A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: Why People Play the Banana Snap Game
It’s summer and the empty hours need to be filled, so young people are snapping bananas, creating imaginary shows on Netflix and forming very strong opinions about Star Wars.
Why gamers spend their days snapping bananas
Video game companies typically spend between $60 million and $80 million to produce a single AAA video game, but the free-to-play game, which likely costs around six dollars to develop, is currently ranked second on the Steam online chart and is threatening to take first place. place. First place in Counter-Strike . There are currently about800,000 people “playing” Banana , up from about 400,000 last week, so things are getting a little bananas. As for what it actually is, here’s the official description: ” Banana is a clicker game where you click on a banana!” It’s really all you do.
Many users love it because it’s silly and goofy, but there’s another reason for Banana’s popularity. If you leave the program on for three hours, you become the “owner” of a digital banana peel. Leave it on for 18 hours and you’ll be the owner of a rare digital banana peel. These assets can then be sold on the Steam Marketplace. Regular bananas sell for pennies. Rare pieces can sell for over $100. So gamers also earn some money by playing it.
While there’s something obscene about the way Banana is taking away the “gaming” part of selling in-game assets, it doesn’t appear to be a scam or an NFT-style pyramid scheme. The developers do not make any false claims about their game. People are willing to shell out for digital bananas (for some reason), so everyone makes a few cents: Steam gets their cut, the Banana developers get their cut, and the banana-snapping user gets their cut.
As Banana continues to grow in popularity, it seems possible that Steam will decide that it doesn’t want to be the internet’s banana-snapping-and-pulling-game home, but for now, you can still snap bananas all day if you’re that kind. person.
What are Smiling Friends ?
The Smiling Friend is this year’s must-see program for young children. The first season of the animated series premiered in 2022 on Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s late-night programming block, but it really took off in May of this year when the second season began. Like Adventure Time before it, it’s one of those shows that everyone loves, with an audience score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes . Smiling Friends combines traditional animation with stop motion, live action, rotoscoping and every other technique to tell the story of The Smiling Friends Corporation, a small business dedicated to making people happy. From this simple concept, Smiling Friends tells unexpected, innovative and quirky stories that are funnier, smarter and edgier than anything else on television. Creators Michael Cusack and Zach Hade started on YouTube before making Smiling Friends, and they bring an online sensibility to every episode. A must watch if you like watching good things. New episodes of Smiling Friends air on Adult Swim on Sundays at midnight and are available to stream on Max the next day.
Is there a show called My Best Day on Netflix?
If you’ve seen ads on Instagram, X, or TikTok for a Netflix series called My Best Day and thought, “I’d like to watch that show,” you can’t. This is not a real show; this is a meme. Last week, Instagrammers, Snapchatters, Xers and others began inserting their photos, illustrations and videos into a fake Netflix homepage preview screen for a series called “My Best Day.” Here’s a Snapchat filter if you want to create your own . And here are some examples for inspiration .
New Meme Stock Alert: Is the Internet Bullish on Grindr?
In the middle of Pride Month, the financial wizards at r/wallstreetbets on Reddit are hyping up a new meme account: Grindr. At the end of last week , a lot of posts began appearing on the subreddit in which users promised to invest “everything I have + my mother’s chemotherapy fund” into these shares. Grindr’s price jumped from $9.23 per share to $10.37 in one day on Friday, but I don’t know how anything works, so who knows if it was because of Reddit or not. Today, stocks are falling back to earth, no matter the cost. Whether Grindr will go the way of GameStop and become a financial saga that will last for years and inspire a feature film, or whether it will be just a throwaway online joke that won’t be remembered in eight minutes, remains to be seen. . Note. Please do not accept any investment advice from Reddit.
Viral video of the week: Novice. Episode 3: Absolute garbage.
This week’s viral video comes from the Star Wars Theory YouTube channel. In ” Episode 3: Absolute Trash” “The Acolyte, ” Star Wars Theory gives its unvarnished opinion on the latest episode of the new Disney+ series “Star Wars: The Acolyte.” Verdict: This is very bad.
A negative fan review isn’t all that interesting on its own—after all, no one hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans—but the review is part of a larger trend within the Star Wars fandom. The Acolyte scores a critical hit. The film received an 83% “fresh” rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes . But fans seem to be rejecting this: the viewership rating is only 15%, and there is a lot going on here.
Part of the poor audience rating for The Acolyte seems to come from that depressing “white dude” faction in fandom that doesn’t like the “wokeness” in “their” Star Wars – the series’ diverse cast and its clan of “space witches.” Stating that the galaxy doesn’t welcome “women like us” is something that irritates nerds (as if science fiction doesn’t always comment on modern culture). The Star Wars theory recently sparked some controversy by claiming that women don’t like Star Wars , but his claim (taken at face value) stems from the fact that the show’s story doesn’t fit into the established Star Wars universe.
“This is not what Star Wars was supposed to be ” has been a common criticism of the franchise since the prequels were released in the 1990s. A lot of fans don’t like The Acolyte for the same reason I thought the prequels were crap: the movie/series/cartoon that defines the series for every fan is the one they saw when they were 11.
This isn’t a silly “it’s too woke” criticism, but the sheer volume of the Star Wars canon product, new audience expectations, and changing mores make it impossible to have coherent lore. Since the premiere of Star Wars: A New Hope in the late 1970s, there have been twelve Star Wars feature films, six Star Wars live-action television shows, nine animated series, and nearly 100 video game adaptations, all at different times and targets. to different audiences. People. This isn’t usually a problem for critics or casual viewers because it’s just a show so who cares, but if you’ve made loving Star Wars part of your personality and have a lot of time to think about how it all fits together, After all, you don’t have a job or a family yet, this is serious.
However, knowledge creep is not the whole problem. On a meta level, a critical mass appears to have been reached that forces the Star Wars facade to confront the sausage production behind what they love. Star Wars is special to the people who love it. It’s personal. But whatever specialness the series has left is quickly drowned out by the mountain of mediocrity that is Star Wars. Between the shows, books, movies, and video games, there’s more official Star Wars merchandise—T-shirts, figurines, coffins , etc.—than anyone could collect in a lifetime. It’s exhausting and it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that this is all a money grab and the fans are treated like walking wallets. See also the backlash surrounding the Star Wars Hotel .
The original films became merchandising opportunities after they became successful, but it can at least be argued that the action figures and T-shirts were a response to people wanting them, rather than the other way around. Now the Star Wars cart is always in front of the Star Wars horse, and it’s all about selling dolls and shit. The ruthless efficiency of intellectual property management exposes a void beneath the surface that cannot be ignored.