A Guide to Childhood Culture for Adults Left Without Connection: Who (or What) Is Horace?
This week’s journey through the collective unconscious of people much younger than me leads us into strange travel traps. There’s a dancing baby named “Horace”, makeup tips that get very personal, and a couple of stories illustrating Gen Z’s conflicting feelings about emoji: Are they friendly? They are awful? Are they both ?
Meet Horace: The Grotesque Dancing Baby of the TikTok Generation
Every generation gets the grotesque dancing child it deserves. The early Internet had, well, the Dancing Kid . The TikTok generation has Horace. Created by animator Jackson K. Gray, Horace began life in 2020 on Instagram as a filter to be inserted into a post. But then he was naked. Instagram removed the viral filter because they considered it “content of an adult or sexual nature.” However, you can’t hold back a good kid and Horace has risen from the dead on TikTok like Jesus. However, unlike our Lord and Savior, Horace now wears a red jumpsuit. He starred in videos like this one , this one , and this one . Horace has become so popular that he is being co-opted by “how are you guys” corporate social media streams such as this one from O’Reilly’s Auto Parts .
I’m too old to have any fun with Horace, but maybe your blood isn’t made of ice water and you want to join 26 million other people on Horace ‘s hashtag, where you can watch videos of a stupid dancing baby, damn it. day.
Makeup recommendations get revealing
If you’re not paying attention to the part of the internet that is dedicated to cosmetic recommendations, you’re missing out on a lot. Lately, beauty posters have been inserting dark confessions into product recommendation videos, and it’s wonderful. Someone will post an innocent question like, “What kind of cleanser do you use?” And they get these videos in response from user Kelsey Souls, who says, “Personally, I will never see human interaction again, but I use Cetaphil.” Looking for a summery shade of lipstick? Preraphaelitequeen says, “Personally, I don’t know how to enjoy a relationship without constantly preparing for it to end. Glossier in Zip is one of my favorite coral shades.” Strange connections that somehow make sense, that’s what the Internet was made for. Funny, smart and unexpected, it’s the exact opposite of the dancing baby meme.
TikTok Alerts
Since everything on the internet is bad and will kill you, here is part 3119 of my 8320 part series “Don’t Do What You See on the Internet”:
- Don’t drink excessive amounts of vinegar : As stated here , drinking carbonated vinegar does not taste like cola, but appears to be just as bad for your teeth as drinking cola.
- Don’t create fake Johnny Depp social media accounts : This makes the real Johnny Depp very angry and sad, and he has deep emotions that are absolutely essential.
- Don’t put ice on your cat .
Emoticons at work for youth
If I were a graduate student in linguistics, I would be writing a dissertation on how people of different generations use emojis. One area of my research will be analyzing the use of emoji in work platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams. So much raw data!
In this video from morefrejenal , she says she uses emoji at her first corporate job to “not seem rude.” Mission accomplished, but does that make her childish or frivolous—at least for old people like me? It’s hard for everyone to navigate work communication and maintain a “work persona” that is so different from their true selves, and I guess it’s especially hard for younger women, but I’m worried Gen Z communication style may not work as well. impression. . After all, a lot can get lost in intergenerational pictographic communication .
Viral Video of the Week: Official Trailer Smile
Speaking of emoji, the trailer for the upcoming horror movie ” Smile ” has resonated with YouTube users, and it’s not because they’re trying to tone down their Slack posts. The trailer for ” Smiles ” was viewed by more than five million people online in the first couple of days. It’s hard to describe the movie other than to say that it looks like Smile is borrowing elements from early 2000s J-horror and adding a creepy/happy face. I agree with dxr ‘s commenter, who concludes, “This will either be casually funny or genuinely scary.” When the movie comes out in September, we’ll see how the coin hits.
The history of horror films “smiling is actually quite scary” is almost as long as the films themselves. The Man Who Laughs , 1928, is about a man who had a huge scary smile carved into his face as a child. The film opened to mixed reviews in 1928, but all the people who saw the film after it was released are already dead, so what did they know? Among the enduring influences on The Man Who Laughs is lead actor Conrad Veidt’s toothy smile, which inspired the original character design of The Joker!