Hello! This week, we’re talking about unidentified ducks, the int list, and Laura Palmer's theme.
The wildly mundane world of fan wikis
We recently came across an entertaining episode of the weird-internet podcast We Are Not Alive where the hosts discovered that the 110,000-entry Tardis Wiki (a product of the Doctor Who fandom) includes many entries for mundane concepts like urine, table, and gravy. The wiki’s rules recommend making these pages: “any noun mentioned in a narrative we cover is fair game for an article here.”
Gawking at entries like these is a practice as old as the internet, or at least as old as Wookieepedia. Fan wikis err on the side of inclusion, and include many pages about familiar concepts from our own universe, often presented in disconcerting past tense (“Breasts were a functional anatomical feature in some mammalian species”).
Wookieepedia has likely the most-discussed entries on mundane topics in the entire fandom universe. The most controversial, quoted above, is the entry for breast; but reading it, you do have to agree that this subject was of interest to many Star Wars writers and artists when designing alien races. 12 years ago, an April Fool’s Day prank turned the page into a frattish discourse on boobs, causing a major schism among the site’s readers that was followed by a sheepish apology (“Wookieepedia has not ignored the voiced displeasure by many…”). An image of a topless Twi’lek was once featured on the page, but has been replaced by one of topless Kylo Ren.
Wookieepedia also maintains an entry for duck — ducks are mentioned in one sentence of the original Star Wars novelization — as well as a lengthier entry for unidentified duck individual, an alien who appeared in one comic strip.
Some other greatest hits:
- Like many fan wikis, the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha includes an entry for table, explaining their use in starship operation as well as gaming.
- The Minecraft wiki contains an entry for air, because the empty space in the world is technically made up of air blocks that can be cheated into a player’s inventory. There is unique “cave air” when underground.
- The Pokemon wiki Bulbapedia includes an entry on rice balls, which cowardly localizers referred to as “donuts” in the show’s original English dub.
- The highly opinionated Transformers wiki has an entry about how scale in the Transformers universe makes no sense. It may not belong on this list, but it’s good.
It's still possible to get banned on Twitter
Last week, the AI image/video generation site Higgsfield managed to get its account banned from Twitter last week, which takes some doing these days. If you’ve very reasonably chosen to avoid the platform, just know that its AI sector is completely overrun with competing “all-in-one” startups selling metered access to models like Sora 2 and Nano Banana Pro.
Higgsfield is one of the most successful of these, and their ceaseless promotional posts defined the AI marketing playbook: constant “ends-today” discounts, exhortations to comment and reply to every post for rewards, and sizzle reels designed to offend and annoy. Sites like Leonardo AI, ImagineArt, and OpenArt have all adopted this kind of marketing voice, which makes it unusual when anyone in the space posts without hyperventilating.
Higgsfield stood out as the most obnoxious engagement baiter, often crediting themselves with causing droughts and “creative job losses.” The last claim actually struck a nerve with their audience — it borrowed the anti-creative rhetoric of other AI hype men on Twitter, but Higgsfield’s video-generating users consider themselves to be creatives. This misstep prompted angry creators to investigate the material used in Higgsfield's relatively slick ads, which turned out to include generic motion graphics templates posing as AI, as well as video-to-video reskins of shots from existing films. The incident also resurfaced an impressively long list of user complaints relating to “unlimited” plans that were not unlimited and creator payouts that were never paid.
The point is, whatever false promises and UI dark patterns and EU legal noncompliance you were imagining happening on pay-as-you-go AI sites, the reality is worse. Higgsfield was breaking so many rules of good behavior that it’s impossible to know what they were actually suspended for. But it also seems like they only really got banned due to a pitchfork-wielding mob tagging the platform’s employees about it; they remain unbanned on Instagram, which isn’t PvP-enabled the way Twitter is.
The Notepad curse
In 2026’s second Windows Notepad-related streaming scandal, long-tenured lolcow streamer LowTierGod accidentally revealed an apparent record of his child support payments on stream by opening Notepad on Sunday. This was a turning point in the trollish streamer’s long-running war with his online “detractors” (antagonistic accounts that upload a streamer’s lowlights, in LTG’s case often photoshopping him to look older), who had long berated him about this subject.
The incident followed on the heels of another Notepad disaster. Last month, degen gacha game streamer Lacari inadvertently shared a number of heinous (and seemingly criminal) links when he opened the program, then spent an hours-long stream attempting to explain their appearance as a glitch or malware.
Both of these incidents resulted from Windows 11’s helpful session restore feature: by default Notepad now reopens the last file you were looking at, whether you saved it or not. But they also point to Notepad’s unlikely prominence in modern streaming culture. Outside of OBS and games, the humble Windows utilities Notepad and MSPaint may be the software most frequently used and discussed by streamers. When xQc wanted to talk to his chat while hiding from his maids, he pulled up Notepad. When Tyler1 maintained an “int list” of teammates he despised (inting means intentionally dying to throw the game), he would pull up Notepad. And many normal, non-cancelled streamers open it daily without incident, in its regular role as a lightweight program that helps disorganized people remember the next two things they were supposed to do. MSPaint has a similar status among streamers, and is frequently used by tech guys like ThePrimeagen and PirateSoftware to explain computing concepts (usually by drawing a box and writing a label on it).
The weirdest thing here is that there isn’t already a longer list of streamers who have made some kind of career-ending mistake on Notepad, given that the restore session update rolled out in 2023. Instead, after years of unremarkable service, we have a sudden contagion of Notepad scandals in 2026. Is the concept of digital notes too powerful? Should streamers return to taking notes with marker on their own hands?
Chum Box
Games
Hall of fame comedy streamer Jerma985 replayed Casino, Inc. [link], a forgotten tycoon game from 2003. His previous 2020 playthrough [link] went wildly off the rails and became a favorite among fans.
The ridiculous list of voice cameos in the strategy roguelike Mewgenics became a hot topic for including several cancelled streamers as well as seemingly random celebrities like the rapper Logic, the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, and Re-Animator star Barbara Crampton [link]
A new cheating scandal about the disgraced Minecrafter Dream broke when Minecraft parkour specialists re-examined his old footage from the Minecraft Championship tournament [link]. It's funny now to remember the first Dream cheating scandal, which was a mathematical certainty [link], but had to be tiptoed around to avoid attracting the ire of his preteen fan army.
“AVGN's football rant is highly compatible with laura palmer's theme” [link]
The Internet
All fonts go to heaven [link]
Gnome country for old men [link]
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One Last Thing
Horrible Monday morning ambiance with agony screams playlist