Stories

Illustration: THE WIRE / NOWYAKNOW. Details per Know Your Meme, VGTimes, Kotaku, VGC and XDA. Take two things people already love and flip them into something new. That's the whole trick behind this fall's viral AI mashup mods. The fights that came right after it, over credit, creativity and who gets to say no, are hip-hop's sample wars on a faster clock. Steve from Minecraft started turning up in Elden Ring in late September. On September 29, Tobyn Jacobs posted the clip that became the face of the wave: "I put the entire of game minecraft into elden ring as mod. its runs on Mac." Know Your Meme counted more than 308,000 likes in a week, and VGTimes put the clip at 22.5 million views. A few days later X was full of them: skateboarding in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Escape from Tarkov in Skyrim, Mario fighting Margit, Spider-Man swinging through Gotham. IGN's headline said it plainly: "Vibe-Coded Mashup Mods Have Taken Over X This Week." ...

Illustration: THE WIRE / NOWYAKNOW. Details per Know Your Meme, NBC News, and LADbible. No, it's not an '80s movie — or a Russian one. It's an AI clip that looked enough like practical-effects fantasy that half the internet went hunting for a film that isn't there. Then someone put Riff Raff under it. You've seen him. A short, gnome-like imp tip-toes across a barn full of straw, dances for a terrified woman, spins the hay into gold, gets a kiss, and turns into a prince. The footage has the grain, the lighting, and the slightly wrong footwork of an '80s fantasy film that never quite left VHS. People swore it was from the 1987 Rumpelstiltskin musical. Others said Russian cinema. Know Your Meme , NBC News , and LADbible all land in the same place: it is AI-generated. Where the clip actually came from According to Know Your Meme, the original video went up on Instagram on August 27, 2026, posted collaboratively by the accounts Stroinaya, Neuroferma, an...

Illustration: THE WIRE / NOWYAKNOW. Details per TIME's Oct 6 reporting. Meta's Muse beat ChatGPT to 5 million US downloads. A TIME analysis into its internal instructions shows what it's quietly writing down — about you, and about people who never signed up. Muse does the boring stuff. It answers email, books travel, fills out forms, buys things for you. That pitch worked: Meta released it in the US on September 8, and by Sensor Tower's estimate it hit 5 million US downloads in 22 days. ChatGPT needed 56. Grok needed 103. Claude needed 492. Then TIME read the instructions. What Muse actually is Muse is Meta's personal AI agent. Each user's agent runs on its own virtual machine in Meta's cloud, powered by Meta's Muse Spark model, and you can reach it through iPhone and Android apps, the web at muse.ai, or WhatsApp. It's free for most uses, with paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month. For now it only works in the US and Canada, where it arrived o...

The Wumpus drawing Discord posted on X on September 23. Credit: Discord (@discord). Discord's new age system decides whether you're an adult, a teen, or "unconfirmed." The company's mascot is paying for how it announced the bugs. If your timeline has been full of a small purple creature meeting terrible ends, that's Wumpus, Discord's mascot. The people drawing those ends mostly aren't random edgelords. Plenty of them are Discord users, and they're angry about one specific thing: the age verification system Discord switched on worldwide in late September. Two weeks in, the system is still live, the jokes kept coming, and plenty of adults found out Discord thinks they might be teenagers. Here's what actually changed, why the mascot took the hit, and what it means if you use Discord outside the U.S. What Discord changed On September 22, Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy published a post called "Safer for Teens, Same Di...

HABIBTI (FOMO) cover art. Credit: OVO Sound. The song fans spent weeks calling Drake's "Choosin' Texas" remix is on streaming now, with a new title, a long writer list, and one viral claim about money that nobody involved has confirmed. If you searched "Solar Eclipse Drake" this week, you probably wanted one answer: is this the "Choosin' Texas" song? Yes. "Solar Eclipse," Drake's track with Don Toliver, interpolates Ella Langley's "Choosin' Texas," the country single that has spent a record 24 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It arrived October 2 on HABIBTI (FOMO), the deluxe edition of Drake's May album HABIBTI. The release is the easy part. The credits are where the story is. How "Choosin' Texas" turned into "Solar Eclipse" This didn't happen overnight. In July, Drake played "Choosin' Texas" while DJing at a Houston nightclub. Langley answered on Ti...