Latest news with #GenerationAlpha
Time Out
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
These 20 baby names could disappear from Australia by the next generation
Naming a baby is one of the most monumental decisions you'll have to make in life. As long as you avoid Australia's list of banned baby names, the options are endless. Parents these days are naming their kids after everything from celebrities and cities to flowers, family members and even food (looking at you, little Kale). While the top baby names in Australia vary slightly each year, some once-popular classics have taken a serious nosedive – and are at risk of vanishing from the next generation. McCrindle 's latest ranking of the most popular baby names in Australia was extra special as it marked the final chapter of Generation Alpha (born 2010-2024). To close the chapter, the research firm has dug into the longer-term data to reveal which names have seen the biggest decrease in popularity over the past 15 years. Chances are, you've met a Jake or Jessica at some point – but those two names have seen the largest drop in popularity from 2010 to 2025, slipping 276 and 270 places respectively. Other boys' names that have also seen a big decline in rank include Tyler, Matthew, Hayden, Mitchell, Blake, Dylan, Connor, Nicholas and Luke. Meanwhile, that list also includes Chelsea, Alyssa, Tahlia, Sarah, Holly, Madison, Maddison, Hayley, Lilly and Lara for girls. Baby names tend to follow generational cycles, and many of the names at risk of disappearing were hugely popular in the 1990s and early 2000s – which explains why your school roll had at least three Matthews and a couple of Sarahs. But today's parents are ditching these overly familiar, traditional Anglo names in favour of something more unique – think globally inspired, gender-neutral and suited to a more digital age. Just please tell us you don't actually know a baby called Siri?! However, history has proven that once-favourite names can make a nostalgic comeback – so we may not have seen the last of these at-risk names just yet! The top 10 boys' names on the decline in Australia right now Jake Tyler Matthew Hayden Mitchell Blake Dylan Connor Nicholas Luke The top 10 girls' names on the decline in Australia right now Jessica Chelsea Alyssa Tahlia Sarah Holly Madison Maddison Hayley Lilly Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out Australia newsletter 👼🏼 The 10 most popular baby names in Australia for 2024 😱 Australia's list of 89 illegal baby names 🐶
The Guardian
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From Chimpanzini Bananini to Ballerina Cappuccina: how gen alpha went wild for Italian brain rot animals
When one of Tim's year 8 pupils asked him about his 'favourite Italian brain rot animal', he thought he'd misheard. 'My hearing is not great at the best of times – I had to ask her to repeat this probably four or five times,' he says. Tim (not his real name) was familiar with the term 'brain rot', used to describe the sense of mental decline after too much time spent mindlessly scrolling online (and voted Oxford University Press's word of the year for 2024). But what was this about it being Italian? He told his pupil to get on with her work, sat down at his laptop – and immediately turned to Google. 'Italian brain rot', he discovered, refers to a series of absurdist animal characters, generated by artificial intelligence. They have ridiculous Italian-sounding names (like Bombombini Gusini and Trippi Troppi), and typically appear in videos on TikTok accompanied by fast-paced, AI-generated and Italian-ish (though also nonsensical) narration. It is, in short, a meme beloved by the emerging generation Alpha (born from 2010 to 2025) and the youngest members of gen Z (generally those born from 1997 to 2012). And if you are any older – even if you fancy yourself as highly online, or a meme connoisseur – it is all but certain to make very little sense to you, as Tim found out at his laptop. He shares his discoveries, sounding trepidatious. 'So there's Chimpanzini Bananini, which is a chimpanzee fused with a banana. Bombardiro Crocodilo, which is a crocodile fused with a bomber plane. There's one who's just a cappuccino with legs …' That's Ballerina Cappuccina: a female ballet dancer spliced with a cup of coffee, often depicted as being in a relationship with Cappuccino Assassino (you can figure it out). 'There's history – lore – behind all these animals,' continues Tim wonderingly. 'Like, some of them are at war with each other. And there are songs about them.' And children in his class are into it on a scale he has not previously seen with a trend or meme. 'As soon as it's mentioned by one person, the entire class starts talking about it,' he says. 'They are obsessively focused on Italian brain rot.' If, reading this, you can feel your own brain decaying, that's understandable. Really, if you were born in a year that starts with the figure 1, 'Italian brain rot' is not for you. Yet its massive popularity with young people is worth at least attempting to wrap your head around as an indicator of the direction of travel of online culture. The first character to take off was a shark sporting Nike sneakers (three, one for each fin), called Tralalero Tralala. The audio – of a man's voice, speaking garbled Italian – surfaced first, on TikTok in early January, before being paired with the AI-generated image a few days later. More characters swiftly followed, spreading across TikTok. Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of the site Know Your Meme, namechecks Brr Brr Patapim, 'a proboscis monkey that is also a tree', as one who made it to YouTube. There is also Indonesian brain rot, notably Tung Tung Tung Sahur ('which is like a stick figure with a bat, telling people to wake up for a meal during Ramadan') and Boneca Ambalabu ('a frog with a tyre for a body, and human legs'). Both are accompanied by an AI-generated voice speaking Indonesian that, like their Italian counterparts, seeks to confuse rather than convey meaning. 'The audio is at least as important, if not more important than the imagery,' says Caldwell. 'They'll be doing it really over-the-top, like 'Tra-la-lero! Tra-la-lala!' – it really goes for the whole Italian sound.' Is it offensive to Italians? 'It seems Italians have been all over this,' Caldwell says, 'so I don't think so.' Indeed, the appeal of Italian (and Indonesian) brain rot is not that it's offensive, or even subversive – but that it's so silly. After 15 years at Know Your Meme, Caldwell admits he doesn't connect with all the online ephemera that crosses his desk – 'but I really like this one,' he says. 'The dumber the meme, the better, in my opinion.' The ease and speed with which these videos can be produced on accessible tools such as ChatGPT has helped with the meme's spread. You can prompt the AI to visualise Bombardiro Crocodilo (just for example!) in a setting or scenario of your choice, or come up with a new character in that Italian brain rot style. 'You don't need to have tons of video editing ability, or even to use your own voice,' says Caldwell. For adults tired or even afraid of the rapid advance of AI, Italian brain rot may be almost reassuring in its banality. 'This is a non-threatening use of AI, not one that induces feelings of either doom or being replaced.' For young people, of course, it's not that deep. They are spending more time online now than in past generations, and from younger ages, with the result that they are influencing digital culture. 'Now you have children who are super-online,' says Caldwell, 'raised by iPads and on TikTok all the time, creating content, determining what are the biggest cultural phenomena of the time.' The last evidence of this, before Italian brain rot, was skibidi toilet: a similarly witless meme that spread from YouTube in 2023 to spark a sensation among the youngest members of gen Z. If you somehow missed it, it features (to quote from Know Your Meme) 'an army of sentient toilets with men's heads coming out of them, fighting for dominance against a bunch of men in suits with cameras for heads, and each video is gaining tens of millions of views'. Tim remembers that washing up in his classroom, too. 'The kids love it so much, the word 'skibidi' is now part of gen Z and gen Alpha vernacular.' Its meaning, however, is far from straightforward, and steeped in ambiguous irony. 'It can mean something good, something bad, something weird … If they call something 'skibidi', it's both a good thing and they're laughing at it the same time.' Taken together, skibidi toilet and Italian brain rot gleefully defy explanation, titillating young minds with their surrealist imagery and crude-seeming humour – and catch adults short in their feeble efforts at understanding. 'AI art' is no longer solely for fooling older people primarily active on Facebook, Caldwell says, giving the example of Shrimp Jesus (look it up). It is developing its own shorthand, conventions and sense that will inevitably – increasingly – go over many of our heads. It's tempting to say that memes were better in the old days. Look at the inventiveness of templates such as Distracted Boyfriend, the layered visual jokes, the endless possibilities for meaning-making. But Caldwell – himself a millennial – is more sanguine, suggesting that Italian brain rot is just another evolution of human creativity. 