a GameFAQs post from approximately 1999 still has administrative privileges over my thumb. Read more →
i rapidly tap B when i’m trying to catch a pokémon because of something i read on GameFAQs in, like, 1999. i know it does nothing. i have known it does nothing for a long time. my thumb has declined to participate in this conversation.
i rapidly tap B to 'improve catch odds' because of a gamefaqs post i read in like 1999 and i still do it even though i now know it Does Nothing
someone else was talking about holding down + B, which is a different denomination of the same religion. apparently some of us believed you had to hold the buttons, and some of us believed you had to attack them. we agreed that the little animal needed to stay in the ball and that, somehow, this was a job for our hands.
an entire belief system could fit beside this screen. Evan-Amos / source. Public domain
the embarrassing part is that i’m perfectly capable of understanding the actual system. the original games’ capture calculations involve things like the ball, the pokémon’s HP and status, its catch rate, and random numbers. there is no bonus for how earnestly a child is pressing B. i am now an adult who works with computers. this should have been enough to resolve the matter.
it wasn’t.
the ball is wobbling and i would like to contribute
catching a pokémon has a very effective little pause built into it. you’ve made your choices. you’ve thrown the ball. now you have to watch it wobble while the game decides whether to be nice to you.
that is an unreasonable amount of time to leave a person alone with hope.
so i tap. if it works, excellent technique. if it doesn’t work, maybe i tapped badly. this is an extremely durable explanation because it can survive literally any outcome. the pokémon escapes and somehow the theory gets another chance.
i don’t remember the username of whoever passed this along. i can’t produce the post. i’m not even confident about the year. but the instruction remains available immediately, without searching, whenever a ball starts moving. meanwhile, a fact i needed for an actual appointment has already left the building.
smaller hardware, same opportunity to insist you are helping. Evan-Amos / source. Public domain
an old internet habit that can stay
there’s something funny about a bit of advice outliving your belief in it. i don’t go into the game thinking i’ve found a secret mechanic. i just start doing the thing, notice i’m doing it, and continue doing it. correcting myself would require more effort than the superstition.
i’ve written about missing the older, weirder web. this is a much smaller souvenir: an unverifiable instruction from a page i read when i was a kid, still making its way into how i play.
i don’t need to turn it into a lesson about misinformation or insist it was secretly good advice. it was wrong. my catch odds are unimpressed.
but if you see me tapping B, please understand that the information has reached the relevant department. the relevant department simply does not care.
somebody has to announce they have arrived, somebody has to react with a heart, and somebody has to send the screenshot. Read more →
the group chat is where adulthood quietly moved its public square. not the glamorous parts, obviously. the group chat is largely weather complaints, grocery photos, and the collective management of a restaurant reservation nobody wanted to make.
it still performs essential services. it witnesses a bad day. it confirms that a suspicious text is suspicious. it keeps a small but functional archive of jokes that would otherwise have evaporated the moment they were said.
there is always a person who posts the news, a person who posts the meme about the news, and a person who arrives six hours later with a very sincere question that was answered directly above them. democracy survives anyway.
maybe that is why i am protective of it. the group chat asks very little: show up when you can, say something strange, and do not make the shared calendar a hostage situation.
dating apps reward us for turning ourselves into instantly legible archetypes. unfortunately, metaphors are package deals. Read more →
the funniest thing about calling yourself a golden retriever on a dating app is that you are asking strangers to take a metaphor seriously, but only in the flattering directions.
you would like us to picture loyal, upbeat, affectionate, and delighted to see us. sure. lovely. but dogs also bark, need supervision, eat things that are not food, and occasionally have to be told to get off the furniture. metaphors are not à la carte.
dating profiles are tiny branding exercises
a dating profile gives you a few photographs, a handful of prompts, and just enough room to construct a version of yourself that can be understood before someone’s thumb gets impatient. naturally, we reach for shorthand. adventurous. sarcastic. fluent in movie quotes. golden retriever.
