Image via TikTok

Dance crazes and wacky challenges are a big part of what keeps TikTok one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, but there’s another cornerstone to the app’s content that never seems to fail to go viral: pranking your friends. TikTok’s latest way to make fun of the people who love you is a fake Google search that falsely predicts how long someone has to live based on a particular characteristic.

The “prank” is pretty simple to pull off. Users display a search result ⏤ typically from Google ⏤ from a life expectancy calculator based on a certain characteristic of the person they want to prank. Typical parameters are “how long do tall people live,” “how long do emos live,” or “how long do idiots live.” The prankster then shows a message featuring lyrics from “I’ll Never Forget You” ⏤ either the Noisettes or the Zara Larsson version ⏤ with the track in question playing throughout the video.

Perhaps it’s not the most sophisticated joke you’ll hear online this year, but the video call-outs seem to be a hit, with some of the videos receiving hundreds and thousands of likes and views.

The trend is the latest to prominently feature “Never Forget You.” Though the Noisettes and MNEK songs are two different songs by different songwriters, both trended prominently last year in videos TikTok users produced to highlight a person or pet that had significantly impacted their lives. However, those videos tended to be much more heartfelt than the newer trend.

Image via TikTok

Like most social media apps out there, TikTok counts on a bit of a Mobius strip when it comes to user engagement. Users come to the platform to indulge in other users’ content, and often become content creators themselves, if only to recreate some of TikTok’s many viral dance and song trends. But the company’s higher-ups aren’t above hedging their bets when it comes to keeping viewers amused. TikTok’s newest viral challenge is “in-house” for a change — a built-in interactive game users can play themselves.

The Stacking Challenge is an interactive game that is part of the platform’s effects menu. The goal is straightforward enough; simply attempt to build the highest tower you can, by placing a repeating series of colorful blocks on top of each other. Of course, the challenge only appears easy on its face. In reality, the process is deceptively difficult. You can stop the blocks by blinking, but they must line up onto each other exactly. If they don’t, the overlapping part will fall off — resulting in an increasingly smaller surface to stack upon. Users playing the game can find themselves rapidly running out of space.

Some challengers are pulling in substantial likes by demonstrating their prowess. One user, _saddestnightout, even managed to go viral with 314 thousand likes when he demonstrated his own hack of blinking in time to the game’s soundtrack, in a video entitled “The Beat is All You Need”.

If you’d like to give the challenge a go yourself, you should be able to immediately, if you already have TikTok on your device (and if it isn’t available — the game hasn’t made it to every country just yet). To play along, follow the steps below:

1. Launch your TikTok app
2. Tap the Discover tab
3. Enter “Stacking Challenge” in the search bar
4. In “Effects,” tap the pink record button next to the challenge
5. Tap on “Try this effect”
6. Point your screen-side camera at your face and watch as the blocks float by. You must stop each block by blinking when they line up.
7. Once you miss, the game is over, and you can try again

Once you get a result you like, share it. Maybe your high score might be the next to go viral!

Brian Johnson is jacked. Incredibly so. Cartoonishly so. Johnson, aka “the Liver King” has been muscling — quite literally — his way into user’s video feeds across TikTok lately. He’s lifting weights, sleeping on wood planks (in his mansion), he’s simulating prehistoric “hunts” and — above all else — he’s trying to get you to eat raw meat.

While humans have been consuming raw foods for all of history, raw food advocacy has seen a recent uptick in recent years, with celebs such as Heidi Montag touting the diet’s supposed benefits, including providing enzymes “lost” through the cooking process — although there is no current, peer-reviewed science to back up said claims. The Liver King’s advocacy goes beyond just the occasional —or even weekly — plate of steak tartare, however.

Johnson advocates an entire “back to nature” philosophy, dedicated to a style of “ancestral living” supposedly based on the diet and habits of primitive man. He even refers to his many dedicated followers as “primals”. His videos, almost all of which have hundreds of thousands and even millions of views, feature his over-the-top workout regimes, his “simulated” primordial hunts, self-help positivity messaging, and of course, meals that often cross the line from gustatory to disgust-atory, including raw bull testicles, animal organ smoothies, and his trademark — one entire pound of raw liver and sea salt ingested daily.