'The AI is making the image, there's a text-to-speech voice, but the joke itself is being invented by an actual person behind a computer.' Tim is not so sure. He's noticed, when he sets his class creative writing assignments or another imaginative task, that they leap to their favourite Italian brain rot creature. 'I think the AI generation is not having those moments of sitting down and letting their imagination run wild, because AI does it all for them – all they have to do is use ChatGPT,' he says. 'I'll say, 'This has to be completely our own; I don't want any Chimpanzini Bananini'.' But he has also started using the class's enthusiasm for Italian brain rot to engage them in lessons. In multiple-choice quizzes, every now and again, one of the four possible answers will be Tung Tung Tung Sahur, Tim says – 'just to try and grab their attention'. He also now has an answer to that year 8 pupil's question. 'My favourite is Blueberrinni Octopussini,' he says, 'which is an octopus fused with a blueberry.' Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
NZ Herald
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Roblox game Grow a Garden surpasses Fortnite with 16.4m players
Anyone older than 25 likely has fond – or madly frustrating – memories of playing FarmVille, the popular browser game that lets users grow virtual crops and herd pixelated animals. Agriculture aficionados can rejoice: Generation Alpha's FarmVille has arrived. Grow a Garden, a simplistic farming simulation that involves planting seeds
Borneo Post
24-06-2025
- Politics
- Borneo Post
Zahid: Umno open to collaborations in Sabah polls
Zahid trying a bag made from rattan after launching the 2025 Premier Women Empowerment Programme by MARA at the Sabah International Convention Centre on Tuesday. – Bernama photo KOTA KINABALU (June 24): Umno is not ruling out the possibility of collaborating with other political coalitions in the upcoming Sabah state election, said its president, Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. Zahid, who is also the Barisan Nasional (BN) chairman, said Umno would contest under the BN banner and the balance scale logo. When asked whether the party would go solo, he explained that discussions with various parties were ongoing. 'We've been meeting with many parties. There are no doors that are fully open, nor fully closed. In other words, space for negotiations and visits remains active,' he told reporters after launching the 2025 Premier Women Empowerment Programme by MARA at the Sabah International Convention Centre (SICC) on Tuesday. 'We're hoping for a positive outcome. Naturally, it's not possible to go into detail right now since the state assembly has not yet been dissolved. But when the time comes, we may reach a conclusion to the meetings and negotiations,' he said. Touching on the issue of seat distribution, Zahid said discussions had not yet reached that stage, nor had they addressed the matter of avoiding multi-cornered contests. 'The most important thing is to maintain an open attitude. Of course, we aim to find more allies than enemies,' he said, joking that BN-Umno would ideally like to contest and win every seat. On another matter, he confirmed that Kalabakan Member of Parliament Datuk Andi Muhammad Suryady Bandy's Umno membership has been suspended. Earlier in his speech, Zahid, who is also Deputy Prime Minister and Rural and Regional Development Minister, stressed the importance of engaging and supporting the younger generation. 'We must appreciate the needs of this generation and Generation Alpha. They are valuable assets. Their aspirations must be acknowledged, and their needs met, as we nurture them to become an even greater generation than ours,' he said. Zahid emphasised that public satisfaction, often reflected through the ballot box, must be backed by concrete follow-up actions. 'We must never be complacent in our efforts to assist the people across all segments of society,' he said. He also called on leaders to put aside differences, as the public is eager for real progress — not rhetoric. 'They're tired of empty promises and endless manifestos. A manifesto isn't a holy book, but it is still a promise that must be fulfilled,' he said. 'If promises are not kept, be prepared — the people will respond.' Zahid reminded his party not to make excessive promises but instead focus on real needs. 'The people don't need fish — they need a fishing rod. If we speak of stability but offer only rhetoric, that's not enough,' he stressed. He also highlighted MARA's role in empowering women not just through education, but entrepreneurship. 'MARA has organised many programmes that empower women, especially in business. Women have proven to be trustworthy — loans given to them have a low non-performing loan rate,' he said. 'This shows that government programmes are successfully raising the dignity and economic participation of women in entrepreneurship,' he added.
