“Unc” is, apparently, the latest gamer term or gen Z slang to enter our common parlance. Articles have argued it originated recently, from young people, who use it as an insult to old people. Except that’s not what unc means, and that’s not where it came from.

Unc, short for uncle (though it’s also been argued, incorrectly, that it’s a shortening of “uncool”), can sometimes be used for gentle ribbing, but fundamentally it’s a term of respect. It’s not a term you bestow upon yourself, but instead a natural consequence of getting older and still showing up tell the youngbloods what’s up. You wanna know who’s really unc? Denzel Washington. That’s not because Denzel is uncool or out of touch, but because he has had a long and illustrious enough career to earn the respect of the younger generation.

The old black man who used to run a record shop that closed during COVID where I picked up a copy of the album The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads is unc to me. My dad, the kind of guy who went down to our local college campus to give advice to students in the encampment for Palestine, is unc. The nice older man who sits on a folding chair outside of his apartment and sometimes asks me to grab him a water bottle from the bodega is unc. I love that guy. Evan Narcisse is unc, and not just because he insists on wearing salmon-colored pants, but because he’s acted as a mentor to me ever since I started working at Kotaku, and I’d never pass up a chance to playfully razz him a little bit. 

You’d never know the meaning of unc or its origins in black culture if you looked to mainstream media, and sometimes even independent media. The Guardian attributes this slang to “gen alpha” and cites examples such as people calling Timothee Chalamet “unc” for turning 30, which isn’t really that old. This was then cited as the definition in my colleague Keza MacDonald’s article about “unc games,” though the article has since been corrected to include a reference to the term’s origins in African American Vernacular English. This article also references an article written by my old boss at Vice’s Motherboard, Emmanuel Maiberg, who wrote about Marathon as a so-called “unc game.”

These false etymologies get reinforced through incurious reporting. 

“As you probably know, unc, short for uncle, is a way to jokingly refer to old, potentially out of touch people,” Maiberg writes. “As far as I can tell, it entered the video game discourse in the form of this meme in which a soyfaced unc excitedly points at the hall of fame of so-called ‘unc slop,’ or, in other words, games that old people say are very good.”

Though I love the writing of both MacDonald and Maiberg, they are both doing something that I have observed in the online fandom for video games for some time. Black people who play video games talk about the games in the terms that they are familiar with, then other, non-black people who play games pick up these terms and run with them. Suddenly, these slang terms become “gamer slang” rather than African American Vernacular English, and these false etymologies get reinforced through incurious reporting. 

It isn’t that MacDonald or Maiberg themselves are the appropriaters. In fact, it’s hard to blame them for not knowing the origins of a slang term that has been so thoroughly appropriated already. But this is a cycle I have watched for a long time, and reporters writing about slang terms black people have used for decades as fresh and new is the end result of that cycle. They get to be discoverers and explainers of something that has already been discovered and explained.

More broadly, I’ve also seen this happen to words and phrases like “chopped,” “clocked it,” “the tea,” “no cap,” and “it’s giving.” All of these are slang terms that originate from African American Vernacular English—“clocked it,” “the tea” and “it’s giving” come from black queer culture in specific—but have now been categorized as “gen Z slang.” I have heard some people start to refer to the habitual be, as in “it really do be like that,” as a “meme” and it makes me want to tear my fucking hair out. We been saying that! That one’s ours!

Non-black people want to take everything from us except the weight of our history.

Appropriation of black culture is nothing new to the internet or the world. When TikTok dances were all the rage, Taylor Lorenz tracked down the originator of the popular “renegade dance,” a black teenage girl who had been all but forgotten as original choreographer of the short routine. The teenage girl who originated the phrase “on fleek” was also almost immediately erased as the term gained popularity as slang. Even farther back than that, I remember my African American Studies professor in college showing us a book cover for a book of essays on this very topic that he felt was illustrative of the way that black culture is extracted from our communities and then commodified: On it was a photograph of a white teenage boy wearing baggy jeans with his boxers showing, which was a style that was popularized in 90s hip hop culture. The title of the book is Everything But The Burden, as in, non-black people want to take everything from us except the weight of our history.

