Blue hair, blue tie
Also: weird gloop, pipe bombs, and Fox McLOUD.
Hello! After a long winter break, we're back to talk about vegetable juice, doubling down, and hopecore streamers.
Miku beam unleashed on Fortnite
Virtual pop star / gamer icon Hatsune Miku was added to Fortnite with a set of cosmetics that some are calling “even better than the Metallica bundle.” The official reveal trailer, which focused on Fortnite’s wack Festival mode, shied away from depicting Mikus fragging out with SCAR-L assault rifles in battle royale. However, Twitter user @itsqueazy put together a sizzle reel equal to the moment:
Blue hair, blue tie, hiding in your Wi-Fi pic.twitter.com/fhtUEBFOae
— Queazy (@itsqueazy) January 14, 2025
It references an improvised fandub of Sonic Riders by SnapCube and friends, Miku’s 2021 cover of Fortnite generation anthem “Chug Jug With You,” 2022’s pipe bomb meme, old-school Vocaloid banger “Vegetable Juice” from 2008, Miku's appearance in the rhythm game Persona 4: Dancing All Night in 2015, parodies of the cursed Mikudayo mascot suit from 2012, Vocaloid hit “Triple Baka” from 2008, Set It Off’s “Why Do I” from 2022, the iconic leek-wielding 2007 cover of “Ievan Polkka”, Spider-Man: Far From Home, a 2013 Domino’s promotion, 2019’s “Assassin Princess” track, and a GIF recreating the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson with Hatsune Miku and Fortnite character Fishstick.
New front opens in the gamer wiki wars
We’ve previously covered a few wiki wars — the efforts by fans of games like Minecraft, RuneScape, Dark Souls, etc. to create viable alternatives (now often hosted by Weird Gloop) to the autoplaying ad-infested wiki farms run by the Fandom and Fextralife networks. If you've played through any RPG that sent you running to a wiki regularly, and have interacted with one of these cursed websites on a daily basis, you will understand the urgency of the mission to replace them. The latest attack on one of Fandom’s SEO Death Stars comes from the Monster Hunter community, which has created monsterhunterwiki.org and is seeking to build it out before the February release of Monster Hunter Wilds. If you’re depressed about the state of the web, there’s at least one bright spot — the wikis are healing.
Cultural exchange initiated
In anticipation of the TikTok ban, which is definitely maybe happening tomorrow, digital refugees have flocked to China’s RedNote video app (Xiaohongshu, or XHS). Bytedance’s Douyin app is the real “Chinese Tiktok,” but it requires a CN phone number on signup, so users are trying out RedNote (the “Chinese Instagram”) instead.
Anyway, American tourists have found some videos that are fried the way we like them:
- “A design for addictive games”
- “A day in the life of an average American 🫡🇺🇸”
- “The Chinese netizens have put America in the ground”
There are also many Chinese spy memes (see Today in Tabs) and a ton of Luigi Mangione fancams that would get you banned on some Western platforms.
XHS has image/discussion posts as well as shortform video, and the best way to use it is on PC with browser translation turned on, so it doesn't feel that much like opening TikTok. The whole episode seems more like a brief excursion to a random Chinese app where users will have fun exchanging factoids (many false!) for a few days before they get bored or the mods ban them for “discussing LGBTQ+.”
"Caught in 4K" week
Several gamers of significance lost major battles in the court of public opinion this week. Their crimes are detailed below.
- Elon Musk was labeled a “FRAUD GAMER” after a breakdown by streamer / Path of Exile lifer Quin69 showed that Musk had likely bought the high-ranking PoE account that he constantly brags about. The incriminating footage came from livestreams that Musk did seemingly to refute previous online doubts; of course, he wound up massively amplifying them. In his next act of crisis inflammation, Musk got into a huge public spat with the streamer Asmongold over the latter’s obligatory reaction to Quin69’s video. It’s hard to imagine a more impressive conversion of a Reddit argument into national humiliation.
- PirateSoftware, a member of the big-deal World of Warcraft guild OnlyFangs (popular streamers who play together on a permadeath server) flamed out in historic fashion after screwing up in a dungeon. Basically, at a moment when he needed to help his teammates retreat, he fled (“roached out”) selfishly, then pathologically refused to apologize later. The best breakdown came from OF’s usual leader Sodapoppin, whose chat fed him a stream of damningly smug clips from older PirateSoftware broadcasts to react to. After days of doubling down, PirateSoftware was kicked from the guild and became an internet hate object.
- Minecraft heel Dream is self-immolating in a feud with TommyInnit, one of his former collaborators in DreamSMP (a roleplay server watched by children during the pandemic). The receipts and DMs here honestly aren’t interesting enough to explain, but you always need a third bullet point.
The really big “oof” payloads above are moments that netizens found by digging through stream archives with a Daily Show producer’s eye for hypocrisy: Musk basking in Lex Fridman’s nonsensical compliments about a video game neither of them understand, or PirateSoftware holding court about his ability to “save lives” in WoW shortly before abjectly failing to do so. The days of public shaming on the internet are certainly coming to a middle: schadenfreude delivery systems continue to improve as people live more of their lives online, leaving a longer trail of statements to be used against them.
A crackdown on the goon squad
An article in Techcrunch revealed that Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against members of 4chan’s /g/ (Technology) board who have been using ChatGPT for erotic roleplaying. Basically, they use jailbreaks to loosen the LLM's inhibitions and run their conversations through anonymizing proxy services instead of their own easily banned accounts. The proxy owners apparently used stolen enterprise API keys scraped from Github to access ChatGPT, which meant that random businesses were getting charged by the word for gooners’ romances with anime maidens.
