A Guide to Children’s Culture for Adults Out of Touch With Reality: Why Is Twee Back in Fashion?
Young people are everywhere this week, recreating dishes on doomed ocean liners, eating Oreos with mustard and joking with each other. Here’s everything you need to know.
Trend of the Week: The Return of Twi
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but TikTok kids have discovered twee . The deplorable fashion and cultural trend was popular among hipsters around 2008 and included Belle and Sebastian’s self-consciously charming music, movies like Juno and 500 Days of Summer , and women’s fashion like ballet flats and denim jackets – remember Zooey Deschanel in her prime. . (I don’t know what the twee gentlemen were wearing, but maybe those momentarily popular waxed mustaches and massive glasses?) Check out the #twee hashtag on TikTok for more tweets than you could ever want and see how the new generation is changing its corporate identity.
Subreddit of the week: r/Niceguys
The Nice Guys board on Reddit is not made up of fans of Ryan Gosling’s 2016 Goodfellas car . This is a subreddit dedicated to guys who “mistake spinelessness and pity for” goodness “.
The never-ending stream of “funny, lewd images” includes all sorts of “nice guy” content, such as the important thoughts of this ” literal fedora with hands “, as well as reports from well-known good guys like the ancient electronic musician Moby . Ignorant dudes who mix kindness and weakness might deserve pity, but blatant misogynists who still think they’re cute are not. And there are plenty of guys like that.
The subreddit has almost a million and a half members, and it’s not just a place to bully weirdos, but rather an object lesson in how not to be for predominantly young Reddit users, mostly males. Enjoy cringing weapon level.
Viral Video of the Week: Recreating the Last Meal on the Titanic
There is too much beautiful, professional content on YouTube, so I always welcome anything that looks homemade and goes viral. Adorable YouTuber Brittany Broskey recreates the last meal on the Titanic this week.
Broski is very funny, but I wish she could cook better. A dish of minted mashed peas, timbale and salmon seems really disgusting in the way rich cream and butter rich people are used to enjoying, but it’s not exactly an honest cocktail unless it’s made by someone with real culinary skills. I suggest Lifehacker’s own Claire Lower for this job. In any case, seeRecreating the Last Meal Served on the Titanic .
TikTok teens diagnosed with rare mental disorders
If a teen or teen you care about has started telling you they have borderline personality disorder, they may be the victim of the latest unfortunate TikTok verse trend. Children diagnose themselves and others with rare psychological problems, from BPD to bipolar disorder and dissociative identity disorder .
While they are essentially doing what you do with WebMD – looking for the symptom they’re experiencing and imagining they have the most serious illness it’s associated with – TikTok’s spontaneously generated content makes it much more worse. Suspicious “therapists” post videos encouraging self-diagnosis, peers encourage this behavior, and it’s all exacerbated by the TikTok algorithm that feeds more and more mental illness videos to frightened kids who think they have them. It’s like a nightmarish horror feedback loop and it gave me derealization disorder.
Disgusting food trend of the week: yellow mustard on Oreos
However, TikTok isn’t just for deplorable self-diagnosis—there’s disgusting food, too. Children put yellow mustard on Oreo cookies, eat them, and post videos to please and make others nauseous. As you might expect, the videos include a message asking viewers to pass it on to a friend so they can try it too. The trend got to singer Lizzo , who seemed to enjoy the snack.
Because I am a brave and selfless person, I spared you all the effort and tried mustard oreos myself. I also fed it to my Oreo loving son. “That’s rough. People on TikTok are really stupid,” he said. I agree with both points.
“Hype House” streaming on Netflix
Want to get a peek inside TikTok’s Hype House, a Moorpark, California mansion populated by exceptionally powerful people like Vinnie Hacker, Lil Huddy, and Larray Merritt? If you said, “Please, God, no!” I’ve got some bad news for you: The Hype House , a reality show that promises to “take an inside look at social media’s most talked about stars as they navigate love, fame, and friendship while creating content and living together,” is streaming right now on Netflix. .
“Imagine a fraternity made up of people who have millions of followers and dollars at your fingertips, with high school drama and like a ring light,” The Hype House star Nikita Dragun suggested on the show. I don’t think I can imagine it. I guess I’ll imagine the Sun running out of fuel and turning into a red dwarf star, which instead expands to destroy the Earth.