2025-12-24 03:00:00
“Don’t put all your hopes into a headset, Chuck,” I hear the voice saying. “It’ll break your heart every time.” And I get that, imaginary voice, but this time is different.
The thing that stood out to me more than anything else with Valve’s announcement of new Steam hardware in early 2026 wasn’t that any of it was some mind-blowing vision of the future. It was that it was all so practical. It seems like every choice they made was the right one, both for customers and for Valve’s bottom line.1
The Steam Frame headset was the part that most interested me, as somebody who was absolutely dead-set convinced that VR games would be the future, who’s been disappointed as the years pass and that keeps turning out not to be the case at all. It gives me the vibe of people who’ve been burned before on the typical release cycle of a VR headset: initial excitement, waning interest as the friction gets to the point of making it not worth the effort, and eventually wondering where exactly you last left the thing and whether the batteries in the controller have corroded.
A while ago, I was having an online conversation with a friend, and he made the perfectly valid point that if VR was ever going to take off, the Quest 2 would’ve done it. Facebook/Meta was in a unique place when they released it, both having Croesus-level stockpiles of money and a boss who was intent on launching Second Life As Global Marketplace.
Even if you were only mildly curious about VR, the Quest 2 was priced at a point that was not that much more than an impulse purchase. It’s got an unprecedented install base (according to Qualcomm via Wikipedia, at least 10 million units were sold as of November 2021). But even that level hasn’t seemed to convince enough people that VR as a medium is worth caring about.
There have been several successful games targeting the Quest, but not the huge, must-have title that will generate a big enough wave of interest to finally lift VR out of its niche.
Apple’s Vision Pro was never going to sell at huge numbers, because it wasn’t intended to. It was pretty clearly intended to be the first step into expanding VR and AR into a much wider audience beyond people interested in games. The tech in it is amazing, but the idea was to establish a platform that could eventually sell at iPad-level numbers (even if not iPhone-level), once the tech inevitably caught up with the ambitions of the first model, and it became lighter and affordable.
But that focus on making it a “lifestyle product” ended up doing even more harm than the price, in my opinion. It’s way too cautious about doing anything “too immersive” or allowing direct interaction with digital objects; its AR tracking tech that’s already ground-breaking on the iPhone is hobbled on the headset, probably because of overheating; it’s too expensive to attract developers interested in making a wide range of stuff; and it’s not exceptionally good at much besides watching movies. If you’re not that interested in watching a Metallica concert or walking across a canyon on a tightrope and feeling like you’re really there, then there’s not much for you.
And the PSVR 2 kept the focus on games, and it was pitched as an accessory for a device where players likely already had an extensive library. But it wasn’t backwards compatible with PSVR games, and it wasn’t great for playing flat-screen games on a virtual screen (I didn’t even know whether that was an option until I just did a search, since I’d never heard any comment about it), and it didn’t attract much interest from developers wanting to make a standout VR experience for it. It was positioned more as a new platform instead of an accessory for the PS5. Plus, it required a cord; sometimes the most boring things cause the biggest problems.
So just in terms of positioning, I’m optimistic about the Steam Frame:
That last point is pretty important, because it eliminates the “wait… what’s the catch?” hesitation. A friend of mine dismissively described the Steam Machine as “a vanity project,” but I think that’s both apt and complimentary for the Steam Frame as well.
Years and years ago, some people at Valve decided that VR was really cool and that more should be done to make it consumer-friendly, and it’s been a going concern in the company ever since. They do it because they like it, and they can afford to keep doing it. So they don’t need to establish it as a whole new platform, or a flagship product for a future vision of online services, but just as another way to play games in your Steam library.
It’s not even that they sell both the razors and the blades. They’ve made a metric asston of money selling the blades, and they can sell the razors for a little bit of profit as well.2
Which might seem like it’s only beneficial to Valve, but their “hey, it might not ever have a huge audience, but why not be the best at it, anyway?” approach to VR resulted in Half-Life: Alyx, so I think it’s working.
For as long as I can remember, VR devotees have been saying “sure, tech demos and small experiences are really neat and show the potential, but as soon as a AAA-caliber VR game is released, that’s when the medium is really going to take off!” Half-Life: Alyx is that.
And the medium didn’t really take off as a result, but I never got the impression that that was ever the intention. It was clearly a showcase for the Index controllers, but it didn’t require them. And it does require Steam VR, but that’s freely available to anybody with a Windows machine. It was never pitched as a killer app for the Index, or even for Steam, really. It felt more like the killer app for the general concept of VR games.
