of music--from fundamental pianists like Bach and Beethoven, to more modern artists like John Legend and Adele. And whenever you are struggling or have doubts, Skoove also comes with one-on-one support options. The app is compatible with all pianos and keyboards, both USB/MIDI or acoustic, and since there's obviously no shipping, it can make a great last-minute present.
You can get a lifetime subscription to Skoove Premium piano lessons on sale for $149.99 right now with promo code ENJOY20 through March 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT, though prices can change at any time.
Every year the holiday season seems to get longer. By the time Christmas actually arrives, you’ve heard more than your fair share of Christmas music—it’s practically inescapable. And every holiday playlist looks nearly the same as the next; if you search for “Christmas music” on any platform you’ll get similar results—including a bunch of songs that have become closely associated with the holiday but aren’t actually Christmas songs except by association.
Sometimes these non-Christmas Christmas songs make sense, because their lyrical imagery is all wintry and it’s easy to see the holidays implied within them. But if you pause for a moment to really think about those lyrics, it’s usually pretty obvious what is and isn’t an actual, bona-fide Christmas song. Here are eleven that snuck into the holiday season under false pretenses.
A constant on holiday playlists, “Winter Wonderland” started life as a poem composed by Richard Bernhard Smith as he recovered from a bout of tuberculosis in 1934. Isolated in a sanitarium due to his very contagious disease, Smith passed the time entering contests writing commercial jingles for companies. Waking up to a fresh snowfall one day, he wrote the words that would become this holiday classic. Music was composed for it that same year, and it became an instant hit—but there’s zero mention of Christmas in there, and the song was never really intended as a holiday song at all.
Composed in 1857 by James Pierpont, “Jingle Bells” was originally called “One Horse Open Sleigh.” It is technically a holiday song—it was originally intended to be a Thanksgiving-themed tune. The full song is actually kind of mischievous, telling a tale of young men racing their sleighs, trying to pick up girls, and getting into a violent crash. It’s essentially a call to sow those wild oats while you can, so it’s kind of remarkable that it’s become a Christmas classic.
Written by a pair of middle-aged executives and recorded by an up-and-coming country music star named Bobby Helms, “Jingle Bell Rock” doesn’t just lack any sort of literal Christmas spirit—it purposefully lacks it. According to the Los Angeles Times, Helms came from a pretty religious background, and knew his mother wouldn’t approve of mixing religion with rock n’ roll (this was 1957, when rock music was still considered a dangerous trend corrupting the youth of America). So he made certain the lyrics were completely religion-free.
Written by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne in 1945, “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” (yes, the official title has the phrase repeated three times) was inspired by the very opposite of Christmastime: a heat wave. Sweltering in the California heat in the age before air conditioning was commonly available, the songwriters conjured up an image of a cold, snowy morning to cool their overheated nerves, and a holiday classic that never once mentions Christmas was born.
Perhaps the most irritating Christmas song of all time is associated with the holiday in large part due to the beloved 1969 television special built around the song, in which a snowman comes to life via magical hat and terrorizes a neighborhood. But the song itself was conceived as a more generic winter season song, written specifically for Gene Autry in 1950 as a follow-up to his smash hit “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” When the TV special was conceived, the plot of the song was expanded and the Christmas stuff was shoehorned in, including an altered final lyric that changed “back again some day” to “back on Christmas Day.”
Originally composed to be on the soundtrack of a documentary, the song that became the jazz standard (and unofficial theme song of the Peanuts cartoons) has no lyrical content at all. The only reason we associate it with Christmas is its debut as part of the soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. Even though the song appeared in all the subsequent Charlie Brown specials and doesn’t even feature bells or other holiday-esque touches, it’s considered a Christmas song as a result.
“Sleigh Ride” is another Christmas classic that is both inspired by a heat wave and has nothing to do with Christmas. Composer Leroy Anderson was cooped up in a hot cottage in Connecticut during a hot 1946 summer, and wrote “Sleigh Ride” while wishing for cooler weather. He describes it as “just another piece of music that I wrote.”
