This week’s Out-of-Touch guide features one of the most viral videos of all time, the first trailer for RockStar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 6. On the opposite side of the mass-appeal spectrum: artsy musician Laurie Anderson is becoming an unlikely TikTok star, and I finally have a resource to help explain all the internet jokes I don’t understand.
Viral video of the week: GTA 6 trailer instantly breaks world record in virality
The trailer for Rockstar Games’ upcoming open-world crime simulator Grand Theft Auto VI has gone extremely viral this week, breaking the world record for most first-day views of a non-music video on YouTube in history. In only 24 hours, the trailer racked up over 90 million views. It’s day three as I post this, and the total is already over 130 million. Add to the total by clicking below.
Set in Vice City, the series’ Miami equivalent, this is the first GTA game with a female lead character. The trailer features imagery inspired by real-life viral videos shot in Florida, and it looks absolutely batshit-awesome.
As you’d probably expect, a GTA game with a Latina woman as main character has lead to tiresome claims of “wokeism” from the worst people on the internet, along with unsourced rumors that Lucia is trans.
The opinions of dummies aside, Rockstar really does have a cultural balancing act ahead of it. Much of the Grand Theft Auto series’ shock-based, “we offend everyone equally” parody was fairly passé when GTA 5 came out back in 2013, and it definitely wouldn’t fly today; not because people are too “sensitive” or whatever, but because that style of confrontational comedy is as stale as Mother-in-Law jokes and Andrew Dice Clay, especially to younger people.
Sadly, we’ll have to wait until 2025 to see how Rockstar threads the needle and determine whether the game actually lives up to the amazing first trailer.
Reddit’s meme-explainer: Peter explains the joke
Have you ever seen a meme or joke online that you just didn’t understand? Maybe something like this:
Credit: SpikedMath/Reddit
Or this:
Credit: u/Person_Named_Jermbo/Reddit
Well now there’s a subreddit that will clear up any confusion. Just visit r/PeterExplainsTheJoke and you’ll find over 300,000 people willing to break it down for you (a service fossils like us need frequently). To keep everything from getting too pedantic—explaining jokes has that problem—the style of the sub is to post comments in the voice of Peter Griffin from Family Guy, like the name says. I’m not sure why; that’s another internet joke I don’t get.
Explanations (not in the style of Peter Griffin):
Meme 1: The bartender is asking if everyone in the group would like a beer. The first two logicians each want a beer, but they don’t know what the others want, so the only logically sound answer is “I don’t know.” The third logician now knows that the other two want a beer—if they didn’t they would have answered, “no”—so they respond “yes. (everyone wants a beer.)”
Meme 2: That is a picture of a cosmic radiation. The reference is to a seemingly impossible glitch caught in a 2013 livestream of a Mario 64 speed-run by TeabagSLR. The glitch: Mario was suddenly able to jump higher than he should have, but only once. The Mario 64 speed-running community got together to try to replicate the glitch, going as far as putting up a $1,000 bounty for an explanation. They could not duplicate it, even when using the exact inputs Teabag used, leading to the theory that a stray ionizing particle from space randomly flipped a single bit on Teabag’s Nintendo 64 at exactly the right moment to benefit his speed run—an astronomically unlikely occurence that was (maybe) confirmed when pannenkoek12 figured out exactly what byte flipped when, then recreated it manually, ultimately duplicating the event.
TikTok discovers a new Christmas cliché: red trucks hauling Christmas trees
Have you ever heard a new word, and suddenly you see that word everywhere? Red pickup trucks hauling Christmas trees are like that: Once you’re aware of this cliché illustration of a cozy, home-y Christmas, you’ll see it everywhere you look from Thanksgiving to New Years.
TikToker mello_yoshi first noticed the imagery on holiday ornaments his mother gave him, showing off a total of 12 decorations with Christmas tree trucks and repeating the phrase, “a little red truck—hauling a Christmas tree!” in a delightful way. This lead to videos of others posting their own little red trucks hauling a Christmas trees, both from holiday decorations and real life, usually imitating the distinct twang of mello_yoshi. If you want to see little red trucks hauling trees, you can either visit the hashtag like 14 million other people already have, or you can just look around at your own holiday decorations. I’ll bet you find at least one.
Why is “O Superman” going viral on TikTok?
It’s fascinating when older music suddenly goes viral, whether they’re from The Mountain Goats or Fleetwood Mac. What is it about this particular tune, at this specific time, that suddenly captures the imagination of a generation of people who weren’t born when the song was released? Case-in-point: The kids are getting into 1980s experimental musician Laurie Anderson. Never particularly popular when she was current—Anderson was way too high-art for mass appeal—her iconic, enigmatic track “O Superman” is gathering steam on TikTok, connected with videos that might make you stop in your tracks as you ponder the great mysteries of existence. Anderson’s lines “Well, you don’t know me, but I know you, and I’ve got a message” is isolated and used for videos illustrating the connections we have to our ancestors, connections that the universe sometimes surprises us with, as if to say, “you know, you actually came from somewhere.” This trend is in its infancy, but I really hope it gets bigger; I can’t get enough of these strange, evocative videos, and I hope to see many more of them.
