Hello! We’re back in action after an unexpectedly long hibernation. This week, we’re talking about Kinect raves, radioactive spiders, and fishy experiences.
PinkPantheress nostalgia ported to 3DS
Back in 2024, PinkPantheress’ music drew comparisons to Sonic the Hedgehog OSTs and the BGM for fighting game character selection screens. The parallels were sensible enough; her music helped establish breakbeat loops and jungle samples as a part of the pop music zeitgeist, hearkening back to the days of Jet Set Radio and Ridge Racer. Nowadays, however, her work is more commonly associated with games from a completely different era: life sims released for the Nintendo DS and 3DS.
This “ultimate girly tunes” playlist puts her music in conversation with DS staples like Tomodachi Life, MiiTopia, and the Style Savvy franchise, titles that today’s mixtape-makers classify as “girlypop.” Some fans prefer listening to her music through a modded 3DS, while others produce fake DS cartridge adaptations of her records. Concertgoers are likely to use their 3DS to film performances or request a selfie.
There are a few possible explanations for this. The first is that members of the 3DS generation are simply old enough to start experiencing nostalgia, so it’s natural for aesthetic trends to shift from Y2K to Frutiger Aero. There have been plenty of 3DS sightings at shows headlined by artists like 100 Gecs and Death Grips over the past couple of years.
On the other hand, PinkPantheress’ sample-heavy production also reflects the anachronistic nature of the modern-day internet; throughout her latest mixtape, Fancy That, jungle basslines slither around samples of both Panic! at the Disco and Nardo Wick of “What the fuck is that?” fame. From this perspective, it makes sense that multiple producers have thought to mash up her music with samples of the BGM from the 3DS internet settings menu, staying true to her esoteric sound palette.
Honest machinery honored with TikTok edits
We only started noticing heavy machinery TikTok edits at the tail end of 2025, when this Kesha-scored montage hit our feeds. Made in the same punchy After Effects style as the platform’s many tributes to gacha game characters or Jujutsu Kaisen bad boys, it seems to be the work of Taylor White of Ken White Construction, who’s some sort of Canadian construction influencer, judging from his Instagram.
But the trend has been ongoing for a while: similar edits by other socially savvy construction companies and bored editors go back to 2024. And it seems alive and well in 2026, which has already seen another notable heavy machinery edit by a German photographer uploaded at the start of January. (Ambitiously, he’s also put up a store page with a €100 course on “how to make a viral excavator edit.”)
Despite the clearly mercenary motives of everyone involved, you’ve got to applaud the instinct to create fancams and music videos glorifying the world’s honest trench-digging and mulching equipment, especially when these clips of real machines still outperform AI-fabricated renditions of sandcrawler-sized excavators and backhoes bitten by radioactive spiders.
Nobody plays the most popular game on Roblox
Last year, you couldn’t walk outside without tripping over a pile of Korblox legs and abusive Admins left over from the latest record-breaking Roblox experience. Both Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot achieved industry-leading player counts and unbeatable playground mindshare through weekly updates that doubled as in-game giveaways, as well as a WWE-style rivalry between both games’ developers, who appeared in their respective games as omnipotent avatars occasionally accompanied by NFL stars and other special guests.
But things have calmed down a little. Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot have fallen out of the platform’s top five. One of the current top Roblox games — trading places with survival title 99 Nights in the Forest — is Fish It!, a title that seems out of step not just with last year’s FOMO-driven frenzy but also with the tastes of most Roblox creators. It’s a carbon copy of Fisch, a Roblox hit from late 2024 that faded away by April.
The interesting thing about Fish It!, as the Roblox influencer NightFoxx pointed out, is that it has basically no footprint in the English-speaking world. It doesn’t get traction on social media, YouTubers don’t get views when they play it, and all of its fans seem to be from Indonesia. Stat trackers show it has a 30-minute average playtime and an oddly flat hourly player count, similar to Steam idler games like Banana, which could mean it’s being played by bots rather than humans. The game even encourages “afk gameplay” with a built-in auto-fishing mode, providing official support for the automation tools that the original Fisch tolerated but "heavily frowned upon," according to its Discord.