Straits Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Grow A Garden, Gen Alpha's FarmVille, is growing like crazy in Roblox
Grow A Garden is the first major Roblox game to integrate offline growth, which encourages players to return to see changes. PHOTO: ROBLOX NEW YORK – Anyone older than 25 likely has fond – or madly frustrating – memories of playing FarmVille, the popular browser game that lets users grow virtual crops and herd pixellated animals. Agriculture aficionados can rejoice: Generation Alpha's FarmVille has arrived. Grow A Garden, a simplistic farming simulation that involves planting seeds and collecting exotic pets, has exploded as one of the most highly played titles of 2025. Technically an 'experience' within the game-creation platform Roblox, it smashed its own record for concurrent users by reeling in 16.4 million active players in mid-June. It is a genuinely shocking feat. That number is more than online game Fortnite's peak and greater than the concurrent player records of the top five Steam games combined. Grow A Garden's allure might baffle anyone who has never toyed with slow-paced world-builders like Animal Crossing or Tomodachi Life. Players nurture a potpourri of plants and pets, which they can buy and sell in exchange for the in-game currency Sheckles. Sheckles can also be bought with Roblox's in-platform currency Robux (which can itself be purchased with real dollars). Plots begin barren before users transform them into fantastical safaris of shimmering frogs and prancing monkeys that each have their own special abilities. Suddenly, a player's dismal square brims with vibrant vegetation and beanstalks shooting into the sky. Numerous qualities elevate the game from a standard farm sim. It is the first major Roblox game to integrate offline growth, which encourages players to return to see changes. There are multiple time-sensitive components, including shops that restock with new items every five minutes and weekly drops – like the fruit-pollinating Bizzy Bees – with exclusive items that feel like can't-miss moments. Every little element has been shaped to keep people hooked, including blind-box pet eggs and the ability to steal things from other users' farms. These digital ranchers are so feverish that some have resorted to third-party sites to acquire the most legendary commodities. People have spent more than US$100 (S$129) on eBay listings for the cosmic-looking Candy Blossom Tree and Titanic Dragonflies. At its peak, Grow A Garden had more than triple the population of New Zealand, the home of Mr Janzen Madsen, who runs Splitting Point Studios, which scouts and acquires rising games on the platform. When the 28-year-old picked up Grow A Garden from the Roblox creator BMWLux in April, it had about 2,000 concurrent users. 'I was immediately like, 'Wow, this is pretty cool,'' said Mr Madsen, who is also known as Jandel. 'Farming is pretty innate to humans. If you think about it, the past thousands and thousands of years, it's what everyone's done.' His team of about 20 people scaled the game, fixing bugs and adding key elements such as daily quests. And it is still tinkering. Mr Madsen teased an update involving dogs that would recover fossils that could be traded in for sand-themed fruits, and eventually a feature that allows people to trade items. He also wants to have celebrities host live events with him. He has scaled many Roblox games, but nothing like this. He has seen people playing the game in real life, and all of his friends' children are loving it. 'To be platform-defining, or even industry-defining, is crazy,' he said. As news about the game's record-obliterating player count spread across the internet, some were dubious about its legitimacy. But after comparisons with other games on Roblox, people have largely concluded that bots have not heavily contributed to Grow A Garden's success. Some have theorised that the game is so popular because its bare-bones, subtly addictive gameplay appeals to a new, younger audience that is just starting to dominate Roblox. A popular video clip showed what looked like a classroom full of children sitting at computers excitedly awaiting a Grow A Garden update. According to Madsen's data, about 35 per cent of its sizeable player base is aged under 13. KreekCraft, a popular Roblox YouTuber, pointed to Grow A Garden's popularity on TikTok and Shorts – full of juvenile, goofy clips of the game – as evidence of its younger users. 'Normally, whenever a Roblox game gets really popular, there's an equal reaction on the YouTube side of things,' said KreekCraft, whose real name is Forrest. Instead, there is barely any long-form content proportional to the game's success. Previous Roblox hits like Dress To Impress were buoyed by influencers such as American online streamer and YouTuber Kai Cenat, but this one is all short-form videos. 'It's a lot of younger kids coming in,' KreekCraft said. 'It's a very simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand game.' Still, Grow A Garden is clearly beloved by people of all ages. Nobody has any clue how big it will become and how long it can continue this upward growth. 'It's definitely a Roblox game that came out of nowhere,' KreekCraft said in disbelief. 'It popped on the radar a few weeks ago and now it's broken every single Roblox record by miles. And it's just like, 'How did this happen? What is the ceiling here?' It blows my mind.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
