The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Who Is homecoming.dairy?

This week, young people are posting puzzling videos about housework, finding naked men in the trunks of their cars, and virtually riding horses together. It’s a strange and wonderful world.

Mysterious TikToker homecoming.diary

TikTok contains tons of inexplicable videos, but @homecoming.diary might make the inexplicable-est. She responds to questions like “What does a skateboard girl do after training?” by wordlessly enacting a series of bizarre domestic rituals. She rides a mini go-cart through her house. She employs a vast array of single-use appliances, like tiny washing machines and an eyeglass sanitizer, for household tasks. It’s always snowing or raining in her hallway. She has a man’s feet. It’s all very strange. Some speculate that it’s some kind of advertising campaign, but if so, it’s very well camouflaged, as no links to any retailers are shown. My theory is that she’s posting from an alternate universe that’s just like ours, except self-stirring mugs and shoe-warmers are commonplace.

Three stories of finding unpleasant things

Discovering a surreal TikToker like @homecoming.diary is delightful, but sometimes we discover thing are not delightful. Like at all. The trio of TikTokers below are prime examples the un-delightfulest things imaginable.

• Shaniqua Cobb just wanted a steak and cheese sub from Subway. Instead, she says, she found a (presumably human) tooth embedded in the sub roll. I’ll never eat anything again.
• The young couple who posts at @geebeeTV say they bought a house at auction and found a hidden room packed with all kinds of horror-movie/occult stuff, like a leather-bound Bible with strange inscriptions and an antique family photo with one person’s eyes poked out. They could be faking it all to freak people out, but what if they aren’t?
• Bethany Coker found a naked man in her trunk. He’d apparently been in there for several days, and when asked why, he said “it’s a right of passage.” When asked how he got in the trunk, he responded, “I’m the son of the pope.”

Red Dead Redemption Online’s equestrian club

When I think of clans in online video games, I picture elitist, hardcore dudes dedicated to squeezing the best kill/death ration out of their chosen game, like the aggro Reaper Lords from Red Dead Redemption Online. Thankfully, there is a countervailing force in the game. PC Gamer brings us word of The Rift Trails, a group of horse-lovers who get together in Red Dead Online.

Started two years ago during the height of the pandemic lockdown, the group has grown to around 1,700 members who mount up regularly to take scenic trail rides together in Red Dead Online where they socialize, wear themed costumes, and otherwise use the digital space in an interesting, unexpected way. You can tell what kind of person you are by whether you’d join the Reaper Lords or The Rift Trails.

Slang watch: What does “mid” mean?

If a young person describes you as “mid,” you are not being complimented. The word is a shortened version of “middle,” and it means something like “basic.” A thing is mid if it is not cool, but not interesting enough to be uncool. The phrase took off when All Elite Wrestling heel MJF riled up a crowd in Cincinnati by declaring, “It’s called the Midwest because every single thing in it is mid,” before offering to fight the entire crowd. The soundbite was lifted from AEW and dropped into a ton of TikTok videos to describe things that are, well, mid. Here’s a good example of the meme. There are a ton more at the #mid hashtag.

The return of Gumby

Fox recently announced it acquired the rights to Gumby, Pokey, and all their clay friends. The plan is to re-imagine the franchise, then market live-action and animated Gumby content to kids, and also sell NFTs. For those who aren’t 8,000 years old, Gumby was an animated character beloved by baby boomers throughout the 1960s. Whether kids today will care about a franchise so far removed in time remains to be seen, but since Gumby’s whole thing is being a blank slate—a slab of clay that can be molded into anything—I’m not sure how you could “re-imagine” him without changing his essential Gumby-ness.

Viral videos of the week: The Adam Project and Firestarter

This week’s viral video is a two-fer: Both are just-released, widely shared trailers for fantasy movies about adolescence. The titular character in The Adam Project is a troubled kid who is visited by the adult version of himself. The time travel/generation gap movie begins streaming on Netflix on March 11 and hopefully has a lot to say about how old farts view childhood, and how children see their future selves. The second trailer is for a remake of Stephen King’s Firestarter, in which the tumult of puberty in a young girl is externalized as an ability to start fires with her mind. King’s excellent novel has always deserved better than the so-so Drew Barrymore-headed adaptation released in 1984. We’ll see if Blumhouse gives it the treatment it deserves when Firestarter is released on May 13.

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