Bowser's sourpuss bread
Also: feverish calculations, space travel agents, and the Chaos Emeralds.
Hello! This week we're talking about the life of the last Pringle, a message from Zanarkand, and a rivalry as bitter as thermal paste.
What’s the deal with weird ASMR?
Recently, we realized we have no idea what’s going on in the world of ASMR. If you aren’t regularly watching whispery, mouth sound-full, trigger-laden videos either as a sleep aid or a sex thing, you probably never get real ASMR content recommended to you, even though the techniques of ASMRtists have crept into everything else. But lately we’ve seen some more outlandish ASMR videos escape containment, often in the form of reshared thumbnails for stuff like “boyfriend takes you out to eat but his opps slide on him,” “pov: you are the last pringle ASMR,” or this:
The video plays off the conventions of traditional ASMR, which has often included soothing check-ups from ASMRtists posing as long-winded doctors and nurses. And while it is bait for scrolling brainrot enthusiasts, the comment section is also full of ASMR diehards. Many fans say they got into ASMR because of the “fringe and wild” roleplaying elements, which can be seen everywhere on popular accounts, from toxic friends doing your makeup at a wedding to sleepy muppets with late-night shows on the Home Shopping Network.
Without fully mapping the ASMR terrain (traditional, soporific, OF marketing, meme, gamer, unintentional, etc.), there’s one region that surprised us: channels that lean into roleplaying with sets and special effects. The 2013 sci-fi series “Departure (or Space Travel Agent)” set the standard for production values, and remains kind of novel in imagining boring scenes from the far future — tedium that traditional narratives could only work in as a brief interlude. The short series has inspired a few recent imitators, but the best is ATMOSPHERE, a channel that hyper-extends scenes from sci-fi and fantasy media into hours-long appointments with Cyberpunk ripperdocs and driving instructors. The series is extensively timestamped (sometimes with headings like “blah-blah,” which is understandable), it has its own lore posts tying all of its worlds together, and it shows a laudable willingness to spend money on something other than a mic.
So why is ASMR content like this? Because the appeal stems from physical reactions (tingling, sleepiness) rather than a shared interest in any traditional media, maybe it’s natural that it attracts creators with diverse tastes. Some are happy to whisper about the same stuff forever, some use it to set up punchlines that obliterate the cozy vibes, and others use it as a vehicle for their own fandom or theatrical aspirations. Channels like ATMOSPHERE can feel like they’re on a grander mission to play with the sensation of boredom itself — exploring the boundary between the dramatic stimulation of traditional entertainment and the comfortable “background noise” of online video.
Job-seekers seek revenge through AI
One of the chief horrors of the modern job hunt is the near-certainty that your application will be rejected by a machine before it gets the dignity of human review. Could AI be the solution? Almost certainly not, but it could give job-seekers their own automation to interact with employers’ automation, in a “have my AI talk to your AI” escalation. This, at least, is the suggestion of an r/ChatGPT post showing an AI agent rapidly applying for jobs in Zurich, a task that seems well within the web-scraping, bullshitting, and CAPTCHA-beating capabilities of current models.
Elsewhere, reviews of OpenAI’s similar “Operator” agent suggest that it isn't currently good at, like, anything you need done right. But the imagined job-search agent isn't intended to do things right; instead, it feels like disgruntled users aiming the junkification cannon of AI at a region of the web (the LinkedIn/Indeed zone) that many would happily see destroyed.
A beautiful speedrun tradition
Last week we linked to a fun Games Done Quick Crazy Taxi speedrun that was accompanied by a live band. But in the comments of a post about that run, we learned about an even more beautiful practice at previous events: all the bros on the couch in Final Fantasy VIII runs singing along with Faye Wong's "Eyes On Me" during the big unskippable music video moment on the game's third disc. Different couches have carried on the tradition, with moving renditions in 2017, 2018, and 2020.
Green Hill Zone
Every day at EX we are confronted by Sonic. Whether it’s image or video, Discord or Tumblr, Tails or Knuckles, we are faced with Sonic & Friends at every turn of our online investigations. This has led to many heated discussions: does Sonic now belong to Gen Z, even though most memers were born too late to qualify even as Sonic Adventure kids? Can you be called a real Sonic fan if the only two villains you can name are Eggman and Metal Sonic? Does Obama count as a Sonic villain?
Here are a few of the thousands of Sonic links we see every day:
- A deeply unpleasant animation from years ago returned to haunt our feeds
- Sonic Riders—a hoverboard racing game so 2000s-coded it looks fake—apparently has a fanmade tournament edition and a still-active scene; it also inspired some cool new music
- A fighting game sweat developed a high-damage “Toontown-ass” anvil combo in the forgotten oddity Sonic the Fighters
New frontiers in receipt presentation
A recent outbreak of creator drama has led to a document that stands alone. While we have appreciated many works that could be described as monuments to haterdom — for instance, a 30-minute statistical analysis showing that a streamer is worse than his friends at Overwatch — a new post by tech review site Gamers Nexus transcends the genre.