It’s worth pointing out that it’s structured as individual chapters in a connected story, giving the player natural stopping points that don’t feel like interruptions. The idea of “a huge, sprawling, AAA-caliber VR game” sounds good until you remember that for anybody but the most hard-line VR devotees, it gets pretty tiresome wearing a headset for more than a half hour or so at a time. I don’t want a VR experience that will absorb me for hours; I want something that I can play for less than an hour at a time and think, “that was pretty bad-ass.”
So my prediction and hopes for the Steam Frame are:
The last part is the most appealing for me, not just as somebody who’d like to put out a weird VR experiment without having to deal with the Quest, but as somebody who has more fun with the shorter, weirder games in VR than the ones that try to be massive blockbusters.
To their credit, Meta has put significant effort into supporting developers wanting to bring stuff to their platform, both financially and in terms of support. There’s a detailed guide for releasing stuff both natively and to run streaming from a PC. But just for me personally, I appreciate any time I get to spend not thinking about Android at all. And while I haven’t yet released anything on Steam before, the overwhelming impression I get is that it’s straightforward enough that it’s practically a no-brainer.
Based more on vibes than any practical experience, targeting the Quest still feels like “we’ve got to make this worth the effort.” Steam feels more like, “eh, why not release it and see what happens?”
Smaller games feel better for the future of the medium overall4, since the games that go big — we have to sell over a million copies to make targeting VR even worth it — inevitably have to play it safe. Part of why I lost interest in even following VR games on YouTube is that the video host would always be super-excited to announce a groundbreaking new game, and then the footage always looked exactly the same, firing rifles or bows-and-arrows at robots.
And maybe it’ll even kick off a trend where the bigger games go back to including an additional “VR mode” even if it’s not their primary target. Maybe the additional development investment will be written off by the marketing potential of more interesting videos of streamers freaking out over your game in VR.
None of this requires the Steam Frame to sell ten million units, or for there to be a Fortnite Except It’s VR-level mega-hit, both of which seem a little counter-intuitive. Everything we’ve ever seen in games suggests that you need huge market penetration and a Mario-level flagship game to have any kind of lasting impact.
But that’s exactly what makes me optimistic here. Basically, Valve doesn’t need the Steam Frame to be a massive seller, since Steam is their business, and any sales benefit Steam. Developers don’t need a massive hit to justify the cost of VR development, since Steam’s low barrier of entry makes it an attractive target, and the lack of exclusivity makes it possible to target other VR platforms as well. And consumers don’t have to rebuild their game library from scratch — assuming they haven’t spent the last few years going apeshit in the Quest store — but will still have a ton of potential stuff to play with on day 1.
I already knew from experience that the most important aspect of a headset is reducing friction as much as possible — no setting up external sensors, no establishing your play space boundaries, no cords getting in the way, and as light and comfortable as possible. I’d thought that the Vision Pro had cleverly addressed many of those issues, just by making the headset “AR first” so that you always see your real environment, and not requiring controllers.
What I hadn’t fully appreciated was how much of the friction comes after you’ve owned the thing for a while, and you’re having to figure out what to do with it and/or what to make for it. If Valve manages to get the pricing right, they may have announced exactly the product VR needs to become interesting again.
Not necessarily with mind-blowing new technology for the stuff we think of as VR, like displays or haptics; or with a flagship game, because they already made that; but just by making good decisions, like the additions to Proton to get games running on more architecture, and the emphasis on wireless and streaming tech to make it as platform-agnostic as possible. All things to reduce friction, barriers to entry, and, I’m hoping, an ethos of opening things up and making them fun again.
2025-12-24 02:00:00
You might think that “can I come up with an entire month’s worth of songs that aren’t at all Christmas-related and somehow make them Christmas-related?” is the kind of thing I do only to entertain myself. And you’d be right. But it has the side effect that occasionally I discover new music I wouldn’t have heard otherwise. And really, isn’t discovering new music the greatest gift of all?
I had never heard of Don Ewell, who was a stride pianist, and I’d never heard of stride piano, either. “Atlanta Blues” by the Don Ewell Quartet feels like the prototypical example of an entire genre of music that I could immediately recognize, even if I wouldn’t ever have been able to name it, or even place it in the right decade.
It puts me immediately in mind of a specific time and place: either standing in a long queue for the Tower of Terror, or watching a movie from the late 1990s or early 2000s that quickly needs to establish it’s set in the 20s or 30s.
