Egg limit
Also: weird hams, an overstuffed chatbot, and the fate of corecore.
Hello! This week we're talking about Harry's miserable reality, a reappearing chemist, and finding love in a hopelesscore place.
Checking in on the tonal chaos of “hopelesscore”
“Hopecore” video tropes are starting to get out of control. You’ve probably been exposed to hopecore if you’ve had the misfortune of navigating an uncurated feed on TikTok or Instagram Reels: Think motivational montages set to weepy guitar music, usually featuring on-screen text of variable font sizes. They’ve enjoyed a long enough lifespan to become fodder for remixing and parody, leading to a “hopelesscore” hashtag that completely divorces the hopecore aesthetic from its origins.
@doll_deranged #hopecore #hopelesscore #freddyfazbear #fnaf
♬ original sound - Doll Deranged
Hopelesscore TikToks like the one above apply the hopecore format to humorous videos, leaning into the dissonance between presentation and subject matter. A mild doomer sardonicism undergirds others. Yet while many of these videos are obvious parodies, the hashtag has become so ubiquitous that it’s begun to pervade the entire platform. Many accounts have begun to use the format to repackage videos of all stripes, from man-on-the-street interviews to footage from the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial.
If anything, the hopelesscore phenomenon proves that all video trends are eventually torn apart by the tides of irony and recursion. Hopecore itself is most legible as a response to the nihilistic undertones of “corecore,” an aesthetic that began to gain traction on TikTok in 2022. Corecore was initially defined by maximalist collages of non-sequiturs associated with “schizoposting," a cynical reflection of life during the age of the infinite scroll Over time, however, the hashtag started appearing in videos with a much more “wholesome” tone.
It's fitting for hopecore edits to share the same fate as ASMR clips or Minecraft parkour footage; it makes sense that content creators would identify the format as a low-effort way to stay conversant with the rest of the platform. But it's also easy to identify genuine sentiments of both hope and despair in these videos, even if couched under several layers of irony.
More:
- The best hopecore parodies are undeniably the ones that center the streamer Squeex.
Erotic chatbot grows to monstrous size
An erotic Shin Megami Tensei chatbot has become something of a legend amongst an online community of horndog AI enthusiasts. It's a character card based on eraMegaten, a fanmade SMT text adventure game with roots that date back to the mid-2000s. Both programs give the player the chance to engage the RPG franchise's roster of demons in a number of debaucherous acts that we won't bother detailing here.
AI character cards consist of tokens that map to words or phrases — the basic units of data that inform things like personality and backstory. While it's common for cards on Character Hub to contain less than 1,000 tokens, this SMT card has a whopping 25 thousand. This is especially egregious considering most AI models have a context window of less than 32 thousand tokens, which represents the amount of information it can store and process at once. Flowery prose might be the culprit — wordy descriptions can make for bloated cards — but it makes a bit more sense when you consider the fact that SMT's compendium of demons numbers in the hundreds.
LEGO-to-meth chemist makes a grand return
In 2018, an organic chemist who goes by Zabbie posted a video that proposes a method for synthesizing meth using LEGOs. It was the channel’s first, made during Zabbie’s freshman year of college. Then the channel went quiet, and Zabbie disappeared; meanwhile, the video garnered over a million views in their absence. This past week, they returned from their six-year hiatus, and their follow-up video — “It turns out that I am indeed, still alive” — is just as charming and informative as the original.
Zabbie’s videos possess a pleasing geniality. Both sport the hallmarks of an academic presentation prepared by the sole “fun” professor in your department: Stock photo collages, harmless image macros, and copious blank space. Their original video isn’t a tutorial for making meth out of LEGOs, but a loving tribute to their field. In many ways, their videos feel like they predate the current era of video essays, which tend to flaunt a cinematic polish. Instead, their latest video splits the difference between personal essay and Powerpoint, allowing Zabbie space to wax poetic about their appreciation for chemistry while meandering between crudely composed diagrams. Here’s to hoping they don’t disappear for another six years.
Recs
Red Rooms
Red Rooms has earned a reputation as an almost unbearable viewing experience, thanks in part to its subject matter: its title refers to mythical dark-web back corners in which viewers pay to watch acts of unspeakable depravity committed on kidnapping victims. But the film is more Caché than Salò — largely nonviolent, at least onscreen, and playing ideas off each other in a way that reverberates in the viewer’s brain long afterwards. The intrusive thoughts are conceptual, for the most part. That does not stop director Pascal Plante and actor Juliette Gariépy from revealing the full horror of those concepts in a series of setpiece images that guide the viewer, smiling, into their own set of backrooms. [Clayton]
FKA Twigs, Eusexua
FKA Twigs has yet to release an album that isn’t great: an all-time kerrang of a debut, a tortured breakup masterpiece for a followup, perhaps the definitive quarantine-era pop exorcism, and now, with Eusexua, an unlikely back-to-basics effort that evokes Kate Bush doing turn-of-the-millennium Eurotrance. As always, Twigs’ moodboard is immaculate — even North West, rapping in Japanese, works here — but it’s her unconventional deployment of these sonic elements that puts the album in line with its predecessors. In under three minutes, “Sticky” blooms from an ambient lamentation into something of a ballad before disemboweling itself in sludgy, spidery synths. The rest is just as surprising, turning the agony and the ecstasy of an endless night out into widescreen, high-tech melodrama. [Clayton]
Chum Box
Games
Inexplicable horniness persists within the Balatro community [link]. Does every popular game now attract a certain amount of this sort of thing, or does the very unsexiness of the source material pose an irresistible challenge?
r/drunkdrivingfun and r/SavageToad (yes, that Toad) find common ground in a handful of bizarrely specific memes [link]
Bush was favored by the Templars, Gore by the Assassins [link]
The Internet
The common wisdom on the internet in 2025 is that algorithmic ranking is bad; here’s an argument in its favor [link]
Vox is taking a novel approach to this round of Trump coverage: a newsletter that quarantines it [link]
Noema looks at the great migration away from Twitter and what a decentralized social-media future may look like [link]
New Session, an inventive "Telnet literary magazine" formatted for a 80x24 terminal screen, is accepting submissions for their next issue. The theme is "adaptations," and submissions will close March 20 [link]
Here’s a troubling Steamed Hams mobile game ad [link] from a channel that continues to produce high-effort Steamed Hams edits [link], six years after the world moved on
AI pollution of image search results has led an artist to create their own reserve of genuine animal images to serve as reference material. Invertebrates “coming soon” [link]
Apple Intelligence reports “Harry lives in miserable reality” [link]
Stingy "egg limit" spotted [link]
Music
A 1995 music video from German band Das Modul apparently inspired Tim & Eric’s immortal Celery Man [link]
Tumblr’s “The Slur Song” [link], a dance track made out of a text-to-speech anti-discrimination training module, has been suppressed by the authorities [link]
Screens
Meanwhile, on network television, CBS hit FBI has a new spinoff that is somehow going to be called FBI: CIA [link]
One of the last remaining ways to make reliable money in the music industry? Landing a TV theme song placement [link]
A cosmology of smoking in David Lynch films [link]
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