I’ve tested the global youth-culture internet and the results have come back positive: Everything is looking up this week. We’re even talking about colonizing Venus, which is cool...if not impossible.
This week in TikTok: Brently and Jeffery make new friends
I’m gonna kick off the heartwarming positivity with the story of Brently and Jeffery. These two Canadian kids like movies, comic books, and slush puppies, but they don’t have many other friends. So they turned to TikTok.
“If you live in the Moncton, New Brunswick area or are just generally in New Brunswick, we’d really like to be your friend ‘cause it’s just the two of us right now, you know?” Brently said in a recent video.
The reaction was mixed. Haters said the video was depressing and pathetic. Others said Brently and Jeffery are awesome, and you’d be lucky to hang out with them. But either way, the video went viral, and soon Brently had thousands of new follows and millions of views. So he organized a meet-up, and lots of awesome people came, and they even brought sodie pop! Sometimes the internet isn’t evil at all.
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This week in streaming: I Think You Should Leave season 2 is live
If you haven’t seen Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave, I’m jealous that you get to experience it for the first time. It’s the funniest, smartest show on TV. ITYSL delves deeply into humor-through-cringe with characters whose inability to navigate social norms inevitably leads to public explosions of embarrassment. It’s hilarious; the perfect show for the internet generation. Season one led to the widely shared Hot Dog Guy meme—a man dressed in a hot dog costume vowing to get to the bottom of the mystery of who crashed the weinermobile, a perfect encapsulation of the nightmare of 2020— so get in there and check it out before it’s memefied. It’s on Netflix. And while you’re at it, track down Robinson’s The Detroiters, a criminally under-appreciated show on Comedy Central.
This week in video games: American troops pulling out of Afghani Pokémon gyms
Last week, American and NATO troops pulled out of Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, leaving behind both Afghani civilians facing an uncertain future and some weak ass Pokémon. When it was filled with thousands of young troops, Bagram hosted a thriving Pokémon Go community, with hotly contested gyms defended by only the strongest Pokémon. Now that the troops are gone, there’s no one to battle. Bagram Air Force base’s Pokémon gyms, once home to only the strongest, highest-CP Pokémon are now defended by weaklings.
According to The Stars and Stripes, a piddly little Lotad has defended the Warrior Chapel at Bagram for ten days, and an Aron has been holding down another gym for two weeks. There’s a bright side, though, as John Sutter, a Pokémon playing military man, pointed out. “I’m sure somewhere in Afghanistan, some kid is bragging about how he took control of an American Pokémon gym,” he said.
This week in global pandemics: Kids faking positive COVID tests
Clever British schoolchildren are reportedly falsifying COVID test results to take days off from school. Before it was banned by TikTok, #fakecovidtest was a thriving hashtag with over six million views. It was full of teens suggesting dumping Coca-Cola, lemon juice, and other substances on COVID tests to fake a positive result.
Surprisingly, it looks like the TikTok videos weren’t just trolls: You can, apparently, break a lateral flow COVID test by dousing it in an acidic liquid like lemon juice, but positive results on that test would likely lead to a not-currently-hackable PCR test for confirmation. Plus, it’s just not a good idea.
“We are sure this involves a very small minority of pupils, and that for the most part the tests are used correctly,” Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told Britain’s iNews.
“However, we would urge parents to ensure that tests are not being misused, and we would suggest to pupils who are interested in chemical reactions that the best place to learn about them is in chemistry lessons in school,” he added, Britishly.
Viral Video of the Week: How to terraform Venus
I can’t even figure out how to keep a basil plant alive in my backyard, but the science-based YouTubers at Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell are figuring out how to terraform the planet Venus. The temperature on Venus is hot enough to melt lead, and the atmosphere is made up almost entirely of CO2, so it’s not going to be easy. The plan is to clean up the CO2 from the atmosphere by building mirrors large enough to block all sunlight from the planet, freezing the deadly atmosphere, and then sending the CO2 elsewhere. From there, we’re going to transport huge blocks of liquid water from the moon Europa somehow, then create miniature artificial suns out of space-mirrors in order to… you know what? It’s not going to work. But it’s a fun video anyway. It’s nice to have hope that we’ll have a livable planet in the future.
