The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture: Why Are ‘Alpha’ Males Trending on TikTok?
Reading Time: 3 minutesAlso, after 27 years, kids have finally discovered NASA’s picture-of-the-day site.
This week, Generation Z is casting its collective gaze toward the heavens, but they’ve still found time to mock toxically masculine podcasts, catch video game cheaters, and laugh at monkeys’ dumb noses.
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NASA’s birthday pictures go viral
NASA’s ‘astronomy picture of the day‘ site launched waaaaay back in 1995 (and it looks like the HTML was never changed), and it has taken until now for it to truly go viral. The site shows you a NASA photograph for every day since the mid 90s, and kids on TikTok are entering their birthday and then posting the result. #Nasabirthday has over 17 million views.
The fun of the trend comes from not knowing what you’re going to get. Your birthday picture might be an otherworldly and beautiful image of ‘light pillars’ over Alaska, or it might be a kitchen strainer on a t-shirt.
Mocking TikTok’s ‘alpha’ males
A TikTok filter that adds stubble, blue eyes, and a septum piercing has given birth to a hilarious new trend: Using it to mock ‘alpha male’ podcasters. Credit goes to Elsa Lakew, who made the first video in the genre by applying the filter and noting ‘if I looked like this, I’d start a podcast.’ Other users ran with the idea, and before long, the top spots of hashtags like #alphamale and #highvalueman—once the home of actual toxic masculinity—were overrun with parodies, revealing who the real ‘alphas’ are. Unlike actual man-o-sphere podcasts, these videos are actually entertaining.
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Cheating in the ‘Guitar Hero’ community
A cheating scandal has rocked the Guitar Hero community. Not many people still play Guitar Hero—it came out in 2005, after all—but there’s a small community of high-end players who stayed with it, and took the game to extreme, nearly superhuman, levels. Among this rarified company, a 20 year-old called Schmooey was the best of the best—or so people thought. It turns out Schmooey’s incredible high score videos were fakes.
YouTuber Karl Jobst posted a video that goes in-depth, but the thumbnail is: While Schmooey actually is an amazingly good Guitar Hero player, he isn’t the absolute best, so to win world records and heighten his reputation, he flat out falsified his videos. after the ignominy of being called out, Schmooey deleted his channel and slunk off into the netherworld.
Cheating in the YouTube gaming community
Cheating at Guitar Hero is embarrassing—imagine going to the trouble of faking videos for years just to convince some nerds you are good at a video game—but the recent cheating scandal around YouTube gamer Paul ‘Ice Poseidon’ Denino is positively insidious. Self-proclaimed internet detective Coffeezilla uncovered the scandal, in which Ice Poseidon conned his followers into ‘investing’ $500,000 in a a cryptocurrency boondoggle, then kept $300,000 of it for himself, allegedly buying himself a Tesla. Even more egregious, Ice Posiedon’s reaction to being caught: He told Coffeezilla that he has no plans to return the money because he’s ‘looking out for himself.’
‘Part of the responsibility is on [the fans] as well for putting too much emotion into it,’ Ice Poseidon said while presumably twirling his handlebar mustache.
Viral video of the week: True Facts: Proboscis Monkey
This week’s viral video comes from internet legend ZeFrank. True Facts: Proboscis Monkey takes a deep and hilarious dive into the world of monkey noses. Why does the ‘nose monkey’ basically not have a nose at all, where the Proboscis monkey has a huge, hanging schnozzola?
It’s a more interesting question than you might think, and takes us to the intersection of comical evolutionary traits and primate sexual attractiveness. I had no idea that Proboscis monkeys have erections all the time, and that humans are the second largest-nosed primate. While I definitely clicked on this video hoping to laugh at some big-nosed monkeys, the joke was ultimately on me. As the video’s narrator points out: ‘If you want to laugh at a monkey with a big nose and a funny looking penis, call up a friend and get naked. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than going to Borneo.’
The generous side of TikTok
Looking at the world of young people through the lens of the internet tends to result in a lot of stories about scandals, dumb behavior, and shallowness. But youth internet has a more uplifting side too. TikTok user @annabellegracestephens embodied it by uploading a video of elderly Doordash driver Kerry Judd with the caption, ‘Tell me I didn’t just get the cutest doordasher.’ Commenters were moved by the sight of such an old dude presumably having to deliver food to make ends meet, and organized a GoFundMe that quickly shot up over six figures.
Twist: It seems like Judd likes his side-hustle. ‘I love sharing my DoorDash experience with others so they can earn income and be successful in their dashing experience,‘ Judd wrote on the GoFundMe.
(I realize that one could view this cynically, and point out that Judd only received his crowd-sourced windfall because of the ageist belief that a 71 year old needs donations from his grandchildren’s peers. And isn’t giving money to someone just because they’re ‘cute’ in video disgusting? But let me have this one thing, OK?)