Via Infovore, here is a pretty sweet comprehensive introduction to the Salty Bet scene, written up by Rich McCormick for Eurogamer.  There are enough bizarre details that you should just read the article.  But the gist, which is more than sufficiently outrageous, is that there is a site where you can bet (with pretend money) on streamed live AI-played sidescrolling fighting game matches, which are done in an open-source fighting game engine called Mugen, using characters from a fairly extensive collection of nerdly sources (existing fighting games, anime, whatever users suggest.  From the article, here is a fan favorite, in which Barney fights someone from Dragon Ball Z).

I don’t think I would ever want to participate in something like this, but I’m extremely pleased to know that it exists.  And think of all the pieces of popular culture and technology that have come together to make it a real extant thing.