It’s literally just gibberish and jump scares.
I watched way the fuck too many of those shorts, trying to figure out what the appeal was.
I guess the appeal is the same as any dumb youthful “OMG SO RANDOM” humor.
CHARLIE THE UNICORN OMG SO RANDOM!!!
So, yeah, it’s just as fucking dumb as the dumb shit we laughed at when we were kids.
EDIT: u/lukmly013 adds some important context to the source of the word “Skibidi.”
Charlie the Unicorn had a coherent plot and humor structure. It wasn’t “lol random.” Maybe you’re thinking of Llamas in Hats.
I mean, to be fair, the same can be said for this, too. Skibidi Toilets actually has a coherent plot and characters if you’re paying attention.
I promise you, if you came across Charlie the Unicorn for the first time as an adult, you would describe it similarly.
Okay let’s take a look and see what’s going on here. youtube search for "skibidi toilet’ holy shit episode 73 okay here’s a bunch of them in order watches the first few then skips around to get a feel for what’s going on
No that’s nothing like Charlie the Unicorn. Charlie the Unicorn is pre-2008 cynicism from the same mold as The End of the World aka “H’okay, so”. It’s a Gen X joke that landed with Millennials. I think it’s closer to Jonti’s work, somewhere on the Weebl & Bob or Magical Trevor continuum, where you look at your friend and just say “badger badger badger” and they know to say “mushroom mushroom!” and everyone but the adults have a good laugh.
Looks like we’ve got some SFM goofiness at the beginning with heads popping out of toilets singing a nonsense song, no telling if it’s something pre-existing that has been re-used or if it’s composed for this, skipping ahead it looks like it goes into “these are invading creatures we must eradicate” SCP creepypasta direction be cause of fucking course it does, this is either made for or made by the FNAF generation. I don’t know how old Matpat’s audience is anymore man, I turned around twice and my newborn niece is in middle school.
I actually smiled and laughed when I first saw that it was a huge trend, considering all the gary’s mod and SFM stuff, especially TF2 videos, I adored myself as a teen/young adult. Made me feel less old seeing that there’s still life in the meme format.
It was wild watching the next generation discover Half Life. There are Youtube essayists who were born after this happened making videos about their theories as to where the Combine came from and such and on the one hand it’s kind of fun seeing their takes on it, and how sometimes they’re missing the context of other stuff that was taking place around that time, the fan communities that are no longer live on the web like PlanetHalfLife.
It’s also weird that a lot of the Source stuff like Garrysmod and TF2 are still popular and being used to create stuff for teh youthz. When you come up with that one guy who did covers of linkin park songs and Gordon Frohman, to see that it’s still going and where it’s gone is just strange.
I always get an aneurysm whenever Enhancer for YouTube fails to hide shorts and I see all the fucking shorts spam on YT. It’s horrible how much it ruined search results. I fucking hate what YT has become over the last decade especially.
It’s why I barely watch YouTube at all and mostly read news and get frustrated if the only source is a fucking YouTube video.
You know what’s really easy to cite? A text document.
You know what’s not so easy to cite? A six-part 14 hours-of-video deep dive into Disnleyland queueing and ticketing systems or whatever.
No, stop, write it the fuck down. You definitely wrote a bunch down in service of making this fucking video so why not also just release that for fucks sake? Are people so unable to get involved in reading anymore?
Some things are more helpful as a YouTube video, like How-To videos where you can see more clearly what is happening when a written instruction can be unclear. It’s also useful for speaking truth to power by recording cops who are breaking the law and so forth. But those are specific use cases.
Yeah, I think this problem is mostly solved if people were more willing to take their obviously highly produced and edited scripts and just make those publicly accessible with sources and whatnot, which they presumably need to basically do anyways in order to have good captioning on their video. The main problem isn’t so much that they use videos, to me, but that we have no way to sort through leagues of text documents and blogs now. Harder for me to subscribe to and read a blog in a dedicated fashion, I guess. I dunno, I guess ultimately I’m just saying that the two mediums need more connection, which would be mutually beneficial, I think.
A lot of people are bad at reading. Sometimes it’s not their fault. Taught poorly, learning disabilities, whatever. Sometimes they’re just lazy and out of practice.
Are people so unable to get involved in reading anymore?
I don’t know know if this trait carrys over to Lemmy, but on reddit I would get my best upvotes on messages that were 1-2 sentences, usually with a quote or reference to something popular.
You know, thoughtless content where I’m just reminding them of a quote from the office, or a small joke. Anything more than a paragraph and people replied "Whoa! I’m not reading that mountain of text! Meanwhile it’s less text than would be on a pamphlet.
It reminds of something Bo Burnham said in a song from Youtube Live, which was planned as an annual celebration of youtubes biggest stars featuring live performances on stage. Bo Burnham had just broke out. He said:
“It’s youtube, it’s what this country’s been needing, an entire generation of kids who don’t waste their time reading!”
That was 2009. Which means at the youngest, those kids are now at least young adults. And the older ones are pushing 30 now.
Excuse me as I go cry looking in the mirror at my grey hairs, pondering how many more years until I need a cane.
