A Guide for Adults Unversed in Contemporary Culture: How to Bring Pumpkins to Starbucks
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Welcome to “The Irrelevant Adult’s Guide to Kids’ Culture,” where I explain juvenile nonsense. This week, kids are bringing empty pumpkins to Starbucks and demanding pumpkin spice lattes; TikTok is obsessed with the fake video game Bird Game 3 ; everyone is adding videos of a fictional video game to the cosmic AI pile; and teenagers are fighting over Lorax costumes. Plus, police departments around the world are warning about an unfunny joke that should never be repeated.
Filling pumpkins with pumpkin spice latte
Look, we’re all excited for Halloween; it’s pumpkin season, motherfuckers . But please, for the love of God, don’t bring a hollowed-out pumpkin to the Starbucks drive-thru and ask the barista to fill it with a pumpkin spice latte. Even if TikTok influencers do it. Even if their videos get millions of views . Virality is not permission.
Feeling quirky is normal, and sometimes even heroic , but baristas do seven invisible tasks at once and get paid for half, and getting them to be extras in your cute video is task number eight. They might smile when you hand them a pumpkin, but when they say, “Oh, cute,” their eyes will blaze with rage. They want to react like this, I promise:
What is Bird Game 3?
Bird Game 3 is the name of an imaginary video game for an imaginary Xbox 50 console. Creating AI-powered videos of people eagerly anticipating the chance to play Bird Game 3 is becoming increasingly popular on TikTok and other social media. Unlike most other AI videos, some of them are genuinely funny. Like this one:
And this:
I don’t know what everyone’s so excited about. When I played the first Bird Game at E3 2010 , it was breathtaking.
Everyone’s taking “celebrity elevator selfies”
Speaking of AI’s chaotic behavior, if you’ve been on TikTok lately, you’ve probably seen a ton of posts featuring people posing with celebrities in elevators, like this one:
Of course, it’s fake—the result of AI image-generating tools—but it’s a fun kind of fake that’s easy to join in on. Just use CapCut, Gemini, or any other AI-powered hack to create the fake, and you too can pretend you were riding an elevator with Brian Boitano or Ice Spice. If you need more detailed instructions, I’ve detailed everything here .
But seriously, the kids making these fake videos are devaluing the unique and meaningful relationship between some random person and a famous idiot, who are forced to interact because they’re trapped in a confined space. Now no one will believe that my dream of that famous elevator encounter with Dr. Phil actually happened.
Viral Video of the Week: Girl Invasion of the Lorax
For the past few years, TikTok and Instagram have been flooded with “The Lorax” girls every October. Videos of girls dressed as Dr. Seuss’s smug characters are everywhere. Here’s a typical example:
The pioneer of the Lorax costume appears to be TikToker McKenna, who posted a Lorax video in 2023 that went viral and garnered over 30 million views:
Since then, the costume has become incredibly popular, with over 200,000 videos tagged #Lorax on TikTok . The trend has become so widespread that backlash is mounting. A rumor has spread among young men and women that only “unfunny popular girls” dress up as the Lorax for Halloween. Some teens even consider these costumes a warning sign and post anti-Lorax memes, such as these:
Guys, the only thing less funny than dressing up as the Lorax for Halloween is complaining about other people dressing up as the Lorax for Halloween. Let’s face it: you’re actually mad because girls are doing something that isn’t intended for male approval. On the other hand, I completely understand the appeal of the “popular girl” costume. It takes a lot of work to cultivate your identity to be “popular” in the deadly pit of high school popularity, so an evening of dressing up as a potbellied goofball and goofing off must be liberating, especially when you’re doing it with a pre-established look that won’t reflect badly on you and can garner millions of views.
Police warn of AI-powered prank targeting homeless people
Last week, I outlined the viral AI-powered homeless prank : kids are using AI to fake images of homeless people in their homes and sending them to their parents as a funny prank. Police want everyone to know that this isn’t funny , and no one should do it, because some parents, understandably, called the police after receiving the message.
Salem, Massachusetts, police immediately issued a statement warning that the pranksters faced up to two and a half years in prison for the stunt. Many other police departments across the United States and even abroad followed suit. My favorite was Yonkers, New York, which posted the following statement on its Facebook page :
“We understand that some pranks are funny, and we enjoy laughing at the best ones. However, some pose a threat to public safety…”
Yonkers Police Department, you don’t “love to laugh at the best of them.” I’ve seen enough teachers say that to know it’s a lie.
But seriously, pretending to be homeless to scare your parents is a bad idea. It’s a waste of resources, and having the police show up at your door is almost always a bad thing. If you really need to pull a prank, try a less provocative option: generate a naked plumber to prank your boyfriend: