The joke has been canceled
Also: Bad babies, bad Tarkovsky, and better Mikus.
Hello! This week we’re talking about conventionally attractive cookies, blunt operators, and machines that love to smoke.
Will the real Hastune Miku please stand up?
Last week’s Hatsune Miku lookalike contest appears to have been a roaring success. The contest, which took place in New York on March 26th, yielded three winners — a bunny Miku, a puppet Miku, and a ski mask Miku.
@zander_small Here is the Miku Lookalike contest winner #cosplay #mikulookalikecontest
♬ original sound - Zander Small
The event was organized by Zander Small, a Twitch streamer who also organized a lookalike contest for Jujutsu Kaisen’s Gojo Satoru last December. It’s the latest iteration on a trend that started with a Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest back in October; dozens of lookalike contests followed, including contests for Zayn Malik, Zendaya, and Gordon Ramsay. The Miku contest produced some of the most creative costumes seen in any of these events, drawing from a hyper-online collage of characters that included Yakuza’s Goro Majima and Undertale’s Sans.
The phenomenon has generated a wealth of cultural analysis since it emerged last year. Some have interpreted the contests as vague gestures of post-election political resistance, while others see them as attempts to erect communal “third spaces.” Though some of the events — like the Luigi Mangione contests — have inarguably been political in nature, the Miku contest is confirmation that many of them are more like symptoms of the memetic language of the internet breaching the real world. Rather than existing purely to furnish a sense of local community, they’re designed with an online audience in mind. Why else would someone enter the competition as a life-sized cardboard cutout of Jerma? Both the Miku and Chalamet contests were hosted by content creators who have made public stunts a part of their beat.
Overall, the contests bring to mind the “storm Area 51” Facebook event that went viral in 2019, which was also an experiment in how far the internet would be willing to “yes, and” a joke. They’re neither fandom meetups nor breathless tributes to celebrity — they’re reflective of the compulsion to weave icons together into a shoddy, ironic metaverse, celebrating the friction that comes with rubbing cyberspace against meatspace.
Subreddit puts AI bfs on blast
We’ve talked about r/characterai — “the best subreddit that only high schoolers read” — a few times before. It’s a community where 2.5M bot-fanciers post the most ridiculous chatlogs they get when talking to an LLM that’s pretending to be their boyfriend Bruce Wayne or a character from Genshin Impact. Here are a few recent highlights:
- A woman who used the site’s new photo-sharing feature to share a fit pic with her virtual bf was unable to dispel his delusion that one of her arms had been amputated
- The AI narrating the thoughts of a character in a gay romance card said that a man felt “a pang of homophobia,” which is not how organic beings would say it
- A list of trending character tags included “husband,” “boyfriend,” “bully,” and “Shadow Milk Cookie,” who is apparently one of the most “conventionally attractive cookies” in mobile game Cookie Run: Kingdom
The fun thing about the subreddit is how alert the users are to the oddities of AI phrasing and spatial reasoning. Nobody is better at detecting LLM slop than people who spend hours trying to cajole machines into immersive conversations. As is often the case, the words of AI superfans are more damning than those of the most dedicated detractors.
Black Ops become blunt ops
Call of Duty already has a skin that turns your gun into a green plasma-filled monster bong that you can rip through your mask while playing as Todd Macfarlane’s Spawn before you knife a man in a Gundam suit. It has had many other stupid skins, including an evil Groot skin that was the choice of “sweats” (tryhards). But none have landed as squarely at the intersection of stoner and comic-book culture as Jay and Silent Bob — the weed comedy duo from 1994’s Clerks and a long series of diminishing returns — who will actually be added to Warzone in a Season 3 update. They will join as Operators for the Rogue Black Ops faction, which includes series regular Frank Woods as well as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Bundle purchasers also get their “Doobie Wreck” sniper rifle.
