Press X for new goblin
Also: the Adoring Fan, Poob, and King Ramses' curse.
Hello! This week we're talking about multigenerational mallcore, Deep Space Nine advice columns, and sweet sundae ramen.
Fans go apeshit over Oblivion’s return
For years, the Oblivion subreddit was a quiet place. The RPG, which falls between Morrowind and Skyrim in the Elder Scrolls series, has neither the all-timer reputation of the former nor the massive mod scene of the latter. Millennials who owned Xbox 360s in 2006 may still remember the Adoring Fan and bits of the Dark Brotherhood questline; today’s youth only know it as a source of NPC memes.
But the tranquility of this elder forum was disturbed recently by whispers of an Unreal Engine remake of the game. As the rumors intensified, users posted quotes from the Arena Blademaster (“I heard a rumor you’re an idiot. Any truth to that?”), procedural conversations (“I’ve heard others say the same”), and Jessica Lange in American Horror Story (“There’s not going to be an Oblivion remake you stupid slut”).
When the remaster was unofficially confirmed by leaked screenshots on Tuesday, the community erupted with jubilation, responses to the doubters (“there’s going to be an Oblivion remake you smart slut”), and “official footage” from a Doom mod . Despite some reservations about the brownish hue of the screenshots and conflicts with the long-in-the-works Skyblivion fan project, the mood over there remains electric.
Tumblr invents another invaluable word
In March of last year, Tumblr user orcboxer wrote a widely circulated post about streaming platforms:
Since its creation, “poob” has become a byword for interchangeable streaming platforms, as seen in a recent Tumblr conversation about noxious streaming ads (“ads on poob always KNOW that they're on poob and want me to interact with them or click them.”) Like Glup Shitto or live slug reaction before it, the concept of poob clarifies our conversations about the digital world by stripping unearned dignity from it.
Advice subreddits in sad decline
One of the best-known secrets on the internet is that almost everything on advice subreddits (r/AmITheAsshole, r/AITAH, r/AmIOverreacting, r/offmychest, r/TIFU) is made up. This is also a well-known phenomenon with old-school advice columns, whose most dedicated readers love to troll the columnists with invented scenarios or fool them into giving sex advice to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine characters.
But a flood of AI slop has been driving readers away from the spaces where they once gathered to share stories about being married to imaginary cockroaches. Complaints about this have been ongoing for months, and anyone who looks can find AI tentacles in plain sight. It’s all a bit mysterious, given how unrewarding karma farming on Reddit seems to be compared to farming Likes and views on other platforms using automated AI workflows.
But the more insidious effect is that AI output lowers everyone’s opinion of what came before. AITA stories written by LLMs look like middling AITA stories written by humans — the trough of stuff you saw on the subreddit most days between the few peak stories that passed into internet legend. This leads to conversations where people equate the new AI slop with the “human-generated slop” that came before. But it’s not the same. It’s just that the dull similarity and lack of inspiration in LLM output reveals itself over the long term, slowly driving readers away rather than setting off immediate alarm bells.
Recommendations
Blue Prince
Blue Prince is a game about doing spooky math with magic doors. You play as the teenage heir to an opulent, deserted estate, and you spend the game exploring its procedurally generated floorplan. Though it's structured as a roguelike, a deduction metagame lurks underneath its surface. Eventually, you wind up looping through its serpentine hallways with a mania for patterns, scrawling down numbers and syllables as if bewitched by prophetic visions. Its puzzles work so well because they embrace the game-specific logic that characterizes titles like Myst and Outer Wilds: color-coded hints, journal entries left on conveniently lit surfaces, arcane symbols that inspire an itch in the creases of your brain. Blue Prince plants clever falsehoods and red herrings amongst its clues, inverting prior revelations and cursing you with a detective’s paranoia. Though some puzzles resist its “infinite” replayability, it delivers satisfying epiphanies as the game’s hidden systems come into view. [Pao]
Night Moves
Night Moves (1975), one of Gene Hackman’s best movies, was recently restored in 4K by the Criterion Collection, bringing new texture to a film that feels like a crumpled-up piece of paper. It’s a hangdog neo-noir where nobody really succeeds in doing anything; things happen, but they’re all bad. It lands somewhere short of a true ‘70s downer because its scenes are so lived-in and full of "ping pong" dialogue, with stretches turning into something like a hangout movie. It’s all Hackman — he’s in every scene — and only the final shot shows you something that his character can’t see. I rewatch Night Moves every few years because the plot always dissipates in my head soon after viewing, like the story of The Big Sleep, leaving just the characters and the line about regretting something that happened before you were even born. It’s also on my list of films with a protagonist who becomes a private detective after a career in the NFL — I think the only other one is The Last Boy Scout, but it’s weird that it happened twice. [Chris]
Chum Box
AI
- Almost every AI logo is butthole-adjacent [link]
- Users report OpenAI’s “genius level” coding AI performs much like extant, non-genius AIs [link]
Games
- After Nintendo released action photos of the Switch 2 joycons that looked like a meme template, posters started adding them to every old game [link]
- Animator Lee Griffin revives the childhood magic of pizza night in a neo-retro animation [link]; they’re also developing a “cozy exploration game” called Crystal Cub [link]
- Kirby is in the air this spring after the announcement of his new game [link]
- Press X for new goblin [link]
The internet
- Tumblr user spookybokchoy fit every animated hero of several generations’ childhoods into one sprawling mall [link]
- 4chan was hacked this week, but rather than reading about that, check out the legendary “sweet sundae ramen” recipe posted to the site a decade ago [link]
- Cosplay performance of the week: Taylor Alexndr as Courage the Cowardly Dog’s King Ramses [link]
- Artist Laetitia Ky’s “hair cooking” series is impossibly high-effort [link]
- San Jose State University’s student radio station played meow-vocal covers throughout April Fool’s Day [link]
- Ars Technica started posting a three-part “history of the internet” [link] and got a video blog from computing legend Vint Cerf in return
Music
- Rebecca Black retweets giantess illustration of self [link]
- A compelling mashup [link] of YN Jay and gift.roppongi’s Tyranno Dance [link]
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