Hello! This week we’re talking about anti-reasoning technology, iconic lawn chairs, and why the colors yellow and pink make Umamusume players see red.
Pixel art utopia poisoned by Deltarune
Deltarune fans made the internet’s most wanted list this past week after vandalizing digital murals of horse girls. The scene of the crime? wplace, a newly launched homage to Reddit’s r/place — a recurring April Fool’s event and collaborative pixel art project — that runs year-round. Every thirty seconds, wplace users can draw a single pixel on a shared canvas stretched across a Google Maps overview of the globe.
Like r/place, wplace was quickly overtaken by hyper-online, ultra-prolific illustrators who were desperate to claim parts of the map on behalf of their respective fandoms. The site is currently replete with band logos, pride flags, and highly detailed portraits of characters from games, TV, and anime — in short, all manner of digital arborglyphs and bathroom wall graffiti.
The ongoing Deltarune vs. horse girl turf war is the most prominent example of the site’s miniature culture wars:
- Deltarune fans staked early claims to locations like the Vatican, building a steady foundation of Deltarune art as more users discovered the site
- Fans of horse girl gacha game-of-the-moment Umamusume: Pretty Derby littered the map with artwork of their favorite characters, including a tribute to Grass Shower, whose real-life inspiration passed away last week (users eventually soured on the mural after learning it was inspired by an AI-generated image, however)
- Meanwhile, other Umamusume fans drew a portrait of horse girl Sakura Bakushin O over North Korea, a nod to a popular headcanon that paints the character as a revolutionary communist
- Eventually, the Deltarune fandom broke containment and started inserting references to the game into unrelated artwork, usually by giving characters pink and yellow eyes as an allusion to Deltarune’s Spamton. Umamusume fans didn’t take kindly to this, leading to callout posts on both Twitter and Reddit
- Umamusume fans weren’t alone in their ire; a contingent of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans eviscerated a sprite of Spamton caught in “the Zone,” for example, as other wplace users began to take notice of the Deltarune fandom’s hijinks
Not all wplace users were pitting Ralseis against Rice Showers. Elsewhere:
- Fans of the game Hytale — a Minecraft-style sim that Riot Games canceled in June after over ten years of development — draped a meticulously drawn “#SaveHytale” mural over Riot’s LA office in protest
- A priest defence force emerged to halt the ever-expanding void in New Jersey
- WWII nerds recreated the Battle of Iwo Jima
- Fans of incest-optional visual novel The Coffin of Andy and Leyley covered Alabama with artwork of the game’s titular siblings
- Users buried J.K. Rowling’s house under a tapestry of trans pride flags
Overall, as a social experiment designed to capture the zeitgeist in online culture, wplace can be viewed as a resounding success — though this also means it’s still full of griefers and bigoted dogwhistles. Nevertheless, the vibes are mostly good, and the site’s expansive canvas alleviates some of the friction between warring users. If anything, the Deltarune fandom is probably the main victim of any lasting collateral damage; it’ll be hard for wplace users to look at the colors yellow and pink ever again without feeling their blood pressure rising.
AI Pokémon arms race continues
The launch of a big new AI model is now always followed by its ceremonial victory in the original Pokémon on Twitch. While press coverage of these runs seems to have mostly evaporated, we at EX have an inexhaustible appetite for streams of non-humans playing games badly, which fit into a long tradition of RNG-driven broadcasts (Twitch Plays Pokémon, fish playing Pokémon) and bot duels (Salty Bet). Twitch viewers also seem drawn to these streams at their weirdest — the original Claude Plays Pokémon channel, which presents more unhinged AI behavior than its successors, still draws tens of thousands of views.
However, Claude was lapped once again last week by OpenAI’s newly released GPT-5. The GPT Plays Pokemon stream set a new record by beating the Elite Four in 161 hours. (The human record is around 100 minutes). It was also the first model to capture Mewtwo. It did accidentally release a Pokémon, but that was one of its only fun mistakes; there wasn't anything on the level of Claude's deranged suicide loops.
But the Pokémon RBY benchmark itself has been criticized for the same reasons as other AI benchmarks: it keeps getting gamed. The programmers who run the Claude/Gemini/GPT Plays Pokemon streams have built an increasingly robust set of tools that their AIs use as they play, leading to criticism that the game’s biggest challenges are “solved in the harness.” GPT-5 has special instructions, custom navigation tools, and walkthroughs it was told to constantly reference. It operates in a way that one Redditor described as “anti-reasoning” — its navigator checks every single tile on the map rather than letting the model think about where to go next.
