A Disengaged Adult’s Guide to Children’s Culture: an Uncanny Valley Makeover
This week’s pop culture feels like a disturbing sci-fi movie. Young people deliberately pose as nightmarish quasi-humans, burn their eyes at strange parties in Hong Kong and share the trailer for the new film Mean Girls .
Mysterious Valley Makeup Explained
TikTok’s makeup tutorials section this week features something strange : uncanny valley makeup. Created by TikToker Emilia Barth ( whose feed is full of grotesque makeup looks), the idea behind Uncanny Valley Makeup is to create the look of an extremely realistic, yet still artificial, human face. Wrinkles are smoothed out, imperfections are erased, and something subtly artificial is added, slightly “wrongly” highlighting some parts of the face. The end result is a doll-like look, or the kind of face that an AI would create, but it’s even weirder because it’s applied to a real person. Not being able to immediately tell if something is human is deeply unnerving. Check out some examples , and if you don’t think it’s creepy enough, here’s the hashtag #uncannyvalleymakeup .
Bored Ape NFT party dazzles guests
Apparently, Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, wasn’t content with stealing the Internet shirts’ savings by convincing them that easily copyable digital images of cartoon monkeys were a sound investment – they also tried to blind them.
ApeFest 2023 took place in Hong Kong on November 4, and people attended the event presumably by choice. The hype for the international congress on gullibility promised: “Three days of meetings and chaos. One big night full of surprises.” One of those big surprises was when ultraviolet light was shined on the crowd, causing severe eye burns.
“I woke up at 04:00 and didn’t see anything else. It hurt so much and my whole skin burned. I had to go to the hospital,” says Twitter user CryptoJane .
CryptoJane describes the symptoms of photokeratitis, a condition that the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) compares to a “sunburn of the eye.” The result is pain, sensitivity to light, and temporary blindness. “While almost everyone has noted that their symptoms have improved, we encourage anyone experiencing them to seek medical attention just in case,” the Bored Ape Yacht Club tweeted. (You really want to get medical advice from these people.)
I’m guessing it was an accident because Yuga Labs would of course ruin anything it touched, but people’s eyes were burned off. These are the eyes of the stupidest people on the planet, but still.
You might expect a class action lawsuit, but I’m not sure. Consider this tweet from professional idiot Adrian Zdunczyk . In it, he reports being blinded and hospitalized at ApeFest, but adds: “Thanks for the great monkey festival logistics @yugalabs and @BoredApeYC. An incredible event, I met a lot of wonderful people.” So maybe Yuga Labs can create a special edition of panda art or something and compensate them with it.
The return of shock content: the “don’t Google” trend
In the early days of the Internet, accidentally clicking on a link to a disturbing image or video was a rite of passage. You might have received an email from a friend saying, “Look at this cool car!” with a disguised link to a lemon party, a goat, or another piece of shocking content. You would rush to click the “close window” button and vow to never click on anything sent to you again. Then you send your message “Look at this cool car!” emails.
The practice has been largely dormant for a long time, but young people are bringing it back, with the addition of reverse psychology, in the form of “don’t Google it.” This phrase, of course, is intended to get others to Google things that will lead to spoiled content.
I don’t think you should google “fish videos”, “horse videos”, “botfly removal” and ” twitter.com “. I really mean it. I don’t know the results of any of these searches because I learned my lesson the first time, so be smart and don’t use Google.
Here’s why everyone’s back to playing Fortnite
If your child has suddenly started playing Fortnite again, here’s the thing: Back in 2018, Fortnite was everywhere. Everyone was playing it, writing memes about it, making videos about it, and generally living the Fortnite lifestyle. But gradually the interest disappeared. Perhaps it was due to being overly focused, focusing on random players, adding mechanics, or maybe it was just outdated.
However, Epic Games wasn’t going to let Fortnite go the way of Angry Birds and did the only thing that could get people to play the game again: they reset the clock. Fortnite OG is bringing back the original map and weapons and encourages players to forget everything that came later. So far, so good: The update/rollback brings the game to a peak player count of 6,172,463, which is more than the game ever had at the height of its original popularity.
Viral Video of the Week: Mean Girls Trailer
They’re making a new musical version of Mean Girls , and the trailer has been widely shared, with over 3 million views in its first day online. Check it .
This project has everything necessary for success: it is obvious that there is a lot of money behind it. The cast is talented and charismatic. It was written by Tina Fey. But based on the trailer, I don’t think it will resonate with the youth at all.
It feels like Mean Girls was written by middle-aged people looking at young people and not understanding what they’re seeing. There are a lot of questions: “Aren’t they crazy about sex?” “wow, they’re evil” jokes and comedy that are worse than just obvious and trivial – they’re dishonest. Real teenagers have far less sex than they did 20 years ago, and as for the “mean” part of Mean Girls , cliques and bullying aren’t that big of a deal for today’s kids. Zoomer and General Alpha appear to be much more innocent, sympathetic, caring and kind than the children before. Honestly, we are the most depraved people, but I don’t think you can make money on a film about that.