The theory among most Roblox commenters seems to be that Fish It!’s numbers are inflated by bot accounts that fish up rare items to sell online for real money. Item trading has been a common feature in Roblox hits for a while — seen in the original Fisch, Grow a Garden, and even the acquisitive free-for-all of Steal a Brainrot — and the platform’s trading culture has trended on TikTok under hashtags like #ngf (“not going first”). A quick search for Fish It! trading sites returns many options for buying “mythic fish” for real money. But it’s hard to say it’s really any fishier than Roblox’s older gambling-for-kids experiences, like Sol’s RNG, which boast similar playtime stats and pseudo-gameplay. The weirdest thing here may be that the addition of a single feature — auto-fishing — was enough to revive a spent game concept and make it a sensation in a whole new region.
Recs
Beating ARC Raiders
I know: everyone already played ARC Raiders, and most players already moved on. Understandably! The quest chains lead nowhere, the game’s rarest guns are outperformed by the common ones, and the cosmetics look shabby. But in retrospect, the absence of player-retention hooks gives your experience with ARC a more natural shape; it lets you walk away feeling good. They even provide an ending. If you collect enough humidifiers, light bulbs, and scrap metal to complete a giant shopping list, your character gets to leave on an Expedition into the wastes, resetting your progress and leaving you to start again as someone else. While this is analogous to a seasonal wipe in Tarkov or prestiging in CoD, it’s accompanied by a real cutscene — easily the best in the game, and the only one where anyone seems happy to see you. All multiplayer shooters should have an ending like this, but you can see why they don’t. It feels like an invitation to quit playing forever. [Chris]
Shinda Gankyuu - 眼球奇譚：前編-20世紀の終わり-
Raine
Heavily processed vocals — crystallized by autotune, pitch-bent into ethereal choirs, bit-crushed and torn apart by 808s — are ubiquitous across pop music nowadays, reflecting a post-”hyperpop” fixation on probing the uncanny valley. Yet what impressed me the most about Shinda Gankyuu’s 眼球奇譚：前編-20世紀の終わり- is the way in which it teases the humanity out of the synthetic. It’s an android graveyard rustling with life. Throughout the record, UTAUloids (personified voicebanks developed for the freeware VOCALOID alternative UTAU) deliver quivering melodies and whisper through forests of reverb. As songs careen between idol pop and shoegaze, between harsh noise and anthemic rock, Shinda Gankyuu wields UTAUloids like acoustic instruments; though the vibrato and breathiness in their voices might just be illusions spun with sine waves and white noise, they deliver performances rich with human anguish and longing. Be forewarned: It’s not for the faint of heart. [Pao]
Chum Box
AI
The developer of a subscriber-management app argued that the AI boom has led to a flood of new apps with no users — 24,000 new subscription apps on the App Store in the last quarter, with just 700 making more than $100 [link]
If you're wondering if anyone's actually making money off "faceless" AI videos, an influencer tutorial led us to this fully automated war-stories channel with 168K subs, which pairs sometimes wonky slideshows with somewhat true tales of valor [link]
Games
How to perform Tekken's Korean backdash IRL [link]
Dark Caramelldansen [link]
Disney's official account paid tribute to Five Nights at Freddy's [link]
Very cool TikToker BFFWAV turns Pokemon into sounds [link]
Using an Xbox Kinect to record a rave [link]
Ancient Touhou meme song “Night of Nights" returns with a vengeance in throwback edit [link]
A tiny #hardtechno edit about Minecraft's Totem of Undying [link]
Minecraft ASMR gone wrong [link]
The internet
Relive every online musical trend of 2025 in just 90 seconds [link]
Bloomberg reported that betting against Christ’s return on Polymarket yielded a 5.5% return in 2025 [link]
Rating the jiggle physics of sea anemones [link]
Motorcyclist goes on incredible journey after consuming incredibly gross drink [link]
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