There are some thorny questions about what playing like a human really means. The question of what makes for an entertaining stream is less complicated. People like watching Claude flail around because it appears to have a personality, and because Twitch chat’s gambling spirit is roused by moments when the AI has a chance to break out of the loop it’s been stuck in for hours or days. It was this illusion of “soul” that held people’s attention. Without it, you’re just left watching the process of automation overcome the possibilities of play.
Robloxia in flames
Check it out, Roblox users can use custom emotes to turn themselves into Minecraft parkour now:
@rosaparksbootystain ♬ Two Time - Jack Stauber's Micropop
Also check it out, Roblox Corp had the worst week ever as several long-simmering child-safety controversies boiled over, causing the stock to drop 7%:
- A Louisiana lawsuit accused the platform of endangering children and failing to remove CSAM. The financial press memorably summarized the situation: “The state accuses Roblox of prioritizing profits over child safety. Roblox doesn't actually have any profits.”
- The To Catch a Predator-style YouTuber Schlep was banned by Roblox Corp for stings where he “actively approached other users” and invited them off-platform for explicit conversations. This ban only drew more attention to Roblox's own inability to combat actual child predators on the platform, leading several influencers to leave the official creator program and sound off about the company's many enforcement failures.
- The same wave of new user-made emotes that enabled the Minecraft parkour stuff also drew criticism for allowing users to crudely simulate sex positions — though probably at the same level as, like, an N64 wrestling game.
- Roblox was banned in Qatar.
Basically everyone who plays Roblox agrees that you don’t go long without seeing some kind of walking penis or suspicious activity in chat. It’s a safety-last platform that hosts entire genres of user-made experiences built around “e-dating.” None of its problems are easily fixable, but that’s largely because the developers have neglected them for so long.
Dead by Daylight community remains mad
An official stream by the developers of asymmetrical horror game Dead by Daylight was disrupted by a hacker this week, preventing streamers from playing with celebrity guest Chandler Riggs (a guy from The Walking Dead). This incident gained further traction on Reddit due to an exasperating clip from shortly before the disaster, when a method for preventing the well-known hack was suggested to the organizers but was dismissed out of hand. The devs later posted several apologies.
Everyone’s favorite closed-captions-on streamer Limmy explained the episode in a bit about why he checks in on the unhappy Dead by Daylight community every week: “If you feed off of negativity, you’ll love this….It’s really good….If you’re inclined like I am to get a buzz off of that, I don’t know what the term is for that, evil?”
Chum Box
AI
After the release of OpenAI’s GPT-5 last week, many noted that the model had toned down the gratingly sycophantic “voice” of ChatGPT 4o, which was widely mocked back in April. But it turns out that many users loved the old glazer AI, and others found it better at non-coding tasks than GPT-5; widespread complaints forced OpenAI to restore 4o as an option in the model selector [link]
Reuters reported that Facebook’s internal guidelines said it was OK for chatbots to flirt with children and give dangerous medical advice [link]
Gaming
The phenomenally profitable romance gacha game Love and Deepspace (or LADS) erupted in semi-manufactured controversy over a goofy image from the summer event, which shows the female protagonist “princess carrying” one of the game’s hunky dudes. Allegedly this upset someone somewhere, but it seems to be mostly a community-wide excuse to talk about a funny image [link]
After a backlash from angry Chinese netizens about the use of historical figures in-game, the Soulslike game Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has made some bosses unkillable — now they just “get exhausted and relax after the fight and talk to you LMAO,” said Lance Macdonald [link]
Justin Wong got parried in real life by a cosplayer at EVO [link]. Jwong was the player on the losing side of EVO Moment #37 [link] and sort of an old-school fighting game heel; these days he’s mellowed out into a streamer and commentator for Street Fighter events
Gacha game Punishing: Gray Raven had an elaborate crossover with Devil May Cry that featured Dante and Virgil’s original voice actors [link]. It also added Vergil’s iconic lawn chair [link], a meme from a DMC5 mod, realizing a years-old joke among PGR fans [link]
How to Hawk Tuah in Super Smash Brothers Melee [link]
The internet
Our friends at the internet-exploring Never Post podcast have a full week of cool streams lined for their member drive – check it out [link, Twitch]
AOL will end its dial-up internet service, also ending the practice of asking people “did you know that thousands of Americans still pay for dial-up?” [link]
The Louvre of Bluesky is an endless gallery of annoying posts, in case you were looking for that [link]
A YTPMV collage with Bjork, MF Doom, and an old TF2 video [link]
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