The internet has hyper-accelerated this extractive process of appropriation. Black teenagers spend more time on social media of all kinds than their non-black peers, and thus have made black slang much more visible than ever before. It’s not a surprise that AAVE has become the language of the internet at large, but also, it’s become much harder to track the flow of language and place it in its proper context. Because of how quickly trends form and then dissolve on the internet—remember “mob wife” and “office siren”?—slang is also picked up, stripped from context, and then discarded at much faster rates than when I was younger. 

It’s also much more difficult to trace the origins of these pieces of terminology, given that much of their dissemination occurs in short form video content on a platform that actively censors its search results. Like Taco Bell does with food, platforms like TikTok and Twitter are incentivized to strip context from language, because then it can be flattened into a saleable product that can be co-opted by corporations. (You can see this in the saga of West Elm Caleb, which turned from a funny story about a bunch of people dating the same guy to a tweet from the Hellman’s Mayonnaise brand.)

Seeing unc stripped of its meaning actually makes me a little sad.

In 2021, Sydnee Thompson at BuzzFeed wrote about the tendency of the internet to extract and then decontextualize black slang, saying that media outlets often cement that decontextualization that is already extant through their reporting.

“When media outlets — including BuzzFeed — and individuals who discuss memes and popular culture reproduce instances of Black American cultural appropriation, they lend them more credibility,” Thompson wrote. “The BuzzFeed Style Guide includes entries for many of these slang terms … and there exists a question of whether we should note their AAVE origins when they come up in a story. Doing so would help put concepts in their proper context and make it more difficult for culture vultures to appropriate with impunity.”

At least in the cases of “on fleek” and the renegade dance, the appropriated trends were short-lived, flash in the pan ideas. But “unc” is something embedded more deeply into black culture, and seeing it stripped of its meaning actually makes me a little sad. If there’s anything insulting about being called unc, it’s the kind of insult that’s meant to bring people closer together, not reinforce an artificial boundary between generations. It’s a word you use for people who are actively in community with you, not people you are trying to shut out. 

I’d love to be unc someday—to be so respected by younger people that they know it won’t hurt my feelings to call me old. When I call someone unc, I don’t want anyone to think I’m insulting the generation older than me, or that becoming unc is in some way a bad thing. That’s not what it means or has meant to me, and I don’t want its meaning to be taken away.

It’s one thing to marvel at the inner workings of a transistor radio or a timepiece, but for artist Manabu Kosaka, that curiosity reaches a whole new level. Using nothing but paper, the artist makes scale replicas of cameras, watches, gaming consoles, shoes, food, and more with a preternatural attention to detail. Not only does a 35mm film camera include a strap and a back hatch that opens, the lever used to advance the film and other gears are also built into the top, some of which are even moveable.

Around ten years ago, Kosaka faced uncertainty about the direction of his work. “During that time, I spoke with a friend who works in art direction, and they suggested that I try creating with simpler materials in a more minimal way,” he tells Colossal. “That advice stayed with me, and gradually I began focusing on paper as my primary material, eventually deciding to work exclusively with it.”

Through a meticulous process of cutting, folding, and scoring, Kosaka creates incredibly realistic depictions of everyday objects, often with a retro twist. He carefully studies the mechanics of the real objects, disassembling them in order to replicate individual components inside. He is currently working on a model of a Playstation 2 console, which was originally released in 2000.

“What I love most about paper is its incredible flexibility,” Kosaka says. “It responds to my ideas almost completely—beyond what I expect, even. It allows me to express what I want in a very direct way, while also feeling that it can become almost anything.”

See much more on the artist’s Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Marvel at Manabu Kosaka’s Hyperrealistic Paper Sculptures of Retro Objects appeared first on Colossal.

I cut my teeth as a telecom reporter, so I spent a lot of time writing about how broadband monopolies and cable TV giants rip off consumers with sleazy, misleading fees. I also spent a lot of that time writing about how lobbying and regulatory capture have ensured that big companies see no meaningful penalties should they falsely advertise one price, then sock you with a bunch of spurious surcharges.

The Biden administration, for its faults, at least tried to tackle some of this. The Biden FTC considered new and popular rules outlawing “junk fees”. The Biden FCC also implemented rules that didn’t ban sleazy fees (unfortunately), but forced broadband ISPs to clearly list them out at the point of sale (something recently dismantled by the Trump administration).

