All decent people look back at their youth and think, “I sure was a callow idiot” (but hopefully in an affectionate way). Remembering the combination of grandiosity and dumb-i-osity that you once embodied is really the key to understanding younger people, because what could be grander and dumber than making a bowl of strawberries internationally famous?
TikTok’s hottest superstar is a bowl of strawberries and chocolate
The video is nothing special: It’s a single shot with a bunch of zooms and Bobby Caldwell’s 1978 song “What You Won’t Do for Love” playing in the background. It’s not dissimilar to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of clips of people showing off their food on TikTok, but something about the timing and content of this one sent it into the stratosphere. No one knows why—which I find inexplicably unsettling in a “maybe we are all ghosts” way—but once it was in front of people, they started liking it (who doesn’t like strawberries?). Then people caught on to how strange it was, and viewing, sharing, and commenting upon the strawberries became participatory group-humor. TikTok’s user base is now consciously fighting to make the strawberry video the most liked piece of content on the site, just to be funny. The current TikTok “likes” champion is this lip-sync from Bella Poarch with 64.1 million likes that was posted in 2017. Strawberries are at 37.3M in only three weeks. I think it can win.
What are “showing up to the competition” memes?
I love meme formats that are difficult to explain but easy to illustrate, like the “showing up to the competition” images that are taking over TikTok this month. The gist: showing a video of yourself arriving at a ridiculous competition, and learning you’ve been bested by an even more ridiculous competitor. Like this video entitled “When you show up to the being late competition and your opponent isn’t there yet.” Or “Me arriving to the kindest person competition but my opponent didn’t show up just so I can win.” Or “When I show up to the spreading misinformation competition but my opponent gave me the wrong address.” Or “When I show up for the gaslighting competition and it isn’t even real.” If you’d like to enjoy more of these videos, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of examples at this link for the atonal piano soundtrack that accompanies them.
The “how many cubes are on the trailer?” controversy explained
Credit: @Rainmaker1973 – Twitter/X
How many cubes are on the truck above? That’s the deceptively complicated question @Rainmaker1973 asked on a recent post that went viral on Twitter. A little back-of-the-envelope math gives an answer of 51 (There’s 3×7 cubes on the lowest level, the second 3×6 in the middle, and the top has 3×4 boxes.) But is that the correct answer? It depends.
51 is only the right answer if you assume that every layer has three cubes, but we don’t have a view that accounts for all the cubes; so it could be fewer than 51 cubes on the truck if they’re arranged in an unexpected way. For that matter, who can say if the cubes we can’t see are the same size as the cubes we can see? They could be several blocks wide in the middle, for instance, and so there would be fewer still because part of the truck cargo wouldn’t be cubes at all.
An image with a 3/4 diagonal view would make it clear, but that’s not the point of these kinds of purposefully confusing math and logic puzzles. The real puzzle is figuring out what information is missing from the original question so that you can respond, “There is no answer.” This is fun, but if realizing there is no answer is presented as a measure of intelligence, that’s wrong too, because 51 is the right answer, from a certain point-of-view. One of the accepted “rules” of doing a puzzle is that all the information is provided to reach a solution. Assuming that’s the case here doesn’t make you wrong. To be on the safe side, I’d answer “51*” with a note explaining the problems with the puzzle itself.
What does the gaming world think of Skull and Bones, the “first AAAA video game?”
On Feb. 16, video game company Ubisoft released Skull and Bones for the Xbox. In the lead up to its release, CEO Yves Guillemot defended the game’s $70 price tag on a corporate earnings call by saying, “It’s a really full, triple…quadruple-A game, that will deliver in the long run.” So the first AAAA video game: What does that mean, exactly?
The phrase “AAA game” is an informal way of describing the set of video games that are full-priced titles released by established game publishers, so Guillemot is apparently saying its new game is one whole A bigger and better than previously released games.
So is it? No; at least, not according to critics and gamers. Skull and Bones has a Metacritic score of 60, and a “Generally Unfavorable” rating from users. The critical consensus is that there are things that are good about Skull and Bones, but overall, it is boring and seems dated. Gamers themselves were a little more direct, posting videos like this one:
