Popkulturist's Argument pieces, newest first. The essays that take a side on games, screens, and the culture around them, and then try to earn it.
The Stuart spinoff premiered last night, at the end of day one of San Diego Comic-Con, and the laughter is gone at last. The new show gets a fair hearing here. The old one has run out of appeals.
This will make you question reality in the happiest way possible. A true story about the moonwalk, Tom Bombadil, The Crew, an understaffed universe, and why you're on the clock right now.
'Denshattack!', the game where Japanese commuter trains do kickflips, launched this week to some of the best reviews of the year. Every publisher who saw it spent a year saying no, which remains the industry's most reliable instinct: rejecting the only ideas anyone remembers.
Two deaths at one company, fourteen months apart. The cartoon owl got a Cybertruck, a eulogy from the CEO and a resurrection priced at fifty billion XP. The translators got a form email ten days before Christmas. On the streak as the instrument that made the whole thing survivable, and the market verdict that arrived for the opposite reason.
Five minutes into the customs interview, the officer wanted to be sure I understood I was confessing. I had ordered sleep gummies from a Dutch webshop called Stonedoos, legal there when I clicked buy, and a Stockholm court counted a hundred and twenty-seven grams of candy as a hundred and twenty-seven doses of narcotics. A five-year record, sixty day-fines, and a state that cannot keep cocaine out of its own parliament.
Ten typed pages turned up in the Bodleian this week, and because they're Tolkien's, the word "lost" did its usual work, and somewhere a fantasy fan started picturing a new map. What the pages actually hold is a translation of a sermon.
In March, Electronic Arts laid people off at DICE, the Stockholm studio behind 'Battlefield 6'. The game had come out a few months before as the best-selling title in America in 2025, and sold seven million copies in its first three days. So the sequence reads: ship the biggest game the studio has made in years, then sack the people who made it.
Last Tuesday at the press conference for 'Fjord', Sebastian Stan refused to laugh at a Trump question. Four days later, his director Cristian Mungiu took home the Palme d'Or for what he calls a meditation on "left-wing fundamentalism." Notes on what Cannes chose to crown.
On the evening of May 20, 2026, Amazon released the series finale of 'The Boys' after five seasons. The next morning, Elon Musk called the ending "pathetic." Within two days he had also clarified, on his own social media platform, that he had not in fact watched the show.
I watched 'Star Wars: The Ghost's Apprentice' on a Tuesday night in February, mostly to confirm it was bad. A guy who goes by Kavan the Kid made it in fourteen days, alone, on off-the-shelf tools: Veo, Midjourney, and Runway. I wanted to roll my eyes and close the tab.