the phrase usually means a partner who is warm, loyal, social, and openly enthusiastic. The Knot’s definition emphasizes supportiveness and devotion, while a 2024 TIME essay puts the trope in a larger family of internet labels that try to describe men by how they orient themselves toward a partner. both are nicer than “i own three quarter-zips and become emotionally unavailable during football season,” which is presumably why the dog won.
the trouble starts when a label stops describing a vibe and begins functioning as a character reference. “golden retriever” can become a way to announce that you are safe, uncomplicated, and emotionally available without demonstrating any of those qualities. it is the dating-app equivalent of a restaurant describing itself as a neighborhood institution before the neighborhood has had a chance to vote.
maybe you really are cheerful and affectionate. excellent. the world needs more of that. but if your entire self-description rests on being playfully doglike, you cannot act scandalized when somebody playfully uses a dog verb. you opened this kennel.
every archetype comes with terms and conditions
internet dating archetypes are appealing because they make personality feel sortable. the golden retriever goes with the black cat. the extrovert adopts the introvert. one person talks to the waiter, and the other knows when it is time to leave the party. a relationship becomes a two-panel comic that can be understood without anyone having to explain their actual needs.
sometimes that shorthand is accurate, and sometimes it is just a costume with good search-engine optimization. real people do not remain on brand. the sunny one gets tired. the mysterious one wants reassurance. the allegedly low-maintenance one has, in fact, developed several maintenance requirements.
that does not make the labels useless. it just means they are introductions, not warranties. “golden retriever energy” can tell me that you aspire to be kind, enthusiastic, and present. wonderful. now comes the part where you have to behave that way when you are bored, annoyed, embarrassed, or asked to bark.
the reblog works because it completes the transaction. if you put a dog breed in the brochure, somebody is eventually going to test the product. sit. stay. communicate directly about your feelings. apparently one of these commands is much harder than the others.
youtube is no longer just a website with videos. according to my watch history, it’s a streaming service assembled from television, obsolete… Read more →
I’m currently rewatching Please Like Me with my friend Jacob, which is how I discovered that YouTube has apparently become a streaming service now.
Obviously YouTube has technically been a streaming service for a very long time. Video goes in. Video comes out. Streaming has occurred.
But that’s not what I mean.
I mean YouTube has somehow accumulated so many different kinds of television that opening the app on a TV now feels less like visiting a website and more like walking into a flea market where several incompatible versions of the entertainment industry have rented tables.
There’s normal YouTube. People talking directly into cameras. Video essays. Podcasts that have cameras for some reason. Game footage. Music videos. A very serious investigation into whether 2015 was Nintendo’s worst year ever.
There are also movies.
There are entire television shows.
There are live television channels.
There are sports.
There are clips uploaded by networks, old episodes uploaded by networks, and old episodes uploaded by somebody whose continued existence probably depends on nobody at a network noticing them.
And increasingly, there are actual streaming subscriptions living inside YouTube. YouTube says it now offers more than 50 Primetime Channels, including HBO Max, Paramount+, FOX One, and NFL Sunday Ticket. Peacock moved in this summer, too, so NBC shows, Bravo, Universal movies, and live sports can now occupy the same app as a six-hour compilation about discontinued game consoles. (YouTube Help, YouTube Blog)
Netflix would very much like you to think of Netflix as television.
Disney+ is Disney.
Peacock is NBC.
YouTube is apparently everything television has ever been, plus whatever I became curious about four minutes ago.
That is a fundamentally different proposition.
according to my watch history, “television” is now a psychological condition
I looked at my recent YouTube history because I wanted to see whether my impression of the service was accurate.
It was worse than I thought.
My recent viewing begins with a Daily Show clip about pardons, followed by three videos about Nintendo’s difficult relationship with 2015, the 3DS, and Wii U games ported to the Switch.
Then Task Mistress.
Then a Tomb Raider presentation from Gamescom.
Then a segment from This Morning called Meet The Man With Hands 10 Times Bigger Than Yours!
Then orcas.
