Hoarse toad
Also: cowboy hats, the Afterlife bar, and guys reflecting.
Hello! This week, we’re talking about a trailblazing toilet, abrasive tiramisu, and cyber-lizards.
Waiting has driven the Half-Life subreddit mad
There’s not much Half-Life news to go around, and what there is — like this year’s Half-Life 2 RTX — often turns out to be bad. Yet the series’ influence remains massive, not just because older gamers recognize all the sound effects and know the campaign front to back, but because Gen Alpha viewers now know a ton of Source Engine faces and assets from Skibidi Toilet. This combination of nothing-to-talk-about and memetic potency has turned the Half-Life subreddit into a multi-generational shitposting palace that sends Gordon Freeman into the Minecraft movie, the Invincible War, and stoner fantasies.
The biggest single contributor to this atmosphere is likely the animator Bchungus, who tirelessly adds Half-Life scientists to hyperactive skits about dog shelters and mobile game ads. But the subreddit as a whole seems to have leaned into brainrot and claimed it as part of their Source Engine heritage. One recent post dug up a Gman-head-in-toilet video made 14 years before Skibidi Toilet premiered. “I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it,” a commenter said.
Devil May Cry remains stupidly great
As the Devil May Cry games enjoy the Netflix bump, moments from the series have started circulating on social media again. Chief among them is a bit in character action classic Devil May Cry V where the hero Dante flips a hat onto his head and breaks out into a Michael Jackson routine. This was the last in a series of over-the-top musical performances in Capcom’s DMC games: Dante also moonlighted as a metal guitarist in DMC3 (2005) and a flamenco dancer in DMC4 (2008). The hat dance has now been immortalized in Netflix’s animation (minus some MJ flavor), signaling a kind of final victory in a DMC culture war that almost everyone forgot about.
See, on release, the cowboy hat bit was viewed as a response to an infamous “Dante’s not gay” GDC presentation by western developer Ninja Theory, who included an image of Dante in Brokeback Mountain alongside slides captioned “DANTE IS NOT.” This attitude was pervasive in Ninja Theory's edgelord Devil May Cry reboot (2013), which reinvented Dante as a broody scene kid. But six years later, Capcom’s DMC V brought back the real developers and the real(ly) flamboyant Dante, winning a heap of awards and effectively re-establishing the character as a man whose radness and lameness were inseparable.
You can still find people who hate the cringy-cool cutscenes of Capcom DMC (see this streamer freakout). A few protested even on DMC3’s release in 2005 (Eurogamer’s 8/10 review cited “absolutely cringe-worthy one liners”). But Capcom’s decision to go all the way over the top now seems like one of the few mid-2000s creative choices that have aged well. The po-faced God of War games of the aughts were updated into dadcore action-adventures in 2018, but their millennial dialogue already feels more dated than the honest cheese of DMC3. Gears of War’s attempts to grow up (by centering trauma, or something) were even less successful. The gaudy excess of DMC, by contrast, now seems timeless.
Stock market crash causes meme market boom
As the stock market fell, rose, and fell again this week, internet wags rolled out increasingly complex riffs on the wall of red squares:
- Twitter users offered pics of guys experiencing a private tragedy and relatable quips (via The Cut); many posts in this vein of Twitter humor felt like they could have been made in 2020
- The all-red heat map became a new canvas for “Bad Apple,” a cover of a Touhou Project song that became a wildly popular shadow play animation in 2009
- A series of post-election memes of dismayed chudjaks wearing “fell for it again award” ribbons mutated into an Evangelion redraw of Rei Ayanami made out of fell for it again awards, and someone added the heat map as a background
Do these advanced memes represent a laudable degree of "cultural literacy," as the Rei poster claimed, or are they just old-school editorial cartoons redrawn with characters known to today's youth?
Recommendations
Barker, Stochastic Drift & DJ Koze, Music Can Hear Us
The past two weeks have been frankly embarrassing for music-fan group chats, with a surge of blue-chip indie stars (Bon Iver, Deafheaven, Destroyer), genre-destroying newer artists (Jane Remover, Los Thuthanaka, Aya) and, in my case, individual favorites (SiR, DJ Python) all releasing solid-to-great new efforts. Hell, even Boldy James fired off a heater (his fifth this year). But the unquestionable highlight, for me at least, has been the long-awaited return of both DJ Koze, returning after seven years with the characteristically joyful Music Can Hear Us, and Barker, whose brainy, infinitely listenable Utility (from 2019) has finally received a successor. Stochastic Drift feels even less rooted by convention, Barker's forward-thinking trance dissolving into a vaporous ambient centerpiece ("The Remembering Self") and concluding with a dazzling, galaxy-brain assemblage of live drums. Koze, meanwhile, solidifies himself as the Willy Wonka of contemporary music, packing his new effort so full of interesting sonic throughways that it lingers in the brain afterward like a good vacation. Your ears, frankly, deserve this. [Clayton]
Chum Box
Games
- Bygone meme star Billy Herrington hanging out at Cyberpunk 2077’s Afterlife bar [link]
- Animations of a player rolling on the ground in R.E.P.O. singing “I Love” have taken off [original and edit, via KYM roundup]. R.E.P.O. is a Lethal Company-style horror-comedy with the highlight-friendly feature of lip-syncing when players talk; lip flap tech has been viable since at least 2003’s Rainbow Six 3, but remains underused in modern multiplayer games
- “the amount of effort u gotta go thru to have ur black dark souls character not look like calvin booth, it's an enormous effort and i always hated him for that even tho he had no idea” [link]
- A game about designing and improving a website, made entirely in CSS [link]
- AC-130 gunship added to Runescape [link]
- A Lunacid-style cat [link]
The internet
- A tiramisu food porn video on Twitter blew up for its abrasive music [link]. It seems to be using a hoarse Toad AI cover of the cloying “Mori no chiisana restaurant” [link] which people are sick of hearing over shortform Japanese cooking videos
- A really magical Cameo from Kori King [link]
- Cyber-lizard art from 1987 [link]
- Magic: The Gathering fan suffers dramatic card-sleeving mishap [link]
- Joel Embiid is rehabbing his knee inside of a PS3 [link]
- Redditor doesn’t understand how rooms work [link]
- Woman pointing a gun at a computer for some reason [link]
Music
- Quavo made the chainsaw assault rifle from Gears of War IRL [link]
Screens
- A post celebrating wildly dangerous stunts from old Hollywood [link] kicked off a thread of scorchers from the pre-CGI days [link]
- "gordon ramsay in ghibli art style but i drew it myself" is the latest in a long series of inspired thumbnails from whoever runs the official Kitchen Nightmares channel [link]. It used to be managed by someone at Little Dot Studios [link]
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