When he announced the move over to Tenet, he did mention that he felt that it would give him more exposure than their existing shadowbanned channel. And that Tenet's brand would give him access to higher profile guests to interview.
I used to listen to the call-in show back in the Jan 6th era. The problem was that it's a lazy and tired format that depends on audience quality.
Their audience that called in were so spergy. It was all debating theology or esoteric constitutional stuff or circumcision.
I do agree with you re: Chen ageing gracefully.
I suppose I liken it to Rebecca (Blonde), Matt Christiansen's cohost, who herself was a firebrand attractive conservative commentator during Trump 2016, somewhat like a more based Lauren Southern.
But Rebecca ultimately met an older military vet and settled down as a wife & mother to two children in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, retreating to treating YT as a hobby she does 3-6 hours a week.
It gets weirder when your main trope is your attractiveness and then you settle down IRL (which is also obviously the right thing to do).
But it feels wrong to simp for lack of a better term for someone you know is a wife & mother, even if it shouldn't matter IRL either way.
She's also relatively a new mother.
It did seem odd that she was starting such an ambitious venture with her silent partner husband at this stage in her life.
She does have some based opinions. But her main shtick is that she's distractingly beautiful on camera, which certainly has a time limit and awkwardness with her marriage, child and age.
It's also interesting that Chen owned Tenet but kept her own brand separate and did no streaming work or promotion for the platform itself.
The other strange thing about this whole thing is that Tenet media was very fledgling with hardly any reach at this point.
The only thing successful on their network with any views was Tim Pool's Culture War. I don't watch it personally. And it was an existing product pre-Tenet licensed to the platform.
I too followed Tenet for Matt Christiansen.
The problem is that existing fans of the creator get annoyed following the MCN for their preferred content while getting flooded by other unwanted notifications while subbed to the rest of the garbage on the channel.
Matt has a small but loyal and longtime audience. I feel like a lot of them haven't followed him over to Tenet for his new Wednesday solo hour simply because remaining subscribed to Tenet is annoying.
There's also the factor that Matt is a lot drier without Blonde (and also without the eye candy). But Blonde is pretty much completely checked out as a mother of two who is hitting the wall with a well-off husband (though still does 2+ hours a week on their Sunday show, where Matt does all the prep anyhow).
I don't think Tenet is some massive Russian op, but it's certainly a mess. Weirdly managed, pretty much no interaction between the various parties involved, no cross promotion, not much advertisement. I don't really get the point of Tenet and, as mentioned, it seems Matt got kind of stuck in the middle of a weird situation, without much gain.
I followed a bit of Tenet's launch.
I was cringefully listening to some of Dave Rubin's content at the time pre-Oct 7th when he was simply a DeSantis shill and not as nauseatingly Zionist.
It was strange at launch because Rubin did zero promo for his own Tenet media show and association on his own Twitter.
His "People of the Internet" show was hilariously dropship. He would show up having done no prep and his attractive Gen Z co-host Isabel Brown (engaged to one of his producers) would show him Tiktok clips for him to react to.
Nevertheless, they did 5 episodes a week for months with little viewership before Tenet quietly cut ties with them last May without any announcement.
Rubin didn't seem invested in the new conservative MCN startup at all, phoning it in, keeping it insulated from his own branding and working to rule doing the absolute minimum of his contract obligations.
Matt must have mixed feelings about this.
He genuinely seemed excited for the OG transition to Tenet media. But his personal viewer numbers on the Tenet platform seems to have really stagnated.
I had already stopped watching his old call-in show when he signed his new contract, but his new show similarly couldn't keep my attention.
I'm not really sure why, as Matt is a good researcher and a consistently fair presenter.
I like couscous.
But I don't need immigrants to make it for me.
They can get yeeted and I'll make it from a box.
What sort of healthcare system do the Dutch have?
Parallel public/private? Any universal?
However I believe the Dutch are the first to allow this for children
Trudeau has had legislation all drawn up to off disabled kids.
I believe they keep kicking its enactment down the road by a year or so coupled with his unpopularity.
Reverse uno that an NFL exec gets fired in a James O'Keefe sting for complaining about not enough faggotry.
I could wear a full kilt, but the modernized version is too short for my needs.
Is this a Chad humblebrag?
What kind of job does one have that they can wear shorts 365?
WFH? UPS Driver?
It's interesting that modern day Indigenous politics are inextricably linked to leftist grievance identity politics culture.
Their leadership bleats constantly about their desire for sovereignty, self-reliance and self-determination. But they constantly throw their lot in with the big government and ever-expanding centralized social welfare state.
You have local Indigenous activists marching with Free Palestine demanding concessions on the other side of the globe and allying with the latest flavor of neocolonialists.
It's also curious that despite the cultural and genetic diversity of the various tribes across North America, their modern day cultural narrative is inevitably gay race communist politically.
There was also the problem with WW2 multiplayer that as time went on, it became impermissible to portray the Nazi side as a fully playable, equivalent option.
Simultaneously, with the gender dysphoria and autism crazes, anorexia nervosa and bulimia cases in the young female population have all but disappeared.
I don't think they're implementing co-leaders.
They've decoupled the leaders from their historic civs - such as having the ability late game to have whatever woke Cleopatra substitute they have this iteration leading Mali or Mongolia.
The social progress leader stuff is more that they've announced that leaders don't have to have historically led their nation anymore. The example they gave was Ben Franklin leading America.
