Skibidi Toilet is a serious of SFM shorts that became popular with young kids. Think in the same vein as the weird flash videos or early SFM videos that were popular with young kids 10-15 years ago. "Skibidi" doesn't mean anything and is just taken from that.
It's literally just gibberish and jump scares.
I watched way the fuck too many of those shorts, trying to figure out what the appeal was.
I guess the appeal is the same as any dumb youthful "OMG SO RANDOM" humor.
CHARLIE THE UNICORN OMG SO RANDOM!!!!
So, yeah, it's just as fucking dumb as the dumb shit we laughed at when we were kids.
BADGER BADGER BADGER BADGER...
EDIT: u/lukmly013 adds some important context to the source of the word "Skibidi."
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
I got that reference!
Charlie the Unicorn had a coherent plot and humor structure. It wasn't "lol random." Maybe you're thinking of Llamas in Hats.
I mean, to be fair, the same can be said for this, too. Skibidi Toilets actually has a coherent plot and characters if you're paying attention.
I promise you, if you came across Charlie the Unicorn for the first time as an adult, you would describe it similarly.
Take that back. How dare you besmirch the good name of Charlie the Unicorn like that.
I always get an aneurysm whenever Enhancer for YouTube fails to hide shorts and I see all the fucking shorts spam on YT. It's horrible how much it ruined search results. I fucking hate what YT has become over the last decade especially.
It's why I barely watch YouTube at all and mostly read news and get frustrated if the only source is a fucking YouTube video.
You know what's really easy to cite? A text document.
You know what's not so easy to cite? A six-part 14 hours-of-video deep dive into Disnleyland queueing and ticketing systems or whatever.
No, stop, write it the fuck down. You definitely wrote a bunch down in service of making this fucking video so why not also just release that for fucks sake? Are people so unable to get involved in reading anymore?
Some things are more helpful as a YouTube video, like How-To videos where you can see more clearly what is happening when a written instruction can be unclear. It's also useful for speaking truth to power by recording cops who are breaking the law and so forth. But those are specific use cases.
Are people so unable to get involved in reading anymore?
I don't know know if this trait carrys over to Lemmy, but on reddit I would get my best upvotes on messages that were 1-2 sentences, usually with a quote or reference to something popular.
You know, thoughtless content where I'm just reminding them of a quote from the office, or a small joke. Anything more than a paragraph and people replied "Whoa! I'm not reading that mountain of text! Meanwhile it's less text than would be on a pamphlet.
It reminds of something Bo Burnham said in a song from Youtube Live, which was planned as an annual celebration of youtubes biggest stars featuring live performances on stage. Bo Burnham had just broke out. He said:
"It's youtube, it's what this country's been needing, an entire generation of kids who don't waste their time reading!"
That was 2009. Which means at the youngest, those kids are now at least young adults. And the older ones are pushing 30 now.
Excuse me as I go cry looking in the mirror at my grey hairs, pondering how many more years until I need a cane.
I actually smiled and laughed when I first saw that it was a huge trend, considering all the gary's mod and SFM stuff, especially TF2 videos, I adored myself as a teen/young adult. Made me feel less old seeing that there's still life in the meme format.
It does mean something.
The skibidi toilet "creatures" are considered the antagonists, and the word is associated with their traits.
Its an insult to and pretty much interchangeably with "creepy" with a splash of "cringe"
Often paired with "ohio" which means "bland" / " boring" / "mid"
Example:
"Yo he got that skibidi Ohio rizz"
Translation:
"This dude has zero game, in fact he is creepy and weird and has negative charisma, people find him repulsive and boring"
Damn, skibidi ohio rizz has a much more devastating connotation than I expected
fr fr
Damn, kids these days. Like, I knew that I shouldn't disregard slang as meaningless just because I don't understand it, but I'm realising how despite knowing this, I've probably been subconsciously dismissive. TIL, thank you.
I've never seen that association with my friends who use it. It's always been more of a meme word, a meaningless adjective you throw into a sentence to make it "funnier."
What is SFM
Source film maker. Kind of like Garry’s mod but specifically for making videos.
Source Filmmaker - basically the tech used in Valve's games (IE Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Gmod) but repurposed into an easy to use animation tool. Valve used it quite a bit for their content but it was also popular among amateur animators since it was easy to use and had bunch of ready-to-use resources from Valve's games.