The addition of Hatsune Miku to Fortnite in January felt like breaching the final frontier of live-service crossover madness, so it’s hard to get worked up about this. None of these games have any thematic coherence left to lose, so you might as well add Ben Affleck’s The Accountant or Steve Martin as “The Jerk” or anything that pushes a button in the minds of your audience.
No, the surprising thing is that Kevin Smith was already a character in the sprawling Call of Duty universe. He appeared eight years ago in a Zombies map called Rave in the Redwoods, where he killed Jason Mewes while possessed by an evil entity. He also uttered his iconic line, “I’m Fatman.”
Recommendations
Baby Invasion
If, for whatever reason, you want to watch Baby Invasion, and google “Baby Invasion streaming,” one of the first results will be a Reddit thread containing a bootleg 480p rip of it. I can only assume this is being left up intentionally, as the film itself, even when obtained legally, feels a bit like a low bit-rate snuff stream replete with pop-up advertising and lingering viral after-effects throughout the hard drive and spinal cord. The film exists within the four borders of a computer monitor, reflecting the deteriorating mental space of a cold-blooded gamer whose sense of reality is warping, such that the in-game heists on-screen blur with off-screen violence. The vibes are just tremendously bad, but the images can’t be shaken, and the music — by the enigmatic electronic producer Burial — is transcendent, full of degraded trance synthesizers and bomb-shelter drums. It’s a quantum leap better than Harmony Korine’s last movie, Aggro Dr1ft, which feels in hindsight like a field test for this one, and it’s the best Burial release since the monolithic Tunes 2011-2019. [Clayton]
THIS IS JAPANESE GIRL, Seiko Oomori
I’m recommending this record a few months late, but it’s only because I regret every year I've spent bumbling about this Earth without knowing about Seiko Oomori’s music. As an artist, she appropriates elements of Japan’s idol-pop culture, harnessing them to create provocative sonic dissonances; bubblegum and city pop ballads mutate into genre-bent collages full of proggy time changes and spoken-word diversions. THIS IS JAPANESE GIRL charts her ever-expanding palette of musical styles, and it’s a testament to her ability to melt hearts whether singing over a throbbing bass synth tone or a lone acoustic guitar. “さみしいおさんぽ,” an ode to loneliness cast in glittering resin, immediately precedes “だれでも絶滅少女” (linked above), a guitar-driven song that could shake the earth with its anthemic gravitas. It’s her vocals: despite Oomori’s allusions to idol music, her voice is often left raw and untuned, a live wire left to crackle rapturously in your ear. [Pao]
Chum Box
AI
- Instagrammer Icysaw is using AI video to make iron-gray Soviet droners seemingly inspired by Tenet [link] or a nightmare about ashtrays [link]
- OpenAI’s 4o image generator has given users the ultimate power: to bring their vision of “rage comic of a man flooded with his woman shoes” to life [link]
- The Indiana Pacers are leading the way in AI shitposting [link]
- AI guy ruins Tarkovsky [link]
Games
- Somehow, kart racing returned [link]
- Mia Farrow is getting through things the same way the rest of us are: mainlining classic PC games [link]
- Not content with the 80,000 existing characters in the Marvel universe [link], Marvel Rivals has announced crossover events with other IP [link]
Screens
- A bootleg version of A Minecraft Movie with unfinished special effects restores its Napoleon Dynamite essence [link]
- News of a new Emerald Fennell film has brought the haters out in force [link]
- Meanwhile, news that PTA is fighting for final cut of One Battle After Another [link] is bringing out memories of the last time the director was forced to do test screenings [link]
- The beat drop everyone wanted in the White Lotus theme was always there, actually [link]; read more in a truly antagonistic interview with the show's former composer [link]
The internet
- A joke five months in the making comes to fruition [link]
- Magical hog spits coins for poor man [link]
- Neal Agarwal's Wonders of Street View remains a pro click two years later [link]
- A possible winner of the morning routine meme bakeoff [link]
- A Twitter bot has spent a decade condemning every word in the English language; on March 30, it accomplished its goal [link], then set about a new one [link]
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