A Guide to Kids Culture for Adults: TikTok Chocolate Covered Strawberries Explained
All decent people look back on their youth and think, “I sure was an inexperienced idiot” (but hopefully with affection). Remembering the combination of grandiosity and stupidity that you once embodied is actually the key to understanding young people, because what’s grander and dumber than making a bowl of strawberries world famous?
TikTok’s Hottest Superstar – Strawberry and Chocolate Plate
The video is nothing special : it’s a single shot with lots of zooms and Bobby Caldwell’s 1978 song “What You Won’t Do for Love” playing in the background. It’s not unlike the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of videos of people showing off their food on TikTok, but something about the timing and content of this video sent it into the stratosphere. Nobody knows why – which makes me inexplicably uneasy in a “maybe we’re all ghosts” kind of way – but once it was in front of people, they started liking it (who doesn’t love strawberries?). Then people realized how weird it was, and watching, sharing, and commenting on strawberries became a collective humor. TikTok’s user base is now consciously fighting to make strawberry videos the most popular content on the site, just to be funny. TikTok’s current champion for most likes is Bella Poarch’s lip sync with 64.1 million likes, posted in 2017. Strawberries gained 37.3 million in just three weeks. I think it can win.
What are “showing up for competition” memes?
I love meme formats that are hard to explain but easy to illustrate, like the “competition appearance” images that are taking over TikTok this month. The idea: show a video of you arriving at a ridiculous competition only to find out that you’ve been beaten by an even more ridiculous competitor. Like this video called ” When you’re late for a competition and your opponent isn’t there yet .” Or “ I came to the kindest person competition, but my opponent didn’t show up just so I could win. Or “ When I came to a competition to spread disinformation, but my opponent gave me the wrong address. Or “ When I go to a gaslighting competition and it’s not realistic at all .” If you’d like to see more of these videos, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of examples of the accompanying atonal piano soundtrack at this link .
The question “how many cubes are on the trailer?” disagreements explained
How many cubes are on the truck above? This is a deceptively difficult question that @Rainmaker1973 asked in a recent post that went viral on Twitter. A little math gives the answer: 51 (the bottom level contains 3×7 cubes, the middle of the second level contains 3×6 cubes, and the top level contains 3×4 cubes). But is this right? reply? It depends.
51 is the correct answer only if you assume that each layer has three cubes, but we don’t have a representation that accounts for all the cubes; so there could be less than 51 cubes in the truck if they are arranged in an unexpected way. For that matter, who can say whether the cubes we don’t see are the same size as the cubes we do see? For example, they might be a few blocks wide in the middle, and there will be even fewer of them because some of the truck’s cargo won’t be cubes at all.
An image with a 3/4 diagonal would clarify the situation, but that is not the point of such mathematical and logical puzzles. The real puzzle is figuring out what information is missing from the original question so you can answer, “No answer.” It’s funny, but if awareness of the lack of an answer is considered a measure of intelligence, that is also wrong, because 51 is the correct answer from a certain point of view. One of the generally accepted “rules” for solving a puzzle is that all information is provided for the solution. Assuming this is the case does not mean you are wrong. To be safe, I would answer “51*” with a note explaining the problems with the puzzle itself.
What does the gaming world think of Skull and Bones , the “first AAA video game”?
On February 16th, video game company Ubisoft released Skull and Bones for Xbox. Ahead of its release, CEO Yves Guillemot defended the game’s $70 price on a corporate earnings call, saying, “This is truly a complete game, a triple…quadruple-A that will work in the long run.” So, the first triple-A video game: what exactly does that mean?
The phrase “AAA game” is an informal way of describing a collection of video games that are full-fledged games released by established game publishers, so Guillemot is obviously saying that their new game is overall bigger and better than previously released games.
Is that so? No; at least according to critics and gamers. Skull and Bones has a Metacritic score of 60 and a user rating of “Generally Unfavourable”. The critical consensus is that Skull and Bones has some good things in it, but overall it is boring and feels dated. The gamers themselves were a little more outspoken, posting videos like this: