Bear heaven
Also: suspicious maps, Jeff the Killer, and roguelike taxes.
This week, we’re talking about getting Weezered, Slamfest ‘99, and Stanley Kubrick’s vegetables.
Also, EX will likely be hibernating for most of December — but don't let that stop you from signing up for future emails here.
Is Among Us full of sus servers?
Among Us, everyone’s favorite all-ages adaptation of The Thing, has long been plagued by reports of ERP (erotic roleplaying), e-dating, horned-up chatters, and sus individuals on its public servers. This a/s/l dynamic is particularly uncomfortable because the game, a 2020 pandemic sensation once populated by several generations of players, has since become a “daycare.”
The r/amongus subreddit has reported on ERP sightings for years, and has a sort of profile for the typical e-dater lobby: The Skeld map, one impostor, four players, free chat. These lobbies also used to have suggestive names and references to My Hero Academia or Friday Night Funkin’ roleplay, but lobby names are now randomly generated to prevent this. Developers Innersloth also now seem to do enough active moderation to catch the dumbest offenders.
We were curious whether this was still actually happening, so we joined one random Skeld/1 imp/4 player lobby and were immediately confronted by a host named “CumonmyBWC.” We conclude that the prevalence of ERP in the Among Us community is not a myth.
Is the internet running out of mysteries?
One of the internet’s great lost media hunts came to an end on Nov. 4, when a redditor identified “Subways of Your Mind,” a New Wave single that was previously known only as “The Mysterious Song”; the search had occupied many online creators since 2019, and the first Usenet post about it dated to 2007.
Internet detectives have found a bunch of other famously lost stuff this year: the “Everyone Knows That” song in April, the Backrooms location in May, the source of “Celebrity Number Six” in September. All of these were found by dedicated redditors or Discord users grinding through old leads again — not by journalists, influencers, or any walk-in commenter who saw a big article or video and recognized the thing.
Within the fuzzy category of Internet lost media — powerfully online stuff distinct from historic “lost media” like the original cut of Greed — only a few high-quality mysteries remain. These include:
- The original image used in the Jeff the Killer creepypasta (there’s a $10,000 bounty for this)
- Footage of Slamfest ‘99, a live-action wrestling event made to promote Super Smash Bros.
- “I admit that there was music,” a song supposedly made by Carly Rae Jepsen in collaboration with Nickelback's Chad Kroeger, which has never been released
Bluesky user report
Everyone’s been talking about the dramatic post-election migration of Twitter users to Bluesky, a shift that finally includes many of the comedians who kept everyone reading Twitter in the first place. In the last two weeks, Bluesky gained more than 5M posters and saw app usage spike 500%; the user count now stands at 22M, according to a real-time tracker. But anecdotally, the population skews older and more political, and it’s light on key demographics like Gen Alpha meme posters and haters. Right now it’s like a party where everyone keeps talking about the fact that they showed up, but it’s unclear if they’ll find a reason to stay.
AI guys rush to say “first”
Where the Robots Grow, a 87-minute animation that billed itself as “the first AI animated feature film,” released in mid-October to little interest and a 3.3 rating on IMDB. But it sparked a minor slap-fight within the AI video community, where many competing unwatchable projects have jockeyed for the title of “first AI movie.”
After reporting on Where the Robots Grow, Forbes issued a correction where they identified the “AI-animated anime DreadClub: Vampire's Verdict” as the first AI animated feature film, which only raises more questions. DreadClub came out first — at the end of July — but is almost all static AI-generated images with lip flaps added. The characters “never, ever, stop talking” and are at best “mostly recognizable” due to unintended shifts in animation style, one of the film’s few reviews noted.
Several other unsavory films occupy the same bin of AI “firsts”: the trailer for Next Stop Paris, a violently ugly romcom, promised that the “first AI-powered love story” would arrive this summer. It never came out, but nobody was interested enough to ask where it went. The Last Screenwriter, the “first AI-written feature film,” was also soon forgotten after a brief controversy in June. In fact, nobody but a few bloggers and hype men have ever talked about any of these movies. Taken together, they suggest that it’s actually very hard for humans to stitch together any kind of satisfying longform story using the fragmented output of AI models.
Chum Box
Games
“Genuinely haunted by stickybear on the cd-i. this bear is so fucking ugly but he lives in heaven.” [link]
Microsoft Flight Simulator has evolved into a walking simulator. [link]
Can you “find all the Weezered moments” in the official Weezer Fortnite map? [link]
Kai Cenat released a bare-bones horror game about one of his buddies chasing you around [link]. On Twitch, the only people playing it were three tiny channels trying to draft off Kai’s 100K-viewer stream. Was this the first true “streamer game” — a single-use work made and played only by the streamer?
Just two months ago, players of the WWII strategy game Hearts of Iron 4 were so bored they were modding the game to “send Roosevelt to the front” [link]. Now they’re all feasting on the new Götterdämmerung DLC, which lifted the game to a new peak player count on Steam. [link]
Elin, a sandbox roguelike JRPG successor to the cult game Elona, launched into Early Access on November 1 [link]. Steam reviewers report that you can become anything from a pianist to a prostitute on your adventure, and that huge tax bills are the ruin of many new players.
Juice Galaxy, a free slapstick comedy game, is a “happy place” to “flip around doing stuff.” [link]
AI
From the image generation mines: A horrifying incantatory prompt about sexualized vegetables (“vegetables look like humans but have vegetable skin, people made out of vegetables, in the style of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ directed by Stanley Kubrick”) was embedded in an shared upscaling workflow on Reddit. [link]
Scammers are uploading viruses disguised as mods on the Skyrim Nexus; they automate the process with AI-generated images and text. [link]
The internet
A clip of Jerma985 explaining how to get a classroom’s attention continues to inspire foreign-language redubs. [Chinese, Japanese, original]
The NYT ran a cool article about the making of the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack. [link]
Lost media fun fact: an avant-garde painting lost since the 1920s was rediscovered by an art historian who saw it used as a prop in the movie Stuart Little. [link]
Here's a relatable clip of the Japanese prime minister trying too hard to look cool on camera. [link]
A man put his cat in Halo. [link]
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