A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: Willy Wonka’s Disastrous “Chocolate Experience”

This week’s topics on what happens to children are failure and fiasco. There’s an ever-expanding story about Willy Wonka’s disastrous robbery in Scotland, a dubious theory about the history of America’s “culture wars,” and Reddit making a doomed attempt to break AI. However, there’s a success that’s leveled the scales: YouTube’s deep dive into the Barbie cinematic universe.

The second level of the Wonka-Gate drama

I’m sure you’re already aware of the drama surrounding “Willy’s Chocolate Experience,” a Willy Wonka-style “thrilling experience” that went horribly, hilariously, wrongly at the Fyre-Festival in Glasgow, Scotland. This perplexing situation has so captured the world’s imagination that a second level of drama emerges, beyond the tales of robbed parents and terrified children present at the event. Curious amateur internet researchers have been digging up every detail of Wonka’s nightmare, and here are some of the treasures they’ve uncovered.

• The actress who played “The Unknown”, a disturbing AI villain created for Willy’s experience and no relation to Willy Wonka, has spoken about her experience playing the role. Her name is Felicia, she is 16 years old, she is from Glazkov, and this was her first acting performance.

• Actor and comedian Paul Connell, the actor who played Willie MacDuff, also went public , but he may regret it. A woman claiming to be a former student of Connell’s posted and then deleted several videos accusing him of having a romantic relationship with her when she was 16 and he was 22. (This news really puts a damper on the “isn’t this stupid?” vibe of the whole experience.)

• As you may have guessed, some of the actors who worked on Willie’s Chocolate Experience are claiming that they were not paid the amount they were promised and may be suing the event organizer.

• A Scottish production company has announced that it is working on a horror film based on The Unknown. Whether anyone will remember this whole affair when the film comes out at the end of 2024 is an open question, as is the question of who owns the rights to the Unknown character.

• If you’re looking for a Halloween costume, you could do worse than dressing up as the Unknown. Here are links to everything you need to become the king or queen of tricks or treats.

  • Silver Mask (Oddly enough, I couldn’t find the exact mask, but this one comes close.)

  • Black wig

  • Black robe

  • Rectangular mirror

What does neurospia mean?

If someone calls themselves “neurospeak,” they are calling themselves “neurodivergent” in a cute slang way. Because it is not a real word, the term does not refer to any specific mental illness, but could refer to OCD, autism, depression, or anything else. It is almost always used to refer to oneself rather than others.

Are we trapped in 2014?

There are a growing number of people online who believe that we are trapped in 2014; not literally: “Time is a conspiracy!” by the way, but culturally. The idea behind ” The Long 2014 ” is that this year marked the beginning of the current “culture war” and we haven’t moved past it in ten years. Ten years ago, the cultural debate about inclusivity allegedly began with GamerGate. People on the “let’s not be assholes to people” side were then derided as “social justice warriors” and are now called “woke” but the arguments haven’t changed and we’ve rehashed and repeated them going forward. an endless cycle since then, never making progress.

This is an interesting theory, but it is created by people who lack historical perspective. It is young people who confuse their own awareness of a cultural trend with its beginning. The truth is that versions of the same arguments in different forms have been around for much longer than a decade. Back in the 1990s, people who advocated for social justice were derided with the term “political correctness” rather than “woke”, and before that they were called “sexist”, “bleeding hearts”, “abolitionists”, “abolitionists”. “Suffragettes” and a host of other slurs that essentially mean the same thing. As William Faulkner wrote back in 1951: “The past never dies. It’s not even the past.”

Why is everyone on Reddit saying “Bazinga”?

If you’re noticing the word “Bazinga” popping up confusingly in Reddit memes, you’re not witnessing a resurgence in The Big Bang Theory fandom. Instead, Reddit users are trying to confuse the artificial intelligence. It was recently revealed that Reddit will be collaborating with Google to train Google’s AI using comments from the site. But in the past , ChatGPT would get stuck on words if there was no context for them, and would give delusional answers when asked about them. So the idea is to repeat “Bazinga” in a different context, completely randomly, without explanation, to confuse the AI.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to work. In the past, the AI ​​was confused by words like “SolidGoldMagikarp” or “TheNitromeFan” – Reddit usernames that were frequently posted but without definitions. But the word “Bazinga” already has an established meaning (i.e., “that annoying, made-up catchphrase from The Big Bang Theory ),” and even if it doesn’t, Redditor’s use of the phrase isn’t actually a coincidence. The AI ​​is smart enough to understand that “Bazinga” in a certain context could mean “a word redditors use to try to trick artificial intelligence” and will likely be able to add its own “random” meanings as well.

Viral Video of the Week: I Watched Every Barbie Movie Ever Made

YouTube’s most important contribution to our culture may be videos that delve deep into pop culture detritus that would otherwise remain unexplored. It’s always good when people ignore what they consider “serious” in favor of what they decide to take seriously. Like this week’s viral video of YouTuber Ted Nivision watching all 42 Barbie movies to “develop a concrete and compelling theory about what the true history of the Barbie Cinematic Universe, also known as the BCU,” is. This nearly two-hour video is truly in-depth, incorporates the classic “strings connecting the boards” organization structure, and actually offers a workable structure for BCU.

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