Adam Bumas

@bumas.bsky.social

1453 Followers 487 Following

Pronounced "BYOO-muss". He/They. adambumas.01 on Signal. Head of Research and Assistant Editor, @garbageday.email. Researcher, @panicworld.com. Other research and journalism elsewhere. The perfect level of online.

Was Freddy’s Ronaldo posting calculated for maximum engagement? I don’t think that’s unfair to say. Does that mean he’s a fake? That’s more unfair — not to get philosophical, but if someone is this dedicated to Ronaldo, calling them “not a real Ronaldo fan” feels pretty silly. But either way, it shows that Freddy’s popularity wasn’t more or less organic than anything else you see on X. He wasn’t a nobody who exploded on our feeds, he’s a savvy, hardworking poster who knows to stick with a trend, and got in on a massive trend at the right time. That might be enough to call him a psyop for a lot of people, though, just like with the whole Geese thing a few months ago. People have finally understood that they shouldn’t take everything that they scroll across at face value. And to build up any sense of collective media literacy for our algorithms, it looks like we’re gonna have to take it one level at a time. Right now we’re at “anything that gets too popular online is a fake/psyop/industry plant” — and it just isn’t that simple.
Homestar Runner talks about Linsanity in Marzipan’s Answering Machine 17.2
On May 8th, a Russian woman named Alexandra Kuzyk was sentenced to 18 months in a labor camp for posting gay fan fiction. Even though the fanfic was free, it was found by a court in Yekaterinburg to be illegal pornography. Ever since 2023, when Russia declared the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group to be an extremist organization, they’ve made multiple efforts to criminalize anything gay on the internet. Naturally, the biggest question on my mind was, “can I read this criminally gay fanfic?”
A Frinkiac screenshot of Krusty The Clown looking pained. The caption reads "We knew it contained spider eggs, but the hantavirus?"
A bar with two TVs over it. The left one is showing a baseball game, the right one shows Earth out of the window of the Integrity spacecraft.
In the early 2020s, bimbofication and its definition of the bimbo spread, like so many other things from the older internet, to TikTok. And it was hard to reconcile the fantasy image of the transformed bimbo with the real world where she now had to exist. We got a round of thinkpieces on bimbos, plus a second volley about himbos. We got a Bimbo Manifesto. The “bimbology” wasn’t uncritical, but since it was centered on the “seggs” app, it couldn’t deal with the reality that this was a niche online sex thing before it was a serious social phenomenon. Which was a problem that’s gotten worse. Because in 2026, most of culture can be directly traced back to niche online sex things. Our slang is incel doggerel, our media diet is a collective goon cave, and our government is insecure memelords.
Discord itself isn’t helping with the misinformation. Their official announcement states the pictures used to estimate your age will “never leave the user’s device.” Despite this, after the usual exploits for faking these pictures were found, X users noticed that the platform is verifying some users’ ages with Persona. That’s a startup funded by Peter Thiel (him again!) that stores all the personal data it analyzes. Discord later said it was only using Persona partially in the UK, and they would only store the images for “up to seven days.” Which means, even in the face of all the backlash, Discord’s promise to protect their users’ identities held strong for about three days. There hasn’t been any update as prominent as the initial announcement.
A clip from the Dilbert animated series of Dilbert's mother demanding doctors give him estrogen (in a labeled pink bag) despite their protesting it will "scramble his gender identity forever".
Wikipedia descriptions for the last two episodes of the Dilbert animated series, where Dilbert gets pregnant.
Beyond the discourse, though, it also convinced a lot more people to play the game. Data from SteamCharts shows that after the awards, the game’s concurrent player count went from a daily average of 14,000 to 45,000 within a few days. Sales estimates from SteamDB show that the week after the awards, Expedition 33 went from Steam’s 12th best-selling non-free game to number two, behind Arc Raiders. This is exactly what awards are supposed to do. Whether or not you think Expedition 33 counts as an indie game, The Game Awards are accomplishing their most basic goal of giving attention and distinction to their winners. This wasn’t always the case — from the records we can find, there wasn’t any comparable bump back when the awards were called the Spike TV VGAs.
A bird of prey on top of a baseball foul pole.
A chart titled "MrBeast Longform Video Performance, First 24 Hours (estimated)". The chart shows a decline in MrBeast's viewing figures.
The Weight of Water
Despite this, there’s one source of news about the shooting that’s gotten a lot of attention in September: Us, apparently. According to Graphtreon, Panic World was the fastest-growing Patreon in September for the “podcast” category, with over 1,300 new subscribers this month. Our own reckoning puts as as number 12 across the whole website — first place, of course, goes to a porn game with over 3,300 new Patrons — but we’ve never even come close to making our own lists before, so we think we’ve earned the brag.
Also, Adam wanted me to mention here that about 5-10% of the most popular posts on Bluesky — 1,000 likes or more — are actually just cartoon erotica. Which no one seems to mention when they talk about the influence of the platform.
This is the latest in a long series of what I’ll call LOLgislation. There was no specific bill or political movement to take federal control of Washington, but Trump posted about it and all of a sudden it was happening. The agenda has been dictated entirely via public comments on social media, pretty much the easiest possible thing to dismiss as not being serious. But when you’re the President, everything you say has to be taken seriously, even — no, especially — if you’re using social media as frivolously as it’s designed for.
The villain of Elio, who looks a lot like a cartoonier version of the Reapers from Mass Effect