The lawsuit is convoluted (it actually focuses on the proxy owners’ use of Microsoft’s image generation API, which one poster compared to charging Al Capone for tax evasion), and it prompted a flurry of analysis in /g/ threads, much of it by posters excited to see that pages of their depraved discussions had been screenshotted, printed, and scanned into official court documents. One user’s posts about their erotic Balatro-themed characters appeared multiple times in screenshots, sandwiched between posts relevant to the suit.
News of the lawsuit broke shortly before the NYT ran a feature about a woman “in love with ChatGPT” who posts on the r/ChatGPTNSFW subreddit. The redditors seem like more basic users than the 4chan set, who have solved some of the technical issues mentioned in the NYT piece (they use frontends to speak with different models, insert repetition-reducing regex strings, use summarization to resume chats, etc.) But both stories lead you to the same conclusion: a whole lot of people are already using AI models to generate smut. One 4chan anon suggested that roleplay was a notably challenging use case for AI: the audience wants it to stay true to the scenario, but also wants to be surprised by signs of “soul,” or some spark of inspiration outside of the instructions.
Recs
The Bazaar
If "asynchronous competitive roguelike auto-battler" is the kind of gamer word salad that activates your salivary glands, then The Bazaar is something to keep on your radar. You play as a trader in an intergalactic bazaar, purchasing card-like modules from a Mos Eisley cantina's worth of alien characters. You spend runs fashioning a Rube Goldberg machine of war out of the items you've purchased; during battle, you watch as your Frankenstein creation assails your opponent with torrents of integers, reaping the rewards of your items' various synergies. It's the brainchild of former Hearthstone pro Reynad, and Hearthstone's aesthetic influence is quite palpable, for better or for worse (many onlookers have remarked to me, pejoratively, that it "looks like a mobile game"). Pachinko-like bells and whistles aside, however, The Bazaar takes its design seriously – every item feels like it was crafted with the same attention to ludonarrative detail that characterizes cards in games like Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering. [Pao]
Hell Let Loose
Hell Let Loose looks like a multiplayer shooter, but really it’s a multiplayer talker. Your squad leader is in two calls at once: in the officer's channel, they listen to your team’s commander yell about the need to defend towns and acquire fuel; in the squad channel, they relay these orders to you and your buddies while you’re busy getting shot in a field by a guy you never saw. You might set out to play HLL with zero interest in dignifying its WWII setting with any kind of roleplaying, but the natural comedy of its game of telephone (and proximity chat) cajoles you into it. It’s a very funny thing to play with friends who understand that communication is the game; but if you’re not coordinating and riffing and asking about the commander’s tone when he mentioned your squad, you’re just playing a stiffer Battlefield. [Chris]
Seefeel, Square Roots
The British trio Seefeel released three oblique, baffling records in the ‘90s, slowly charting a path from post-rock to post-sound, dissolving into a haze of mathematical possibility. They spurted back to life with a fractious LP in 2011 and then again, last August, releasing the typically enigmatic and excellent Everything Squared. But I am here to recommend instead December’s Square Roots, which recombines elements from the earlier LP to stunning effect. I couldn’t possibly say that it’s better than its predecessor; rather, they function as companion pieces the way albums rarely do, functioning more like algorithmic aberrations than distinct statements. You could imagine a dozen such records, each affecting in its own way — a dozen gateways into a labyrinthine, ever-shifting discography. Seefeel isn’t a band, they’re an intellectual pursuit. [Clayton]
Chum Box
Games
Speedrunning event Awesome Games Done Quick couldn't feature the game Crazy Taxi for years due to a licensed Offspring soundtrack that triggers DMCA takedowns; this year, they finally ran it with a live band [link]
Insane 2004 arcade racing game Valve Limit R appears to have anticipated the modern era of react content [link]
Development on imm-sim/boomer shooter Fortune’s Run has halted because the dev is going to prison [link]
User “accidentally” purchases Star Fox fetish comic [link]
Knuckles’s voice actor admitted to saying the word “shit” in 2003’s Sonic Heroes, putting a 20-year-old playground argument to rest [link]
Sonic was everywhere we looked this week — even The Simpsons [link]
"There's Kojima, look!" [link]
The Internet
A "hopecore" fancam of the streamer Squeex achieves an impressively sharp tonal dissonance [link...if TikTok still works when you read this]
Miku started the new year with intensely negative energy [link]
Original Newsletter Full Of Link “Links I Would Chat You If We Were Friends” pulled together this infographic of the link recommendation ecosystem as it currently exists [link]; find your new fav sletter here [link]
Screens
RIP David Lynch [link]. Several Lynchian things are currently free to watch, including Twin Peaks on Pluto [link] and David Lynch: The Art Life on Criterion [link]
This YouTube compilation of “cursed” ‘10s commercials is mostly just a gauntlet of canceled people, with extensive timestamp annotations [link]
Last year Steamboat Willie entered the public domain; here is the foretold horror subversion Screamboat Willie, starring the evil clown from the Terrifier movies [link]
RaMell Ross, director of the acclaimed Nickel Boys adaptation, says he reads every Letterboxd review [link]
Steven Soderbergh published his annual list of every movie, book, and TV show he watched in the previous year. For 2024: A surprising quantity of Star Wars prequels [link]
Books
Romantasy is so cliche-driven — a feature, not a bug, to readers — that copyright law is hard to enforce in the medium [link]
Nothing but scathing book reviews! [link]
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One Last Thing
“When I’m 90 I’ll still be referencing this video”
