The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: What Is Skibidi Toilet?
This week’s Out-of-Touch guide covers a kidnapping that might not have happened, singing heads coming out of toilets, and people eating borax for their health. So make yourself a girl dinner and get comfortable.Read more...
Tekef
This week’s Out-of-Touch guide covers a kidnapping that might not have happened, singing heads coming out of toilets, and people eating borax for their health. So make yourself a girl dinner and get comfortable.
Viral videos of the week: The Skibidi Toilet series
Maybe it’s the summer heat frying everyone’s eggs, but YouTube’s hottest videos are “Skibidi Toilet,” a series of surreal animated shorts in which creepy heads with terrifying, rictus-grin face emerge from toilets. Animated with the Source Engine used in the Half-Life video games, Skibidi Toilet is the brainchild of YouTuber DaFuqBoom. The first Skibidi Toilet episode is a clip of a menacing looking head in a toilet “dancing” and singing the Turkish song “tummy dancer” by Yasin Cengiz.
Instead of a mildly amusing, quickly forgotten weirdo internet video, Skibidi Toilet quickly evolved into a continuing series, with over fifty episodes telling the surreal story of an army of singing toilet monsters locked in combat with a variety of well-armed enemies. They’re half funny and half scary, and they don’t make literal sense, or any kind of sense, and people love them: Skibidi Toilet videos have topped 100 million views on YouTube alone, with fans calling for a live-action movie, and for DaFuqBoom to win both an Oscar and a Country Music Award. If you’d like to enter the skibidi-verse, start with these videos. Then report back, and make it make sense.
What is a “Girl Dinner” (and why does anyone care)?
The latest food trend on TikTok is the “girl dinner,” basically an array of small items eaten in the evening. You might know it as a snack plate or a light meal. The trend started with TikTokers showing off the kind of not-usually-thought-of-as-dinner food combos we’ve all eaten on occasion: bread and cheese, peanut butter cups and kombucha, or a full plate of exotic snick-snacks. But then it caught on, and became a trend. And got weird.
People started posting girl dinners that were more like “eating disorder dinners,” like a single can of corn or a glass of ice. But maybe they were posting to be silly? Then young men started posting their “boy dinners.” Then people became very alarmed about girl dinners. Shouldn’t they be more balanced? Are they encouraging eating disorders? Maybe it’s a good idea to eat calorie-heavy meals earlier in the day? But maybe we should eat a large dinner instead?
Why it became a thing in the first place is the only interesting part of girl dinner. Literally everyone (including me, I guess) seems to feel the need to evaluate and police the choices young women make, down to what they eat for dinner. I understand a concern over eating disorders, but it seems at least adjacent to the “concern” some people have about obesity that’s actually barely concealed hatred of fat people.
Mercifully, Popeye’s rolled out a “girl dinner menu” today, signaling the corporate commodification that eventually kills every trend. (Keep Mr. Clean away from Skibidi Toilet!!!)
The strange story of Carlee Russell
Something happened Carlee Russell this week, but no one is sure what. The 25-year-old nurse called 911 on July 13 to report a toddler wandering on the side of an Alabama highway. When police arrived, they found no sign of a child, but they did find Carlee’s empty car. A search was launched and rewards were offered. Two days later, Carlee showed up at her parents’ home with a minor injury to her lip.
She said she’d exited her car, apparently looking for the child, and a couple came out of the woods by the side of the road and grabbed her. They reportedly threw her in a truck, blindfolded her, and drove her to a nearby house where they took nude photos of her. The next day, she managed to escape. The couple had apparently been using the toddler as bait, as Carlee says she heard a child at the house.
Yesterday, police in Alabama held a press conference where chief Nick Derzis said investigators could not confirm Russell’s account. Authorities pointed to searches on her phone, some from hours before the incident, for things like “The movie Taken” and “Do you have to pay for an Amber Alert,” and heavily implied heavily they know what really happened and will reveal more later.
But for now, the dice are in the air. Maybe Russell is telling the truth and she really was kidnapped by inept human traffickers—it sounds unlikely, but not impossible. Or maybe she made up the whole thing. But if so, why? Maybe she was abducted by aliens.
Don’t eat borax, even if you see someone do it on TikTok
TikToker Chemthug has made it his mission this week to issue a simple warning to humanity: Do not eat borax. “Don’t eat sh*t out of the f*cking laundry box, people,” chemthug says in a video, after highlighting clips of other TikTokers reporting they’re “on the Borax” train, and eating the substance for its supposed health benefits.
Chemthug is a PhD candidate in synthetic organic chemistry, but we shouldn’t need a chemist to tell us this
. Small amounts of boron are naturally present in some foods,
and safe to eat. And the alternative medicine folks are right that Borax is a “naturally occurring compound,” but so are cyanide and asbestos. According to the research from the National Institute of Health, consuming a lot of borax can cause “irritation of skin and respiratory tract” and “nausea, persistent vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, erythematous and exfoliative rash, unconsciousness, depression and renal failure.”
Despite mainstream reporting warning people off of the trend, it is, as always, unclear if it is actually a trend anyone is doing. You probably never thought about eating borax until reading this, right? But I bet you’re thinking about it right now, aren’t you?
Why are TikTokers’ pretending to have podcasts?
I’ve seen countless short clips on Instagram or TikTok of earnest podcast guests staring slightly off camera and talking into microphones about whatever nonsense
. But I’d never thought to question whether those people are actually on podcasts. It’s not like hosting or guesting on a podcast is a high bar to clear, right? But a lot of times there is no podcast.
The pretend podcast has become a whole sub-genre on short video sites because looking like your clip is from a podcast conveys a kind of authority and that apparently leads to more
views. Here’s Justin Whang explaining the process through demonstration,
if you need a visual aid.
There are countless examples once you start looking for them, but the most well known are probably NSFW Instagram/onlyfans model Vicky Banxx’s faux podcast appearance that went mildly viral, and fitness hack Vshred upping the game by pretending to be a guest on a specific (real)
podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience. There’s something plaintive and hilarious about these clips, once
you know that there’s no one else
right off camera,
and that the supposed guest isn’t actually a
part of anything larger. It’s just someone crying
out for attention and legitimacy who
found a deceitful way to grab a little more of it. Aw.