I was also unfamiliar with Jósean Log, a Mexican musician who both first gained prominence via YouTube and uses a ukulele as his primary instrument, and yet somehow the combination of those things doesn’t make him insufferable. 1
All of his stuff that I’ve heard is pretty catchy, but I’m particularly a fan of “A Pesar de Todo,” from his EP Más Normal De Lo Normal.2
2025-12-23 03:05:00
I made a first pass on this list back in June, mostly because this has been an unusually good year for movies (if not a good year for anything else), and I somehow already had 10 favorites within the first six months.
At the time, I wondered whether the list would change by the end of the year, or if things had already peaked, and it would just be a repeat. Turns out it did change pretty significantly, thanks mostly to a summer surprise.
Other surprises:
15. Together
You kind of have to respect this movie just for how much Alison Brie and Dave Franco commit to it so completely. It’s body horror that didn’t feel overwhelmingly nasty, and it ultimately feels unsettlingly romantic. Over the course of the year, a theme of “fearless sincerity” started to emerge across my favorite movies, and I think this one fits, by presenting a gruesomely codependent relationship that’s also kind of sweet.
14. Eternity
I still don’t understand how this movie managed to have so many objectively beautiful people and make them all look kind of plain. But apart from that, it’s a charming and genuinely funny take on the romantic comedy format, exploring what happens in the “happily ever after” part.
13. Frankenstein
It’s beautiful, and cinematic, with stunning set design, costume design, and character design. It’s got an intelligent script that’s a personal statement from the writer and director while still being a faithful adaptation of the original story. And it balances darkness and beauty in a way that seems unique to Guillermo del Toro.
12. Ballerina
This is the year I finally watched John Wick, and while it didn’t blow me away, I can now at least understand why it resonated with people enough to launch a franchise. I had no expectations of Ballerina, but it did manage to blow me away. Relentless action, with fight choreography that actually let me follow what was going on, and was often funny. I’ve still only seen two movies in the franchise, but I appreciate how they’re trying to build an action movie mythology instead of being fixated on being grounded or realistic.
I had to think about this one for a while, since I was trying to force it into the category of “Stephen King’s sentimental stories, not the supernatural horror ones,” without appreciating that it can be kind of both. Outstanding performances from Karen Gillan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Matthew Lillard in particular. The thing that’s stuck with me is how it balances the sweet and sinister, the tragic and uplifting, the spectacular and the mundane, exactly how a story about life should. I still hate the narration, though.
10. Black Bag
I still think it tries a little too hard to be a power fantasy for affluent middle-aged people who desperately need to think they’re still cool, but it’s stuck with me throughout the year. Steven Soderbergh understands how to make movies feel cool and memorable, which is why I’ve only seen Out of Sight once but still consider it one of my favorite movies of all time.
9. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
This was my most anticipated movie of the year, and I enjoyed it a lot, but also feel little desire to watch it again. It’s great as an adaptation of the Fantastic Four, because it nails not just the mid-century aesthetic, but the dynamics of the family, and the feeling of optimism that sufficiently advanced science can solve any problem. That also means that people who didn’t already love these characters are unlikely to be won over by this take on them, no matter how well it was executed. And I can’t imagine their being anywhere near as appealing when taken out of their environment and mixed in with the rest of the MCU.
But Michael Giacchino’s score might be my favorite of any Marvel movie. I think the most joyous moment for me in First Steps had nothing to do with the plot, but just watching the motion graphics of the end title sequence playing out in IMAX 3D while listening to that amazing theme song.
I wasn’t a particularly big fan of the franchise, so I had zero expectations from this, and might have skipped it altogether if I didn’t have the AMC subscription. But I’d forgotten just how bold and experimental Danny Boyle gets with his movies. There’s a feeling of freedom you rarely see outside of animated features. A sense of “these are movies, not documentaries. We can show whatever we want, so why not go for it?”
I’m glad I watched this a second time, because it let me shut off the part of my brain that kept screaming, This wasn’t made for you! and just enjoy it. It’s almost as experimental with its character designs, animation styles, and overall look as the Spider-Verse movies, but without drawing as much attention to the craft and just staying light, fun, and completely accessible.
It’s absurd to call this “my least favorite in the Knives Out trilogy,” because it’s excellent. That only makes sense for star ratings, or ranked lists like this one. But at least it made me reconsider what it is that defines “a Knives Out movie” besides Benoit Blanc.
I realized that the most significant commonality is that they’re all so unabashedly opinionated. They all center on a fundamentally good character who’s surrounded by people who range from flawed or misguided to outright evil. It’s tempting to be cynical and assume that you can’t build a compelling argument story around a character who’s genuinely virtuous, but these movies feel uplifting because they celebrate good people, instead of treating incorruptibility as a flaw.