This classic song is now known primarily thanks to Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music, but it made its public debut in 1959 as part of the Broadway production of the story. It was not originally intended as a holiday-themed song, but when the film was poised to be released in 1965, producers worried that they didn’t have a hit song driving ticket sales, so they approached singer Jack Jones about recording one of the songs in hopes of landing on the charts. Jones was making a Christmas album, and liked “My Favorite Things,” but worried that it wasn’t really a Christmas song. The solution? “Just add sleigh bells.” It worked.
Struggling to find the perfect present for someone picky or who simply seems to have it all? Instead of resorting to boring gift cards, let's get creative this holiday season. Consider these unique gift ideas for those on your list who are extra difficult to buy for.
Obvious, yet underrated. For the person who buys whatever they want for themselves as soon as they want it, shift your gifting focus to experiences. Book them a cooking class, wine tasting, pottery workshop, concert tickets, or other events you know match their interests. Giving events and activities creates lasting memories compared to more stuff.
If your budget allows, surprise that frequent jet-setter or travel lover with elements of a trip like plane tickets, hotel bookings, or even full travel packages. Or get creative with travel accessories, like monogrammed luggage tags, organizational packing items, and cozy blankets for the flight.
Products to consider:
Collapsible water bottle, $7.99
For eclectic personalities who enjoy surprises, subscription box services make fantastic ongoing gifts, especially monthly ones that they'll continue to enjoy in the months following Christmas. There are a ton of different subscription boxes out there that deliver curated items like books, coffee, healthy snacks, or even exotic meats and alcohol. You pay for a recurring shipment for a set period—like 3, 6 or 12 months—in which they'll receive items tailored to the recipient's unique tastes. Consider a flower subscription service for the eco-conscious, an Atlas coffee club subscription for the caffeine addicts in your life, or perhaps a snazzy Japanese snack box.
Lifehacker's Alice Bradley got a Murray's Cheese gift basket this year and "lost [her] dang mind." Cheese, candles, napkins—think really elevated versions of everyday stuff, like cashmere socks and fancy hand soap. I mean, who doesn't need a new (or back-up) umbrella? (And when is anyone going to buy an umbrella for more than five bucks, if not for a holiday gift?)
A charitable donation gifted in someone's name can be meaningful for do-gooders and people passionate about social causes. You can choose a monetary amount or symbolic adoption of animals or trees through various nonprofit organizations. Print out a custom certificate to give the recipient announcing your donation made in honor of them.
Lifehacker managing editor Meghan Walbert recommends One Simple Wish, an organization that allows you to grant wishes for kids in foster care. Another option is to plant a tree in someone's name, which you can do here.
And hey—if they're a stinker about a charitable gift, then they should reflect on why they're so hard to buy gifts for in the first place. But hopefully, with a little extra thoughtfulness and creativity, you can make even the pickiest on your holiday shopping nice list light up.
Disney—the corporation, the man, and the way of life—has long been a flashpoint for misinformation and conspiracy theories. The corporation’s “have fun or we’ll break your arm” philosophy, the life of its enigmatic founder, and Disney's ownership of our collective imagination in the form of Marvel, Star Wars, and more, make it seem like anything you hear about Disney could be true. When you factor in the unbelievable-but-verifiable facts about the company and the man, no one could be faulted for mistaking Disney fiction for Disney fact. Maybe Disneyland really was used for CIA mind control experimentation! You don't know!
Disney is currently the boogeyman of cranks on the right side of the political spectrum, with extremists calling for boycotts of its parks and cruises over their “wokeness” and allegations that the corporation's real purpose is not making money, but "grooming" children. But Disney used to be every bit as deeply distrusted by cranks on the left—not for grooming kids, but for its corporate malfeasance and cynical profiteering. The result: There are many flavors of misinformation to enjoy in the expanded Disney Conspiracy Universe. Below, I’ve compiled a collection of lies about Disney, along with an equal number of truths that are nearly as unbelievable.
The granddaddy of all Disney conspiracy theories is the one about Walt Disney attempting to cheat death by freezing his head (or his whole body) so he could be thawed out and reanimated at some future date. This story originated as far back as 1967, when a reporter for a tabloid called The National Spotlite claimed he’d snuck into the hospital where Walt Disney died and saw his body had been frozen in liquid nitrogen. From there, it caught on and grew for no real reason beyond the fact that it seemed like something Walt Disney might do. Sadly, the rumors are not true: Disney was cremated and his ashes are interred in Glendale.
