Hello! This week we’re talking about turning to a life of cringe, winning at horse plinko, and getting your oof back.
Bad music is just business
With all the clamor about AI-generated bands and fake city pop playlists these days, it’s easy to forget that plenty of hard-working humans are still out there making bad music by hand. Intentionally bad songs have become a sort of cottage industry on social media, generating publicity for artists and views for reaction channels that make “bad Instagram music” compilations.
The idea isn’t new: bad songs have periodically gone viral since Rebecca Black’s “Friday” in 2011, or maybe Leona Anderson’s “Rats in my Room” in 1957, depending on how loosely you define viral. More recent examples include the “I am rectangular” guy, who seems to be a CEO first and musician second, or the authentically painful TikTok lowlight “Married in a year.”
Several YouTube influencers have started doing periodic roundups of bad Instagram music, including Anthony Fantano, who — say what you will about his reviews — always finds a bumper crop of insane clips. But he, and most of the people talking about this, usually don’t look too far into the artists’ other accounts. The creator Shun dug into it and found that many of the most obnoxious artists had a history of creating better music that got no attention, then turned to a life of cringe after discovering that the algorithm would finally give them air time if they did so.
The subreddit r/crappymusic, which surfaces many of the clips that become fodder for reactors on other platforms, found the “queen” of the format in auto_parts_store_tina, who does karaoke covers of songs like “Beat It” with lyrics promoting a warehouse full of used car engines owned by Guangzhou Xinwangda Auto Parts.
Whatever one thinks about people making bad music for publicity and reactors compiling it for views, it is something the machines can’t do — a credible human performer is essential to the genre.
Horse girl game finds shocking success
Umamusume: Pretty Derby, a gacha game about anthropomorphic horse girls who compete in races and sing pop songs, recently reached #1 on Steam’s top sellers list. This was a cause for both celebration and confusion among gacha fans, some of whom had played the Japanese version of the game for years, but did not expect its surreal concept (real-life racehorses reimagined as anime girls) to translate to the mainstream.
There’s a lot to say about Umamusume’s presentation — it’s less horny than gacha games like Zenless Zone Zero, its story cutscenes are more elaborately animated, and its races actually seem to have gotten more developer attention than the lootbox animations did. But more importantly, it prompted another eruption of memes from the gacha mines, where the fervor of K-pop stan culture meets the emotional rollercoaster of a gambling addiction.
These include:
- “Have you ever played goo-goo babies with your life on the line?” In the storyline for the “motherly” character/horse Super Creek, she asks to play “goo-goo babies,” which is some kind of age regression play where she talks to the player as if he’s a baby. (Scene at timestamp.) Fans reused an image from the soccer manga Blue Lock (“Have you ever played soccer with your life on the line?!!”) to arrive at this more powerful formulation, which was spammed at streamers like Northernlion and Koefficient whenever they played the game.
- “Bakushin”: The intensely annoying song “Bakushin Bakushin Bakushin” is just the word “Bakushin” over and over; the horse (?) who sings it, Sakura Bakushin O, will set it playing on the in-game jukebox in the lobby.
- Haru Urara: A horse whose unbroken losing streak became national news in Japan in the early 2000s. Her in-game storyline led to a new wave of attention from English-speaking fans, who paid for shipments of ryegrass to the real retired horse.
Revenge of DashCon
The disastrous 2014 Tumblr fan convention DashCon has long since passed into internet legend (and has sometimes curdled into culture-war caricatures). But it became, for better or worse, a potent symbol of Tumblr culture. After years of “Dashcon 2” jokes, a new round of organizers actually staged the event on July 5, and it sounds like it was a resounding success. The convention included another ball pit, an appearance by one of DashCon’s original organizers cosplaying as a ball pit [link], “IRL horse plinko,” and panels about the Warrior Cats books and the infamous vampire fanfic My Immortal.
Probably the best summary came from poster @indigosfindings, who was generally positive but also said:
i felt there were conspicuous absences in the reproduction of like the Artifacts of early-to-mid-10s tumblr fandom….in neither cosplay nor merch was there any presence of hetalia! i think maybe an event like this kind of sifts out the things that people actually maintain nostalgia for--the things that can be affectionately called "an embarrassing memory" versus the things that are collectively considered *actually* too embarrassing to acknowledge
Hetalia: Axis Powers was a 2006 gag comic (and later anime) that turned the warring nations of WWII into bickering boys based on national stereotypes. The whole thing was an invitation to be offensive (Wikipedia categorizes it as “dark humour anime,” a sure sign that you’re in a classy neighborhood), which made it controversial in the 2010s and unworkable on most of today’s internet, as Indigo suggests.
That said, you can still find active fan accounts on Tumblr who don't seem to be up to anything more sinister than baking Hetalia-themed cheesecakes and using the characters as a moodboard. Tumblr is just one of those places where fandoms can keep running happily in low-power mode, far from the searchlight of big-internet discourse.
Chum Box
AI
We previously wrote about the specific phrases that AI models repeat ad nauseam — what users call the model's “slop.” The most notorious of these is saying something is “not x but y” in an emphatic and annoying way. Someone actually made a slop leaderboard comparing different models’ overuse of this construction, and ChatGPT-4o ranks predictably high [link]
The streamer Nova has been playing through games while on the phone with Sesame’s “Miles” conversational AI [link], leading to a number of wild misunderstandings [link]
Gaming
Legendary YT channel Classics of Game returned after a three-year absence [link]
An insane Runescape skate video made in Blender [link]
Upcoming samurai game Ghosts of Yōtei has a lo-fi beats mode with an original soundtrack [link]
Roblox got its OOF back [link]. The famous death sound was missing for three years after a copyright dispute in 2022. Also, if you’ve never seen it, here is the obligatory link to Hbomberguy’s two-hour documentary on OOF’s alleged creator [link]
The strategy game Silence of the Siren, which is like Heroes of Might and Magic but sci-fi, renamed itself Heroes of Science and Fiction to save everyone time [link]
2008 Suzuki Swift GL in Morrowind [link]
The internet
The shark girl VTuber formerly known as Gawr Gura, who left the big VTuber agency Hololive in May, returned to streaming as an independent, legally distinct fish character named Sameko Saba in late June [link]. Many Saba clips have been escaping containment lately, like one posted by a fan highlighting the facial tracking on her new avatar [link]
The loaded dice used in a Warhammer 40K cheating scandal survived the perpetrator’s attempt to flush them down the toilet and are now framed on the wall of a Manchester games shop [link to comment explanation]
A banger from the r/crappymusic archives [link]
Photo of a huge stick bug climbing on a man’s face [link]
“What I imagine when I hear ‘techno feudalism’” [link]
Longreads
From 2013: Sam Kriss’s review of the DSM-5 as a “dystopian novel in the classic mode” [link]
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