A Guide to Children’s Culture for Adults Out of Touch With Reality: What Is a Pizza Robot?
This week, I’ll take a look at some of the darker, uglier, and grotesque phenomena in youth culture, from toxic masculinity to frightening stalkers and the artistic grotesque. But there’s also a pizza maker robot and some cool bugs to balance the scales.
Creepy stalker arrested thanks to social networks
This week, Knoxville, Tennessee resident Jacob Yerkes posted a video that went viral in the most appalling way. In it, Yerkes is talking to a pair of cops he apparently named himself, as he bluntly describes how he harassed a colleague, admitting that he “stalked her” because “women love it”. He further explains that women want to be raped using BDSM porn as evidence. The cops point out that the women do n’t really like it and he should leave this particular woman alone. Then they send him on his way instead of immediately handcuffing him. This is a disturbing video, and both Yerkes’twitter and SoundCloud are equally scary with many references to rape, homophobia, racism and Ayn Rand. The dude is the living quintessence of the worst things on the internet.
But there is a happy ending (as happy as can be). The Loudon County Sheriff’s Office announced Tuesday that Yerkes was arrested on charges of aggravated stalking and stalking. According to Loudon County, “Yerkes’ social media threats have gained national attention, leading to the involvement of the Loudon County Sheriff’s office as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.”
The internet is getting rougher
Writer Laura Pitcher of ID identified an interesting trend among young people that I’ve mentioned here in the past: ugliness and all things grotesque have a moment. Think of the ubiquity of artfully ugly cakes , the popularity of acne popping videos, and artist and fashion designer Mikaela Stark’s underwear designed to warp flesh and accentuate decaying skin, stretch marks, veins and other things women “should” hide. . And this is just the beginning – a world of ugliness lies ahead.
Maybe it’s a backlash against social media’s obsession with the elaborate and pictorial, or maybe it’s an expression of the ugliness that lies at the heart of post-industrial society, or maybe it’s just something to piss off older people like me. “I mean, kids, you will still look ugly and terrible in a few years. Why hurry? But here it is – ugliness in action.
New from the “human-sphere”: Sigma Grindset
Speaking of ugly things—actually ugly, not performatively ugly—internet insels are sitting on some new (slightly) bullshit that’s even dumber and meaner than their old bullshit . What’s new is a fictional class of men they call “sigma males” as opposed to the alpha and beta males they invented before.
Sigmas are the rarest kind of male, lone wolves that play by their own rules, according to the internet’s nastiest people. They are obsessed with money and are very attractive to women, but they also hate women, so they treat them with contempt. All of this can be summed up by fictional “movement” hero Patrick Bateman in American Psycho . Or think of them as alpha males without the whole “be nice and have friends” part. People who prey on lonely internet freaks tell their followers that they must take the “Sigma Grindset” in order to achieve this status – earn money, work, avoid all joy and friendship.
In fact, few of these clueless assholes are going to get past the “being attractive to women” part of the Sigma lifestyle, and many won’t achieve the “having money” part, no matter how many training courses they buy or the YouTube videos they have. watch . But the popularity of striving to be a misogynistic sociopath is alarming, as is the concept’s popularity of 3 billion video views tagged with #sigmagrindset.
Personally, I am not alpha, beta or sigma. I’m an omega man, like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man . The last man on earth, surrounded by mutants on all sides, I take refuge in an old movie theater and watch the Woodstock documentary over and over again.
I, for one, welcome our new pizza robot overlords.
Just look at the dark side of youth culture. Here’s something that’s only positive: pizza robots exist. Right now! On the ground! But you have to go to Southfield, Michigan to see them. Southfield is home to Zabot , an automated pizza kiosk/robot that bakes and distributes pies without any help from pathetic humans. Zabot can sell you pizza 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It’s there all the time! Greetings to our overlords of pizza robots!
Like everyone else, I learned about Zabot from a video posted by bonnie.babyyyy . According to Bonnie, Care’s instructions were simple, the pepperoni pizza was ready in three minutes and at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, it was also “a little loose”, but if the movies have taught us anything, it’s that robots are good, gradually improving their programs until they have a mind that starts killing all of us fragile people. So let’s give the pizza robot some time, that’s what I’m saying.
Viral Video of the Week: List of Insects
Let’s cleanse our tastes of internet ugliness and robotic pizza by taking a closer look at some of the bugs! The TierZoo YouTube channel offers an innovative way of presenting the sciences – it explores animals through the lens of video games, putting “fractions” of animals into tier lists from best to worst based on their abilities, physique and strategy. This week’s hit video, The Insect Tier List, combines beautiful macro photography of insects with a deadpan VoiceOver ranking different types of insects.
Silverfish are at the very bottom of the list due to their low defense and weak special abilities (gaining XP for eating cellulose). At the top of the list we have beetles, reservoirs of the insect fraction; Beetles have the highest CD, but are superior in combat power, chemical weapons, and high movement speed. I won’t spoil the best insect of all, but their main advantage lies in their numbers and unrivaled ability to work together.