The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Bringing Pumpkins to Starbucks

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Welcome to The Out of Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture, where I make sense of youth nonsense. This week, kids are bringing hollowed-out pumpkins into Starbucks and demanding they be filled with pumpkin spice lattes; TikTok is obsessed with a fake video game called Bird Game 3; everyone’s growing the universe's AI slop-pile with videos about a fictional video game, and teens are fighting about Lorax costumes. Plus the world's police departments are issuing a warning about a prank that is not funny and you should never do.

Filling pumpkins with pumpkin spice latte

Look, we're all excited for Halloween; it's decorative gourd season, motherfuckers. But please, in the name of all that is holy, do not bring a hollowed-out pumpkin to the Starbucks drive-through and ask the baristas to fill it with a pumpkin spice latte. Even if influencers on TikTok are doing it. Even if their videos are getting millions of views. Virality is not a permission slip.

It's fine, sometimes heroic, to be whimsical, but baristas are doing seven invisible jobs at once and being paid for half a job, and trying to force them to be extras in your twee little video is job number eight. Maybe they'll force a smile when you hand them the gourd, but when they say “oh, cute,” there will be murder in their eyes. They want to react like this, I promise:

What is "Bird Game 3"?

Bird Game 3 is the name of an imaginary video game for the imaginary Xbox50 game system. Making AI videos of people who are very excited to play Bird Game 3 is becoming a hot thing to do on TikTok and elsewhere. Unlike almost all other AI slop videos, some of the Bird Game 3 videos are actually funny. Like this one:

And this one:

I don't know what everyone is so excited about. Now, when I played the first Bird Game at E3 2010, that was exciting.

Everyone is making "celebrity elevator selfies"

Speaking of AI slop, if you've been anywhere near TikTok lately, you've likely seen the proliferation of posts of people posing with celebrities in elevators, like this one:

They are, of course, fake—products of AI image generation tools—but it's a fun kind of fakery that's easy to be part of. You just use CapCut or Gemini, or any AI-slop-making machine, and you too can pretend you rode an elevator with Brian Boitano or Ice Spice. If you'd like more detailed instructions, I broke it down here.

On a more serious note, the kids making these fake videos are devaluing the unique and meaningful relationship between some random person and a celebrity jerk who are forced to interact because they're trapped in an enclosed space. Now no one will believe my dream-come-true celebrity elevator encounter with Dr. Phil actually happened.

Viral videos of the week: Invasion of the Lorax girls

Over the last few years, TikTok and Instagram have been taken over by Lorax girls every October. Videos of girls dressed as Dr. Seuss's self-righteous hero are everywhere. Here's a typical example:

The Lorax costume pioneer seems to be TikToker McKenna, who posted a Lorax video in 2023 that went viral to the tune of over 30 million plays:

Since then, the costume has become very popular; there are over 200,000 TikTok videos tagged #Lorax. The trend has become so widespread that a backlash is building. The word among young men/boys is that only "unfunny popular girls" dress as the Lorax for Halloween. Some teenage boys are even calling the costumes a red flag and posting anti-Lorax-Girl meme videos like these:

Fellas, the only thing less funny than dressing as the Lorax for Halloween is complaining about other people dressing as the Lorax for Halloween. Face it: You're actually mad because girls are doing something that isn't designed for male approval. On the flip side of the coin, I can totally understand the appeal of the costume for "popular girls." You gotta really work on shaping your personality to be "well-liked" in the murder pit of high school popularity, so having a night where you dress like a pot-bellied goof and act the fool must be liberating, especially when acting the fool in an established way that won't reflect badly upon your image and might get millions of views.

Police warn of AI homeless prank

Last week, I laid out the basics of the AI Homeless Person prank going viral—basically, kids are AI-faking images of homeless dudes in their houses and sending them to their parents as a funny joke. Well, the cops want everyone to know it's not funny and no one should do it, because some parents, understandably, seem to have called the cops when they got the message.

The police in Salem, MA got the ball rolling by issuing a statement warning that pranksters could face up to two and a half years in jail for the stunt. Many other police departments followed, from all over the U.S. and even overseas. My favorite is from Yonkers, NY, who posted this on its Facebook:

"We get it — some pranks are funny and we like to laugh at the best of them. Some, though, pose a public safety risk..."

Yonkers Police Department, you do not "like to laugh at the best of them." I've had enough teachers use that line to know it's a lie.

But on a serious note, it's actually a bad idea to pretend a homeless person is in your house to scare your parents. It wastes resources and the cops coming to your door is almost always a bad thing. If you must pull a prank, try the less confrontational option of generating a shirtless plumber to prank your boyfriend:

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