Hello! This week we’re talking about cellar beats, non-sticky slime, and those unforgettable nights at Fredbear's.
The slime fridge is evergreen
We’ve talked a few times about “aesthetics community” trends like Frutiger Aero, Utopian Scholastic (millennial-bait playlist here), and the dubious Frasurbane. But one of the most powerful artifacts of Frutiger Aero culture has taken on a life of its own on the internet: the slime fridge, which looks like an elongated mall kiosk filled with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ooze.
The slime fridge has recirculated on social media for years, and now has also filtered down to become the subject of articles on various aggregators and AI content mills. But it was never real: it was a fridge product concept from 2010 released with some hand-wavey explanation of how “non-sticky” “bio-robot” gel would keep everything cool somehow. (2010 sounds late for Frutiger Aero, but the wiki argues it was around until 2013.)
People still bring up the slime fridge as the flying-car example of the lime green Frutiger Aero future that we never got. But they also bring up something else: if this product was real, people would have sex with it. No thread about the slime fridge is complete without someone calling it a fridge Fleshlight, saying “people would definitely fuck that,” or threatening to do so themselves. Like Frutiger Aero itself, the concept is best admired from a distance.
Sora 2 is like watching MadTV in hell
OpenAI’s new video generator, Sora 2, came out on Tuesday to a big round of new-AI-toy reactions (“an unholy abomination,” wrote the author of Vox’s Good News newsletter). Basically, it’s a skit generator that can turn a simple prompt into multiple shots with their own semi-coherent soundtrack. This can feel like black magic:
But while Sora can put together very coherent videos in its favorite scenarios (iPhone video, interview, news broadcast), the quality nosedives if you ask it to imitate trickier styles. It’s tuned for social media, and there are many old genres of TV show and movie it can’t do; it often ignores style instructions to the point where it turns live-action scenes into animations. One of its most unpleasantly human traits is its “voice,” an overbearing and hacky sense of humor that often leads it to insert its own jokes and shots into the script you fed it.
The whole skit-generator concept seems like it's sidestepping a larger problem with video generation. What the guys in communities like r/AIvideo really want is a flexible shot generator that they can use to assemble longer stories with the most granular controls possible. But if users can closely control the output, many will keep tweaking their generations to work around safeguards and create wildly brand-unsafe stuff.
Instead, Sora keeps the controls out of reach while packaging entire stories for you. So the people who make longer videos like this one are doing so by generating their idea 1,000 times on Sora, downloading the clips, piecing together the best takes on third-party editing software, replacing the crunchy audio, then posting it on other platforms.
The most cursed Sora 2 feature by far is the Cameo, which lets you make your own digital clone by scanning yourself with an iPhone. This is a weird “we have character consistency at home” feature that must have arisen more from safety concerns than user requests. The presence of a Cameo character seems to nudge Sora in a queasy funhouse direction that feels like the version of MadTV they make you watch in hell. It also means that the few famous people who provided Cameos have overrun the platform, creating a singularly malign FYP where the faces of Sam Altman and Logan Paul are in every thumbnail.
The social platform is the strangest part. You have to post a video publicly in order to alter it through “remixing,” and anyone else can remix your videos as well. This leads to random users immediately remixing prominent creators’ stuff into ads or turning it into a soapbox with a prompt like “make this character turn to the camera and complain about [platform issue].” Popular videos are often remixes of other popular videos with one word changed. Even if you like playing with the generator, the wall of indistinguishable "copy of a copy of a copy" content on the FYP is deeply unpleasant to behold.
A lot of other mini-stories emerged around the launch:
- The floodgates were open for generation of copyrighted characters for a few days before OpenAI shut them on Friday (and made a statement about working with “very excited” rightsholders). OpenAI’s image generator launches were also like this: a few days of IP violations and edgy content that goes viral, then more heavy-handed enforcement.
- Altman’s Friday statement shouted out the creativity of Japanese users in particular, and they were highly visible on Sora. One anime-gen specialist, hakoniwa, seems like the platform’s biggest star.
- Sora’s 10-second video duration is pretty high compared to open-source generators, which top out at 6-8 seconds depending on hardware. But you can actually get Sora to make 15-second clips if you mess around in the console.
- Dreamlike full-throttle flying videos remain an interesting Sora specialty that doesn't really resemble any pre-AI video genre (except maybe the Home Depot flythrough).
What is literally tanzelcore?
A few weeks ago, we came across a Halloween-y video of guys in wizard hats lurching around to some kind of sploinky dance music:
While comments also describe this sound as “wizard gabber,” the title is “literally tanzelcore,” which made us curious whether tanzelcore was a real thing. It turns out to be a musical subgenre related to keller synth, which is a subgenre of dungeon synth (keller is “cellar” in German, and “tanzel” is dance), which is vaguely video game-sounding electronic fantasy music found on gloomy YouTube ambient channels and bare-bones Bandcamps.
So tanzelcore is some kind of dungeon synth that sounds vaguely German, “more techno,” and goofy. “This is what I expected witch house to sound like,” a comment on one of the biggest tanzelcore albums says. Another comment explains the difference between keller synth and tanzelcore: “one is terrible and the other is extra terrible.” Whatever your feelings on this music, it’s the right season for it.
Dexter meme format blows up 19 years later
Memes about the “good guy serial killer” show Dexter have been abundant on social media lately, likely because of its sequel series on Showtime. Though you don’t often meet a big Dexter guy IRL, people online love it — just check out this 8-year-old’s sick edit.
The most recent Dexter memes pick up an old thread. Doakes, the police sergeant who hounds Dexter in the first two seasons, achieved internet immortality through his line “Surprise, motherfucker,” which has somehow remained popular from the YTMND era through to present-day brainrot soundboards. Recently, Doakes has been starring in a new wave of edits based on the same scene, in which he takes issue with Dexter’s examination of a cargo box:
Here’s a huge playlist of these. There’s an ASMR version, a Doakes vs. Doakes version, a Christmas special, and a million scrambled takes of the “surprise” line. In addition to the traditional YTP sentence-mixing and stuttering, the edits also often degrade the visual quality of the source scene, either by mushing it down to 240p resolution or by over-sharpening it with AI tools. As usual with YTPs, there isn’t much of a lesson here, but it’s nice to see the format still thriving.
Chum Box
Games
Sip Fisher is an “incremental fishing” game about drinking an entire lake [link, Steam]
We recently learned about the existence of a Five Nights At Freddy's fangame series called Those Nights at Fredbear's [link]
Users report presence of a vine boom in Silent Hill f [link]
“Me hearing a lost imp in Doom” [link, but really from a Civvie video]
The endearingly scrappy gaming zine Funland has relaunched with a monthly format full of wily reporting, fake game ads, smart reviews, and more [link]
Can the blockchain be used for good in gaming rather than whatever Axie Infinity was? The O'Ruggin Trail is a first stab at using it to sort of invisibly undergird a platform for user-generated text adventures [link]
Truly useless Dark Souls facts [link]
Music
Every musician feels compelled to write that they're #no-ai now — even if they're making "Music for Resilience on 19th Century Lute" [link]
Spike Lee accused of using “MMO music” [link]
Accordion secret boss theme [link]
Amen break toy [link]
The internet
Bewildered cat in rescue photo compared to “TWAS I WHO SET THE HOUSE ABLAZE” cat [link]
A Puerto Rican barbershop ad full of unauthorized Simpsons characters did the rounds again thanks to an actual Simpsons announcement [link]
“Dogs love using their horizontal nature to stand in front of you” [link]
“He sucks sins through his nose” [link]
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One Last Thing
What if Guile threw his projectile out like Chun Li?
