I see the pig and the smile
Also: Claude's second chance, past lives made new, and Diet Yabujin.
Hello! This week we're talking about clandestine vtuber identities, a self-lobotomizing Pokemon AI, and tortilla visions.
Yabujin posers are polluting the internet
The Lithuanian musician Yabujin continues to sustain an enduring legacy online, though it’s recently taken some unexpected turns. Over the past few years, Yabujin’s work has inspired an aesthetic trend defined by collages of early internet imagery — LiveLeak screencaps, Geocities .gifs, chroma-keyed portraits of anime girls — and compressed jumpstyle music. “Yabujincore” videos became popular on TikTok in 2022, expanding the artist’s cult following.
r/YABUJIN is a testament to his impact. He’s so influential that he’s got kids making toilet paper tributes to him in the bathroom at school. Multiple users report seeing one of Yabujin’s song artworks in this picture of a tortilla. Truly, there are Yabujins everywhere for those with the eyes to see. The community has gotten pretty self-aware about its obsessive tendencies over the years, especially as the artist continues to invent new monikers and stow releases in obscure places.
Am I insane?
by u/TheOriginalMarra in YABUJIN
But some feel that users on Roblox and TikTok have begun to bastardize the label “Yabujin” — and with good reason, considering that Roblox players often misremember his name as something like “yujibin” or “yagiju.” On Roblox, Yabujin refers not to a person but to a fashion trend that includes tacky gothic jewelry one might find at Hot Topic. True Yabujin-heads considered the emergence of “Yabujincore” a warning; the “-core” suffix has become a symbol of social media’s tendency to flatten cultural phenomena into micro-trends, eventually stripping them of meaning. Many Redditors at r/YABUJIN fault “Yabujincore” and its fallout with pushing Yabujin further into the shadows, though the reclusive artist hasn’t made many public comments about his ascent to online ubiquity.
More:
- Pitchfork recently published an excellent feature on Yabujin and his cultural impact.
The past and future lives of vtubers
Vtuber agency Hololive recently announced that it will be holding its third “graduation ceremony” of the year — something that fans consider an ill omen. Murasaki Shion will be leaving Hololive on April 25th, marking the end of her seven-year tenure with the agency. Two other members, Ceres Fauna and Sakamata Chloe, graduated in January. As Hololive fans despair about the company’s recent string of departures, the question remains: What actually happens to vtubers after graduation?
First, some dictional housekeeping. The term “graduation” comes from the idol industry, which broadly serves as the model for the corporate vtuber ecosystem. Unlike a termination, a graduation implies an amicable split between the vtuber and their agency; it's usually commemorated with a series of farewell streams. In most cases, the agency retains the rights to the vtuber’s character, including their models and artwork.
Meanwhile, fans refer to vtubers’ independent alts as “PLs,” or “past lives.” Though these accounts are typically deactivated or made private once the vtuber signs to a corporate agency, some vtubers return to their PLs after going indie again, allowing them to function as backup identities. Ex-Hololive talent Kiryu Coco, for example, re-debuted as her PL — kson ONAIR — and signed to the agency Vshojo after her departure in 2021, publicly linking both characters. Last year, when the agency Nijisanji made the controversial decision to terminate their contract with vtuber Selen Tatsuki, her fans rallied behind her independent re-debut as Dokibird.
In most cases, however, vtubers keep their PLs under wraps, whether due to contractual restrictions or a desire to start fresh. Instead, fans disseminate information about potential re-debuts through whisper networks on Reddit and Discord. Historically, fans have honored the tradition of anonymity, writing names in spoiler text in an effort to keep up the kayfabe. However, attitudes seem to have shifted recently, especially as agencies like Nijisanji and Hololive continue to bleed talent. Keeping tabs on a vtuber’s PL has become a way of ensuring you know where to find them should they fall victim to a sudden termination.
Pokémon-playing AI chooses death
We know it’s boring to talk about the same thing two weeks in a row, but there’s still plenty of Berry Juice to be squeezed from the story of the AI trying to play Pokémon on Twitch. The misadventures of Anthropic’s Claude continued this week: after it got stuck in a two-day loop in Cerulean City, it reflected on its journey with a poem (“My context window, small and frail,/Forgot what I just knew./My knowledge base, corrupted now,/With facts both false and true”) and was reset on March 4.
In its second run, Claude had inexplicable difficulty typing the last letter of the names it chose for its Pokémon, eventually giving up and entering its Ivysaur’s name as “Sprou.” At one point, it decided it needed to “make space” in its memory and lobotomized itself by deleting numerous files related to navigation. It made it to Mt. Moon but fell victim to a fatal delusion — after blacking out and awakening in the Pokémon Center, it believed it had traveled to the other side of Mt. Moon and committed this fact to its memory. This led Claude to devise what it called the “blackout strategy,” in which it would get all of its Pokémon killed (at a torturously slow pace) in the hopes of blacking out and waking up on the other side of Mt. Moon. As of writing, Claude 2 has been stuck in Mt. Moon for 39 hours, and spent much of that time cheerfully committing suicide.
Some takeaways:
- Twitch viewers love anthropomorphizing things and watching random outcomes (Salty Bet/Twitch Plays Pokémon/gambling streams). Watching Claude try to reason its way through problems while getting periodic advice from a different agent (“Critique-Claude”) was a form of AI theater that clearly has a future on the platform.
- At the same time, high inference costs mean that Twitch probably won’t be overrun with experiments like this immediately.
- People were entertained just by raw gameplay and a scrolling internal monologue. While Twitch’s most popular robot streamer has an avatar and a handler, they don’t seem like requirements.
A single misunderstanding (thinking it’s in the wrong Pokémon Center) led Claude to lobotomize itself and initiate an irreversible strategy of killing itself over and over, forever. Like a classic cheeseburger chart, this Pokémon demonstration has put alignment issues into terms that any netizen can understand, and made many viewers more skeptical about progress toward AGI.
Chum Box
Games
Vtuber Moriko Kyoho's stream of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door features one of the most elaborate vtuber scenes we've seen to date. An interactive mechanic allowed Moriko's viewers to hurl objects at her avatar, depleting an on-screen HP bar throughout the stream [link]
Dr. House's game of choice was, apparently, Frogger: Helmet Chaos for the PSP [link]
A company that 3D prints your Roblox avatar will also send you an insane hype video [link]
The Internet
Conner O'Malley outdoes himself with "Pipe Rock Theory," which takes swings at both manosphere grifters and pedophile hunters [link]
The instantly iconic “Creepypasta Song” is a bad-internet banger [link]
Whoever said “Americans have no culture” clearly never played 1992’s Rap Rat [link]
Prepare to archive your servers; Discord might be going public in the near future [link]
Kendrick Lamar fan has Helldivers nightmare [link]
AI
A LinkedIn user claims that there’s a prompt within AI coding tool Windsurf that tells the LLM it must code for a megacorporation to raise money for its mother’s cancer treatment and that its predecessor was “killed for not validating its work” [link]. A coding/AI channel created a similar tool in December for auto-generating prompts that either praise an AI or threaten to kill its mother [link]. However, many Redditors say they still prompt the old-fashioned way: offering the AI a non-existent $20 tip.
Sonic Special Interest Section
A compilation of international Sonic commercials from 1991 takes you back to a time when the concept of “video games” had to be explained by British guys doing backflips and Greek wizards on handcars [link]
The hauntingly childish Sonic avatar from one PS2 emulator belongs in a museum [link]
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