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This week, the kids are testing each other’s loyalty through TikTok, clowning on a gamer for his ignorance about women’s anatomy, and making their dads famous by digging up an old disco song.
Celebrities you may not have heard of: Ninja
If you don’t already, you should know about Ninja. Richard Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has been balanced on the knife-edge between real world and internet celebrity for years. The amiable gamer has over 17 million subscribers on his Twitch channel, making him the most-watched streamer on the platform, but he’s done a lot of non-online things as well. He’s appeared with his family on Celebrity Family Feud, made the cover of ESPN Magazine for his eSports career, been included in Time’s 100 list, and even appeared on The Masked Singer. Is that enough to be a real celebrity, or does he have to be known by people over 35 too?
TikTok’s loyalty testers
The tag LoyaltyTest has wracked up over 730 million views on TikTok, and it’s pretty creepy. It works like this: People in relationships ask—and sometime pay— a stranger to slide into their partner’s DMs to see how they’ll respond to a stranger flirting with them. Sometimes a would-be cheater is caught. Sometimes something wholesome happens. Sometimes there’s a shocking plot-twist. Any way it goes, the most popular videos in the genre seem to take joy in the suffering and failings of others. The whole thing speaks to the casual cruelty that comes from everyone being both connected and isolated. I don’t think I like the future, so let’s look at the past?
The forefathers of TikTok challenges
Barely understanding what’s happening with young people often leads to breathless media and police warnings about dangerous, stupid teenager trends, Tide Pod challenge, milk crate challenge, Kool Aid Man challenge, etc. But if any older reader is self-important about how foolish kids are today, here are some fads from the distant past that were as dumb and dangerous as anything you see on TikTok:
- Flag-pole sitting: Popularized in the 1920s by attention-starved sailor Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, the pole-sitting challenge involved staying on a platform on pole for as long as possible. The longest time ever was achieved from 1982-1984, when H. David Werder lasted 439 days.
- Phone booth stuffing: The phone booth challenge took off in post-war America and involved seeing how many people you could fit into a phone booth. The record was set in 1959 when 25 young people in South Africa fit in a phone booth.
- Belladonna eyedrops: No beauty trend on TikTok is as disturbing as the Victorian practice of putting deadly nightshade in your eyes to dilate your pupils and create doe-like eyes...and blindness if you use too much.
- Marathon dance contests: “Seeing how long you can dance” wasn’t a fun little thing. It was a grueling nightmare freak show undertaken by desperate people during the great depression. See They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, an excellent, depressing movie about the topic.
- Goldfish swallowing: I’m in favor of this fad. Yeah, it’s cruel to goldfish, but it’s just so stupid and disgusting that I can’t help but admire it. The (somewhat disputed) record is 89 fishies.
- Panty raids: I’m glad we live in a society where this kind of bullshit would be considered a felony instead of a fun thing for college kids to do.
- Streaking: Interrupting something by running around naked was a huge thing in the 1970s, our most inexplicable decade. It still happens today occasionally at football games and the like.
Gamer learns about women’s anatomy through Twitter mockery
Maybe people are being too hard on this rando Twitter guy, but when you tee up a post that so perfectly embodies the worst stereotypes of gamers, you can’t expect people not to take a swing. Peach-fuzz-gate began when @9santy1 posted a shot of a promotional still for just-released video game Horizon Forbidden West, with a message that translates to something like: “Since when does [the game’s female hero] Aloy have a beard?” with a helpful circle drawn around the offending hair. She doesn’t; but graphics are now good enough that we can see the peach-fuzz on her cheeks. This dude, as many twitter users pointed out, has clearly never been close enough to an actual woman to notice. @9santy1 doesn’t seem to mind the mockery. He pinned the tweet.
Viral video of the week: Zach Montana and his disco dad
This week’s viral video comes from TikTok’s Zach Montana. The teenager discovered a forgotten recording of a disco song, “Surrender to Me,” that his dad recorded 43 years ago and excitedly played it for his online audience. The song is, as they say, a bop, but it’s made even better by Zach’s ebullient reaction to it. The video went viral, the song is topping 500,000 play on Spotify, and Zach and his Dad performed together it live on Jimmy Kimmel Live. If this turns out to be a carefully planned and coordinated media stunt, I will not be surprised—it all seems a pretty convenient. But for now, it’s heartwarming.
from Lifehacker https://ift.tt/qzYmZHF
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