Walt Disney spent so much time at Disneyland during its construction that he had an apartment built for himself above the firehouse on Main Street so he could avoid commuting to work. Sensible maybe, but why did Disneyland keep the rooms as he left them after he died? Why is there a light on in the window to this day? The park occasionally offers tours of the room (for a price, of course), but is it really a stretch to think the real reason they keep Walt's apartment is because they’re hoping he'll will return one day, with his thawed head attached to a new body, ready to start production on Song of the South 2? (Yes.)
As far as we know, Walt Disney was not a Nazi—but it’s complicated. When Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl visited Hollywood in 1938, the industry gave her a cold shoulder—but not Walt Disney. Walt gave Riefenstahl a tour of his studios, but he refused to watch or endorse Olympia, Riefenstahl's documentary about the 1936 Olympics. He also hired a lot of Jewish people who never reported any incidents of antisemitism. But the best evidence for Disney's non-Nazism is an anti-Nazi cartoon Disney produced. "Der Fuehrer's Face" stars Donald Duck and features music by Spike Jones, and it is such an effective takedown of Nazi Germany that it's doubtful a Nazi would have approved it.
Disney’s live action/animation feature Song of the South is racist, and not just when viewed through modern eyes. During its production, both the NAACP and the American Council on Race Relations basically told Disney, “Hey, your movie is really racist.” The Hays Office reviewed the script and demanded the removal of objectionable racial terms. Crew members quit the production over the film’s depiction of African Americans, and it was met with protests on its release. So Walt knew full well that his movie was racist, but he didn’t care, and made no move to make it less racist.
This piece of outrage bait comes from the “satirical” website Mouse Trap News, an outlet that propagates many fake news stories designed to appeal to modern conservatives’ hatred of Disney. Donald Trump will remain in the Hall of Presidents, so bored visitors seeking an air conditioned place to sit can check out his animatronic likeness. (Also, for the record: Disneyland is not planning to serve human flesh in any of its restaurants or snack bars, Moana is not “the First Transgender Disney Princess,” and Mickey Mouse is not going to play a leading in The Mandalorian season 4.)
Until recently, our most corrupt president (as far as we know) Richard Nixon was also a huge Disney fan. He visited Disneyland multiple times, oversaw the dedication of the Monorail when he was vice-president, and, when president, invited Disneyland’s Golden Horseshoe Revue to perform at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner. (I'm sure they delighted D.C.'s cynical political reporters.) But the best Disney/Nixon crossover of all is the fact that Nixon’s famous “I am not a crook” speech was delivered on the grounds of Disney’s Contemporary Resort in Florida.
This isn’t a myth about Disney, but one that Disney helped spread. The mistaken belief that lemmings intentionally kill themselves when their population reaches a certain point existed before Disney’s 1958 “documentary” White Wilderness, but the film cemented the untruth in the popular imagination by showing footage of hundreds of lemmings leaping off a cliff to their deaths. Except the lemmings were actually pushed off the cliff to get the footage. To be fair: The Walt Disney Family Museum says that photographer and filmmaker James R. Simon Simon faked the footage without the approval of Walt Disney.
While he didn't mutter "Kurt Russell" on his death bed (again, as far we know), the actor's name was the last thing Walt Disney wrote before he was brought to the hospital, where he died due to complications of lung cancer. At the time of Disney's death, Russell was a 15-year-old actor on the Disney lot shooting Now You See Him, Now You Don’t. Russell’s name appears in Walt’s hand on sheet of paper with the printed title “TV Projects In Production: Ready for Production or Possible for Escalation and Story.” No one knows exactly why. "I assume, as [does] everybody else, that he was talking about some movie that he was thinking about having me in…I don't know what to make of it other than that," Russell once told Barbara Walters.
There is a widely believed rumor is that Disney is so protective of its parks’ image that they will transport dead or dying people off the property to ensure that no one will ever be declared dead at a Disney park. While Disney has never publicly disclosed its internal policy regarding guest deaths, people have indeed been declared dead at Disney parks at various times over the years.
