Stephen Johnson Senior Staff Writer
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Stephen Johnson is a senior staff writer at Lifehacker covering pop culture and technology, including the columns “The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture” and “What People Are Getting Wrong This Week.”
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January 21, 2026 Add as a preferred source on Google
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Credit: TikTok / Screenshots by Stephen Johnson
A weekly deep dive into the current trends, slang, and viral videos of youth culture in terms that even the squarest can understand.
Table of Contents
This week’s out-of-touch guide is a mélange of internet nonsense that reflect real world anxieties. A gritty part of London is going viral for a taxpayer-funded water park that only exists thanks to AI videos made to enrage racists. Inside the kid-centric videogame Roblox, users are protesting both ICE and age verification without ever leaving their avatars. And in the darker corners of the online world, looksmaxxers are determining who is a HTN, while everyone on TikTok is saying, "Screw it. We’re going to pretend to be birds."
What is a Croydon Water Park?
It might sound like the name of an outré sex act or a cocktail from the 1980s, but a Croydon Water Park is something else entirely, and it’s going to take some exsplaining. Croydon is a large town in South London with a reputation as a rough, gritty place, known (fairly or unfairly) for its concrete and crime. It’s also diverse—51% of its population identifies as Black, Asian, or from a minority ethnic background—so U.K. racists generally don’t like Croydon. The "water park" bit comes from people posting AI-generated videos of face-masked men ("roadmen," in slang) enjoying Croydon’s waterpark, which doesn’t exist, often with "reminders" that it’s "taxpayer funded." This is rage bait for old, racist Brits. Here’s a representative sampling:
Other AI created locations in Croydon include this tax-payer funded buffet:
And the Croydon Aquarium:
In the online hall of mirrors, it’s impossible to tell how many of the angry wankers in the comment section are legit, and how many are kids cosplaying as angry wankers. Judge for yourself on the #Croydon tag.
Protests break out in Roblox over ICE raids (and age verification)
Digital activism can be messy. Recently, in response to ICE protests in Minnesota, Roblox users have been staging their own demonstrations within the game. Led by @clipsforcloset, users are reenacting ICE raids, holding up signs, and otherwise expressing their deep feelings about current events. It looks like this:
Here’s a demonstration featuring ICE vans rolling up to a pre-school:
Protesting in a game isn’t likely to have an immediate effect on the real world, but in terms of educating an extremely hard-to-reach population about what happening outside their computers, it could be effective. But it seems that the issue that’s most important to many Roblox users isn’t ICE, but the platform’s age verification requirements.
Roblox’s newly rolled out restrictions on chat require users to either provide an ID or pose for a series of photos so their age can be determined—otherwise, they can’t chat. From the guess-the-age bot getting it totally wrong, to privacy questions, to people selling age-verified accounts online, there is a lot wrong with Roblox new policy, so some Roblox users are organizing "marches" on the virtual headquarters of Roblox that seem to be against both ICE and the chat restrictions.
Some have pointed out that marching in a game means you’re adding to the player count, so it might not be the most effectivemeans of protest, but it’s interesting that the same kind of "What’s the point?" arguments and inability to keep protestors "on message" are known issues in real-life activism. Speaking of real life, so far, it doesn’t look like Roblox age verification is affecting its parent company’s stock price.
What do you think so far?
What does HTN mean?
The acronym "HTN" stands for "high-tier normie." In normal language, you might call a HTN a "good looking guy," but not like male-model good-looking. It comes from the online community of "looksmaxxers," people focused on maximizing physical attractiveness. Looksmaxxers use what they consider an objective gauge of human facial attractiveness called the PSL scale, and a HTN has a 4.5 to 5.5 out of 8 on the PSL scale. All of this is totally nutso of course, but a lot of younger men think it’s truth. If you know any younger men like that, explain to them that scoring high on the "being a semi-decent person" scale beats any number on the PSL scale.
Viral videos of the week: TikTok’s Owl impersonators
This week, TikTok is being overtaken by people doing impressions of owls. The meme works like this: You say, "This is my impression of an owl if it was X" and act it out. The X can be anything. Celebrity owls are popular, like this impression of an owl if it was Michael Jackson:
There are lots of owl impressions of groups, like this owl that is an "Italian American, but also from New York."
If you dig a little deeper, you get into more conceptual owls, like an owl that is "an overstimulated millennial mom who is teaching herself to self-regulate while teaching their child to self-regulate,"
or an owl "that is ChatGPT."
For thousands of videos featuring countless kinds of owls, check out TikTok’s owl impersonators.
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