A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: What Is “Steal a Brainbreaker”?
Are you old enough to remember constantly talking to your friends on the phone? On a landline ? Then welcome to “The Adults Who Don’t Know” Guide to Kids’ Culture—a guide to what’s going on among young people. This week, young boys are stealing each other’s brains, drinking strong soda, (not) paying $500 for a candy bar, and being attacked by a drunk robot.
“Steal the Brainrot”
If you know anyone under 16, they’re probably playing Steal a Brainrot , and you’re probably asking, “Steal a what now?” Well, here’s the gist: Steal a Brainrot is a multiplayer minigame in the maxi-games Roblox and Fortnite . In Brainrot, up to eight players share a server, and each has their own base. The goal of the game is to buy Brainrots for your base and/or steal Brainrots from other players’ bases while protecting your Brainrots from thieves. Steal enough Brainrots, and you become stronger and can make your base more secure. The Brainrots themselves are objects meant to reference “Italian Brainrot,” aka: low-quality internet memes. They vary in price and have vaguely Italian names, but they are not based on actual Brainrot memes.
Steal a Brainrot is incredibly popular, with over 20 million players playing simultaneously, so you’re probably wondering, “Who’s making money off this (and why not me?)?” The answer: two groups make the bulk of the money. The first is the game’s developers, SpyderSammy and DoBig Studios, who receive a cut of all microtransactions in Steal a Brainrot (players can spend real money on in-game items). The other beneficiary of all this nonsense is Roblox, the corporation that provides the platform in exchange for the remaining money from Brainrot’s microtransactions.
As for why it’s not you, it’s because you don’t have any good ideas.
What is “heavy soda”?
Unlike “heavy water,” in which hydrogen atoms (H2O) are replaced by deuterium atoms, heavy soda is carbonated water with syrup added. As hard as it may be to believe, some people find Sprite and Mountain Dew not sweet enough. Heavy soda is sold in self-service soda machines. Some apparently have a switch to increase or decrease the amount of syrup in the finished drink, and many TikTok users are big fans of the drink you get when you set the machine to “maximum syrup.”
Sometimes called “dirty soda,” the hard-boiled beverage is believed to have originated at gas stations in the southern tip of Missouri . If your gas station’s soda machine looks like this:
…then you’re probably at least 1,000 miles from a Whole Foods. But that might not be for long: thanks to TikTok ads, the hard soda is spreading.
Polaroid aesthetics are making a comeback
I’ve experimented with Nano Banana , the image generator in Google’s Gemini AI app, and so have my kids, but they’re not using it to smooth out wrinkles or reduce belly fat. They’re embracing the 1970s instant-print aesthetic and creating Polaroid-style photos of themselves with famous people, fictional characters, and everything in between.
One of the most popular variations of this trend is combining photos of your current self with your younger self, resulting in surreal yet touching videos like these:
Creating your own is easy: install Gemini. Upload your current and previous photos. Then, type a request to Gemini, such as: “Create a Polaroid photo with desaturated colors, a flash as the only light source, and a 1970s suburban house as the background.”
Do people really buy $1,000 rocks from Anthropologie?
A few weeks ago, TikTok user Phoebe Adams posted a video of herself pranking her boyfriend by opening a box containing a rock she claimed was worth $150.
“It’s a special stone from Anthropologie,” she explains to her irate boyfriend. “It’s going to sit on our hallway table. It’s a unique stone that they actually found on the ground,” she adds.
The video became incredibly popular, and people began to imitate it by making videos like this:
and this:
But then things went awry when the real Anthropology staged a real rock exhibition in the store so Phoebe could continue to bully her long-suffering boyfriend Dan:
All of this begs the question: did the retailer cleverly take advantage of an unexpected trend, or was this all just viral marketing from the start? I’m 50/50 on that.
Viral Video of the Week: Rizzbot
Speaking of things that are likely guerrilla marketing campaigns, this week’s viral video star is Rizzbot. This four-foot-tall, walking (and dancing) robot in a cowboy hat, formerly known as “Jake Rizzbot,” has been touring the country for months, wowing audiences with its robotic demeanor and robotic Generation Z slang.
Videos from Rizzbot’s official channel have garnered hundreds of millions of views, especially this video of Rizzbot throwing a tantrum:
But Rizzbot can also be a complete idiot, and sometimes he just shouts insults at people for no reason:
or promises a compliment, and then receives a slap on the back of the head in response, proving that no one should trust a rude person:
Rizzbot is a decorated version of the $16,000 Unitree Robotics G1 ” Humanoid Agent AI Avatar” robot, which can play pranks on people and sometimes stay upright. Despite its appearance, Rizzbot doesn’t act autonomously. Someone is closely monitoring its every move and word, but we don’t know who or why. The bot is most often seen in downtown Austin and has strong ties to the Texas Robotics lab at the University of Texas .