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Things We Hate and Love Online This Week

The Packet Connoisseur. The guy who got “banned” from the DMT realm. The OSINT TikTok stripper. All the ghouls are here.

By Adam Christopher Smith

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The column that is terminally online so that you don’t have to be.

I used to care about being on the right side of history; now, all that matters is being on the right side of the joke.

Last week, while fussing over the Chinese dogs that supposedly escaped from killer thieves and made their way home, I wondered aloud if it might be a high-tech hoax. It turns out it was actually an old-fashioned fiction (the horny mutts were following a German Shepherd in heat) but hey, the antennae were working pretty well. I was right to have suspicions.

Pranks and parodies, cunning stunts, AI impersonations, fakes of all different depths… At a time when it’s impossible to know who to trust, trust RATED AND SLATED to bring you the best and the worst of what the internet has to offer each week.

Now let’s get into it.

THE PACKET CONNOISSEUR

How much is the packet in Brazil?Some might say this is real boots on the ground journalism pic.twitter.com/iQpAAkuAGg— James Goddard (@JamesPGoddard90) March 27, 2026

How much is the packet in Brazil?Some might say this is real boots on the ground journalism pic.twitter.com/iQpAAkuAGg

The Packet Connoisseur must be in line for a Pulitzer. This sketchy citizen journalist is currently traveling the world documenting the price and quality of cocaine in different countries, in a rogue form of public service. According to him, if you’re not on coke, you’re woke—so maybe he’ll be able to hide out in the U.S. once Interpol finally catches up with him.

‘DA-BOOM-DA-DA-MMM-DUM-NA-EE-MA’

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Sure, TikTok may be a crippling addiction for the teenagers of today, leading to alienation, self-loathing, sexual confusion, and body dysmorphia—but have you ever tried growing up as a nu-metalhead without it? There was no TikTok for me. I spent my youth alone in my bedroom with a red baseball cap and fake Chester Bennington tattoo sleeves, sniffing a dead crow in a jar. If TikTok had been around? Well, maybe I’d still have my bottom two ribs.

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After experiencing firsthand the devastation of opioids, Luke Goebel says he wrote his new novel as a form of “direct action against the major dicks that kill us all.” Writing a book seems like a particularly peaceful and time-consuming form of protest—the equivalent of a one-man flash mob stretched out across however many years it takes to finish the damn thing. Luckily, Kill Dick is one of the most anticipated underground literary releases of the summer, otherwise Luke might have been forced to resort to more violent methods—dropping crates full of the book on the heads of Big Pharma CEOs or building a massive bonfire of paperbacks on the Sackler family estate........

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