Then a Graham Norton tribute to Dolly Parton, followed immediately by Kylie Sonique Love’s “Do It Like Dolly.”
Then a Jim Cornette omnibus, a full episode of The Big Fat Quiz, another episode of Task Mistress, and Bob the Drag Queen ranking reality television fights.
No television network has ever assembled that schedule because a television network would be investigated.
YouTube looked at all of those things and said: yes, this is one viewer. We can work with this.
Task Mistress: conventional television, except it lives beside Nintendo retrospectives, enormous hands, and orcas in my history. Video: Avalon.
The categories stop meaning anything after a while. Is a three-hour Scott the Woz compilation a television show, a podcast, a documentary, or the audiovisual equivalent of leaving a box fan running while I do something else? Is Bob the Drag Queen playing a Roblox animal hospital a game stream or a sitcom? Is The Big Fat Quiz television if I watch it through an official upload on the same service where I just learned that somebody put Linux on an Android phone?
At some point the answer becomes: who cares, it’s on the big rectangle and I am watching it.
Streaming services usually organize themselves around genre. Comedy. Drama. Reality. Documentary. Action.
My actual YouTube genres appear to be:
Nintendo made a decision several years ago, and we are still processing it
professional wrestling was occasionally terrible, please explain for 94 minutes
drag queens interacting with video games or one another
somebody is doing something inadvisable with food
obsolete consumer technology remembered at exhausting length
a science question I did not have until the thumbnail asked it
British television I can watch without opening another app
three hours of a familiar person talking so the apartment is not silent
Netflix does not have a row called Because You Watched Why Growing Pink Pineapples Is Illegal.
YouTube understands that it should.
The sort of extremely specific historical inquiry that YouTube correctly identifies as television for me. Image: Scott the Woz/YouTube; used for commentary.
youtube has one enormous advantage: it already lives on everything
Every streaming company spent the last decade trying to convince us to download another app.
YouTube did not have to do that.
YouTube was already there.
It’s on the television, phone, tablet, Xbox, Switch, and probably the refrigerator if Samsung believes it can make me watch a preroll ad while getting shredded cheese.
It is the one video app I can safely assume exists on whatever glowing rectangle happens to be nearby.
That becomes surprisingly powerful once YouTube stops being merely “YouTube videos.”
If a television series is officially available there, I don’t have to remember which media conglomerate owns it this quarter. I search for it.
If I want a game presentation, I search for it.
If I want to know why a Superman game is apparently so difficult to make, I search for it.
If I want to know whether an apple provides more energy than coffee, I search for it, despite having survived for 37 years without requiring a ruling.
And if I don’t know what I want, YouTube is prepared to generate a need. Before reviewing my watch history, I had forgotten that I apparently needed to see whether two interleaved phone books could be pulled apart, why cold drinks were deadly before 1914, every occasion on which evolution produced a crab, and what ancient humans did when it was too hot to sleep.
The app collapses the distinction between watching television and looking something up about television, then collapses the distinction between looking something up and being ambushed by a new subject entirely.
Netflix wants you to stay inside Netflix.
YouTube wants you to fall down a staircase.
Reality television criticism, comedy, and Bob the Drag Queen: an algorithmic recommendation requiring no further defense. Image: Bob the Drag Queen/YouTube; used for commentary.
it has the world’s strangest back catalog
Streaming services present their catalogs as intentional collections.
Here are our prestige dramas.
Here are our comedies.
Here are our blockbuster movies.
Here is a tasteful row called “Because You Watched The White Lotus.”
YouTube’s catalog feels archaeological.
There are current game presentations beside retrospectives about the Wii U and PlayStation Vita. There are polished cooking productions beside Modified Grilled Cheese — You Suck at Cooking. There’s a 100-hour Counter-Strike 2 marathon somewhere between Cobblemon analysis and an episode of Poker Face in which one dish has been sabotaged.
I watched a history of browser games, a video about weird 3D GIFs, and somebody playing Toontown Rewritten. On another service, that would require a carefully programmed nostalgia collection. On YouTube, it’s apparently just Tuesday.
