Shawn B, Thoro The Alien And MuckBoy27

Three Instagram Users Worth Following Off A Cliff

By O.A. CARRY FOR: 65,000〡PUBLISHED: June 1st, 2025

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Shawn of a Merica

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln designated the Council Bluffs, Iowa, train yard as the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad, marking it “Mile 0” on the map. Years later, to honor the town’s legacy, the Union Pacific Railroad Company erected its only museum on the site. It holds cherished pieces of American railroad history, like photos, old train equipment and monuments. Any enthusiast would go crazy. However, for local resident Shawn B, the source of their pleasure is his living nightmare.

Shawn B is convinced that a train conductor is stalking him.

At unholy hours of the night, Shawn B is thrown awake by the fog horn blares of a passing freight train. His home is right next to the tracks, which cut his neighborhood in half.

Most of Council Bluffs is interrupted by railroad tracks. It must be frustrating to live there. These long slugs barely creep through, slowly approaching the yard at the town’s center, causing traffic jams and missed appointments.

It’s extra harrowing when the train conductor’s after you.

In one recent video, Shawn showed a train crawling past his house and then abruptly stopping. He said it’s because the delinquent conductor wants to slam the railcars together. Why? Shawn cannot explain. The camera’s unsteady as his hand succumbs to angry shakes, putting the peephole he’s filming through into perspective.

“I haven’t heard any national news or people complaining about the illegal shit that the Union Pathetic is doing in the middle of the night,” he said.

Shortly after, the train went in reverse. Shawn was lost for words. The "8pm pervert" (as he calls him) was doubling back to get another peek inside his house.

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Shawn has challenged the conductor before. In one video, he’s standing on the street, yelling at a man in hi-vis climbing into the cockpit. He courageously gives him the middle finger. “Hey! This isn’t a fucking rail yard assholes!” He says. “Evidence of the Union Pacific stalking me,” the video’s title reads.

Shawn’s conclusion is simple: “Every piece of shit who works for the Union Pathetic railroad is a complete waste of life and you should beat the shit out of them every time you see them out in public… These harassing, pervert, pedophile, fucking stalkers of the Union Pathetic railroad.”

The thing is, Shawn B might be right. Council Bluffs residents are constantly battling railroad crossings, which trap them on the way to work, walled off by the locomotive jail, powered by bureaucracy.

One of the town’s most notorious hell-zones is referred to by locals as the “Triangle of Death.” It’s where the tracks at 16th Street split into two directions near 23rd Avenue and come back together around 10 blocks later. “Quite often, they will block all three crossings,” said local activist Andrew Whitehill to 6 News WOWT. “So people that live inside the community either find themselves trapped inside or trapped outside.”

Getting to work or school is one thing, but ambulances trying to get into the neighborhood have no way in, except through the Union Pacific rail yard, which requires special clearance. According to WOWT, Union Pacific is not subject to local laws and regulations.

The Mayor’s janky proposal to combat train blocks is a system of towers across town that light up when a crossing is blocked, letting drivers know what to avoid.

Meanwhile, Shawn B is taking matters into his own hands. When he closes his eyes at night—and the train conductors are busy shapeshifting into demons howling at the Omaha skyline—he dreams of his national TV appearance when he can deliver his message loud and clear, unfettered by the algorithm’s whim, and get the people in his community to listen.

But his fellow citizens have already heard of Shawn B. One Trains forum post in particular had local scholars chewing on the issue.

One user surmised that Shawn B lives on the west side of the 12th St. line. They wrote, “The reason trains stop on the 12th St. line isn’t to annoy Shawn B. That’s how far out trains doubling, tripling, even quadrupling together get when done and trying to build air for the air test to make the train whole.”

But Shawn B is not listening. He’s getting his beauty sleep with his alarm set for 8 pm (the alarm is the pervert yanking his horn).

Shawn B actually posts on YouTube at Shawn of a Merica, but you can follow @shawn.b.council.bluffs on Instagram, who isn’t Shawn but a dedicated reposter and holds the entire archive of his many deleted YouTube Shorts.

Thoro the Alien

On a clear night, if you stare long enough (if you wish hard enough), a spaceship will cross in front of the moon. There’s an alien inside. He’s wearing skinny jeans, a skull joker and what look like Supras. His hair is sticking straight up.

His name is Thoro, and he’s obsessed with humans, so much so that he can’t stop reacting to their Reels on his Instagram account @thorolabs.

He is, of course, not real. His digital likeness exists in the swamp between VRChat, VTubers, reaction content and AI video. Meanwhile, Thoro himself is stuck in the mud, as the ambition of the page (and its project) far exceeds the half-baked content dripping from the UFO’s exhaust pipe.

In the comfort of his swanky, orbiting pad, he tees up a quip to what he’s seeing on his Explore page, which ranges from rage bait to shock media—from big boobs to big farts.

An example is his Hawk Tuah reaction (which came seven months late). The original clip plays, but it’s shown that Thoro is watching it through a portal (really playing into his “based Rick and Morty fan” vibe).

Before Haliey Welch can spit, Thoro vaporizes her. “Phew! You just Hawk Tuah’d that plasma ray, Miss Welch,” he says triumphantly. “No more rug pullin’ from you!” Notably, his mic clips when he says, “pullin’” and his feet glitch into the floor as he walks away.

