Hello! This week, we're talking about Chicago’s finest, unholy chessboards, and hidden lobsters.
A brilliant Instagram account
@chicagosanitation is an Instagram account that posts vomitous animated PSAs about inhalant abuse, 9/11, red meat, and the talking dumpster Trashee; some say it isn’t run by the real department of Streets and Sanitation, though you never know. As good as the account is, they have an even better early-00s website with an odor report form, a lot of military propaganda, an unusual CAPTCHA, and a 9/11 page with a moment of silence button. They use AI to make their ramshackle animations, which are impressively nauseating. “Unfortunately I do find stuff like this to absolutely be art,” one viewer wrote.
Demo season returns
Steam Next Fest — the online storefront’s triannual festival of free game demos — returned last week to send millennials into reveries about PC Gamer demo discs and PS1 game samplers. There was a lot of good shit this time around:
- Forbidden Solitaire — an MS-DOS horror pastiche from the makers of Regency Solitaire — may have been the single most compulsively playable game of the fest, though it seems like it will be short.
- Titanium Court, a shape-shifting tile-matching game, has a nice flow and a theme song that gets stuck in your head for days. “Nine out of ten doctors recommend doing anything other than opening Steam and searching for AP Thompson’s most recent release.”
- “Balatro but chess” game Gambonanza lets you upgrade your pieces as you play through a variety of chess puzzles on a mini-board; the mutating board adds a dimension to the game that makes it feel fresher than other Balatro imitators, though its union of chess and gambling is unholy.
- “Peak but Granny and also gnomes” friendslop game Burglin’ Gnomes, where you team up to torment an angry old man, probably has the most traction with YouTubers at the moment, as many were sent copies in advance of its Next Fest debut.
- Blobby pixel-art roguelite Everything is Crab, where you eat other animals to evolve, was a standout among the fun-size Vampire Survivors-likes.
- Sledding Game, a hangout title with no real goals but a bunch of hidden tricks and items, feels like a successor to casual social titles like Webfishing.
PC Gamer found one theme: turning everything into Balatro, with many games swiping its shop design and some biting its entire look. Another throughline among the most popular demos, like Windrose and Far Far West, was a focus on multiplayer co-op. But with 3,400 demos, any pattern was a trick of perspective — the impressive part is how different everyone’s lists of favorites wind up being.
The comparison to late-90s demo discs was widespread: the Neon White-like speed FPS Cicadamata incorporated it into their demo’s splash screen and intro, as did others. But the real reason kids used to prize demo discs was a lack of other options — back in the day, you played 10 hours of the ESPN eXtreme Games demo on the PS1 because you only owned two other games on the system. Next Fest, by comparison, presents a glut of options to users who already have giant backlogs of great games they’ll never play. You do feel bad for the bottom 3,300 demos that never climb to the front page; how many of them could have become an all-time favorite for some bored kid back in 1995?
It’s not like reaching the top of the Next Fest leaderboard guarantees success, either. You can look back at the top 5 from most previous events (Oct. 2024: Delta Force, Supervive, Strinova, Rivals of Aether 2, and Gladio Mori) and see that Fest hits don’t always translate to retail triumphs. Instead it feels like the Fest itself becomes more of an institution with each round, leading to more publications and specialist creators posting roundups and recs each time. The discussion also skews unusually positive for a gaming event — the Fest spawns listicles, not reviews, and avoids spiky discourse cycles of reaction and counter-reaction, allowing everyone to walk away feeling good.
The secret to AI content is a disapproving human host
When looking at AI channels on social media, you see so many people selling shovels that it’s hard to find anyone actually mining. That is to say, you see a lot of guys selling workflows and courses about fake influencers and automated slop creation, but not many people credibly making bank off dancing dogs or whatever the current video-gen trend is.
It’s easier to find thriving channels that react to AI trends than to find anyone with long-term success slinging the slop themselves. We’ve seen a number of similar react channels spring up around the AI trick of the week — the channel FatherPhi, for example, films himself asking AI about the car wash question, upside-down cups, the seahorse emoji, and so on while shaking his head theatrically at the LLM’s foolishness. The account Showtoolsai does something similar with r/isthisAI content rather than r/chatGPT content, debunking videos of exploding trees and fake NFL footage while pointing out context clues that betray the misshapen hand of the machine.
The most sustainable quality-agnostic AI channel we’ve seen might be Dan Dingle, whose videos are inevitably called things like “Idiots Laugh At TERRIBLE AI Videos,” and show the streamer taking weird ideas from his chat and feeding them into the latest video-generation models. Many creators tried out similar formats in the 2023 heyday of Bing Image Creator, but few adapted it to video generation, which is expensive and still very hit-or-miss. Dingle’s format actually works better on a miss; it shows how often generators like Seedance 2 still scramble prompts and output nonsense, which tutorial guys and hype men have no incentive to show you.
The common thread is that all of these channels document real people using AI, or breaking down how it was used. For the moment, a human frontman still seems essential; though faceless AI channels have proliferated, they can’t carve out their own niches, as even their finest slop will be quickly cloned by other indistinguishable accounts.
Chum Box
Games
The reveal of a new Pomeranian puppy Pokémon, Pombon, has mobilized Dog People across the internet well in advance of the 2027 release of Pokémon Winds and Waves. It also revived an old strain of anti-bipedal discourse within the Pokémon fandom, where players bemoan the fact that quadrupeds often evolve into awkward bipedal Pokémon. “Please keep it a cool/cute animal on all fours and not a weird humanoid,” one wrote. [link]
SegaSonic ring satiety faces [link] are the new GamePro reviewer faces [link]
Kyle Bosman, whose weekly YouTube reviews of game marketing are always a treat, released an unusually caustic episode about departing Xbox boss Phil Spencer, spending about 10 minutes reading increasingly over-the-top passages from various corporate eulogies [link]. “With all due respect, Phil Spencer has been failing for 12 years straight. And to her credit, Sarah Bond has been doing a bad job too.”
The free weekend for Bungie’s imminent extraction shooter Marathon did little to settle arguments between the game’s large built-in bases of fans and haters, but it confirmed that the game will feature lobsters [link]
A sick PinkPantheress CoD edit [link]
Pikmin lion dance [link]
Every stationary NPC in Morrowind slowly drifts out of position over the course of hours due to an idle animation that skips a frame [link]
Musician Gale Sosa made musical themes for Olive Garden (N64) [link] and Arby's (PS1) [link]
The Internet
An animated homage to 2010s EDM [link]
A brain-attacking sentence in a re-captioned cartoon [link] got us thinking about other classics like “why do they call it oven” [link]. In the case of the museum cartoon, the language derives from an ancient Scooby Doo YTP [link]
Connect with EX
- Feedback? Hit reply or email team@exresearch.co
- Follow us on Twitter [link]
- Follow us on Threads [link]
- Follow us on Bluesky [link]
- Support us with a donation by clicking Account