The crystal cube of agony

I’m teaming up with my dear friends at Hear Me Out, a culture strategy firm in Brooklyn, for a pre-XOXO party in Portland this week. Our XOXO pre-party is on August 22nd and it’s free, but it’s also first-come, first serve. Listen to some great music, grab a drink, and vibe before things get crazy at the fest. If you hate networking, you’ll like this.

Click here to RSVP!

The Veep Gender War

Former President Donald Trump is not having a good time right now. Last week, he jabbered incoherently on a glitched out X Space with Elon Musk and now he’s been encased in the Crystal Cube of Agony. But Trump’s juicelessness has even spread to his posting, which is where he’s always really reigned supreme.

On Sunday, he posted 22 times in one hour on Truth Social and the majority of the posts were just bad AI slop. And even though he’s kinda-sorta back on X, he’s posting the same AI junk over there, as well. As one anime catgirl recently wrote, “As a hater and poster myself, it’s extremely sad to see Trump’s fall off on here.”

Before we dig into why this is happening exactly the way it is right now, I, unfortunately, have to include the usual disclaimer: Normal elections are extremely fluid and this one is especially precarious. Just because Trump is unpopular doesn’t mean he’ll lose in November and if he loses that doesn’t mean he won’t figure out a way to steal it.

But the two big issues plaguing Trump right now, as I see them, are actually just different sides of the same coin: “generational political anti-talent” JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. And what links both of these men is how they, respectively, reflect — or do not reflect — American masculinity.

Last month, I wrote that the largest and least discussed story in American politics over the last decade has been a war over gender. This is why Trumpists are obsessed with trans people and why they’ve been so swift to attack reproductive rights, rather than trying to roll back other progressive issues like gay marriage. Though, they’ll clearly go after that next. I also suspect that’s a large part of the anti-public school platform Project 2025 is centered on. Smashing public education kills the tree of progress at the root.

The problem, for Trump, at least, introduced by both Vance and Walz is that by pitting them against each other, the Democrats and Republicans have inadvertently provided voters with irl examples of what masculinity looks like for each side. To use a metaphor that Vance, the millennial Magic: The Gathering player might understand, Trump’s team played a 1/4 creature with Haste that they thought could go on the offensive immediately because it doesn’t have summoning sickness. But Vice President Kamala Harris’ team quickly hit it with Lightning Bolt and now Vance is just sitting on the board as a measly 1/1.

[Editor’s note: I haven’t played Magic since Odyssey came out. Zachary in the comments has provided a much better version of the line above, “Kamala threw down Barl's Cage and just pumps mana into it every turn so that Vance never untaps. And Trump has no other creatures in his deck. So now he's going to cobble together whatever direct damage he can tutor out to go face and Kamala's going to mill him to death while playing another game on her phone and barely paying attention.”]

To translate, Trump, the paragon of made-for-TV boomer masculinity, who won in 2016 buoyed by a wave of support from America’s silent army of middle-aged white women, inadvertently nominated an out-of-touch millennial that wore drag in college, is currently possibly wearing eyeliner at rallies, is too awkward to walk a dog, and spent 2005 blogging about how emotional the movie Garden State made him. It’s actually kind of spooky how similar their dynamic is to my relationship with my dad tbh.

Now, a lot of stupid fucking losers on the Democratic side have preyed on Vance’s inability to live up to Republican ideals of masculinity because a lot of very loud liberals in America believe that the middle of the country is full of psychotic bigots that have to be electorally corralled like children every four years. The BlueAnon contingent are having the time of their lives calling Vance a sissy, seemingly unaware that the quick ascendence of Walz flies in the face of their own misconceptions about what’s actually going on here.

Walz is a former high school teacher, football coach, and National Guard vet from the Midwest who listens to Husker Du and Bruce Springsteen. He’s also an unapologetic socialist and LGBT rights advocate. And, most importantly, he’s happily playing sidekick to a woman presidential candidate.

And the difference between how both candidates are presenting their masculinity on the campaign trail is having vastly different reactions online. Over the weekend, a rumor spread that MAGA supporters were carrying around cups of Vance’s cum. As funny as it is, it doesn’t seem likely. Analyst Elise Thomas over at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue did some digging and the whole story originated from an X account with an AI profile picture that was setup earlier this year and has never posted until three days ago. But it isn’t the only bit of Vance misinfo going around right now. He was also photoshopped onto a long-running Something Awful meme about being awkward in front of a girl at a party. There is a certain kind of delicious irony that Vance’s entire candidacy has been defined by his inability to clear up viral misinformation about how weird and lame he is.

Meanwhile, Walz went viral for joking about how he can’t eat spicy tacos. Which sent right-wing influencers into a tailspin and now they’re trying to claim he’s a race traitor. Which will go nowhere and only makes them look impotent. Republican pundits that do not learn from tan suit Obama are doomed to relive tan suit Obama, it seems.

But it’s not that Walz is masculine and that Vance is an awkward pathetic dweeb (though he is). It’s that the lies that Republicans like Trump weaponized about what makes American men men have never been true. And flooding the internet with Red Pill theory videos and spree shooter memes for a decade wasn’t enough to convince everyone it was. The big lie was immediately undone once a candidate fully shaped by it stepped on stage and opened his idiot cringe mouth. Because the Trump distortion field only works if you can play the part. And playing the part only works if the person you’re running against is playing one too (sorry Hillary). But when all of this is pulled out of the internet and forced to exist in the real world, it quickly becomes apparent that the central tenet of the incel has never been true. Life is not a battle between the virgin and the chad. It’s a battle between people who are confident in who they are and those who aren’t. And Republicans are quickly realizing they spent the last three election cycles building a political bloc of loud horrible millennial men who are pathologically incapable of ever being comfortable with themselves and now everyone knows it.

