The Impossibility of Explaining TikTok To Someone Who Doesn't Use TikTok
It sounds crazy when you say it out loud. Probably because it is. Oh, and Marky Mark came to town.
I write about the internet a lot. I think about the internet a lot. Probably because I’m always on the internet.
I’m one of those people who hyperventilate if I don’t have my phone and immediately stop everything I’m doing to find my baby!
I obviously don’t see a whole lot wrong with this, mostly because I’m not a teenager and my brain is (arguably) fully developed, and I can choose what to do with my time. And if what I choose to do with my time is watch a grown man in Carhartt overalls swallow successive cheese sticks whole and then throw up, that’s my choice.
God bless America.
Now that Substack has become Twitter, let’s talk about all those blank looks you get when you mention something you’ve seen on TikTok, or Twitter, or Instagram, or Mastodon (if it even still exists—and by the way, whose bright idea was it to name a social media platform after an extinct, hairy elephant?) to somebody who is relentlessly, pitilessly normal and actually lives their life IRL without clicking or scrolling or LOLing or knowing what the words “milkshake duck” mean.
I can barely even wrap my mind around the concept of people like this, and yet, I’m surrounded by them. In fact, I used to be one of them.
Could I ever be one of them again? Nay, I swallowed the red (or blue, depending on your point of view) pill and it is what it is.
Here are some of my current, impossible-to-explain tidbits on TikTok, and if you think this is just an excuse for me to scroll through TikTok for a few hours pretending that I’m doing “research”, you’re absolutely right.
(No, I’m not finding all the links for you, that would take forever and I have to wash the dog for her trip to the vet tomorrow — 🎶can’t be a dirty dog, gotta be a clean dog🎶. It’s like brushing your teeth before you go to the dentist.)
There’s a guy who puts voiceovers on his (many) cats, and of course they’re really meowing, so their mouths are moving. And then he said that people wanted to hear their real voices, so I thought they would be meowing, but they were just Cockney.
There’s Matt Mathews, whom I adore. Everyone should do farm chores in a robe and verbally abuse their animals.
There’s carlostherooster, who is a chicken with issues.
Tanaradoublechocolate is probably my number one. Just screamingly funny. Dragging other people’s videos on TikTok is a big pastime because it doesn’t take a lot of effort and anybody can trash talk.
The guy swallowing disgusting things is garrettm1994 and I have to literally look away. I’m one of those people who think other people throwing up is funny. I understand if you’re not.
“Do you or do you not feel bonita?” omfg this is so irritating.
So, so many sick kids and deformed people. Things that even 15 years ago you would not have been exposed to and now your phone is just this endless screaming void of strangers asking for help.
I listen to almost nothing except Radio Andy and TikTok Radio on SiriusXM. Radio Andy is Bravo-centric entertainment news, and on TikTok Radio, all of the songs are sped up.
Why? Who knows.
In a similar vein, I wrote about Nextdoor on Medium (and it’s Nextdoor, not NextDoor. Not everything is qUirKy).
Nextdoor Is The Bottom of the Internet Barrel | by Bev Potter | Apr, 2023 | Medium
Oh, and Mark Wahlburg visited a Giant Eagle near my home to promote his beef and tequila (why am I following Mark Wahlburg? Surely I did not willingly do that).
It seems a little desperate to jet in from your Las Vegas mansion to push hamburgers and liquor at a less-than-great grocery store in the middle of BFE.
Just sayin’.
this was a wild rollercoaster read - like someone hyped on caffeine and I f-king loved it. Also so many times I make tik-tok references and my partners looks at me like I'm the lunatic. It's very hard to make a funny meme joke and have your partner not understand the reference. Not hard, painful, really.
For better or worse, my brain is just not wired for TikTok. A couple of times I visited the site with the intention of creating an account to supplant Twitter. And each time I was overwhelmed by the noise and constant motion and decided this just isn't for me. I guess this is how getting old starts.