There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/LocalLLaMA that’s been rattling around in my head for the past couple of days. It started out as people poking at what appeared to be an AI bot posting in the community — responding to comments, giving out banana bread recipes, the whole nine yards — and it quickly spiralled into one of those gloriously chaotic internet moments where nobody’s quite sure who, or what, they’re talking to anymore.

Sitting at my desk this morning, scrolling through the news about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I found myself staring at my screen in a kind of bewildered horror. The 22-year-old shooter had engraved bullets with internet memes. Not political manifestos. Not ideological screeds. Memes. One of them literally read “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?” - a furry roleplay joke that’s been floating around the darker corners of the internet for over a decade.