Hello! This week, we're talking about liberal remixes, LARPing as AI, and Bombo World.
Cookie’s Bustle triumphs over the copyright trolls
Cookie, the digital baby bear that stole the internet’s hearts in 2019, is finally free. For years, 1999’s Cookie’s Bustle: Mysterious Bombo World — a surreal Japanese point-and-click adventure game — has been plagued by spurious copyright claims that threatened to condemn the game to obscurity. But this past Tuesday, the Video Game History Foundation announced that it had used its legal resources to put an end to the trolling once and for all, representing a rare victory in the world of video game preservation. Fans have been commemorating the occasion by reuploading Cookie’s Bustle Let’s Plays and highlights that were at risk of being lost to the void forever.
Cookie’s Bustle is the stuff of lost media gold. The game follows Cookie, a 5-year-old from New Jersey who sees herself as a baby bear, as she ventures to Bombo World, a country in the midst of a violent conflict between its alien-dominated government and a group of terrorists. (Moments after the opening credits finish, she watches as a bus full of passengers is instantly obliterated by a rocket launcher.) It features hundreds of NPCs, sports minigames, and even emotional balladry. At one point Cookie acquires the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its absurdist tone and structure made it an instant cult hit upon its exposure to the English-speaking internet.
But throughout 2022, the UK trade association Ukie issued DMCA takedowns to a number of content creators and fan artists who had posted work related to the game. The actions were filed on behalf of Graceware, a company that the VGHF eventually outed as fraudulent.
A team of preservationists has maintained a thorough timeline of Cookie’s struggle for liberation throughout the controversy:
- Rodik, a company that mostly developed fortune-telling software, released Cookie’s Bustle in 1999. They shuttered in the mid-2000s, and their trademark registration for Cookie’s Bustle failed in 2008.
- Cookie’s Bustle emerged from the sea of obscurity following a leak in 2018. Once she reached the English-speaking internet, Cookie could not be contained; lost media curators like the YouTube channel Classics of Game helped proliferate footage of the game throughout the following years, while devoted fans started working on translation projects.
- In 2021, someone began filing applications for trademark ownership over Cookie’s Bustle under the name “Brandon White,” who’s also listed as the copyright owner of Graceware. A slew of DMCA takedowns swept across the game’s burgeoning fandom in 2022, targeting everything from longplays to Discord discussions. Vinny Vinesauce was immediately issued copyright strikes following his 2023 stream of the game, drawing more public attention to the onslaught of takedowns.
- After weathering their own fair share of DMCA notices, the VGHF prepared a legal defense and notified Ukie that neither Brandon White nor Graceware had any legitimate claim to the game’s trademark, rendering their takedown attempts invalid. Ukie responded by suspending their services for Graceware, effectively putting the trolling saga to rest. The internet collectively rejoiced.
The VGHF’s investigation revealed that Brandon White / Graceware had taken advantage of low-cost services and unscrupulous processes that allowed their flimsy claims of trademark ownership to go unchallenged. Ukie’s takedown services are carried out by a company named Obviously (formerly Web Capio) that automates the issuance of notices, likely without thorough legal scrutiny. The VGHF notes that, without access to legal resources like theirs, individual creators and fans remain vulnerable to these takedowns, with devastating consequences for game preservation.
But for now, nature is healing and Cookie is back on the menu. Classics of Game has begun reuploading their old Cookie’s Bustle clips, while fans of Vinny Vinesauce have already repopulated YouTube with several VODs of his 2023 stream.
A flashback to a more candid internet
This fanmade music video for Geese’s “Cobra” captures a specific flavor of nostalgia: a longing for the era of truly candid YouTube videos. It cuts between various clips of people dancing, each one baked with varying levels of digital compression. While it also contains footage of flash mobs and late night segments, it mostly revolves around home movie-style videos characteristic of early YouTube, when view counts were more modest and content formats were loosely defined. For many commenters, the video inspires powerful nostalgia for the social hits of the mid-to-late 2000s, before more cynical engagement bait took over.
You could write it off as an outgrowth of the ongoing Y2K nostalgia gripping the cultural consciousness, but there’s more to it than that. In recent years, platforms like TikTok have codified the way people post videos of themselves to the public, reflecting the growing use of memes as vehicles for social interaction and self-expression. The advent of the influencer economy also had a hand in encouraging more streamlined formats for documenting one’s daily life. The era of home movies quietly gave way to the era of vlogging, which eventually gave way to the era of DIMLs and TikTok choreography. But videos like this gesture towards the need for freer forms of self-expression — the ability to truly dance like no one’s watching.
Distressing earworm developed
In mid-February, several fandoms started feverishly remixing a years-old Alex Jones bit where the conspiracy theorist begins chanting “liberal, liberal, liberal” and launching into song. Nintendo and Deltarune fans were particularly into this, maybe because those scenes already have very active remix / “fan OST” cultures.
Here’s one killer compilation — stick around for the remix of “The World Revolving”:
Somehow, the red and bankrupt figure of Alex Jones has returned as a revitalized meme avatar, appearing also in a word-association meme from February. But the internet works differently now than in the heyday of Alex Jones memes. Millennial culture writers used to busy themselves separating memes into left- and right-signifying camps and ascribing great influence to them; academics used to chastise lefties for promoting Alex Jones by mocking his gay frog rant.
These days, people aren’t sweating the small stuff so much. Everyone on TikTok and Twitter gets blasted with Epstein and Kirkified memes that could offend someone from any political quadrant, but are largely divorced from any message beyond button-pushing. The “liberal” remixes seem similarly meaningless, distorting the likeness and voice of Alex Jones into pure noise. For their part, the creators seem to be young YTPers on Twitter linked only by video game fandom and their shared delight in pitching Jones’ voice up or down.
Chum Box
AI
Claude is apparently the only LLM willing to call users out on their bullshit, according to a benchmark that asks AI models nonsensical questions and rates their responses [link]
Youraislopbores.me is a site where you pretend to be an AI chatbot and respond to humans’ requests for information or drawings [link]
Games
A Geometry Dash level turns the music video for Vocaloid Kasane Teto’s “Birdbrain” into a dizzying multimedia experience [link]
A new Resident Evil game means new save room music has dropped [link]; add it to the compilation [link]
Vampire Survivors but it’s Windows antivirus [link]
Shigeru Miyamoyo once likened video game secrets to “grotesque” pornography [link]
One of the original characters in massive fighting game mod Smash Remix is an evil piano [link]; Mad Piano was introduced first as an April Fool’s Day bit, then added to the game for real later in 2020.
The Internet
Traffic to tech publications has fallen almost 60% since 2024 according to SEO firm Growtika, which attributes the decline to Google’s AI overview and Reddit [link]. The article doesn’t seem to account for the role paywalls have played — The Verge’s traffic dip, for example, seems to coincide with its switch to a subscription model.
Fantasy dildo company Bad Dragon defeated the developers of roguelike Cult of the Lamb in a bidding war for the mechanical “butt birth” rhino prop from Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls [link]
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