Rated and Slated: Things We Hate and Love Online This Week

August 5, 2026 · Vice

Welcome to RATED AND SLATED, the column that is terminally online so you don’t have to be.

Last time I gobbled up a fistful of magic mushrooms, I became obsessed with something I’d read online about how if you spent a minute in another person’s brain it would be as disconcerting as landing on an alien planet.

Visit casino-promo.biz for more information.

The great news is there’s absolutely no need for an entheogenic rocket ship. Now, all you need to do to experience astronaut ESP is to pick up someone else’s phone and look at their Instagram “for you” section.

This reel, sending up Kareem Rahma’s SubwayTakes, suggests that we should all be forced to spend at least an hour in another person’s algorithm. A surprisingly good joke for something made by the BBC (promoting the new Top Comment podcast).

Incidentally, the BBC was where I was working at the time of the aforementioned psychedelic excursion. I’ve now escaped from that particular psychic ravine, which is probably for the best—my social media feed is too weird for someone employed by a public broadcaster. On the upside, that means I have an endless supply of provisions to help sustain you throughout the next bad trip.

rated

THE DRUG CITY SOUND

Sure, Drug City might not boast the best life expectancy but, per capita, its undoubtedly home to the highest number of musical geniuses in all of human history. Those joyless podcasters moaning about how every drop of alcohol takes you one step closer to grave could do with paying it a visit sometime. At the very least they might think of something better to do with all those endless hours of audio output. Come on now, buy the ticket, take the ride.

VILNIUS NIGHTLIFE GRAPHICS 1992-2004

Reading The Corrections would’ve been more fun if Chip spent all his time raving around post-Soviet Vilnius rather than scamming foreign investors while enduring “chronic coal and electricity shortages, freezing drizzles, drive-by shootings, and heavy dietary reliance on horsemeat.” If nothing else, Jonathan Franzen would’ve benefitted from a research trip to the techno clubs of Lithuania. I mean, his editor should probably lock him in a darkroom until he finally works out how to write a sex scene.

THE SHARDS

Speaking of great American novelists… finally, a new Bret Easton Ellis adaptation streaming via Disney! Parents get your content settings sorted out before your beloved offspring get sucked down the Cinderella to American Psycho pipeline and are blackpilled into a lifetime of mistaking Patrick Bateman for Prince Charming, like everyone on Tumblr in the early 2010s.

“THE NEW COCAINE”

It’s a good thing no one can tell when you’re on 3-MMC because I just stuck my face in a massive pile of the stuff while on a Teams call with management, and kept on snorting until it was time to unmute. In this country, first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get verified on LinkedIn.

BEFRIENDING A CROW

Saving a crow when he was 15 might not be the origin story I expected for Elias Rønnenfelt, but it’s one that makes a lot of sense. With poignant gothic lyricism and irrepressibly ramshackle attitude, Iceage is exactly the band you’d expect a teenager sitting in the pub with a bird on his shoulder to grow up and front. Punk, it’s a thing with feathers.

N.B. A little bird told me he’s also a good friend to the pigeons. More on this in the new issue of VICE.

slated

NO BAD DOGS, ONLY BAD INFLUENCERS

I was so sick of being seen as neurotic, non-masculine, and undatable, that I went to the nearest black market breeder and got myself a pit bull (end dog racism now). Of the 9 percent of women who’ve given me their phone numbers, 100 percent have been mauled. After following Chris Williamson’s advice, I now have a girlfriend; she’s a 10, but she no longer has a face.

GENERATIVE “HISTORICAL FOOTAGE”

Sure, we can all make reality breaking videos of 90s school children who possess preternatural insights into what the future has in store, but there’s no escaping the obvious space-time paradoxes, like why are none of these little brats raising the alarm and trying to tell that TV host of the horror waiting within the first 700 days of the new millennium. No, instead they’re just readying copies of The Pet Goat for the bleakest of presidential storytimes.

HIGH-SPEED CHASING

Growing up, watching Friends to try and understand the adult world, there was much I found mystifying, not least the portrayal of high-speed police chases (Season 5, Episode 5, “The One with the Kips”) as a destructively engrossing form of sublime entertainment. But now I’m watching AI-generated clips of this fugitive crip walking on the roof of a white SUV as it hurtles through the streets of south central LA, and all I can say is I miss Chandler and the reassuring feeling that my life had its own laugh track.

THE WORST MUSIC OF 2007

I don’t know whose car you just got into but it’s clearly not one of British suburbia’s most fearsome teenage drink drivers. The cider swigging school-aged passengers hurtling down country lanes listening to drum and bass bootlegs and UK garage compilations would like a word please. We didn’t risk our lives in the back of a hotboxed Nissan Micra only to endure the insult of this kind of Corin Bailey Rae apologia.

THE KING OF IRON FIST?

You can spend years mastering moves from Tekken for online clout, but what are you going to do when you encounter a button-mashing capoeira master who spams you with endless spin kicks until your health bar slowly drains away to nothing? That’s right, Taekwondo guy—Eddy Gordo is coming and no amount of Instagram followers can save you.

Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi

The post Rated and Slated: Things We Hate and Love Online This Week appeared first on VICE.

Read full story at source