Sheer iconicity

Hello! This week we're collecting our Jemanes, getting our horses tested, and admiring a good flashbang gag.

Let people enjoy horse test lore

A Twitter account devoted to fictional horse betting races has become the latest reminder that we, as a collective online consciousness, can’t have anything nice. Indie developer Blake Andrews spent the bulk of April posting “horse race test” videos to their Twitter feed, prompting viewers to place bets on their favorite contestants. They essentially served as brief interactive experiences, gesturing to the idea of a game without actually providing or capturing one. 

It was a massive success. Over the past month, the series’ horses — bipedal blobs of pixels that are pretty much equestrian in name only — have become the subjects of numerous works of fan art, inspiring everything from references to Mitski to (SFW) horse-on-horse yuri. Fans gave the horses nicknames, wrote half-baked fanfics, and wondered aloud about which horses were “woke” and which ones had probably attended the January 6th insurrection. The horses got so popular that they started appearing in fancam edits on TikTok. Many used the series’ acronym, “HRT,” as the basis for in-jokes about being trans, as in this spin-off “DIY HRT” video.

Though Andrews has announced that the tests are officially over, the series lives on as the topic of heated discourse about the nature of online fandom. As the series grew in popularity, some started getting exasperated with the volume of half-ironic lore that had ballooned in its wake. “if ur invested in this shit past the funny joke of how shitty it is,” one user wrote, “i feel like you’d enjoy sprunki or dandy’s world.” Sprunki and Dandy’s World are horror games with younger audiences, and they’ve both become heavily associated with content farms that churn out low-quality animations based on their characters. Within this context, it’s difficult to ignore the sheer cultural impact of Five Nights At Freddy’s, which popularized “mascot horror” as a genre ripe for hidden lore and recursive fan theories, even (and especially) when the source material isn't equipped to provide it. 

To be fair, HRT is markedly different from the games that tend to get chewed up by content farms, especially when so much of its fan art is tongue-in-cheek or purposefully abstruse. As an experimental video series with a hyper-online, creatively inclined audience, it isn’t particularly suitable to the capitalist machinations that might render other fandom phenomena soulless or played out. But at the same time, it’s noteworthy that a significant part of its fandom succumbed to the compulsion to fill it with lore and original characters, whether out of irony or genuine interest. After all, like the cast of Sprunki or Dandy’s World, HRT’s color-coded characters are just sparse enough in detail that anyone can remix them at will.

CS streamer turns to physical comedy

The CS2 streamer Lootych came up with a new bit this week:

If you can’t see that, he moves his webcam overlay to the center of the screen, spins his chair around, and gets up to mime physically peering around the in-game corner before making a callout to his teammates. Peeking the fourth wall was such a good gag that he immediately did it again in other videos using higher and lower barriers; he was blinded by a flashbang in another upload. By performing all of these variations in one week, he seems to have maximized the performance of the bit on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where audiences favored different variations. This limited but powerful shtick was the best reason to watch a CS2 clip since 2023, when beta bugs let players project themselves onto the skybox and bend completely backwards like Neo.

Games, music, digital culture.

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Recommendations

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

For me, the long and winding quest of Oblivion always starts with reuniting the Jemanes — two long-lost brothers living in different cities. They ask you to escort them to their home, Weatherleah. But once they start following you, they become unkillable (though frequently knocked-out) quest NPCs. So as long as you never take them to Weatherleah, they’re the closest thing to permanent party members you can find. Because NPCs equip the most expensive things they find in their inventory, you can outfit the Jemanes with new gear by reverse-pickpocketing enchanted zero-weight items onto them when they’re not looking. The only problem with this playstyle is that they get angrier and angrier as you accidentally hit them in random fights throughout the game, until their beaming faces set into masks of rage. Occasionally you’ll be off battling daedra hordes inside an Oblivion Gate, and when there’s a break in the action, you hear a voice behind you say “You have but to lead us to Weatherleah…”

The Jemane party and most other stupid Elder Scrolls tricks I remember still work in the new remaster of Oblivion, which is judicious in its mechanical changes and freewheeling in its visual ones. It’s not hard to talk me into replaying this massive game at any time — there are always a few corners of it you haven’t seen — so this mostly-right recreation is the year’s most welcome surprise so far. [Chris]

Chum Box

Games

Minimalist sheep-based “battle royale” arcade game CrazyCattle3D has taken over America’s schools [link]. It launched two weeks ago on itch.io and has been followed by a herd of unofficial browser-based replicas [link]  

The San Diego Padres are running a promotion that truly comes out of left field: a collaboration with gooner gacha game Nikke: Goddess of Victory [link]

The high-speed presentation of clashing animation styles and non sequiturs in the intro to a Lythero video is best experienced with no context [link]

Somehow, a recent Windows 11 update (24H2) made a plane disappear in the ancient Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004). The modder Silent, who maintains a series of bugfix patches for old GTAs, wrote a breakdown explaining how a change to Windows’ handling of critical section objects activated an old bug that never surfaced in most versions of the game [link]

"Friendslop" enjoyers aren't beating the "friendfarming" allegations [link]

R.O.B. and Mister Game and Watch doomed yaoi [link]

"NOT WHAT I'M CALLED" [link]

The internet

They don’t make webcomics like Captcha Comics anymore – they don’t even make those captchas anymore. The creator last posted in 2016 [link]

An infamous real-life stream sniper (that is, he surprises streamers in real life) known as “Dr. Pepper Guy” keeps finding Twitch stars in Tokyo, handing them a Dr. Pepper, then walking away [link]

You may have seen the jokes about J.D. Vance killing the Pope [link]. But it also marked the second time in recent memory that a Tumblr sexyman poll coincided with the death of a world leader [link]; Queen Elizabeth died on the same day Sans Undertale was elected in 2022 

The horse race tests got so popular that this illustrator had to specify that their work "IS NOT HORSE YURIIIIII" [link]

Guts theme hits you like an airbag chair [link]

I love you VLC media player [link]

Music

An insane motion-stabilized FPS music video from rap duo Paris Texas [link]

Screens

“My copy of Blue Velvet for PSP signed by cinematographer Frederick Elmes and editor Duwayne Dunham” [link]

Nathan Fillion’s character in The Rookie, a network cop drama, incriminated himself for having committed a genocide run of Undertale [link, clip]

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One Last Thing

Lvl 99 Koromaru