Hey y’all this isn’t about video games at all, unless you wanna count the increasingly bizarre press events put on by companies under fire for sexual harassment allegations like Ubisoft as relevant. Instead, this is a post addressing the straight up fucking weirdness we’ve been experiencing online lately, best summarized by the phenomenon of “cake where there should not be cake.”
Look, we all saw these posts like a year or two ago, a particularly creative baker or two has been making cakes that look exactly like everyday objects for a while, and we all oooh and ahhh over them for like, 36 hours, then they go away for a little bit until some fucking algorithm puts it in our faces again and the cycle continues. But I think what changed is our capacity for dealing with Shit That Should Not Be.
We’ve been locked inside for almost half a year. Our government is falling apart. The video game discourse has been worse but like, lmao, it’s pretty fucking bad right now. Wild shit keeps happening in non-politics news. And now all of a sudden we fuckin… WE GOT THE GODDAMN CAKE OBJECTS AGAIN.
It’s not rational to be afraid of the cake. But like what are you going to do, let the cake roll over you like a gentle wave? I think not. So instead, you’re going to share the memes and take the ride like the rest of us, and we’re kind of on Willy Wonka’s log jam down the chocolate waterfalls now. We have no way of knowing for sure where we are going.
Do you want a buoy? An anchor to reality? Something to assure you that shit could get much, much incomprehensibly weirder?
Do you remember cuil theory?
Let’s go back to 2009. Reddit was a website that people went to, and on that website, someone posted a story to r/worldnews called “Police raids reveal ‘baby farms’.” This led to a commenter responding, “Reddit’s thumbnails have a Cuil level of effectiveness,” referring to an unsuccessful search engine of the same name that went out of business in 2010. This is when Redditor RedDyeNumber4 responded with the classic post:
“Can we make that a unit of measurement?”
From there, RDN4 lists four initial levels of cuil, which we’ll define as levels of abstraction from objective reality. The example the commenter uses is “You ask me for a hamburger.”
1 Cuil: if you asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.
2 Cuils: If you asked me for a hamburger, but it turns out I don’t really exist. Where I was originally standing, a picture of a hamburger rests on the ground.
3 Cuils: You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.
4 Cuils: Why are we speaking German? A mime cries softly as he cradles a young cow. Your grandfather stares at you as the cow falls apart into patties. You look down only to see me with pickles for eyes, I am singing the song that gives birth to the universe.
And so on.
As we get further and further abstracted away from the expected, the level of surreality takes on cosmic implications. Check out an excerpt from 7 Cuils:
I give you a hamburger. The universe is engulfed within itself. A bus advertising hotdogs drives by a papillon. It disapproves. An unnatural force reverses Earth’s gravity. You ask for a hamburger. I reciprocate with a mildly convulsing potato. You disapprove. Your disapproval releases a cosmic shift in the void between birth and life. You ask for a hamburger. A certain small dog feasts on hamburger patties for the rest of its unnatural, eternal endurance. Your constant disapproval sends silence through everything. A contrived beast becomes omnipotent. You ask for a hamburger.
Right now, we’re at an estimated .5 cuils. Be glad your hamburger is just cake, and not a raccoon. Or the entire universe collapsing in front of you.
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