5. Weapons
The one thing that sticks with me about this movie is how much it defies over-interpretation or analysis. It’s just an intriguing, funny, suspenseful, downright scary, sad, and then hilarious again story, well-told. And it works specifically because its structure of interleaving stories puts all of the intrigue in exactly the right places.
4. Final Destination Bloodlines
The Final Destination series has always been something that I loved in concept more than execution. When they work, they’re exactly the right kind of “active storytelling” the best horror and suspense movies do, where your brain is constantly firing off possibilities of what might happen next.
But Bloodlines is the first one to absolutely nail the formula, and they did it by getting the tone exactly right. Characters likeable enough so that you’re invested in their stories, but not taken so seriously that it’s miserable watching these people who are all doomed to die horribly. It’s possibly the best movie I’ve seen at understanding the similarities between horror and comedy, getting the timing so perfectly right that the most gruesome moments are also the funniest.
3. Companion
Back in June, I named this my favorite of the year with little hesitation. I still think that it’s a near-flawless screenplay, with outstanding performances from everyone, and a real sense of humor that doesn’t undermine the scenes of real horror. But it’s also undeniably a movie with modest ambitions that nails them, and when you’re doing something as pointless as ranking movies in order, modest ambitions get outranked.
I still love this movie, and I especially love it for being the best expression I’ve ever seen of a profound idea: that the love you choose to give to people belongs to you. No matter what they choose to do with it, and no matter how awful they turn out to be, it’s still yours, and it’s still “real.”
Useful for looking back on relationships that have ended, whether they’re romantic or friendships, and instead of feeling gullible or foolish, concentrating instead on celebrating your own capacity for love.
2. Sinners
I’ve seen it three times now, and it’s still impossible not to think at least once, now this is cinema.
Which sounds pretentious, because it is, but also it says a lot about how divisions between “genre movie” and “art film” have become so completely irrelevant that the most cinematic, profound, and impactful movie of the year is also so largely dedicated to vampire fights and cunnilingus. Calling out how phenomenal the music is feels like disrespect towards how phenomenal everything else is.
It is likely the “best” movie of 2025, but since this is a ranked list of favorites, I’ve got to put it just behind the movie that hit me the hardest.
1A! 1A! Superman
I spent the better part of the summer trying to figure out how exactly a movie that felt so corny, on-the-nose, and prone to going off on clunky tangents, still charmed me so completely that it eventually turned into an irrational love. Like The Force Awakens did, but less explicable, since I’ve never loved Superman anywhere near as much as Star Wars.
Ultimately, I think it’s so effective because it’s so on the nose. It’s a movie about fearless kindness, and it delivers that message by being fearlessly sincere. It says that we shouldn’t be afraid of looking silly or corny, we shouldn’t be embarrassed about the things that connect with us (like comic books), and we should never be afraid of doing the right thing.
Meaning that it rejects all my attempts to categorize, analyze, and interpret it, because it bypasses all the defenses in my brain and lodges itself directly in my heart. Looking for images for this post meant that I watched the ending of Superman several more times, and you’d think I’d be over it by now, but it still brings tears to my eyes every damn time.
10. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3
It’s so dark and punishingly cruel that I had to turn it off in the middle of one of Rocket’s flashbacks, because I was getting too upset. But it’s the end of a trilogy that brought goofy fun to the MCU, and which was the end of a difficult production and the end of a studio relationship, so it feels like putting everyone through the worst so that the catharsis at the end has the biggest payoff.
An all-time classic ghost story that I’d been hearing about for years, based on a novella that I never particularly liked. It was very slow going at first, even by the standards of the early 1960s, when everyone had longer attention spans and more patience. But once things start to unravel, it becomes deeply unsettling, with images that seem tame or even quaint compared to modern adaptations of The Turn of the Screw, but are much more disturbing in context. And thinking too much about the implications will inspire a kind of existential dread.
8. Freaky
A silly horror comedy with an outstanding premise and some surprisingly great performances from a cast that has to keep everything just over the top. It’s just plain fun, and it deserves to be ranked up with Happy Death Day in the Blumhouse horror comedies.
7. Oculus
This has been on the backlog since I became a fan of Mike Flanagan’s, and should be required viewing for anyone who’s a fan of his Netflix series, since Oculus feels a little bit like a test bed for them. As soon as it sets up its premise, it fills you with dread about what you’re going to see next. And hoping that it’ll be somehow be able to escape the ending that it so clearly foreshadows.