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Good Bathroom Post

Some More Insight Into The Gen Z Coolness Crisis

There are four sort of low-level generational discourses circulating the web right now that I want to try and synthesize into a larger idea. There’s the weird backlash around the word “demure” going viral after a trans TikToker popularized it. There are millennials panicking that Gen Z thinks we all spent the 2010s talking like ermahgerd le epic bacon YouTubers. There are lines going down the block in New York City right now full of people waiting to try the viral Olympics muffin. And, my particular favorite, there is a hilarious argument happening on X at the moment about whether or not Julia Stiles’ character from 10 Things I Hate About You would have listened to Chappell Roan.

The core conflict at the heart of all of these various conversations is about coolness. Is it cool to learn slang words from viral videos? Whether we’re talking about TikToks now or Vines 10 years now. Is it cool to spend two hours in a line to eat a muffin you saw on Instagram? Would a notoriously cool character from an old movie like the new cool thing now?

And my takeaway from these and other little generational skirmishes this summer is that, unless something drastic happens to the way we consume information, millennials may very well be the last generation that remembers what coolness looked like before virality was attached to it. The YouTubers that Gen Z accuses us all of talking like were, at the time, largely regarded as child predators and loathed by their peers. Waiting in a line for anything that wasn’t nightclub in New York pre-cronut was an offense punishable by eviction and banishment. And, yeah, a teen girl in the 90s that listened to bands like Hole and Sleater-Kinney, if she were magically transported to 2024, would probably have some issues listening to Chappell Roan, simply because Roan is very popular right now. Source: I knew (and lived in fear of) cool teenage girls in the 90s.

I’m not saying this is inherently bad, but it does seem to be confusing! And it seems particularly disorienting for Gen Z who, time and time again, have demonstrated that they want to be cool, but still don’t realize that nothing can truly be cool if it is judged by the number underneath it that tells you how many people liked or shared it. Nevertheless, I wish them the best on their ongoing journey of cultural discovery.

Justice For XiaoPang

This little orange dog is named XiaoPang, which roughly translates to Little Fatty or Little Chubby in Mandarin. He went very viral in the US last week when Americans discovered the skits his owner has been sharing on Douyin under the user name “请叫我小胖,” or “Please call me Fatty”.

The controversy around XiaoPang’s videos is whether or not the dog is actually being abused. At first glance, it looks like XiaoPang’s owner is actually upsetting him and so, obviously, a lot of people were freaked out. In subsequent videos, however, XiaoPang’s owner filmed what appeared to be behind the scenes clips of XiaoPang being trained to perform, growling on cue and cowering after hearing certain repeated phrases.

Unfortunately, as XiaoPang has gone more viral in the last day or so, more Chinese content about the account has surfaced and been translated. X user @falltimefog wrote a great thread about the Please call me Fatty Douyin account. Many of the videos on there are reuploads from 2022 when, at its peak of virality in China, users freaked out after XiaoPang was abused on a livestream. The police even investigated at one point but, as @falltimefog points out, China doesn’t have any law that outright bans animal abuse. Here’s a Chinese news article from 2022 written about XiaoPang that I, honestly, couldn’t finish because the allegations in it are pretty horrific.

Who Or What Is @SpicyCammy?

If you’re one of the poor souls still on X, chances are you have come across at least one very spicy reply from an account called, well, @SpicyCammy. If you’ve never clicked in and checked out her account, you’d probably assume she was a bot, but, no, it seems like she is a real person. Based on a cursory glance, @SpicyCammy is just a very enthusiastic OnlyFans model that has figured out that you can go very viral on X by indiscriminately hornposting in everyone’s replies.

This Redditor Is Trying To Clean A Love Doll Skeleton They Found

A redditor posed a very interesting question to the r/Animatronics subreddit over the weekend. They had stumbled across what they believed to be “the remains of a rotted animatronic” and they wanted advice on how to clean it. Unfortunately, the metal skeleton they stumbled across is most likely NOT an animatronic. Strictly speaking.

At first, commenters settled on it being the armature for a mannequin before coming to the consensus that this is probably an abandoned skeleton for a love doll. It is best not to wonder about why someone would abandon a love doll out in public, especially without its skin. “Oh no that’s so embarrassing 😭😭😭 I really wanted it to be an animatronic base,” the user wrote.

Though, the story ends happily. The commenters have a bunch of good advice as to how to convert the skeleton of the former love doll into a working animatronic. Classic Reddit.

There Is Simply No Reason For This To Go As Hard As It Does

@bscott2hot

Princess Peach is for the streets! 🍑😂 #MarioBros #Luigi #PrincessPeach #NintendoParody

Some Stray Links

• “RFK Jr. stuck his hand in the Central Park bear's mouth. Necropsy shows he may have been knuckle-deep in her leaked brain.”

• Variety went long on why Borderlands flopped so hard

• Esquire went long on why all Netflix shows look the same (and bad)

P.S. here’s Blue Man Group covering “Welcome To The Black Parade”.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***