Hello! This week, we’re talking about a sordid chapter in Minecraft history, a Dota 2 post that went horribly awry, and a grave insult to Burial’s music.
Minecraft overrun with jorking jesters
In May of last year, a popular Minecraft video posed the question: “Can I beat Minecraft while beating myself?” While the concept seems to have resonated with many Minecraft players, it was more of a thought experiment; the uploader was clearly not engaged in anything more unseemly than delivering a string of jorkin-it jokes. It was followed by many imitators using similar titles, such as “Can I beat Minecraft while my friend rails me?” and “Can I beat Minecraft while 2 friends rail me?” These videos featured a lot of tasteless sound effects and puns, a lot of talking about being “bricked up” etc., but again nothing actually graphic (outside of suggestive thumbnails).
On April 1 of this year, the trend reached a Dadaist apex with the upload “can i beat minecraft whiel beating mysefl an i bea mineaft whole baeting.” The video, which is really worth watching, is a string of unsettling non sequiturs with no connection to the title concept. It was uploaded by the same account that made the original “beating myself” video, and would be a fine way to close this sordid chapter of Minecraft history.
The 7-year quest to beat “We’re Finally Landing”
Speedrun historian Summoning Salt, probably the biggest name in the space on YouTube, has for years been associated with unrelenting use of the track “We’re Finally Landing” by the synthwave band HOME. A music list for his channel shows that, following his discovery of the song in 2018, he then used it in every one of his 34 subsequent speedrun documentaries, often for both the initial title drop and the emotional peak of the narrative.
The association is so strong that many other speedrun chroniclers have used it either as a parody or tribute to Summoning Salt. One commenter called it the “national anthem of speedrunning.” So we were surprised to notice recently that Salt overcame his addiction to the track all the way back in April 2025, and now often uses music from the synthwave artist Seimuc instead. While the sound of speedruns remains indelibly synthy, we have at least been liberated from the tyranny of one particular intro.
Another stupid AI trick
At the end of March, the TikToker Husk demonstrated that ChatGPT will flat-out lie about its ability to start a timer in a memorable clip where the LLM claimed that 10 minutes had elapsed in the space of seconds. More recently, the podcast Mostly Human got Sam Altman to react to this clip. His reaction was interesting — with the appearance of a man suppressing volcanic rage, he laughed it off and said that voice models would be able to start a timer in “maybe another year.”
It’s hard to imagine why it would take another year to teach the AI to use an egg timer. But this is apparently a deficiency shared by most LLMs. In a Redditor’s testing of Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude, only the last was able to summon a functional timer, and it failed to actually start it.
The bigger issue was the AI gaslighting the user about what it could do, which Husk demonstrated in an even more absurd video of ChatGPT reacting to Sam Altman’s reaction to his original timer video. The same problem lies at the heart of many stupid AI tricks pointed out by similar channels like FatherPhi, who we’ve written about previously — the new group of disapproving human hosts who prod and interrupt the bots as they attempt to spin a web of lies. It’s not clear when we’ll see LLMs that know their own limits; “maybe another year,” maybe never.
Chubby-cheeked creature keeps gacha game alive
If there’s anything to take away from the steady success of Korean gacha game Trickcal: Chibi Go, it’s that Speaki sells. The character — a mischievous specter impersonating a priestess — went viral at the beginning of the year thanks to a wave of “Speaki brainrot” memes, mostly driven by Korean and Japanese players. Though Trickcal suffered from what one Redditor calls “the worst launch in the history of games,” Speaki’s ubiquity across social media feeds helped the game exceed 3 million global downloads last week.
Trickcal’s chibi character designs, which include pattable heads and pinchable cheeks, are the game’s main selling point. Speaki memes tend to emphasize her childish, “head empty” qualities, making copious use of her catchphrase “Choayo!” (a Korean word that roughly translates to “I like it” or “good”). Her reputation as a community appointed mascot mirrors that of “Doro,” a meme that emerged from a chibi illustration of a character from the horny gacha game Goddess of Victory: Nikke.
Additional reading:
- According to Reddit, the villainous elves in Trickcal are based on a series of netizen memes about the mistranslation of Warcraft III Reforged in Korean. This was apparently caused by visual glitches where Chinese and Korean characters stacked up on top of each other in text boxes. The mutated Korean text supposedly implied that Warcraft elves, or "Kkanfs," were “bitchy and demanding” members of the “Killiance.”
Chum Box
AI
Users on Twitter and Reddit tested multimodal AI models’ musical comprehension by asking for feedback on a track in progress, then uploading a cavalcade of flatulence [link]. While some other models identified the prank, ChatGPT was unable to do so in multiple users’ experiments, complimenting the audio’s “cool lo-fi, late night, slightly eerie vibe” and comparing it to the music of Burial.
The actress Milla Jovovich claimed to have developed a new AI memory system; according to one Twitter investigator, it's a snake-oil project from a crypto bro that blatantly rigged its benchmarks [link]
Games
Bandai-Namco has been releasing their own soundtracks as “music to study/relax to” playlists [link]; but where’s Ridge Racer?
A Dota 2 diehard who had played 17,000 games as the fishman assassin Slark posted this impressive total on the subreddit. However, a truly dedicated hater in the comments watched their in-game replays and exposed them for using a hack that revealed enemy wards [link]. The event to an explosion of Slark jokes on the sub, as well as the creation of a real custom minigame called Slark’s Ward Simulator [link]
Multiplayer Witcher 3 mod updated to let you mount other players [link]
A Danish streamer has been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on an old laptop that runs it at 4fps; at his current pace, Tom’s Hardware estimates it will take almost 500 hours to beat the main game [link]
The initial rollout of a rating system for games in Indonesia went awry, mislabeling GTA: San Andreas and adult visual novels as suitable for ages 3+ [link]
A Starcraft II physical authenticator device died after 16 years of service [link]
The Internet
A killer Dynasty staircase montage courtesy of the menswear guy [link]
Amazon’s dub of the new Fist of the North Star anime is taking viewers back to the bad old days of 90s voice acting [link]
The CS streamer ohnePixel’s whole shtick is exaggerated German reactions, but even by his standards this is an impressive noise [link]
Yoshi bath bomb turns into bloodbath [link]
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