The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: What Is 'Steal a Brainrot'?

Are you old enough to remember talking to your friends on the phone all the time? A phone with a cord? Then welcome to the Out of Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture, a guide to what's going down with all the youths out there. This week, the young 'uns are stealing each other's brainrots, guzzling heavy soda, (not) paying $500 for a rock, and being harassed by a rizzed-out robot.

"Steal a Brainrot"

If you know anyone under the age of 16, they are probably playing "Steal a Brainrot," and you are probably asking "Steal a what now?" so here's what it's all about: "Steal a Brainrot" is a multiplayer mini-game within maxi-games Roblox and Fortnite. In a game of Brainrot, up to eight players share a server, and each has their own base. The object of the game is to buy brainrots for your base and/or steal brainrots from other players' bases, while defending your own brainrots from thieves. Steal enough brainrots and you become more powerful and can make your base more defensible. The brainrots themselves are objects meant to reference "Italian brainrot," i.e.: low-quality internet memes. They vary in value and have vaguely Italian names, but they aren't based on actual brainrot memes.

"Steal a Brainrot" is insanely popular, boasting a concurrent player count of over 20 million people, so you're probably asking, "Who is getting rich from this (and why isn't it me?)." The answer: Two groups are making most of the dough. The first is the game's developers, SpyderSammy and DoBig Studios, who get a cut of all the micro-transactions within "Steal a Brainrot" (players can spend real money for in-game items). The other beneficiary of all this brainrot is the Roblox Corporation, who provide the platform in exchange for the rest of the money from Brainrot micro-transactions.

As for why it isn't you, it's because you don't have any good ideas.

What is “heavy soda”?

Unlike "heavy water," in which H2O's hydrogen atoms are replaced by deuterium atoms, heavy soda is pop with extra syrup—as hard as this is to believe, some people think Sprite and Mountain Dew just aren't sweet enough. Heavy soda comes from self-serve soda machines. Some, apparently, have a toggle to increase or decrease the amount of syrup in the resulting drinks, and many people on TikTok are great fans of the beverage that results from setting the machine on "maximum syrup."

Sometimes called "dirty soda," heavy soda supposedly originated in gas stations on the Southern tip of Missouri. If your gas station drink machine looks like this:

... then you are probably at least 1,000 miles from a Whole Foods. But maybe not for long; thanks to boosters on TiKtok, heavy soda is spreading.

Polaroid aesthetic making a comeback

I've been messing around with Nano Banana, the image generator within Google's Gemini AI app, and so have the kids, but they're not using it for wrinkle-smoothing and paunch reduction. They're getting in touch with the 1970s aesthetic of the instant camera and creating Polaroid-style pictures of themselves with famous people, fictional characters, and everything else.

One of the more popular variants of the trend involves combining a picture of your current self with your younger self, resulting in surreal-but-poignant videos like these:

Making your own is easy: Install Gemini. Upload the current picture and older picture. Then write a prompt for Gemini like, "Generate a picture taken with a Polaroid camera, desaturated colors, with a camera flash as the single light source and a 1970s suburban tract house as a background."

Are people really buying $1000 rocks from Anthropologie?

A few weeks ago, TikTok user Phoebe Adams posted a video where she pranks her boyfriend by opening a box that contains a rock she said cost $150.

"It's a special rock from Anthropologie," she explains to her angry boyfriend. "It’s gonna sit on our entryway table. It's a one-of-kind rock that they actually found on the ground," she adds.

The video blew up and people started imitating it in videos like this:

and this:

But then things kicked up a notch when the real Anthropologie set up an actual rock display at a store so Phoebe could continue to gaslight her long-suffering boyfriend Dan:

All of this leads to the question of whether this is a retailer cleverly taking advantage of an unexpected trend—or was the entire thing viral marketing from the beginning? I'm 50/50.

Viral video of the week: Rizzbot

Speaking of things that are probably guerrilla marketing campaigns, this week's viral video celebrity is Rizzbot. Formally known as “Jake the Rizzbot,” this four-foot-tall walking (and dancing) robot in a cowboy hat has been traveling all over the country for the past several months, rizzing people up with its robotic swagger and robotic Gen Z slang.

Videos from the official Rizzbot channel has racked up hundreds of millions of views for videos like this, where Rizzbot goes off on a rando's fit:

But Rizzbot can be a total jerk too and sometimes shouts obscenities at people for no reason:

or promises a compliment only to deliver a roast, proving that no one should trust a clanker:

Rizzbot is a decorated version of Unitree Robotics G1 "Humanoid Agent AI Avatar," a $16,000 robot that can joke around with people and sometimes keep from falling over. Despite appearances, Rizzbot is not acting autonomously. Someone is carefully controlling his every move and word, but we don't know who or why. The bot is most often seen in downtown Austin, and has some serious connections to the Texas Robotics lab at UT, though.

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