The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: 'Starfield' Reviews

Video game Starfield has shut down all activity among people who don’t have jobs this week. The kids are all off in their little rocket ships, and what little time isn’t being spent in space is being used to listen to people yapping, watching Doja Cat’s new video, and hating on overweight squirrels.

Gamers react to Starfield

Massive life-sucking sci-fi RPG Starfield just came out, and the game has taken over all cultural discussion among people who like videogames (ie: everyone under 30). Reviewers like it, giving it an 87 out of a 100 Metacritic score, but the audience score is 5.4 out of ten. So mixed reviews, but not mixed like everyone saying “it was OK, I guess” but mixed like half the people flipping out about how great it is, and half saying it sucks. Contrarians are mainly complaining about invisible walls, the encumbrance system, or they have some weird cultural axe to grind. Oh, and PlayStation users are salty because they’re left out altogether.

There are a ton of glitches in Starfield too, but this is a game from Bethesda, so I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t full of hilarious bugs like creepily staring NPCs, casual chats with floating heads, conversations with companions who seem to have broken backs, and vendors who suddenly blast into space.

There’s also the weird “This is too woke” crowd, who seem angry that there are politics in the game, that Starfield’s imagined future is partly a commentary on reality today—keep that stuff out of science fiction, right? Anyway, the poster child for these cretins is this dipshit having a conniption because the character creation screen ask people what pronouns they prefer.

My favorite kind of Starfield reaction, though, are the fans who use the game in unintended ways. They always tout RPGs like this by saying you can have any kind of play experience you want, and some people like to see how far they can take it, like this absolute legend from Reddit who turned Starfield into a potato collection sim. They gathered over 20,000 potatoes and stowed them in their spaceship. It’s not only a testament to weird gamer ingenuity, but also to Starfield itself: the potato physics are ridiculous.

Slang watch: What does “yapping” mean?

The word “yapping,” as in “quit your yapping!” isn’t new, but the kids are using it to describe a specific kind of presentational style in online videos. Creators who talk too much about nothing are said to be “yapping” or labeled as “yappers.” Usually it’s meant in a derisive way, but not always. The kings of yap are are TikTok’s @bag_and_cj who have embraced the style on channel, proudly yapping through tons of reaction videos. They actually raise yapping to the level of art—check out the #yipandyap hashtag to see what I mean.

Does Reddit hate fat squirrels?

There are over 120,000 subscribers to reddit’s fatsquirrelhate board, a subreddit dedicated to “publicly shaming greedy and obese squirrels, groundhogs, and other marmots.” The sub features photos and videos of obese rodents with captions like, “this fat fucking squirrel ruined my nice walk, fucking fatass,” and “Shitty fat moron keeps planting himself on my bed, every night I have to deal with this.” Fat squirrels, of course, are the best, and I could look at them all day, so I think these Redditors are doing the old switcheroo.

TikTok’s “How to Dress to Attract a Man” trend explained

Much like fat-squirrel-haters who actually love squirrels, the TikTokers posting videos entitled “how to attract a man” are not really trying to attract a man. Instead, they’re taking sexist advice relationship/fashion advice like “show some skin” and “always have a pleasant expression on your face” and doing exactly the opposite. The trend started with a video from @veronicashavie that spawned thousands of responses from young women hilariously trying their hardest to not attract a man.

Viral video of the week: Doja Cat - Demons (Official Video)

I hate everything about the end of summer except that it means Halloween is right around the corner, and musician Doja Cat is ushering in the season with an epic video for her song “Demons.” The stylish, creepy video has been shared nearly 10 million times in the past few days, but I bet many of the young people digging it aren’t aware of the source of Doja’s haunted imagery. The homages to The Shining and Poltergeist are fairly obvious, but Doja Cat’s video goes so deep I turned to horror writer Greg Burkhart to try to figure out which classic horror movies are being tributes here. Doja’s overall look is a reference to obscure British horror movie Gothic from 1983 (or maybe 2015 documentary The Nightmare). Then there’s riffs on Paranormal Activity 2, The Babadook, Lamberto Bava’s Demons, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Witch, The Entity, and god knows how many others that we didn’t recognize. In other words, this is the greatest music video ever made.