While the end of The Beatles didn’t involve an ill-fated ride on the Matterhorn, it is true that the Beatles broke up while at a Disney resort. John Lennon signed the legal papers finalizing his exit from the band while he was on vacation at the Disney World Polynesian Resort. You can even stay in the “death of the Beatles” room if you want.
This is really strange rumor that spread through chain emails in the 2000s. There doesn’t seem to be a discernible reason to believe that this could be so—Disney never said or did anything in his life that suggests he had any interest in seeing this scenario play out—but there is something weirdly plausible about the theory. It just feels like something that’s true. But it’s not. From what we know about Disney's will, he actually left 45% of his estate to his immediate family, 45% to the Disney Foundation, and 10% his sister, nieces, and nephews.
Irascible science fiction writer Harlan Ellison once worked for Disney, and according to an autobiographical essay in his 1982 book Stalking the Nightmare, Ellison's tenure ended after one day at lunch with his co-workers when he jokingly suggested Disney should make a porn movie starring his well-known creations. He then acted out the noises various Disney characters might make in said porn movie. What Ellison didn’t realize was that Roy Disney was at the next table and overheard the whole routine. Roy apparently didn’t find it amusing, and Ellison was terminated.
This week, young people are donning spy glasses, undressing one another through AI, making a football agent famous, and asking each other whether they can “name a woman.” If you can draw any conclusions as to what it all means, please leave a comment below.
Computer-created fake nude images of celebrities have been around for decades (like the alluring deepfake of Wilford Brimley above), but AI is now being used to create nudes of literally anyone users have a photo of. Welcome to the future, where “undressing” apps, programs that allow users to submit images and/or videos so an AI program can remove the subject’s clothing, are spiking in popularity—to the delight of creeps and weirdos everywhere.
According to a report published this week by social media analytics firm Graphika, companies that sell subscriptions to “synthetic non-consensual intimate imagery” services are advertising on mainstream platforms like Reddit and Twitter, and millions of users have already nude-ified images of their friends, teachers, and aunts. Twenty-four million people visited undressing websites in September alone according to the report.
While larger platforms like TikTok, Reddit, and Meta say they're taking steps to ban advertising related to undressing apps, there is currently no law against creating nude images of people without their consent (unless they’re underage), so there really isn’t anything that can be done. Other than stepping onto a nearby ice floe and riding it slowly into the Arctic Ocean.
Back in 2013, TV game show Billy on the Street featured a segment where the titular host demanded that a passerby “name a woman” for prize money. The subject was not able to. It was funny, but recently the clip has inspired a TikTok challenge that’s 11 times funnier.
The “name a woman” challenge is simple: A woman points a cameras at their partner or another man in their life and demands that they “name a woman.” It seems like a very dumb trend at first, but the videos that result are hilarious. There’s the instant look of fear when the subjects try to suss out the expected answer, and the hilarious punchline of a dude naming an unexpected woman like Susan B. Anthony, Florence Nightingale, or Harriet Tubman.
The “correct” answer, as explained by Amanda Carlucio’s father, is the name of the woman in your life, who’s usually holding the camera. “What other woman would I say?” Carlucio asks. But the videos where the dude names someone like Anne Frank are way funnier.
A decade after Google Glass fizzled, having a tiny camera hidden in your glasses is making a comeback. Eyewear maker Ray-Ban’s line of Meta Smart Glasses retail for $329 and allow users to livestream to Instagram and Facebook as well as stream music. Unlike Google glasses, they don’t look dorky—they’re styled like classic Wayfarers.
As you might expect, TikTok is turning the high-tech spectacles very trendy. The hashtag #raybanmeta has over 124 million views, with the most popular vids being TikTokers playing Jungkook's song “3D” while looking in a mirror and dancing, a trend that started with user @wanna_be_ur_ex_boyfriend and spread outward to infinity. The videos' popularity led to parodies, like these videos of TikTokers taping iPhones and tablets to their faces, and this clever tutorial on how to fake the effect for way less than $329.
Mainstream media may be exhaustingly covering the ins and outs of pop star Taylor Swift’s love affair with Kansas City Chief’s wide receiver Travis Kelce, but football’s most interesting relationship is between New York Giants quarterback Tommy Devito and his agent Sean Stellato.
After being caught on camera talking to his client on this week’s Monday Night Football broadcast and celebrating the Giant's unexpected victory, Stellato became instantly internet-famous for the strong “legitimate, Italian-American businessman” vibes his black and silver pinstripe suit and black fedora give off. Stellato’s picture immediately went viral on Twitter, leading to an interview with ESPN, coverage on CNN, and instant worldwide fame.
Devito’s story is even better than his agent’s. The 25-year-old is an undrafted rookie who still lives at home with his parents. He was the Giants third-string QB who was only put on the field in week nine after a disastrous season start in which both the first and second string quarterbacks were injured. Unexpectedly, Devito led the dismal Giants to 3 victories and a 2% chance of making the playoffs.
YouTube mainstay Mark Rober’s “glitter bomb” videos have been an internet holiday tradition since the original was posted four years ago. This week, the sixth edition of the series was posted on YouTube, and Rober announced it is the final time he will create booby-trapped packages to surprise petty criminals. Watching people who gank an Amazon package from a stranger’s porch be terrified by loud noises, glitter and fart spray is kind of funny, but it’s also troubling: These aren’t hardened criminals we’re talking about, and is it really OK to laugh at the misfortune of the wretched? Perhaps to avoid the moral ambiguity around the series, the latest edition is not aimed at “porch pirates.” Instead, it features people who break into cars in San Francisco to make off with the laptop you left on the passenger seat. The piece includes some investigative reporting on how fencing stolen goods actually works in the City by the Bay too, as well as a fascinating diversion into why it’s difficult to break a car window with a baseball bat but effortless with a spark plug. Ultimately, the video reveals that car window smash-and-grabs don’t seem connected to organized crime. Instead, it’s perpetrated by the same kind of desperate bottom-feeders who steal packages. It’s probably good that this is the last glitter bomb video; it’s more sad than funny at this point.
Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year—unless you don’t celebrate it. Then you’re stuck in a mostly shut down world with seemingly nothing to do. Fortunately, you still have quite a few options, whether you’re along or with friends, to make Dec. 25 a fun day off, regardless of your observances.
Chinese restaurants and movie theaters traditionally stay open on Christmas day for those of us who don't celebrate and/or have nowhere else to go. Just getting some orange chicken and seeing what's playing at the multiplex can make for a fun Christmas day. While this guide will include ways to find other activities, you shouldn’t rule out these tried-and-true non-Christmas activities. They’re staples of the un-holiday for a good reason.
Finding a Chinese restaurant that’s open on Christmas doesn’t take much work. Just search Yelp for options near you. A few phone calls should find you a meal pretty quickly. If you’re in a larger city with a large cluster of Chinese restaurants (e.g. a Chinatown), you can head straight there—but don’t forget to make a reservation, even if it’s just dinner for you or a small party. Popular restaurants sometimes receive so much overflow business on Christmas day that they can’t accommodate everyone. You may not run into a problem, but it’s always better to be prepared.
If Chinese food isn’t your thing (or your reservation doesn’t work out), look at restaurants serving any non-European cuisine. This is a good time to check out that Vietnamese place you've been eyeing, or to get some Halah Thai food. Plenty of establishments that serve non-Western dishes do close on Christmas because they feel they won’t get enough business to justify the cost of staying open, so check the hours online or give them a call to make sure.
For Christmas entertainment, movies are the traditional choice. Several new ones always come out on Christmas day, because theaters attract both people who don't celebrate Christmas, and people who celebrate the holiday but want to get away from their families. Going to the movies on Christmas is so popular, it's a good idea to get your tickets ahead of time—hit up Fandango, MovieTickets.com, or order directly from your theater of choice. Consider hitting up the out-of-the-way or pricier theater with the table service or the cushy recliners that you usually don't go to, which can make it feel like more of an occasion.
