Yes yes yes

This week, we're discussing the AI guy's favored fruit, blazing a trail down memory lane, and getting to the bottom of Baldi's "noteboos."

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Who is Baldi, and where are his notebooks?

Though it started as a parody, Baldi’s Basics in Education and Learning has since merged in the online imagination with the targets of its mockery. Made for a 2018 game jam, it’s a lo-fi mash-up of the old edutainment title Sonic’s Schoolhouse and YouTuber-bait horror games like Slender; in it, you’re chased by a crusty sprite of a schoolmaster with a goofy voice, a cocked eyebrow, and a whip-like ruler. Its peculiar blend of absurd humor and loud, harsh jumpscares sets it apart from lesser mascot horror games, but the interchangeability of everything in the genre means that Baldi is often lumped in with less interesting animatronic peers.

The “don’t forget to collect my noteboos” meme, which has been popping up on Discords and Twitter this year, seems to have been made by Baldi superfans keeping the knowingly stupid spirit of the game alive. Slenderman wanted you to find eight pages, Baldi wanted his seven notebooks, and the meme wants you to relive the whole ridiculous era of “run around maze collecting paper” quickie horror games. 

The outrageous strawberry man

One well-known defect in current AI models is their inability to count the number of “r”s in the compound word “strawberry.” The problem apparently stems from the tokenization process — LLMs break words into tokens, not characters — and can be seen in other spelling and math problems. Though outright hallucinations seem like a bigger issue, strawberries have become a symbol of higher intelligence to AI guys, and presumably led to OpenAI changing the codename of an in-development model from “Q*” to “Strawberry.”

On Twitter and Reddit, the vortex of hype cultivated by OpenAI has attracted crypto-like boosters and attention–seekers whose speculations read more like Q than Q*. One of the visible recently is a Twitter guy with a pfp from Her and the handle “🍓🍓🍓”,  whose claim to fame was getting retweeted once by Sam Altman. “Strawberry man” kept posting stuff like “q* isn't a project. it's a portal. altman's strawberry is the key.” He then predicted that the singularity would begin the next day:

When this did not come to pass, redditors rejoiced that strawberry man threads would finally be banned from communities like r/singularity (“attention is all this guy needs,” one commenter said).  Strawberry man himself quickly folded and claimed he was just raising awareness about how annoying it is to do exactly what he was doing, or something. But, given the conspiratorial atmosphere common to all AI communities, and the entire industry’s reliance on hype, it seems like conditions will remain ideal for future strawberry men to grow.

More:

• Recent AI models GPT-4o and Gemini can now sometimes get the strawberry question right, but are still stymied by less-popular examples like the compound word “schoolbooks” [link]  

The ding-a-ling kid secures another fifteen minutes of fame

This video is like a shotgun blast from multiple pasts. Its format is a reference to the “This is Sparta!” remixes that plagued early YouTube, which all revolved around an iconic scene from 2006’s 300; the original 2007 .GIF is miraculously still live at YTMND, a site that once served as a breeding ground for nascent meme humor. Meanwhile, the original “ding-a-ling” clip — taken from s3e8 of The Simpsons — exemplifies the kind of Simpsons joke that tends to burrow itself into the internet’s memory through memes and remixes: It’s from the series’ “golden age” (so pre-season 9), it features a bizarre one-off character, and it’s an effective non-sequitur. The Sparta remix was likely inspired by DJ Suede’s “trap remix” of the same clip, which was uploaded in 2015 and currently boasts 3.36m listens. 

To recap: This is a 2024 video that combines references to a) a 2007 meme about a 2006 movie and b) a 2015 remix of an episode that aired in 1991. One could argue that this was all an inevitable follow-up to the “Y2K renaissance” that emerged on social media over the past couple of years, making it natural for meme-makers to pivot their attention towards online artifacts from the mid-2000s. But the currents of social media are only getting faster, leading to pop culture mashups that get more convoluted and anachronistic with each passing year. Only time will tell whether or not the ding-a-ling kid will continue to haunt future generations of the internet.

Elden Ring messages have broken containment

Thousands of Elden Ring-brained commenters saw this TikTok and had some variation of the same thought: “dog ahead…therefore likely friend.” In case you haven’t played Elden Ring, it has nothing to do with the gag in the video — they’re reacting to the turtle on the left side of the frame. 

FromSoft’s messages have inspired plenty of inside jokes amongst players (“the true Dark Souls starts here,” “don’t give up, skeleton!,” etc.) but this is one of the few times they’ve left the confines of a Reddit post or GameFAQs thread. In FromSoft messages, diction and syntax are limited to a list of preset options, making them easy to replicate and distinct in their “voice.” It’s become something of a meme for Elden Ring players to call turtles “dogs,” scrawling messages like “dog ahead therefore don’t you dare!” or “friend ahead…praise the dog!” in front of any in-game turtles they find. “mist or beast” (as in "Mr. Beast") on the other hand, is one of the most popular messages to emerge from the Shadow of the Erdtree era — second only to “I want to go home…and then edge!”

Games, music, digital culture.

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Chum Box

The Internet

• The casual Turkish shooter from the Olympics, whom everyone is now sick of hearing about, was known as “free-to-play ojisan” in Japan because he hadn’t bought any cosmetics [link]
• An extremely dedicated fansubber translated a grisly news alert that appeared on-screen during a broadcast of Pretty Cure [link]
• Actor Phelan Davis keeps adding himself into scenes from Halo and Half-Life 2 seconds before disaster [link]
• This thread of weird cars could have been posted in any era of the internet, but it’s still good right now [link]
• For the uninitiated: “oshi” is a Japanese word used by Vtuber fans to identify a “favorite” creator they emphatically support [link]

Games

• Nintendo’s short-lived 2016 social app Miitomo — which was either before its time or beyond our understanding — birthed one great compilation [link]
• People still love Miitomo’s progenitor, the surreal Tomodachi Life (“The Sims starring your friends’ Miis”), but Nintendo doesn’t seem interested in reviving it [link]
• The glacial horror of the bad ending to 1992 platformer Rolo to the Rescue must be seen to be believed [link, via Something Awful] 
• The 2024 Pokémon World Championships (for both video games and the card game) are streaming throughout this weekend [link]

Movies

• Hong Kong great Corey Yuen (Ninja in the Dragon’s Den, Yes, Madam, She Shoots Straight) apparently passed away two years ago from Covid, but the news wasn’t made public [link]

AI

• Life imitates AI art [link]

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One Last Thing

"thoughts on this?" [link]