For context: dueling GPU analysts Stephen Burke (Gamers Nexus) and Linus Sebastian (Linus Tech Tips) entered a new phase of their The Prestige-style rivalry after Mr. Burke mentioned Mr. Sebastian in passing in a video about GN’s mostly unrelated lawsuit against the makers of the browser extension Honey. Though the allegation was basically just that LTT had behaved in an “uncool” manner, Mr. Sebastian used his own podcast to say, in effect, “name one time when I was uncool.” Mr. Burke responded with this extraordinary post, which has the heft of a legal document, enumerating several instances of what could fairly be called uncool behavior.
More:
- If you're wondering about the connection between LTT and Honey, it's fallout from this December exposé about the extension.
Recs
Ethel Cain, Perverts
I didn’t recommend Ethel Cain’s sprawling new ambient doom-folk LP Perverts last week because I wanted to spend more time with it. A week later, I still do. It’s not that the album, which transforms the songwriter’s gothy Americana into dark, imagistic sound collages, is too dense or difficult to parse. I actually find it a surprisingly compulsive listen, radiating, over its runtime, a strange warmth. No, I still wanted more time with the record because I can’t suss out just how much I love it. Did my favorite LP of the year drop in its first week? Or is this bewitching fog of sound, this exorcism of a distinctly middle-American darkness, just perfectly suited for this exact moment, iced-in and terrified? Either way, it’s consumed me. [Clayton]
Frosty Faustings XVII
#GuiltyGear x #Balatro is now a real-life game you can play at Frosty Faustings.
— Krackatoa (@krackatoa.ca) 2025-01-24T02:12:27.994Z
If you're reading this on Saturday, there's still time to watch the back half of Chicago's two-day Frosty Faustings event — the first real outing for the fighting game community in 2025. FGC stuff is an acquired taste, but I'll always tune in to see the various killers and frauds revealed over the course of a weekend tournament, the strats that someone "saved for nationals," the face-offs between cutthroat gamers with handles like Bustman and Beancel, and the dads dusting off old fight sticks for Vampire Savior or Third Strike. The best bits are often off the main stage, in side tournaments for kusoge like Fist of the North Star and poverty games like Wonderful World, where the commentators keep leaving the desk and taking a seat by the console to compete in the top 8. There actually was a Sonic The Fighters tournament there yesterday, and it turns out to be a cacophonous, hyperactive game where rings explode out of everyone with every hit. I think it's also the only fighter I've seen where a character can grab someone else's gun and shoot them with it. [Chris]
Chum Box
Games
Citizen Sleeper 2, the new tabletop-inspired sci-fi RPG from our old pal Gareth Damian Martin, comes out next Friday. The first game was like a great book you tear through in a couple sittings; they've said the new one will be a more episodic adventure in the vein of Cowboy Bebop [link]
After releasing Storyteller, a game he worked on for over a decade, Daniel Benmergui has released the browser game Dragonsweeper, a dungeon-diving riff on the classic time-waster Minesweeper [link]
The horned-up subreddit for the gacha game Zenless Zone Zero, one of the highest-earning mobile RPGs, has been generating walls of feverishly perverted calculations [link] as related subreddits look on in dismay [link]
Actually cool video essay: “How many times can you piss in Heavy Rain?” [link, via RPS]
A beautiful message from Final Fantasy X [link]
"The last four were Miku, we didn't shoot, we emote" [link]
“This is how a Yakuza side story starts” [link]
The Internet
While TikTok’s troubles have led to much hand-wringing about the death of BookTok, the New Statesman explores the surprisingly robust literature community on 4chan [link]
404 Media talked to a developer who made a diabolical link-maze to trap AI web crawlers [link]
“Before the internet you had to carry your posts around and hand them to people” [link]
Was the iconic Grinch ‘18 design RUINED by corporate? [link]
Mario is a broken man [link]
Music
“Pelly’s most striking contribution is her observation of where Spotify’s incentive structure seems to be pushing us: toward some sort of cyberpunkean cultural future where the platform fully recontextualizes music as means for passive mood regulation” [link]
New Actress LP dropped [link]
Screens
John David Washington and Malcolm Washington’s Criterion Closet video is an all-timer; at one point they refer to their dad as “Big Zel” [link]
Alien production design enthusiasts will love this contemporaneous article written by the programmer who constructed the Nostromo landing sequence graphics [link]
The Brutalist is a 3.5-hour Oscar frontrunner, beloved for its celebration of old-fashioned American craftsmanship — but its brief use of generative AI has caused a backlash [link]; director Brady Corbet’s response [link]
“Every idea ChatGPT came up with was good”: Paul Schrader starts the new year with a scorching hot take [link]
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