Assume AI develops to the point where you can just tell it to make a game with your parameters or you're a billionaire who can self-fund a dev team without having to bend the knee to anyone. No limits or restrictions on what game you can make. What do you make?

I think I would do a GTA/Saint's Row style game, but with themes based on Death Wish. You've got a city with a gay hippie district, then various portions of the city are black neighborhoods, jeets, mohammedans, etc. You play as a White guy who has some tragedy that sends him into a vigilante quest Death Wish style where you do different missions in those neighborhoods, and as you play, you slowly begin to drive them out and gentrify the neighborhoods. Disrupt enough black gang activity in their portion of the map, burn down some drug houses, etc and they start leaving and White families move in and clean it up. Burn down enough Mosques and take down terror cells in the mohammedan section, and they are driving out and Whites move back in and so on.

Other White guys start joining your cause as well as you progress and turn your crusade into a movement. Could start out with the police being an antagonist too, as they would be, but as you start taking territory, maybe work in a political angle that sort of replaces a diverse city council with more and more White men as you play and take ground, and you see more White guys as cops who start being less hostile to your activities and start looking the other way. Missions where you have to rescue kids from the mohammedans or faggots, some missions outside of the city where you take out Chicom owned farmland where they have weapons and drones in secret storage and big drug farms. Hell, maybe there's a Little Tokyo or Little Koreatown section of the city that is neutral to you if you wanna go that way. Some kind of communist trained "community organizer" type mayor as the Big Bad you have to face near the end, in the heart of the Antifa held faggot downtown district to cap it off.

Obviously no company on earth would spend 5 seconds developing such a game, but if you could do it yourself and just release it out into the wild via torrents or something, I bet it would get some traction.

Movie, TV show, anime, game, book, whatever. Is there anything on the horizon you're actually optimistic for?

If you're as sick of modern TV and movies as the rest of us and want something that is just fun, engaging, and doesn't have all the messaging and cynicism of modern media, check out two series. Sharpe and Hornblower. Both are British military action adventure series from the 90s era. Sharpe, starring a young Sean Bean, is about a rifleman the Duke of Wellington's army as he fights in the Napoleonic Wars. Hornblower, starring Ioan Gruffudd, is about Horatio Hornblower, a sailor in the British Navy in the late 1700s.

Both are based on book series, and both are made in the typical British fashion of the time which is fewer episode, but each being nearly movie length in running time. If you liked Master and Commander, you'll like either of these series. Being the 90s, the 'effects' and sets aren't what you'd see from a modern movie. A lot of 'a few dozen extras meant to give the impression of armies of thousands' sort of shots, but the writing and character stuff is light-years beyond anything being written today. They are quintessential and unashamedly 'guy' action adventure shows. If you can get over the natural hokey nature of the production value of the 90s, you will feel good watching them, and even better having watched them. It is a great way to rinse off the sludge of modern TV and movies.

One thing I've seen bandied about often when talking about Star Trek in particular, is the assumption that a show like TNG or DS9 would not work today because it would not be interesting or popular to any current generation of viewers. It's treated as a forgone conclusion that 26 episodes of low-budget/mediocre effects TV about ideas that's mostly people standing in a room talking just would not appeal to anyone who isn't old, so there's no sense in even trying to make that anymore. I don't see anyone questioning that premise, only accepting it as true and then arguing that something new has to be attempted. Even if one is on the side that hates things like nuTrek, Disney Star Wars, etc, I only see people starting with 'well we simply can't do what they did 30 years ago. It could not work. We have to make something modern, they just haven't done it the right way yet'.

And I find myself wondering why this is assumed to be true. Are people not people anymore? Did human beings and their brains evolve in some way over the past 30 years that basics of storytelling that have worked across all mediums for thousands of years simply broke, and the only way anyone knows how to even try to understand a story is if it's an 8 hour movie cut into a dozen segments telling exactly one interconnected linear story? If a 13yo boy watched TNG in the 90s and found it entertaining, why is it assumed a 13yo boy in 2026 would just absolutely hate it?

It's treated as a natural inevitable evolution from 24-26 episode serialized TV shows to "prestige TV" seasons of half a dozen episodes telling one big single story because that's just what happened. But I content it was never proven that's what had to happened, or that the old model would fail. I don't believe that only the binge streaming cut-up-movie design can work. That's just all they make now, and so that's all people watch. And then they use the fact that's all people watch as evidence why it's the only thing that works. The whole argument is circular and the underlying premise relies on assumptions being true that have never been proven.

Just head about this and saw the trailer on Fake Wizard. Anyone excited for this, or do you expect it'll just be more woekshit?

Games like Among Us, RV There Yet, Peak, Lethal Company, etc. I don't mind them so long as there's no woke elements to them, though I've never actually played any of them myself. I have two groups of streamers that I like (Fooster/Fisk/Olafpawbelt and Splitsie/Capac/TFE/Shack) that play them from time to time and it's pretty enjoyable watching them. These sorts of games strike me as games that are more meant to be watched than played yourself. I doubt many of them sell that many units, and they typically are only popular for a couple of weeks before being replaced by the next one.

