One of the internet’s greatest features is satisfaction on demand. Dial up a video tagged “satisfying” and conjure a mesmerizing sensation from your screen. Beautiful bars of soap cut into ribbons, fresh dough squeezed through a pasta maker, icing piped onto a cookie, a spider weaving its web — they scratch some kind of mental itch. The content seems to bypass the brain to access our bodies directly. And satisfaction incarnate is slime, that substance suspended at the boundaries between liquid and solid, and the onscreen and the physical.

First popularized by Instagram users in Thailand and Indonesia, slime content has invaded the satisfaction internet and oozed into the American middle school. Slime is an art form, a community and an industry: sensory gratification tubbed and sold. From mundane household materials — laundry detergent, glitter, glue — springs an exotic material.