This is an obvious ploy to stick as many female and indigenous characters into the game as possible because there simply wasn't enough historic options with the old constraints.
He's half right.
The OG leader you choose remains constant, but you change the culture/ethnicity/nationality of the empire your leader rules every new Era.
It's copying Humakind mechanics, which was another failed "Civ Killer" developed by Amplitude a few years back with the same novel mechanic.
But Humankind flopped hard despite having tons of hype from streamers pre-launch.
I haven't played it myself and don't really understand particularly why it failed. All the 4x streamers played it for a month live, then all simultaneous dropped it and memoryholed it.
I heard a lot of complaints about balance issues and the fact that changing civs so often meant a lack of identity and that there was usually an optimal civ choice that led to similar gameplay each time. Lots of complaints too that keeping track of enemies was confusing because they change constantly too.
I followed some of Humankind's development as well. One of their leads was a flaming troon.
That's the general consensus from the community.
I used to play World of Tanks on console.
The dev team, which was separate from the PC version, would openly admit that certain features of the game couldn't be improved or changed because no one from the OG programming team remained. And no one from the existing team understood their legacy code.
Some proposed changes to Civ 7
- no more builders/workers
- tile improvement options occur immediately with city population growth
- no more external Civ 6 style districts
- buildings are built on tiles outside the city, two per tile
- no more Loyalty system
- Civ 6 disaster system persists in some form
- soft cap on Cities that can be settled, Happiness penalties for exceeding cap
- towns exist as resource colonies that can farm a single type of resource, but can only be changed once per era
- no more manual City Management of tiles, cities get all resources from all tiles owned
- city borders expand with population growth
- no more Amenities, now there's simply a general Happiness mechanic
- apparently no more Bonus or Luxury resources
- navigable rivers added
- no more global Great People, some Great People available in certain eras to specific civs
- specific civs have massive bonuses to build civ Specific wonders - ie Egypt & the Pyramids
- new Commander mechanic - General who can load/unload up to eight combat units inside them and march them to battle
- Commanders now upgrade, units don't
- no more Faith as a resource
- Religion doesn’t seem to be available in the first Age
- no more Religious Victory
- new Economic Victory has been added
- overhauled Diplomacy system where players have to spend Diplo currency to trade with opponents, Open Borders, etc
- new Humankind-like system where players choose an initial leader who stays permanent, but options are available to change or adapt civs with each Era change - Ancient Egypt can become Songhai or the Mongols (if horses found)
- game now divided into 3 eras - Ancient, Exploration, Modern
- all civs progress through era change simultaneously
- rubberbanding mechanics with era changes to try to avoid snowballing, opponents get to catch up on Tech Tree with era change, etc
- the end of each era presents a scripted Crisis that the player has to resolve
- the developers are trying to discourage speedrunning, each era lasts 125-150 turns on Standard
- multiplayer players are mad - Ancient era only allows 5 players to start then map & # of civs expands as new eras progress
- no more hot seat
- concern that Civ 7 will restrict modding possibilities even further
- game is launching with DRM Denuvo spyware
- lots of scummy preorder and DLC tactics - hiding two leaders behind preorders, planning something like 6 DLC packs over first half year of release, selling DLC tile set cosmetics, etc
One of the biggest problems with Civ 6 was that the AI couldn't play it's own game.
The AI posed zero military threat once you survived the initial Ancient era.
Other CPU players could be difficult to conquer at times because of how OP walls are. But they hardly ever rebuilt units once they take some initial losses. They never declare war passed the midgame and never pose any existential military threat.
A lot of players liked all the DLC that Civ 6 had. But all the extra features simply compounded the problem that the AI couldn't handle the base game, let alone each new layer of complexity.
So far with Civ 7, there hasn't been much focus from the devs re: improved AI. They've completely overhauled all the game mechanics wrt changing civs midgame, no districts, soft settlement caps, took away builders, revamped the era system, etc.
The chance that they made so many drastic changes means it's unlikely that they've invested enough resources into making competent and challenging AI.
The 1996 Helen Hunt version was pretty girlbossy as well.
Bill Paxton is portrayed as a city weatherman who sold out and is dating a prissy therapist. He returns to beg his ex-wife to sign their divorce papers.
Helen Hunt is the fearless stormchaser leader in a dirty wifebeater driving alone because...a tornado specifically targeted her childhood home and family???
The rest of the men on her team are all nerdy, kooky betas.
The Aryan chad Carl Elwes character who plays the heel is portrayed as privileged, unethical and so arrogant that it leads to his death and his entire crew.
I liked it back in '96 and can still watch it today.
But taking a step back, there’s lots of 2024 already in 1996.
One of my most hated Hollywood movies of all time.
These books were very specific to my personal situation, so they likely don't extrapolate.
But without a doubt, these two books have had the biggest impact on changing the way I approach real life.
Perhaps a high school curriculum could have a reading list of similar Big 5 Personality Inventory books that have been vetted so that teens could pick the one most applicable or interesting to them to start "thinking about thinking".
It will be interesting to see what Matt does next if Tenet doesn't survive.
His brand is credibility.
It remains to be seen whether he can succeed without his foil Blonde, who is headed in the other direction extricating herself from YT commentary life as a wife & mother.
I find myself watching less of his content not for any disagreement with his work or opinions, but more that he isn't keeping my interest like he once did.
He mentioned last night that he isn't really interested in branching out from the pure political/culture war stuff, which may be why I'm checking in less.