If there's a nearby theater that provides seat assignments, consider going there even if you have to drive a little further. Christmas is a very busy time at the movie theater and you don’t want to get stuck in the front row. Regardless of assigned seats, however, you should still arrive a little early. People traffic and parking can make you late on a busy day.
Chinese restaurants and movie theaters aren’t the only establishments open on Christmas. A number of other retail chains—and even some local stores—keep limited hours for the minority who do not celebrate the holiday.
Several attractions remain open on Christmas day, especially in larger cities. As always, call ahead before making plans. Here are some options:
Go skiing or snowboarding: Most mountains are open on Christmas and the lift lines are blissfully empty. There's no better way of celebrating a winter-based holiday than on a wide open mountain.
Pretend to be a tourist: Tourist attractions tend to stay open on Christmas, especially in larger cities. This includes places like Madame Tussaud’s and Ripley’s Believe It or Not as well as zipline and Segway tours. Find out what’s local to your area and chances are they’ll have special Christmas hours. Of course, many tourist attractions don’t have to remain open for you to enjoy them. If want to check out a monument or historical landmark, they’re still around on Christmas and will cost you nothing.
Visit a park or skating rink: It may be cold outside (in some places), but if you bundle up you can enjoy a park or skating rink. Bring some friends and get a game of snow football together. Take a sled with you if your park has a big hill. When you get home, make some hot chocolate and enjoy being warm again.
Get a room: If you’ve got some spare cash lying around and have nothing better to do, get a room at a hotel. Hotels can’t really close on Christmas, and they typically offer plenty of amenities. As always, be sure to call ahead and find out if there are any Christmas day restrictions.
Volunteer: Not having anything to do on Christmas isn’t exactly a big life problem that needs solving. Other people have nowhere to go and nothing to eat. If you’ve got nothing to do, use that time to volunteer and help people who need it. Check your local homeless shelters and non-profit organizations for possibilities. Look at VolunteerMatch if you can’t locate anything easily. Your local Craigslist has a volunteer board you can look at as well.
Use Christmas as a catch-up day: Is everyone out of town? Have you been neglecting chores, work, your hobbies, or even working on a few DIY projects? While getting things done may not be anyone’s first choice on their day off, Christmas or otherwise, you can spend at least part of your day knocking a few things off your to-do list and the rest of the time relaxing. That way you’ll get a break and still feel accomplished.
Spend time with friends and family at home: Not celebrating Christmas doesn’t mean you can’t spend the day with family and/or friends. Get together with your family )(or family of choice) and play games, watch a movie, cook together, talk, or whatever else you’ll all enjoy. You don’t have to go out to have fun, so don’t rule out staying in with people you care about.
These are just a handful of options. A few local activities and attractions, such as arcades, laser tag, spas, and sports clubs often stay open on Christmas day. We couldn’t possibly list them all here, but call a few places to find out if they’re open. You might be surprised.
Some national chain restaurants remain open on Christmas day, so if you aren’t a fan of Chinese food you can often count on them. There's a restaurant chain open on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day for all tastes, from Applebee's, to Benihana, to Denny's, Fogo de Chão, and more. Keep in mind that all franchises often do not follow the same schedule, so while one Burger King may be open on Christmas, another may not. Call ahead first.
You won’t find much to celebrate at a store, but many chains traditionally stay open for a short time on Christmas day, including Walgreens, CVS, and 7-Eleven. Grocery store chains are generally not open on December 25—Costco, Kroger, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and many others will be shuttered for the holiday.
Because so many places are closed on Christmas day, the one thing you must do is plan ahead. This won’t take more than 15-20 minutes in most cases, and can ensure you won’t run into any unwanted disappointments during the day. Just follow these steps:
Make a list of the places you want to go.
Call nearby locations to confirm they’ll be open, as not every chain follows corporate holiday hour recommendations. It’s always a good idea to find out their exact hours for Christmas day, too.
Make reservations at any restaurant(s) you plan to visit.
Put together a basic timeline of the day, accounting for travel time, so you don’t lose any reservations, miss a movie, or arrive after the store closes.
If you follow those steps you’ll be ready to enjoy a very special non-Christmas, whether you’re going solo or enjoying the day with others.
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