A Guide to Children’s Culture for Adults Out of Touch With Reality: What Is “bullshit”?
This week’s exploration of the underside of youth culture takes us into surreal and frightening imaginary spaces and invites us to have a heart-to-heart with a cartoon dog from a nearly forgotten app. I hope this doesn’t give you an ick.
The newest internet celebrity is Talking Ben.
I asked my kid for something funny that he and his friends find funny and he pointed me to YouTuber IShowSpeed . Like many YouTubers, he streams long sessions of Fortnite and the like, but more recently he has become known for his conversations with a cartoon dog originally featured in a 2011 kids app. Talking Dog Ben lets you ask questions to a rude cartoon dog that answers yes, no and evasive grunts. It’s like the Magic Eight – the kind of thing you find funny for 30 seconds and then delete. But IShowSpeed somehow turned the app into half of the funniest comedy duo on the web. It’s kind of funny because asking a cartoon dog controversial questions like “do you support LGBT rights?” hilarious on its own, but mostly because the comic chemistry and timing between IShowSpeed and the imaginary dog is somehow perfect, even though only one of them is reasonable. Just watch one of these videos to see what I mean. And then watch this one . And then watch the rest. The popularity of IShowSpeed streams has many people downloading an ancient app: Talking Ben the Dog was the top selling app on the Apple store recently despite being over ten years old.
What is “Ik” and how to get it?
If you notice that people on social media mention “Eek”, here’s what happens: “Eek” means a sudden feeling of disgust for the person you are dating – the moment when you realize that the person you idealized is actually kind of rude, clumsy, or even just a person. The hashtag on TikTok contains tons of videos of people explaining how they got sick. Some people get annoyed when they notice that a guy has abnormally long nails . You can annoy people by clumsily riding a bike , wearing denim shorts , skinny jeans , or a Spider-Man costume . Users even try to get through failed relationships by imagining their exes doing terribly human things so it doesn’t hurt so much. Maybe this is what happens when the idealized characters we create in the online world meet our stupid, stinky meatbags, or maybe it’s just a fun little joke. You decide.
Northman ‘s poster bug has become a meme
Something is going on with the marketing campaign for the upcoming film The Northerner . Posters on the New York subway tell you everything you need to know about the movie: it was directed by Robert Eggers ( The Witch and the Lighthouse ), it stars Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe and damn Björk, it’s about Vikings. The only thing missing from the poster is the title of the movie . Someone really dumb and forgot to put the name on the poster, or very smart and hoping to get some online meme magic with an obvious oversight. I think the latter because people online notice and share. Some scold the person who forgot to include the title , or point out that it looks like an ad for a mobile game , but the best memes are those that add the title of another movie.
Viral Video of the Week: Have “Backstage Rooms” Been Found on Google Earth?
To fully understand this week’s viral video, you’ll first need to dig down one of the weirdest rabbit holes on the internet. TikTok user yeetme084 posted this video of a discovery they allegedly made on Google Maps. To detuned music with the inscription “Well, why are they hiding in Japan?” the video zooms in on the strange circular building, then switches to street view to show its interior, a modest but vast collection of stalls and a pit that leads… somewhere. It has been viewed by over 20 million people so far, and judging by the comments and discussions, many people think that this TikToker has found the fabled “backrooms”.
The Backrooms is an urban Internet legend – a fabulous endless maze of empty, randomly generated office spaces that supposedly can only be entered without “cutting through” reality. The idea of this and other “liminal spaces” has captured the imagination of people on the internet who are drawn to unsettling places for reasons that can’t be explained. They make games , short films , and post creepy photos of places that evoke inexplicable fear.
Internet detectives located the coordinates on yeetme084’s video and found that they point to Nara Dreamland, a Japanese amusement park that has been closed and demolished since 2006. Nara Dreamland is a popular destination for urban explorers of abandoned places . the space between the real world and what we cannot see. Soon, videos of other behind-the-scenes locations around the world were found on Google Maps and Streetview.
This is such a good creepy story that I almost hate to spoil it, but the video is out of this world. In other words, they are fakes, part of an alternate reality game too tedious to care about. This youtuber explains everything if you are one of those people who are “realistic”.