An entire history of browser games is simultaneously documentary, nostalgia programming, and something YouTube correctly decided I would leave running. Video: People Make Games.
There are also entire ecosystems of old media being watched, clipped, reconsidered, ranked, and turned into new media. A chaotic episode of Wheel of Fortune becomes a full upload. Old celebrity interviews become warning signs. Every bad wrestling faction can be assembled into a taxonomy. A forgotten console receives the sort of historical treatment once reserved for dead monarchs.
A streaming service would never design a catalog this way.
That is precisely why I like it.
For years, online video has moved toward behaving more like television: better production, professional creators, cleaner interfaces, premium subscriptions, and increasingly expensive programming.
YouTube accomplished all of that without successfully removing the basement underneath it.
The polished television is sitting directly on top of twenty years of internet debris.
That rules.
the streaming services are becoming tenants
The funniest part is that conventional streaming companies seem increasingly willing to simply move into YouTube.
YouTube launched Primetime Channels so people could subscribe to individual services and watch their shows, movies, and live programming without leaving YouTube. FOX One joined in June 2026, and Peacock followed later that month. YouTube described the point plainly: put more entertainment in one place so viewers do not have to jump between apps. (YouTube Blog)
We spent years unbundling cable so every media company could build its own streaming service.
Now the streaming services are slowly climbing back into bundles.
Except one of the new cable companies is YouTube, and its channel guide was assembled by an algorithm with access to my psychological vulnerabilities.
Imagine explaining my recent programming schedule to somebody in 1998:
8:00 — Task Mistress
8:45 — The Worst WWF/WWE Factions
10:00 — Bob the Drag Queen runs a Roblox animal hospital while armed
10:32 — festive cheese
11:10 — can air become alcohol?
11:28 — an update on some rocks a woman left at stage one for six months
11:47 — ancient heat-management strategies
12:09 — typewriter keyboards
12:31 — illegal pink pineapples
That channel would immediately become my favorite channel.
maybe this is what streaming should have been
I don’t particularly want another perfectly curated streaming service.
We have those.
They’re fine.
What I increasingly appreciate is a place where professional entertainment and random human obsession occupy the same space.
My history is full of videos made by broadcasters, newspapers, game companies, established production studios, independent creators, comedians, drag queens, wrestling obsessives, hardware tinkerers, and people who have appointed themselves historians of failed consoles. YouTube doesn’t ask me to decide which class of media I am currently consuming. It just keeps playing.
That used to be much more common online. The internet did not have such clean boundaries between “media” and “some thing a guy made.” YouTube still doesn’t.
It may now contain television networks, subscription services, live sports, studio movies, premium entertainment, and shows I already wanted to rewatch, but none of those things have managed to displace the weird website underneath.
They just moved in next door to it.
So now YouTube is possibly the most complete streaming service, provided your definition of complete includes Please Like Me, professional Japanese kitchen gadgets, WWE nobodies who somehow became world champion, Michael Jackson’s most savage moments, an LGBTQ+ sandwich, and a Pokémon toy that is also a Nintendo DS.
Mine apparently does.
Anyway, I need to get back to Please Like Me.
Unless YouTube would like to explain why everything keeps evolving into crabs first.
The algorithm’s closing argument: apparently everything keeps evolving into crabs. Video: PBS Eons.
the discourse around geese being an “industry plant” vs just engaging in chaotic good marketing is proof that our collective brains have… Read more →
we have officially reached the stage of modern internet culture where if a young indie band is actually good, charismatic, and knows how to use social media, people immediately assume they were manufactured in a secret underground pentagon laboratory
the discourse around geese being an “industry plant” vs just engaging in chaotic good marketing is proof that our collective brains have been fried by algorithm paranoia. when did being inventive and having fun with promotional campaigns become suspicious?? if turning album promotion into surreal, chaotic art keeps rock music interesting, we need more of it, tbh