I bet a lot of copies sold are people who think 'oh man, this looked like fun when I saw $streamer play it, I can't wait to play it with my friends' and then they never do. They seem to be pretty cheap, so if an indie dev can provide a few weeks of enjoyment for $9.99, honestly there are worse ripoffs in the gaming world.

And something always felt a little off about it. It's a great movie with a lot of great scenes, but there's a woke element that just doesn't make sense, and makes the rest of the movie harder to buy into. Making Emily Blunt's character a FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader more or less breaks her character arc.

The first scene of the movie shows her leading an FBI tactical team on a raid against a drug house where she is involved in a firefight and kills a guy. In wokeness, this would be done to set her up as a girlboss who is never wrong, is always tough as nails, never gets overwhelmed, etc. But the rest of the movie shows her as a meek and timid woman out of her depth, getting shown up by men constantly, getting overpowered and totally at the mercy of a stronger man multiple times, and has her have an emotional breakdown at the end where she can't wrap her head around the situations she was just in.

That version of her character is actually more true to life, and a woman would get her ass kicked by men every time, would have an emotional breakdown, and would be out of her depth in every one of those situations. But the movie still tried to portray her as some tactical badass for like the first 10 minutes. It would have made more sense to make her some FBI financial crimes office worker type who was brought on as an advisor because of the whole money tracking plot point.

The movie wants to set her up as a badass, but then spends the rest of the time undercutting it. Those two things just can't really exist in the same character. If she really was competent enough to climb the ladder of the SWAT pipe hitting community to be a part of FBI HRT as a leader, she just shouldn't be such a meek pushover and basket case the rest of the movie. Granted a small woman like her actually doing that is laughably unrealistic, but if you're going to write the character to be that, it just doesn't make sense to turn around and have her not be that for the other 95% of the film.

I suspect perhaps in an earlier draft of the film, her character maybe was written to be some office working investigative type who was painfully naive about life threatening situations, but someone probably put a stop to that because it wouldn't be empowering enough, so they changed her into being some SWAT team hardass...only to have none of that characterization actually count for the rest of the movie.

Are you familiar with the youtuber 'whatifalthist'? If so, what do you think about his content?

What do you think about all this stuff that's supposedly being released about alleged UFOs?

Personally I don't think we are lucky enough for alien catgirls to be real, but one can hope.

I was watching star wars and when I got to the line when Obi wan says 'you must do what you feel is right, of course', it made me think of something. The message in more movies, tv shows, comics, etc since before I can remember has always been 'follow your emotions'. Think about all the different kids shows or cartoons, animated movies, 80s and 90s family adventure movies and so on where the main character or hero is given some kind of advice that amounts to 'follow your heart', or 'what makes a hero is inside here' and the mentor points to the heart. A hundred different variations of that.

In contrast, characters who use intellect and reason are almost always made to either be wrong, comic relief, some kind of busybody or pencil neck rule-follower who is annoying or insufferable, and the answer or solution or action they arrive at ends up being the wrong one, and the main character who had a hunch, or acted out of love, or felt courageous despite ever reason to think they would lose and such, ends up being correct.

And I realized that the culmination of this is generations of people being told to follow their emotions and not their capacity to reason. Reason is of course one of the most fundamental strengths that sets humans apart from all other life. We can choose to ignore what our instincts or base level reactions and 'lizard brain' tells us, and instead engage a high level of intellect and arrive at an answer that may be more correct than what our 'gut' or 'heart' told us in the beginning. That is not to say emotion is pointless or without value as a consideration, but the capacity to reason should always at least be tried and worked through, before deciding if the 'heartfelt' answer is the one to pick anyways.

And I don't think I've ever seen that message in a piece of media. As we know, emotion based behavior is the feminine way of 'thinking', while reason is the masculine. And people who base their actions entirely off of feelings, also tend to be the ones most easily led, most readily propagandized to, most easily duped into something. Animals have only instinctual reactions, but no true thought. Humans are supposed to be capable of both. It is a regression to a baser and lower form of life to ignore reason and act on feeling alone. And yet that is the message that nearly all media for as long as I can remember taught.

And we now live in an era where critical thinking is nearly extinct. It didn't used to be this way. 12yo boys used to read Aristotle and Sophocles. They would have rhetoric class and be taught the Socratic Method of analysis. Classical educations emphasized the teaching of reason and how to exercise it. They don't teach anything close to that anymore, and most people couldn't actually reason their way out of paper bag. It's not just leftists either. A massive majority of the right also rejects thought and instead engages purely with how something makes them feel, and are equally susceptible to various pundits, podcasters, youtubers, and propagandists who know how to stroke their emotions and rile them up in a particular useful way. Most people don't know how to think anymore, and nearly all media that anyone currently alive has ever seen, if it has a moral message at all, it tends to be "don't think, feel". And I find that very curious.