But the companies that make these AI models don’t want an even hand, they want a fist. The Copyright Office report cites official comments from companies like Meta and Andreessen Horowitz, saying any regulation of AI training will stifle innovation and growth, as some of the many arguments it’s taking into account. And it goes beyond the scope of the report to mention how these companies have been, as you might put it, impressively shameless in attempting to influence the Trump administration. Andreessen Horowitz founder and America’s most expensive egg, Marc Andreessen, personally helped start Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And, more recently, Meta’s champion friend haver Mark Zuckerberg moved to Washington days after Musk started to lose favor with the White House.
One of the most infamous blessings and curses of the internet is the idea that it lasts forever, that nothing you say there will ever go away. But that's just an idea, one that absolutely isn't true in practice. A Pew study from last year found almost 40% of webpages from 2013 are now offline. My own most formative internet community — a semi-official forum for people waiting for Half-Life 3 — was unceremoniously shut down nearly a decade ago. The internet doesn’t live up to its own standards of timelessness, especially because it’s entirely created by, for, and about us fickle mortals. Without active efforts to preserve, disseminate, and curate, the internet has the same fate as everything not designed to change with time: It becomes garbage.
The poster for "Colorful Stage: The Movie: A Miku Who Can't Sing"
Part of the song’s popularity is due to the fact that bigfoots-biggest-fan does have a degree in music production. So it is actually a banger. “Never used the degree because it didn’t seem like a sensible job,” they said. But another important piece here is that the sheer ironic offensiveness of the song — especially with lyrics coming from HR training — is a statement on its own. It flies directly in the face of the censored corporate social networks that spent years shoving soulless rainbow capitalism down our throats only to immediately bend the knee to the Trump administration last month. The song is queer in the most fundamental sense of the word — defying convention, reveling in transgression. And on the internet in 2025, true transgression means making something algorithms can’t promote.
The poster for Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man
Two tumblr posts from user arachnid-party. One says “do you think if blades of grass had consciousness they’d have a foot fetish”. The second says “sorry about this post. turns out i had been inhaling toxic fumes for the past 4-5 days”.
Matthew McConaughey’s infamous promotional Tweet for The Dark Tower, asking “.@idriselba you want the Tower?” Elba’s account is deleted, so there’s no reply, but McConaughey’s next Tweet in the sequence remains.
A "jollified" screenshot from Dune 2. The black-and-white image of Giedi Prime has a Christmas tree border, and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen has a Santa hat. The subtitle reads "marks the Holy Birthday of our beloved na-Baron Feyd-Rautha", but "Feyd-Rautha" has been badly replaced with "Jesus".
Two posts announcing the House Ethics Committee has voted to release their report on Matt Gaetz. After each post is a very sexual post with images that have been hidden for containing adult content.
An abstract green, orange and white design. It’s a Toynbee Tile embedded in a road at Union Square in NYC. It’s labelled “HOH24”, HOH meaning House Of Hades.
Robert Culp in Santa's Slay
Frank Oz sits down in front of a screen at the Museum of the Moving Image, as an interviewer carries away his crutches.
A full thanksgiving plate with turkey at the center. Clockwise from top: Spaghetti squash bake, kale and pepper salad, cranberry relish, oyster cornbread stuffing, potato leek gratin, roasted brussels sprouts.
One of the bizarre side effects of our streaming- and platform-driven digital media environment is that, even though your favorite TV shows and movies have never been so accessible, audiences are also more likely to not actually experience them in full. Also, by being gobbled up by large franchises, many of them are now just as long-running as Broadway productions, in a sense. The result is a world of mass entertainment reduced to something you do or consume through short clips on your phone. Algorithmic social platforms like Facebook and X have been suppressing outgoing links for years, prioritizing the conversation about a thing over actually going and seeing the thing. And more recently, TikTok has taken it to another level. The app’s autoplaying, algorithmic presentation is designed to make people feel like watching and making content are one and the same. You could sit and watch all eight episodes of Disney’s Star Wars spin-off, The Acolyte, but chances are you didn’t. Though, you may have seen the cool headbutt scene. TV shows, movies, gambling, dating apps — you are likely consuming all of that via vertical videos first, if not completely.
Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino in an image from High Sierra.
A mashup of movie title treatments: "I'm Still" from I'm Still Here, "Here" from Here, and "Tic" from Heretic.
A bowl of avgolemono, a Greek chicken soup with made with eggs and lemon juice.
An image from the movie Real Genius featuring Val Kilmer and his college compatriots.
Kevin Costner in Horizon, wearing all shades of blue
Jonathan Groff's character from "looking" in a Gordon Freeman halloween costume
A sign with a bunch of birds and eggs, reading “All poultry is A.I. negative. All organic products have been A.I. tested.”
Timothee Chalamet as Willy Wonka, with Fremen blue eyes and a stillsuit nose tube added. The caption "Here we go, Mama" has been changed to "Here we go, Jamis."
A person with a censored face sitting at a table. On the table is a glass of beer and a phone on its lock screen which shows Phoenix Wright and Miles Edgeworth kissing.
Jambalaya with shrimp, with green onions on the side
Things are still happening on smaller platforms, however, ones where people go because they actually want conversation. July was the first month with enough data that we could track Bluesky follower counts, and it’s just as lively as Twitter used to be: Last month, the Washington Post gained fewer new followers than a trans shitposter named June. And US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in the top 5, but since she hasn’t posted anything for a while she may be losing ground to the XKCD guy.