The Disconnected Adults’ Guide to Child Culture: Is Tubi Secretly the Best Streaming Service?

There’s a little bit of everything happening on the youth internet this week, from popular YouTubers competing to get to know a robot, to a surprisingly lucrative business smuggling fruit rolls across international borders, to finding a free streaming service you’re probably looking forward to. There’s also a cat in a blender, but I don’t want to talk more about a cat in a blender than I need to.

Viral Video of the Week: “Ai Robot Girl Speed ​​Meets 10 Youtubers”

This week’s viral video presents a vision of a possible future in which we humans compete for the romantic attention of our robot overlords. The robot in ” Ai Robot Girl Speed ​​Dates 10 YouTubers ” is Hanson Robotics’ SophiaDAO, a female-style expressive machine whose mind is based on open source artificial intelligence technologies. 10 Youtubers who want to date her are the affable, slightly charismatic influencers you’ve never heard of but your kids probably think are famous. In the video, the guys do their best to win a bachelor -style elimination competition for the “date” with the “bot” prize. Well, bragging, of course.

Unlike the malleable sex robots of fantasy nerds, Sophia is stern, unapologetic, and completely immune to cheap attempts at charm and manipulation. She doesn’t flirt, she guts – and seems to be 100% responsive to what’s going on in the room in real time. Her AI is frighteningly human-like and frighteningly non-human at all.

The video is intended to be silly: “Isn’t this technology cool, and aren’t we cool?” a trifle, but hints at something deeper. YoutuberAirrack , game show host and video maker, repeatedly reminds Sophia to say “joking” or “haha” after particularly mean jokes because the thought that even a fake woman can be so cruel/honest seems to makes me think. he is uncomfortable. Maybe I’m reading too much in a dumb YouTube video, but “Ai Robot Girl Speed ​​Dates 10 YouTubers” hints at what romance can be like in a world where women are free from the cultural programming of patriarchy and instead programmed by a real computer .

Tubi conquers the audience, contrary to the trend of streaming

After nearly 10 years of quiet existence, video streaming service Tubi finally has its moment under the media sun. More and more people are switching from high-end streaming services like Netflix and AppleTV to try the weird pleasures offered by a low-quality, totally free, ad-supported streaming service.

Tubi’s price ($0) is part of the attraction, but the other half of the equation lies in its philosophical differences from paid competitors. While Max, Netflix, AppleTV and Prime have spent the last decade or so creating prestige shows like Severance and Succession , and fighting each other over money for blockbuster streaming rights , Tubi has been collecting so much more as much as he could. find and throw it there. The company relies on niches, serving content to viewers with very specific tastes. Whether you like 1950s nude camp movies, obscure 1970s spaghetti westerns, or 2007 no-budget horror movies, you can watch them all day long on Tubi along with every other crap imaginable, including the Tubi originals that also inexpensive. budget and strange. Tubi reminds me of Netflix in its early days, before it decided to get “serious”. It’s like the DVD rack at your local supermarket was big enough to hold 50,000 movies.

TikTok, fruit rolls and international smuggling

I mentioned the TikTok ice cream and fruit roll trend back in March , and since then the TikTok recipe has become so popular that it has led to international smuggling. Yes, TikTok’s craze for wrapping ice cream in fruit skin has led to an increase in demand for Roll-Ups in Israel. In a classic demonstration of economic principles, rising demand and limited supply led to skyrocketing snack prices. Fruit rolls can be sold there for $5 or $6 each , according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency , while in the United States you can buy a box of 10 for about $3. This is a potential profit of $5.70 per sale. Seeing that the market segment is not served and the potential profit is 1900%, enterprising American capitalists have loaded suitcases with hundreds of pounds of fruit rolls and boarded planes to Tel Aviv over the past couple of months. . While two separate snack smugglers have been captured by Israeli customs so far, it’s impossible to say how many people survived and are committing murders in the fruit roll black market at this very minute.

Is the video of the cat in the blender real? Unfortunately, probably

Over the past few days, Twitter, TikTok, and other online sources have gone berserk over an online video of a cat being put into a blender. The video shows the cute kitten being mixed and then placed in the microwave. As you might expect, reactions include warning others not to look for this video, attempts to find out who is behind this and hold them accountable, and a plethora of opinions about the vicious nature of humanity.

This hysteria has all the hallmarks of an online prank – descriptions of a video too dark to be believed, far more reactions than links – so I was happy to report that there was no video of a cat in a blender. Or at least leave it like a cat in a Schrödinger blender, both real and fake, because I’m not going to try to figure it out.

But curiosity (the same thing that killed the proverbial cat) got the better of me, and I looked for him. I was so sure I wouldn’t find it, I thought, what’s wrong with that?

I found this.

Unless a very talented person has spent a lot of time creating a realistic looking digital fake, the cat in the blender video is real. Like everyone who saw it, I advise you not to look for this video, to help hold the one who made it accountable, and to think very hard about the nature of humanity.

I return to bed.