This week's trip into the minds of people who aren't old enough to rent a car is like a potpourri of unrelated trends and memes that present a picture of the variety of ways young people are relating to the world. Some TikTokers are memorializing peak moments in their lives with a "Hozier yell," while others are spending their precious time on Earth creating brain-rot "juggtok" videos, or getting really, really angry about chess and chubbiness. It's a big world.
What is a Hozier yell?
A "Hozier yell" is used in TikTok videos to refer to a peak, climactic, awe-inspiring moment. Literary types might substitute "barbaric yamp."
The end result is videos like these:
The reference and the audio that goes with it is to the song "Northern Attitude," a 2024 collab between Hozier and Noah Kahan, in which Hozier hits a particularly climactic note just as the song climaxes. Hozier, by the way, is an Irish singer-songwriter whose songs are heavily influenced by folk music who is best known for his 2013 song "Take Me to Church."
So far, nearly 200,000 videos have used the audio clip of Hozier and Kahan, commenting on everything from seeing a bear to marriage proposals to graduating cosmetology school.
What does “Jugg” mean? And what is "Juggtok?"
The slang term “jugg” (sometime “juug”) means to grab quickly or to steal. Like most modern slang, it is derived from AAVE, specifically from the South.
"Jugg" has been around for awhile—the word is used in a number of rap songs from the 2010s—but it has come into wider usage lately as part of a TikTok meme format called "juggtok," a convoluted brain-rot-centric subculture in which specific slang words and acronyms are paired with a set of unrelated images and video clips in such a way as to render it all meaningless. If my reading is correct, juggtok and its offshoots and adversaries like slimetok and jollytok defy explanation on purpose. They are meant to be meaningless and self-referential. Here are a couple examples:
(For more definitions, check out my slang glossary, 'Aura Farming,' 'Huzz,' and Other Gen Z and Gen Alpha Slang You Might Need Help Decoding.)
Chubby filter causing TikTok controversy
The cultural argument over "fat acceptance" has been going on for a long time, but artificial intelligence is adding an exciting new wrinkle. This month, a video filter called "Chubby AI" allowed Tiktokers to visualize what it would look like if they (gasp!) gained weight, and videos like these started going viral:
There was, as you'd probably expect, an instant backlash, as illustrated by this X post from writer Bec Shaw:
If you had hope that younger people might be more accepting of people being overweight, since so many of them are, you'd be mistaken. But on the plus side, I'm confident that many skinny young people who look down on fat people will eventually grow fat themselves.
Is chess.com trying to rename the bishop?
Since we're doing controversy, a way dumber foofaraw was kicked off last week by chess.com that proves how everyone must pick a side of the culture wars, even websites about chess.
The row began when chess.com's X account posted this seemingly innocuous piece of engagement-bait:
Apparently some X users assumed that Chess.com wants to rename the diagonally moving piece because of religious connotation of the name "bishop," so the comments section quickly filled with responses like this, from a " friendly neighborhood Christian Nationalist:"
And this, from some other goof:
And this, from a normal person having a very normal day:
Anyway, chess.com ensured more outrage by troll-posting:
So is chess.com really trying to bring down Christianity? Sadly, no. They'd made a similar post earlier about The Rook:
And no one freaked out. The seething outrage over a meaningless shitpost illustrates that X is worst website ever and no one should use it. I feel like I need a shower after even a few minutes there.
Viral videos of the the week: Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?
As the great Criswell intones in Plan 9 From Outer Space, the future is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives; no doubt a lot of that time will be spent driving, and driving will be very different in the future. Cutting-edge technology is rapidly taking over driver's decisions, whether it's emergency braking or full-on auto-driving so I can take a nap and go to Hardees.
Computer-assisted driving is generally a good idea, but the technology has limits, and the future holds auto-related dangers that Henry Ford never dreamed of. For instance, how would an auto-driving car handle a brick wall painted to look like the road? That's the question at the center of this week's viral video of the week, in which YouTube legend Mark Rober pits the two leading self-driving car technologies against obstacles like thick fog, heavy rain, and a wall painted to look like the road.
Rober's experiments features a car from Luminar with a self-driving system that uses a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to navigate, and a Tesla that uses cameras. Rober's tests are unscientific—this is an entertainment YouTube channel after all—but they are, as Elon Musk might post, "concerning." Few drivers will ever encounter a brick wall painted like the road (unless they're driving through a Warner Brothers cartoon) but whether a car on auto-pilot will brake for an obstacle in a heavy fog seems pretty relevant. And the results don't look promising for the Tesla.