Honestly the entire thing evolved quickly from silly random humor to a full-blown story with recognizable characters and drama.
So the Skibidi Toilets seem to operate on being able to hurt "people" via jump-scares. These "people" I refer to could be called "Tech Heads" (don't know if there is some skibidi-subculture which has consistent names for factions or characters).
The Tech Heads come in various flavors and keep upgrading their Heads to fight off the Skibidi Toilets.
The battles increasingly rely on both sides absurdly upgrading their arsenals in over-the-top and sometimes downright Cronenberg-esque ways. It makes heavy, heavy use of Half Life 2 GMod assets that are heavily modified to be these freaky creations.
The main endings of the shorts are either Skibidi's winning and serving you up a jump-scare before a blackscreen, or the various Tech Heads winning and giving each other a thumbs up gesture. Over time, even these concepts are lampooned or used as misdirects.
Further, there has honestly been clever use of the different type of Tech Heads for storytelling and meta-storytelling devices.
It ends up in an all-out war that includes deep subterfuge on both sides. I won't say it's not creative, it's actually incredibly creative and well-put-together.
I just wasn't able to find the humor in it, personally.
Actually, it's a statement on how shitposting is killing traditional media
I think it initially started off silly, but as the story started to unfold it just got less sillier and more darker because the story didn't need to be overtly silly.
Now, what's SFM?
Source Film Maker, 3D animation software based on source engine which was used for games like Portal and Team Fortress 2.
Thank you! That's a name I haven't heard in a decade or so!
I watched an episode or two, and it's basically the current generation's version of GMod Idiot Box.
Skibidi Toilet is this generation's War and Peace
...and it's all subconscious representations of feelings about the internet.
It makes some users into toilet brained idiots. Perverts looking to gorge themselves on internet filth.
It reveals people as political agents if governments.
It shows some are just "camera men" viewers, recorders, uploaders, and others are speakers trying to say something.
It questions what can be ridiculous in this new arena - if anything in an age defined by the scale of your "influence"... And how that causes our drama chips to go haywire.
The art style is known as Machinima, and dates back to the early 90s.
Humans actually have trouble saying things that aren't meaningful - our subconscious tends to always have something to say due to always having to hold things back. It's just who we are.
Wanna be more confused by Skibidi? Check out the video for Skibidi by Little Big
I came to write that: it's a masterpiece, and Little Big has more!
I'll never forgive Covid for the Eurovision it took from us. Little Big was supposed to represent Russia in 2020
Gen X guy here. This is literally the first time I have come across the word “skibidi”. I simultaneously wish I could help you, and glad I don’t know what that asinine word means.
Gen X really are just boomers in waiting.
So is EVERY generation.
Edit: apparently some people refuse to accept the concept of linear time. Seems a bit quixotic to me, but okay.
Millennials are in the "Oh fuck I'm 'the Man' now" phase.
Are we? Still too poor to own stuff because generations before us are hoarding riches like they could take them to the grave.
While others did explain skibidi toilet, I think it would be good to step back a little to what popularised the... sound? "skibidi".
Some Turkish dude used this part of a song in his belly dance video. I am talking about a bouncy belly. This is a repost of that: https://youtube.com/shorts/3-RlRmYshCQ
He then later posted more similar videos, becoming a meme.
As for the song, this is it: https://youtu.be/0U7SBGBCoGs
"Skibidy" predates this song by a long shot. It's a common vocalization used in a lot of scat singing, so it's possibly a century old at this point.
Ha, true.
Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub
Hadn't thought about this in years but you mentioning it had my mind mainlining the song.
My tween will try to be edgy by saying “you’re so skibidi” to siblings.
I'm a millennial who doesn't really know.
But. It seems like the duck billed platypus of zoomer humor. YouTube pays for views. And people just make million of videos. And this one happened to catch on. And it's so bizarre people show it to their friends. Hilarity ensues. 🤷
Its what the blind algorithm hath brought us.
it's not zoomer humour, it is alpha gen humour. zoomers hate it.
as a millennial i think it's very funny that gen z are confused by the next generation's memes
The hate for skibidi toilet baffles me because it's literally the same shit we laughed at not even 20 years ago? Does nobody remember pingas and pootis? Fan flashes? It's crazy how fast people fall into "kids like it so it's bad"
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