It must take effort to make these, so much so that joke writing falls to the wayside.

I like to imagine them in a greenscreen studio. One guy’s wearing a morph suit with all the white balls on it. The crew only has five minutes to shoot the thing because they don’t have the money for more studio time.

I imagine the director is a disgraced page from the Avatar set, who snuck into the VFX studio and CGI'd a Na’vi chick giving him head. James Cameron barged in, catching him in the act as he was pulling on the imaginary ponytail ("We’ll fix it in post"). The white balls on his morph suit are just barely whiter than his own.

Recurring comments on Thoro’s videos read, “Go back to your planet,” or “Did we ask for your opinion?” Others threaten to draw him pregnant, or request, “Someone invent a slur for him, please.” But the overarching sentiment is best summed up with, “Why are you hiding behind an avatar? Get a job.”

It is truly hard to believe that someone is behind Thoro, not because the puppet masterfully cloaks the puppeteer, but because, who would want their name associated with this?

A guy named Weston Fordham does. Thoro the Alien is the social media mascot for his start-up, Thoro Labs. He’s the only guy liking the company’s posts on LinkedIn.

Fordham graduated from the University of Central Florida, and the rest of the start-up’s team seems to be his fellow brothers from Phi Delta Theta.

He lists himself as the co-founder of Thoro Labs, but his polished, professional LinkedIn photo, with its tasteful frame, contrasts the man seen on his Instagram.

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He has an appreciation for fine art, rap music (he’s done visuals for multiple Atlanta rappers like J Young MDK) and, most recently, AI-generated videos of cars and human jellyfish.

Fordham obviously sees a future for himself in AI video, both for filmmaking and going viral. He’s been flirting with camera tracking that adds CGI to actors without the morph suit needed, just a camera and his software.

Thoro Labs’ About section brings to light what’s really being offered by the start-up, and how the alien mascot ties into the plan:

Thoro the Alien is a means to an end.

He’s a temporary being.

Weston Fordham’s hope is (I imagine) that some Duolingo executive will see one of Thoro’s videos and—after a while—we’ll be seeing the green owl living inside his own social media. It will fully automate the roles of animator, writer, and even social media person, all in one swoop.

Zoomers with corporate “TikTok” gigs beware. Thoro is coming for your job. He’s floating above us right now, looking down at you pitching “short-form video ideas” to a boardroom and laughing when you get silenced by the head-honcho at the table’s end, who says, “Fuck all that, just use the hottest CapCut template and call it a day.”

I’m writing this like I hate Thoro, but I don’t. The start-up’s idea is actually cool to me, but Thoro himself is barely scraping its audacious vision. In the interim, the mock-epic sum of its parts is fun to laugh at, because a company filled with people who view themselves like this can only accidentally achieve the avant-garde.

You can follow Thoro the Alien at @thorolabs on Instagram.

MuckBoy27 / Bryan Drake

When I was in the third grade, my dad got me a metal detector for my birthday. It’s because I used to watch those old men at the beach scanning the sand, wearing a fishing vest (pockets stuffed with shells and bottle caps), and the thought of treasure (the possibility of treasure) being everywhere underneath us was exhilarating. Why was I missing out?

After not finding anything—expect for a Victorian-era spoon in my neighbor’s backyard—I gave up on treasure hunting. But my interest in hidden artifacts has, I guess, remained because it was recently reawakened.

On Instagram, a guy named Bryan Drake is a different kind of “old man at the beach.” When he walks outside, he picks up every rock that he sees and scans it for fossils, ancient markings and bones.

According to him, he’s found several relics. His California apartment is full of them, covering tables, folding tables, side tables, ottomans, TV stands and the floor (a blue, plastic tarp protects the carpet from each sharp edge). Some of the rocks are so large that they’re boulders. It means he has superhuman strength.

I don’t think Drake has a degree in archaeology, but I’m with him. He’s onto something (at least) because the ancient stone tools, going for +$400 on eBay, do look about the same to me.

He might not be a scholar, but he’s well-read. On Facebook, he shares screenshots of the articles he’s reading. They’re on websites riddled with grammatical errors. They identify artifacts found in seemingly everyday rocks, which were accepted by the Smithsonian and elsewhere.

So, when Drake sees a “bird effigy” in a random stone, his silent reading time is to blame, convincing him that each hole, bump and curve has a meaning, like seeing animals in the clouds.

It’s not clear whether Bryan Drake is unmedicated or not, but the people in his comment sections are convinced.

If it’s not the rock garden taking over his apartment, subtle indicators wink at you; like on his Facebook, he often posts screenshots of his lock screen when the time reaches 11:11, 4:44 or 2:22. His phone background makes the evidence doubly poetic.

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But, "Is he or is he not crazy?" is not the good question here. He's already admitted to going to rehab. The real question is, has he found anything worthwhile?

Plus, all of his full-screen screenshots show the “personal hotspot” symbol, meaning that there’s someone to share his trailing thoughts with when they’re flowing. Maybe it’s this beautiful woman, seen in a February 2024 post.

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Bryan Drake is close. He’s close to some truth. It’s the reason why Instagram has banned three of his previous accounts. If you want to follow him now, his handle is @muckboy27eldraque1.