Credit: Warner Bros. – YouTube
This week’s report on what young people are doing covers what happens when the movie industry announces a Minecraft movie, the media industry notices a small time trend, and what banks do when you steal from them. I also take a look at one of the darkest viral videos ever.
Why does everyone hate the Minecraft movie trailer?
Minecraft is probably the biggest pop-culture product for both Gen Z and Gen A. It came out in 2011 and still has around 160 million active monthly players. So you’d think the game’s fans would be happy that a live-action Minecraft movie was coming out. But they definitely are not. At least not this movie.
Warner Bros. released the first trailer for A Minecraft Movie this week, and a lot of people online are dunking on it. They hate everything about it—they hate the look, the casting, the whole enchilada: the current “like” to “dislike” ratio for the trailer is 617k likes to 1.3 million dislikes. Oof.
Here are a few YouTube comments about the trailer:
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“This looks like a parody trailer that some YouTuber would make to show what a stupid idea a Minecraft movie would be.”
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“‘Are you sure you want to delete this world? It cannot be undone.’ Yes.”
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“Aren’t trailers supposed to make you want to see the movie?”
The hate is, I think, premature and maybe unfair. The Super Mario Bros. movie connected with fans by staying true to the look and story of the game, but Minecraft doesn’t have a story, and you couldn’t realistically make a movie with the lo-fi visuals of the game. So it seems like the filmmakers went with a look that suggests Minecraft, but isn’t pixelated like a 16-bit game, and a boilerplate kid-movie plot that’s worked since The Wizard of Oz: People from the “real world” are transported into the fantasy world and have to learn something about themselves to get home. There’s no way to tell if the movie will resonate with its intended audience of little kids either, so maybe gamers should chill out.
What is “airport tray aesthetic?”
Some major news outlets are reporting on the emerging trend of image-conscious Gen Z travelers taking photos and videos of their full trays in the TSA lines at the airport and posting them on TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram. They call it “airport tray aesthetic,” and people are pissed about it. Can’t you just picture some very online clout chaser holding up the line as you try to make your connecting flight? An outrage!
Except airport tray aesthetic doesn’t seem to be a big thing. Like a lot of “Gen Z are doing something I disapprove of!” news stories, the reporting seems disproportionate to how widespread the practice is, with many more people hearing about it than people actually doing it. Sure, you can find some posts on TikTok or Pinterest featuring artfully arranged TSA trays as some kind of “aren’t I adorable?” flex, but there aren’t many of them and they don’t have “going viral” numbers. In other words, airport tray aesthetic is another “you damn kids, get off my lawn!” outrage-bait fake story, like Nyquil chicken, the slap-a-teacher challenge, and a billion other variations on the theme.
What is Dursting and Scrobbling?
Credit: @numetal_moment – X
The mainstream media’s hand-wringing and misreporting of life online isn’t going unnoticed by internet wags. They’ve invented a new copypasta/meme to comment on how the media comments on them. It works like this: You take the phrase “A 15-year-old boy has been hospitalized for attempting the dangerous TikTok trend of” and add whatever scary/silly fake trend you like. Dursting, Scrobbling, Robot Rocking, Weening Out—a 15-year-old boy has been hospitalized after attempting each of these dangerous TikTok trends. Very funny, but not as funny as “the porcelain challenge,” a parody that got its creator banned from the service.
(For the meaning of the real slang words coming out of Gen Z and Gen A’s mouths, check out my ever-expanding slang glossary.)
What is the “Chase Glitch?”
The Chase Glitch is bank fraud.
On September 6, people on X and TikTok started posting videos of a “viral free-money hack” they called “The Chase Glitch.” Some sources report that Chase banks were letting customers withdraw the full amount of checks immediately after they were deposited; some were saying you can only withdraw a percentage of a check you deposit. Either way, word of the “infinite money glitch” spread quickly. People were supposedly lining up at Chase Banks to deposit phony checks to make withdrawals. What could go wrong? A lot, actually, because that’s bank fraud. You can go to jail for it, and the bank will take the money back, plus extra for their trouble.
The vast majority of older people, I imagine, are familiar with check kiting and the potential penalties it brings. A lot of younger people are learning about it the hard way this week: JP Chase issued a statement saying, in effect, “We’re going to help the police find people who steal from us.”
Viral video of the week: SmartSchoolBoy9: An Internet Rabbit Hole
Despite jokes about Dursting, the Internet really can be a terrifying, confusing, and dangerous place, as this week’s viral video illustrates.
YouTuber Nick Crowley is part of a growing number of creators examining the dark side of life and culture: disappearances, degenerates, death—you know the drill. Crowley recently hit one out of the dark park by introducing the world to Smartschoolboy 9, a mysterious nightmare-person who lives in the fetid depths of one of the spookiest rabbit holes in internet history.
According to the video, until recently, whoever was behind SmartSchoolBoy9 (aka truth_sticks_11, girl-chloe12, stephanieschoolie) maintained a number of Instagram accounts where they pretended to be a child or the parent of a child, while simultaneously warning children and parents about users pretending to be children for nefarious purposes. The goal seems to have been to interact with actual children, although whether it happened and to what extent can’t be determined.
There’s nothing in Crowley’s video that runs afoul of YouTube’s strict TOS and seemingly nothing actionable on any of Schoolboy’s (now deleted) Instagram accounts, but it all suggests something extremely sinister lurking in the darkness, something scarier than any horror movie I have ever seen. I mean, just look at this person:
Credit: Nick Crowley/YouTube
Since Crowley posted this video, Internet sleuths have been digging deep into the mystery of SmartSchoolBoy9, and trying to connect it with a real person. While I don’t trust the investigative skills of the internet enough to repeat the name of the person they think is behind the accounts, if the reports are accurate, SmartSchoolBoy9 has been doing whatever it is they are doing since the 1990s.
