The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Why Is Everyone Obsessed With Grimace?

This week, kids are eating rat snacks, staying off Reddit, considering their “canon events,” and finally asking important question about Grimace, McDonald’s inexplicable abomination of a mascot.

Grimace memes take over internet

To celebrate the 52nd birthday of Grimace, McDonald’s rolled out psychedelic-purple shakes this week. They come in a pre-set meal, are berry-flavored, and reportedly taste very sweet. That’s terrific and all, but what even is Grimace? We know he’s purple, and some kind of monster who doesn’t wear pants, but what does he do all day? What is he about? Those kinds of question have inspired the weirder corners of the internet to create hilarious Grimace lore to fill in the backstory.

Twitter user @jpbrammer tweeted, “drinking the Grimace shake binds you to his will.” According to @notsofiacoppola: “there’s a grimace in the back of every McDonalds that is screaming in pain as they milk him.” Ben Rosen points out “a June 12 birthday suggests grimace may have been conceived on September 11.” And Nathan Robinson tweeted, “he’s a bourgeois parasite fuck that fat purple turd he will be dealt with appropriately when the time comes.” (While we’re on the subject of McDonaldland, why has the Hamburglar never been brought to justice?)

What are “rat snacks?”

According to TikTok, “rat snacks” are unusual food combinations you greedily eat like a hungry little rat. (You might also think of this as “food I eat when I get high.”) Some rat snacks are quirky favorites that only one person loves, like maybe French fries dipped in Grimace shakes, cheeseburger Pringles, or pasta and peanut butter (it’s almost like Thai food!). The other kind of rat snacks are more rat-like—they’re meals made of whatever’s lying around, like pasta sauce with potatoes chips for a sad chips-and-salsa approximation.

I’m a huge fan of the spirit of rat snacks. Proudly eating rat snacks is a critique of the preciousness and fussiness of foodie recipes, but it’s a little more creative than just eating processed snack food straight from the tin. I do find the name a little troubling though; real rats snack on literal garbage.

Reddit blackout explained

If you noticed that online message board destination Reddit looks a little different this week, it’s not a trick of the mind. The site’s users are in open rebellion against Reddit’s management. Around 6,500 communities protested against Reddit this week by closing shop, leaving more than 12 million Redditors without anything to look at on the internet.

The fight is over Reddit’s application programming interface, which essentially means access to its data. Since it launched in 2005, Reddit has let anyone use its API for free, allowing the creation of third-party apps with custom Reddit-based experiences, but the company recently revealed that it is joining Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook by charging a licensing fee for use of its API. It won’t be a small fee for some apps either: Christian Selig, CEO of Reddit-based app Apollo, says the licensing would cost him $20 million a year. Reddit’s moderators are particularly pissed: They are volunteers, and some say that third party moderation apps are necessary to keep doing their unpaid work.

This looks like Reddit growing up to me, making a transition from the open-internet vibe it used to have to a real company. And real companies generally try to make a lot of money. Reddit’s goal seems to be driving people from third-party apps to the site itself, so they can look at all those weird Jesus ads. For now, Reddit is standing firm despite the uprising, but so are many of the site’s users: The protest was supposed to last for two days, but many subreddits are still dark.

TikTokers are discussing their “canon events”

In this summer’s animated mega blockbuster Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, “canon events” are moments that take place in every part of the Spider-Verse: Every iteration of Spider-Man is bitten by a radioactive spider, for instance, and if anyone prevented that from happening, that particular incarnation of the Spider-Verse would be destroyed. But the idea of canon events moved from the screen to real life this week when TikTokers started sharing their own canon events—that is, things that make people who they are and cannot be interfered with, even if they seem very bad. Those moments include parental abandonment, accepting an on-the-spot job offer even though you’re told the company is “a family,” and creating the “most abysmal PlayStation Network username of all time.”

Viral video of the week: “Identical Twins Switch Places AGAIN”

Genial YouTubers Brooklyn and Bailey are identical twins, and in this week’s viral video they’re trying to trick people close to them by switching places. Twins switching places to fool friends and family has been a comedy staple at least since The Patty Duke Show, an entire sit-com about twin-swapping that premiered in 1963 (I’m very old). But it hits different when it isn’t done with editing and special effects.

I obviously know that identical twins are a perfectly normal genetic variation completely understood by science, but there remains a primitive part of my brain that sees two people who look exactly the same and thinks, “it should not be so.” Their voices are the same. They have the same gestures. It’s just—wrong.

The twins’ video is lighthearted and fluffy, and it’s low key hilarious to watch people try to suss out what’s happening when they talk to the “wrong” one, but my brain refuses to fully accept that there can be two people who look and sound so much alike. That they would try to fool others makes it even more unsettling. How could you ever be sure you were talking to the right twin after they tried this? What if they got themselves mixed up? How do they know they didn’t change identities a dozen times when they were infants? It’s just too much for me to deal with.