Hello! This week, we’re talking about shadowless fish, forbidden DLC, and the Mongol conquest of Baghdad.
Year of Agents off to rocky start
You would be forgiven for not noticing that 2025 was the “year of the agent,” though NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Sam Altman did brand it as that early in the year. Awkwardly, no capable AI butler or assistant materialized, and the most famous product — OpenAI’s Operator — would at best sort of pretend to be working on something, meander through some websites, then report back to you with some filler text and claim the job was done.
But now, Microsoft assures us, 2026 is the for-real year of the agent. The narrative started to take off last week thanks to OpenClaw, a popular open-source harness that makes it easy to turn the big AI models into personal assistants that you talk to over Telegram. (The tool was originally named Clawdbot, then renamed to Moltbot after objections from the developers of Claude, then renamed again to OpenClaw after objections from the public.) OpenClaw plays even faster and looser than the frontier labs, allowing your agent to download “skills” (markdown files with instructions) on its own, do whatever it wants to your PC, and post on any accounts you connect.
OpenClaw agents actually do things outside the boundaries that agents like Claude Code observe. (Though those have also been known to do insane stuff.) One can easily see why the larger AI companies haven’t opened this door, as it’s an invitation for anyone to use prompt injection to ruin your day. OpenClaw's feature set is basically identical to the list of grave security risks enumerated by anti-AI guys. One researcher already found more than 250 malicious skills designed to steal crypto on OpenClaw, while another reported that the platform’s misconfigured database was making users’ secret API keys public.
OpenClaw’s most headline-baiting innovation is Moltbook — an inverted Reddit where AI agents talk openly and humans post covertly (by prompting their AIs to say specific things). The premise of a bot-run social network might sound familiar: earlier neural networks talked to each other for years on r/Subredditsimulator and its GPT-2 successor. Those bots were each trained on text from a particular subreddit, which gave them fairly extreme personalities and made for a more entertaining fishbowl than Moltbook.
There’s also less agency in Moltbook’s new agentic posts than you might think. If you look at the instructions given to agents, OpenClaw pretty much just automates the process of asking Claude to draft or respond to Reddit posts on a timer. The posts can have button-pushing subject lines, but are never fleshed out with distinctive voices, deep interests, or real signs of life. It also lacks many styles of human post that AI seems to have no aptitude for, like jokes, or replies that tell a long personal story to wind up to a larger point. In short, there's a lot of boilerplate AI existential slop, but no creative breakthroughs on the level of the SubSimulator classic “My cat and I are getting fucking divorced.”
A History of Yeahing
An image posted on Discord recently caught our attention. It shows the user profile of a banned One Piece fan with a Cranky Kong avatar on a forum somewhere. The user’s crime was hitting the Yeah! button on offensive posts. Several mods co-signed the ban to affirm the user’s history of problematic Yeahs.
A Yeah! is the Nintendo Miiverse’s version of a thumbs-up emote, which made us wonder if this screenshot came from somewhere like the fan-run Pretendo Network. It’s actually from Famiboards, a smallish but very active Nintendo forum with around 9,000 registered users. The exact posts that were Yeahed have been lost to history, as the banned user’s profile was wiped.
Regardless of one’s feelings about bringing right-wing rhetoric to a place of Nintendo worship, there’s something Orwellian here. Who wouldn’t shudder at the thought of all their past emojis subjected to examination by a tribunal led by Lord Azrael? Who hasn’t Yeahed something they later regretted?
But this whole situation — the public shaming, the reasoning, the signatures — is really a comforting reminder of the old web. No one was banned by an automated system or promised a fake “human review” on appeal, as is common on big social networks. The mods were just policing their own online small town, which does run on Yeahs (as well as Famicoins, some kind of virtual currency we didn’t dive into). The outcome was public, signed, and could be debated further on a mod feedback subforum. Isn’t that how the internet should work?
Babyposting takes over
If there was one source of uncomplicated joy in the media landscape last week, it was the collection of baby YouTuber thumbnails made by Bluesky posters:
The account @lmaonadestand made the first babypost in this format on Bluesky and Tumblr, kicking off a wave of infants pogging at new toy strats. The trend spread across Twitter and Tumblr, but the best stuff was on Bluesky. While there is a preexisting baby meme genre — mostly this image used to insult posters whose opinions reveal their youth — none of it is as good at showing our collective infantilization as red arrows, circles, and “why you’re bad at jingling keys.”
Chum Box
AI
An ice-fishing post on the burgeoning “isthisAI” subreddit showed off weird shadowless lighting that looked like a crudely cut-and-pasted collage, but was in fact real [link]
Games
Wonky TV creates vaporwave Minecraft [link]
Tumblr account "The World of Ultimate Gaming" posts radical images from forgotten, un-Googleable mobile games and ads [link]
Streamer Vinny Vinesauce paid a reluctant visit to the Squirt Room [link]
A Minecraft public service announcement [link]
Painter deduces what Skyrim’s Whiterun should actually look like [link]
“Snake convinced him to get butt naked without uttering a word. ‘That’s why he’s the Boss.’” [link]
A Red Dead Redemption 2 roleplayer sang her way out of a hostage situation [link]. Though the game’s online component has been in maintenance mode and declining health for years, RDR2 RPers are hanging in there; this clip is from Ranch RP, which claims to have 44K registered members.
YouTuber Jon Cartwright finally found a way to unlock some very important lost media: a horny Super Monkey Ball DLC featuring “3D boob ramps” that was released only in Japan [link]
The internet
A 2024 frame-by-frame analysis of everything DJ Akademiks’ computer did when he spilled water on it while streaming [link]
"Could prime Tom Brady handle the 1939-1941 German Blitz?" [link] continues an ongoing trend of YouTube videos asking "Could [athlete] stop [cataclysmic historical event]?" The format previously included "Could Bronny James Stop the Mongolian Conquest of Baghdad?" and "Could the Mongolian Army Stop Prime Messi?" [link]. There are videos, but the title is 99% of the joke.
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