A Guide to Child Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: Why Is Everyone Watching the Last of Us?
There’s something for everyone in the world of youth culture this week, whether you’re into post-apocalyptic drama, shaming the creepy guys at the gym, or pretending to be a wizard in one of those damn vija games.
HBO’s The Last of Us is taking over TV
In our balkanized media environment, there aren’t many shows that everyone watches anymore, but HBO’s The Last of Us is becoming a rare exception . As much as people love to binge watch, The Last of Us ‘ release schedule of one episode a week is clearly working for the show. The audience grows with each “premiere” of each episode: the premiere was watched by 4.7 million viewers, and by the third series, the number of viewers per premiere increased by 37% to 6.4 million. Apparently, HBO liked those numbers so much that they announced a second season this week .
The critical and popular success of The Last of Us is even more pronounced when you consider the quality of almost every other show or movie based on a game ever made. The Last of Us pulls off this rare trick: respecting source material without being afraid to deviate from it as needed for another medium. It also helps that this is a story about a world that has been plunged into madness and savagery due to a contagious disease. It’s relative.
All about Hogwarts Legacy
Like movies based on games, games based on movies/novels usually suck too. But judging by the online chatter and millions of views of the launch trailer , the gaming world is looking forward to Hogwarts Legacy . Here’s a rundown of what it’s all about: Hog Leg is a single-player open-world RPG set in the Harry Potter universe. Players will enter Hogwarts Academy in the 19th century. As you’d expect, there’s a lot of magic in combat. The plot of Legacies does not repeat the plots of novels and films, since the action takes place hundreds of years before most of the characters were born in them. Of course, a hero is more than just an ordinary wizard. You will be a special magician with a special destiny and connection with ancient magic. It releases for PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on February 10th.
What happened to all the #gymcreeps?
It’s nothing new for weird nerds to stare at women trying to hit the gym, but young men are using social media tools to recognize and shame them. Under the hashes of #WeirdGuysAtTheGym and #GymCreep on TikTok, you can see countless videos like this , this , or this , in which a hidden phone camera captures slippery guys doing dirty business, as well as reports of disturbing encounters . But since this is the internet, there are also videos of offended dudes (who would never do anything like this themselves!) get offended on behalf of the male gym-going community who didn’t watch at all . There are also a ton of commentaries on phenomena , probably a bunch of fakes made by people to get clicks, and the usual slightly funny comedy sketches .
TikTokers are trying new tricks to keep videos sticky
Our buddies at gaming site Kotaku recently spotted an interesting new trend in TikTok videos: Creators are creating collage-style videos that simultaneously display clips of unrelated content, such as a clip from Family Guy in one part of the screen, accompanied by silent gameplay footage. (often from the mobile game Subway Surfers ) or maybe someone is doing something “nice” like scooping up ice cream. The best guess as to what’s behind sensory overload is that it’s a ploy to get viewers to watch longer and possibly remember more information from the “main” part of the clip. The idea is that viewers are less likely to click “Next” if they can switch their attention to another part of the screen instead of switching to a new clip. It could also be that the “relaxing” elements of the clips make users more receptive to the message of the main video . They are certainly mesmerizing, but the trend is more than creepy, especially if the idea is to make people fall in love with Family Guy.
Viral video of the week: Doom’s most mysterious glitch finally solved after 30 years
This week’s viral video comes from the strange and insular world of speed running, where players push games to their limits by trying to finish them as fast as possible. “Having fun” is not the point; the goal is to exploit every possible advantage or glitch in the game’s original programming in order to complete it. Big news for the community: Doom ‘s level completion time has been reduced by a few seconds thanks to a new use of a rare glitch discovered in the 1990s. You wouldn’t think there were any secrets left in a 30-year-old game that could be exploited, but at least one of them wasn’t fully understood until recently. The details of the complex method of exploiting the “all ghosts” glitch are impressive. This involved using a brute-force simulation to try every possible combination of inputs until a failure occurred, a process that would take a human 300 years.