Swimming specialist
Also: disrespectful demons, microwave speedruns, and chairs for hands.
Hello! This week we’re talking about creatures filled with red bean paste, Minecraft build guide rappers, and corrected Wojaks.
Blob-heads become their own species
The Touhou fandom has apparently created their own new form of life. Touhou Project is a long-running (1997-present) Japanese series of top-down bullet hell games starring anime shrine maidens and mythological entities. Originally made by a solo developer, they’ve spawned a million fan-games and spin-offs and become an otaku cultural phenomenon that you encounter in crustier corners of the internet all the time. If you see a 1,000-year-old anime girl you can’t identify, and they’re not from a gacha game, there’s a good chance they’re from the sprawling cast of Touhou.
Yukkuris are representations of Touhou characters that squash them down into disembodied heads with wide dumpling-like shapes. The yukkuri wiki suggests they are a form of magically animated pastry filled with bean paste, chocolate, or cream. A translated interview traced the origin of this mutation to ASCII illustrations of Touhou characters on the Japanese forum Futaba Channel. These gradually became more streamlined until the characters evolved into blobby heads around 2005, and eventually gave rise to an iconic image of two yukkuri saying “Take it easy!!!” around 2008.
Anyway, the wiki has more than 300 pages, so you can read all about various yukkuri fillings and catchphrases if you want. The most interesting development, mentioned in the interview above, is the spread of yukkuris outside of the Touhou fandom and their use as literal talking heads in Vtuber-style videos made with text-to-speech. While you could mark the peak of yukkuri mania at either three years ago or like 15 years ago, they remain an ongoing phenomenon that will randomly crop up in other media like the popular Dandadan.
Will Death Stranding 2 include a character named “Baby Oldman”?
After watching the latest electrifying trailer for Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2, due out in June, we were struck by a nagging question: will the game include a character named “Baby Oldman”?
Consider the evidence:
- The antagonist of Kojima’s 2010 game Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was named Hot Coldman
- The first Death Stranding included characters named Heartman (stops his own heart every day) and Die-Hardman (known for his survival instincts)
- Death Stranding 2 will introduce two new -man characters, Tarman and Dollman, whose names directly express their whole deal
- Death Stranding 1 & 2 are about carrying babies around
- Death Stranding 1 & 2 are obsessed with mortality and aging, and have an unusually old cast
Given Kojima’s penchant for this naming convention as well as the themes of the Death Stranding series, we are making an official EX prediction that the game contains a yet-to-be-revealed character named Baby Oldman.
Hardened gamers pessimistic about AI agents
A tiny poll in the ClaudePlaysPokemon subreddit (646 members) shows how greatly Claude’s shambolic gameplay may depress one's expectations for AI. Haunted by memories of Claude getting stuck in a loop talking to the same bird for hours, the majority of voters don’t believe generalist LLMs will be capable of beating Pokémon Red — an easy game that does not require 3D navigation or quick reactions — at a human-like pace within the next two years. On the nerd-rapture subreddit r/singularity (3.6M members), by comparison, the most popular posters usually think full-blown AGI is coming within two years or is already here.
The steady ascent of VRChat giantesses
VRChat — a platform once notorious for an anarchic culture defined by “loli police departments” and racist Sonic the Hedgehog memes — has since matured into a haven for VR enthusiasts and sexual deviants of all stripes. One such community is devoted to size play, a kink that revolves around partners who differ greatly in size. Today, VRChat hosts a number of interactive “giantess”-related experiences, many of which have been documented at a channel called Wolfys Vrchat Welt (blanket NSFW warning for the links in this post).
Some of these experiences are designed with a solo player in mind — Easter eggs that make an anime girl balloon in size, for instance — while other rooms function as social hubs for size play. Meanwhile, creators like ChonkyLotus use VRChat as a vehicle for size play-related streams; other giantess players charge “tinies” for sessions in private rooms. The simple explanation is that VRChat represents one of the most effective ways of bringing these fantasies to digital fruition. The platform gives players an easy way to resize their avatars in any room, while creative use of hidden interactable chairs on avatars' hands can allow players to physically pick each other up.
Chum Box
Games
The Bean manifests in a Pokémon Emerald romhack [link]
"In the line of duty, I may have to use Swimming." A long tradition of absurd Deus Ex edits continues with “Swimming Specialist” [link]
No one respects the player’s time less than a Megaten demon [link]
The moody dungeon crawler Lunacid is getting a free spinoff developed using a create-your-own-King’s Field tool that FromSoft released 25 years ago [link, manual]
Ubisoft Karl Marx [link]
The internet
TikToker “verycooltutorial” turns Minecraft build guides into antagonistic rap tracks [link, Fetty Wap remix]
Thanks to a redirect, the vxtwitter service (which makes buggy twitter links embeddable if you change the “x.com” in the URL to “vxtwitter.com”) also works if you change the URL to “stupidpenisx.com” [link]
Nobody celebrates the Ides of March like Tumblr users, who have been Caesar-posting their guts out [link]
Screens
This Evangelion paper ragdoll video builds to a glorious needle drop [link]. The director followed it up with another banger [link]
After 82 years as a jabroni, Martin Scorsese will finally work with six-time Wrestlemania champion The Rock [link]
An intensely quotable edit of a History Channel cryptid show's episode about “monster hogs” [link]
The best scene from the forgotten 2003 F-Zero anime [link]
AI
AI search engines don’t cite shit, Columbia Journalism Review finds [link]
The latest version of Gemini’s image generator seems to have made progress on the eternal character-consistency problem, at least for Wojaks [link]
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