The Trump administration (and its courts) has taken an absolute hatchet to U.S. consumer protection on regulatory autonomy, ensuring that the problem of predatory fees is much worse across every sector you interface with. So it was funny to see Wall Street Journal reporters recently openly wondering why there are so many shitty fees all of a sudden (non-paywalled alternative):

“An extra 3% for paying with a credit card. A 5% involuntary contribution to a restaurant’s employee wellness fund. $25 a month in addition to rent for trash collection.  

Consumers already weary of rising inflation are now contending with a new crop of costs that are hidden in plain sight. New fees or surcharges are popping up everywhere as companies search for ways to recoup their own rising costs while blaming outside pressures.”

The WSJ reporters and editors decided to cover soaring sleazy fees, but at no point in the article do they mention (even in passing) that Trump has dismantled most of the (already fleeting) efforts to rein in such predation. Or that the Trump Supreme Court has issued numerous rulings effectively making it almost impossible for regulators to fine corporations or hold them accountable for bad behavior.

The article mentions that the Trump FTC did grudgingly implement the Biden-era plan to ban junk fees, but they don’t think it’s worth mentioning that the Trump administration refuses to enforce it:

“The Federal Trade Commission banned drip pricing in short-term lodging and live-event ticketing in 2025, citing research showing that consumers were manipulated by low initial prices even when the full cost was eventually disclosed.”

They also don’t think it’s worth mentioning that the worst offenders of this kind of stuff, like Ticketmaster, were recently let off the hook by the Trump FTC via a piddly settlement (that left states, which had partnered with the FTC legally, high and dry). They’ve chosen to cover consumer protection, but not really. Not with any sort of interest in full, contextual reality.

While this particular instance is the Wall Street Journal, you’ll notice this same habit across most of corporate media. They’re dedicated to an alternate reality where Trump isn’t historically corrupt, and the regulators you’ve historically trusted to be at least semi-present to police the worst offenses are still dutifully on the beat protecting the public interest.

It’s of course a reflection of ownership bias seeping into editorial (most media owners are affluent Conservatives or Libertarians who like tax cuts, rubber stamped merger approvals, and mindless deregulation). But it’s also a form of weird normalization bias, where the reporters assume that because regulators have always been there (with natural partisan ebb and flow) they’ll always be there.

But they’re not there anymore. The damage will likely be deadly and permanent, impacting far more than just shitty, sneaky fees. And the press is doing a terrible job informing the public of that fact.

This is particularly amusing because the Wall Street Journal’s own reporting recently highlighted how even the semi-consistent folks within MAGA who sometimes supported things like functional antitrust reform have been easily ousted by lobbyists, but the reporters exploring “why are we getting ripped off more than ever by predatory corporations” aren’t willing to make the obvious connection.

Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an illegal monopolist, a Manhattan jury found, according to Bloomberg. The jury found the company liable on three counts: illegally monopolizing the market for live event ticketing, amphitheaters, and tying its concert promotions business with the use of its venues, Bloomberg reported.

The verdict, reached after several days of deliberation, leaves the live entertainment giant open to a potential breakup - which was the stated goal of the lawsuit back when it was filed by the Biden administration's Department of Justice. Such an outcome would go far beyond the settlement that the Trump administration's DOJ reache …

Read the full story at The Verge.

You know who else wanted to construct gaudy buildings in his own image? Here’s Timothy Ryback on Adolf Hitler’s obsession “with adding an expensive new wing to the Reich chancellery”.

The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”

Ryback is the author of several books on Hitler and the Nazis, including his forthcoming 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy, which sounds like a must-read to me.

I’ve been enjoying the series of articles he’s been doing at The Atlantic about the parallels between Hitler and the dangers of Trump’s authoritarianism without ever explicitly mentioning Trump. In addition to the above piece about architecture, he’s written about Hitler’s Greenland Obsession, What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker, Hitler Used a Bogus Crisis of ‘Public Order’ to Make Himself Dictator, Hitler’s Terrible Tariffs, and The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler. If it looks like a duck…

Tags: Adolf Hitler · architecture · Donald Trump · politics · Timothy Ryback