If you’re a grown-ass person confused by the un-grown-ass among us, I hope this week’s trip down the rabbit hole of Gen Z and Gen Alpha culture brings you a step closer to enlightenment. Allow me to tell you why man-on-man phone calls are so popular and hilarious right now, the meaning of the word “fambush,” and why you’re seeing so many disturbing videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
Calling your friend and saying “goodnight” is a wholesome, hilarious prank somehow
A couple weeks ago, TikToker Miranda Faye posted this video of her boyfriend calling his friends to say “goodnight.” (I love the guy who answers, “What’s up, bitch boy?” immediately. So dude.)
Overall, it’s a poignant video that really says something about how men relate to one another. It’s also hilarious, and exactly the kind of thing that kicks off a trend. It didn’t take long for dudes all over to start calling their friends for no reason other than to say “good night” and/or “sweet dreams,” resulting in videos like this one:
I love the guy who responds, “The fuck are you talking about?” and how all of his friends seem ready to call the police; this is how unusual it is for men to call each other at bedtime to say “good night.”
Here’s my absolute favorite example:
The dude trying to keep from laughing, paired with his friends’ reactions, is gold. If you want to enjoy an endless stream of these videos, waste some time on the #goodnight hashtag.
A lot of commenters on TikTok connect this to the “male loneliness epidemic” or view friends calling friends as something men should do. But I think that’s looking into it too deeply. For the most part, the friends in these videos immediately ask the callers “are you ok?” with real concern—I’m not seeing a lot of male loneliness here. And there’s something great about the trait of not talking to your friends about personal things unless it’s really important. The real male loneliness sufferers are the many guys out there who don’t have any pals they can gently prank on video.
What is fambushing?
Since I’m covering wholesome trends this week, let’s talk about fambushing. The word combines “family” and “ambush” and refers to young people checking where their parents are on location-sharing apps so they can get some free food—you see mom at Chipotle, you’re gonna ask for a burrito. Starbucks too:
According to a rep from family-location-sharing app Life360, teenagers who use the app are more likely to check what their parents are doing than parents are to check their kids’ locations. This seems wholesome and encouraging at first, but if I project back to my own youth (long before cell phones) I’d probably be using to check where my parents were so I wouldn’t get caught doing whatever I was doing.
Forgotten Cher and Future collaboration disgusts nation
Sometimes Gens Z and A dig up a delightful piece of popular culture from the past to highlight how awesome it is. That is not the case with Cher and Future’s cover of Sly’s “Everyday People.” Nine years ago, these two very different artists collaborated with producer Zatoven on a Gap-sponsored ad featuring hilariously awkward chemistry, a total lack of effort from all involved, with an entirely cynical vibe. It’s so terrible that it quickly becomes fascinating. The more times you watch it, the more cringe details you notice, and before long you’ve fallen into a rabbit hole of awful from which you cannot escape.
Anyway, the video made no ripple when it was produced and quietly slept on YouTube for nearly a decade. But a few weeks ago, the kids noticed. And they started tearing it apart.
“I love the way future sings in lower case and she’s just yelling in his face,” posted TikToker Maliha Zahid. “Why does future sound dehydrated 😭” asks @jae._m1ll1y. “He looks like he’s listening to granny tell a story,” posted @vvs.lizvrd. Ouch.
The song so captured the imaginations of young people that they started re-enacting it in videos like this:
and this:
Even the Zaytoven’s son started clowning on it:
What does it mean? Nothing, really, but it reminds me of a show business saying: “Behind every bad movie there’s a good mortgage.”
The “Outfits I wore in high school” trend will make you feel even more ancient
There comes a time in people’s lives, usually around when they turn 30, when they stop noticing changes in fashion. Concerns like “I have to work all the time” and “is this mole cancer?” take over that brain-space. So for everyone who’s ever been advised by a clerk at the Gap (Cher and Future’s favorite store!) to “try a looser fit,” the “Outfits I Wore in High School” trend on TikTok will make you feel as old as the Cryptkeeper. Or even as old as Cher.
In these videos, twentysomethings reveal their younger, more misguided selves by showing pics of outfits that I (and probably you) find indistinguishable from what anyone is wearing today. It’s partly a symptom of the nostalgia cycle collapsing in on itself—kids are getting misty-eyed over the “good old days” of 2017—and partly the first blush of generational panic: “Wait… am I getting older too?”
It’s all very cute until you realize the joke is on you. Your fashion mistakes aren’t nostalgic, they’re prehistoric—not even worthy of parody. You’ve aged out of relevance. It’s comforting in a way.
Viral video of the week: Will smith eating spaghetti, revisited
Back in 2023, Reddit user u/chaindrop created an AI video made with Stable Diffusion featuring Will Smith eating spaghetti. It went viral for being a grotesque, surreal nightmare that frightened everyone who saw it. A year later, Will Smith himself posted an actual video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. A few weeks ago, Google released Veo 3, an AI video generation tool that creates realistic clips, complete with dialogue and sound. So of course it was used to make a video of Will Smith eating pasta. Check out how far AI has come:
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It’s not perfect visually—it still has traces of the unnatural sheen and rubberiness of AI videos—but it’s getting there. The audio, though, needs work. I’ve heard of pasta al dente, but AI Will Smith’s spaghetti is crunchy.
It sounds absurd that “Will Smith Eating Spaghetti” is the baseline test for AI video generation, but it’s actually a worthy challenge for artificial intelligence: humans eating and pasta are both hard things to “generalize” in an AI way. I also can’t deny that’s it’s technically amazing, but I’m not looking forward to the “we can’t tell real from fake” future that will probably be here in about six weeks.