And, not surprisingly, Johnson uses his now well-established platform to hawk his own brand of supplements — how our primal ancestors had access to them is anyone’s guess — that go hand in hand with “ancestral tenets” as eating “naturally” and going to bed early. Follow the routine, Johnson implies, and you just may find yourself looking down on a sculptural eight-pack set of abdominals all your own. Start with liver, get some really good sleep, move like Liver King, eat like Liver King, shield like Liver King. Live like the ancestral man, and you’ll have the hormone profile that’s double or triple of the manicured modern man.”

Claims like this are hardly a rarity on TikTok. Although the platform is far better-known for its popular dopamine-inducing and time-wasting dance craze and challenge videos, the so-called wellness industry has taken to the format practically en masse. Scroll through any given user’s feed, and you’ll find at least one video extolling the benefits of frozen honey, rice water hair baths, push-up challenges, or dry scooping your protein powders for every five videos of zoomers dancing to “Corvette Corvette.”

However, eating a mostly raw meat diet isn’t exactly common sense, “hormone profile” or no. Whatever devotees of the extreme diet might claim, there is little to no hard data that proves raw meat is in any way more beneficial for you than cooked meat, and raw meat is most definitely a breeding ground for potentially harmful food-borne pathogens. Salmonella, Clostridium perfringens, E. coli, Listeria monocytogenes, and Campylobacter can all be found in raw meat, but are generally destroyed by cooking processes.

The Liver King is definitely a standout in a crowded field; his New Agey ancestor worship helps allay the bro-ness that hampers a lot of insanely over-muscled wellness creators on the app. And his relentless positivity — well-tempered, with a “by your bootstraps” capitalist tinge — makes him more approachable than many of the “woo woo” body, mind, and spirit types as well. It’s a combo that has made Johnson one of the platform’s stand-out successes. He has over 1.8 million followers thus far, and counting. Not bad for a lifestyle entrepreneur who, only seven months ago, had little digital presence whatsoever.

Johnson’s approach to the platform was navigated by his PR firm, 1DS Collective, a management agency that specializes in branding through social media. Johnson approached the firm to develop his brand and create businesses based on his “ancestral tenets” philosophy. “Brian Johnson AKA Liver King has made a fierce debut across social platforms this month. Led by yours truly, the team at 1DS Collective. It’s been an honor to set the stage for Liver King,⁣” 1DS wrote in a September 2021 Instagram post.

Although TikTok has spread both Johnson’s message and his sales, he is adamant that isn’t his main focus. “I don’t give a shit if I change one person’s life,” he told Buzzfeed News. “I give a shit about changing millions of lives. The narrative we’re faced with today, whatever’s happening mainstream, is not working. I’m convinced there’s a better way to do life.”

Photo via A FUSCO/YouTube

TikTok is home to a seemingly never-ending stream of trends, challenges, and viral moments. Creators flock to the app to share amusing experiences, dance, and occasionally indulge their nostalgia through a timely trend that leans on special childhood memories.

Such is the case with the video-sharing app’s latest trend, which uses audio from the decades-long run of PBS’s Reading Rainbow. The educational children’s television series ran for more than 20 years, between 1983 and 2006, and became a staple of hundreds of thousands of childhoods during its run. The audio that accompanies the show’s intro is instantly recognizable to fans of the former series and has become the official soundtrack for TikTok’s latest trend.

TikTok’s Reading Rainbow filter

On TikTok, the Reading Rainbow filter is typically used to emphasize a situation in which someone feels out of their depth. The audio is commonly paired with a space-themed background, which drifts past several planets, and the sun, along with a set of daunting math to really drive home how lost people feel in a given situation.

Most of the videos participating in the trend clock in at less than 15 seconds, using just the opening lines from the intro to PBS’s popular series. Uploads cover everything from concepts that are difficult to grasp — like daylight savings time — to amusing or baffling childhood stories.

The filter also prompted a hilarious exchange of stories, after one creator used it to detail the two weeks she drank “vodka” flavored coffee, only to later learn that “Bailey’s Irish Cream is, in fact, alcohol.” This prompted another creator to share her story of accidental alcohol use in the comment section, and ultimately inspired her to make her own TikTok discussing the week her mom “accidentally packed Mike’s Hard Lemonade” into her school lunches.

There’s really no limit to what the Reading Rainbow theme can accompany, as proved by the massive range of TikToks leaning into the trend. Hundreds of creators have already found a use for the popular audio, and it doesn’t look ready to slow down any time soon.