The image of the black void had been lodged into public consciousness long before I got the chance to see the movie, but it’s still effective: weird, disorienting, and ambiguously sinister. It’s effectively a movie about a serial killer, and a movie that is often so callously and dispassionately cruel that it feels nihilistic, but then it ultimately makes you feel some level of empathy for them.
5. The Witch
Watching Nosferatu made me realize I need to get caught up on all of Robert Eggers’s movies. This might make for a good double feature, since they’re both masterful at establishing a mood, and a sense of ever-present dread of a coming evil that will inevitably destroy everything.
It’d also make for a good double feature with The Innocents, as movies about people forced to confront an evil that’s impossible for them to understand or explain, because they have insufficient frame of reference. I’d end with The Witch, though, because it at least has a happy ending.
On the backlog forever, this was the Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day movie with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, something you have to point out because it’s got a bad title that doesn’t say much of anything.
It’s every bit as good as I’d heard it was. Despite the time loops, it doesn’t actually subvert that much from corny sci-fi action movies — apart from Cruise playing a character who’s so deliberately unlikeable at the start — but just executes on the formula so well.
3. Paddington
This was the year I finally watched Paddington and Paddington 2, and I finally got to experience what so many people had been talking about: being struck directly in the heart, and then feeling all of the joy and kindness radiating throughout your entire body. I think I liked Paddington a little bit more, because it felt as if they were still establishing what these movies could be and experimenting with how they could work.
2. Nosferatu
I’d expected this just to be a stylish, modern, faithful adaptation of Dracula, an attempt to “get back to the literary origins” or whatever, and undo the Universal monsters and the past century making a copy of a copy of a copy. Not sure why I thought that, exactly, because it’s an adaptation of a movie that was already an adaptation of Dracula, which happened to have fixed 90% of the issues that make me dislike the original book.
Anyway, I loved it. Not so much for its attempts to modernize the story — although I very much appreciated its condemnation of the patriarchy — but for its going all-in on mood and style. It starts with the “gothic horror” and “melodrama” dials turned to maximum, and it just leaves them there for the entire runtime. And because every single person in the cast seems to know exactly what kind of moving they’re making, it never boils over and becomes too silly and over-the-top to be enjoyable.
I already loved this movie at about five minutes in, and it kept refusing to disappoint me. The weirdness and cinematic affectations don’t feel like distracting, unnecessary, flourishes, but actually land. This is supposed to feel surreal and weird, because these were all extremely weird people. It somehow balances funny and sad, presenting a story that doesn’t really have any good guys, but still makes you feel for each one of them.
2025-12-20 08:35:00
The best scene in Game Night has Annie (Rachel McAdams) trying to remove a bullet from her husband Max’s (Jason Bateman) arm, in the parking lot of a convenience store.
That one scene has everything that makes this movie work. It’s got the basic premise that runs throughout: normal people (relatively) put into the kind of situation that you only see in a movie. It’s got a tight, funny script that always seems to be exactly in sync with the audience, always playing what we know against what the characters know, so that the pacing never feels off.
And more important than any of that: it’s got the confidence of filmmakers who realize that they’ve absolutely nailed the casting, and they can devote several minutes of screen time just to enjoy watching its leads play off of each other.
McAdams and Bateman are both doing what they do best: she’s being intensely charming and relatable while clearly in a situation she’s not cut out for. He’s dead-panning through it so hard that it makes Michael Bluth seem over-emotional. And the characters and the actors are so perfectly matched that their chemistry is off the charts. Their back-and-forth feels like a couple who not only has been together for years, but who were perfectly matched from the instant they met. It’s near-impossible to tell how much of the scene was written and how much was improvised.
And on top of all that, it perfectly combines wry and wacky. She’s having to use all the medical equipment she could improvise from a convenience store, including giving him a hamburger-shaped dog toy to bite down on for the pain, while looking on her phone for instructions on how to remove a bullet from some kind of survivalist site that means having to ignore all the racist parts. So throughout, she’s having to operate the phone with her nose, there are cuts to a close-up of an open wound that’s bleeding copiously1, and while bantering, the two of them are trying to keep from throwing up, while trying to keep the other one from throwing up.
When Max feels a sudden jolt of intense pain, he spits out the chew toy, and it hits Annie on the head with a perfect squeak. And that was the biggest laugh-out-loud moment I had watching a movie that was packed full of them.
The second biggest laugh was when their friend Kevin (Lamorne Morris) sees someone thrown onto a glass table for the second time that night, and the table fails to shatter like it’s supposed to in an action movie, and he says, “Man, glass tables are acting weird tonight!”
It’s a perfectly-executed punchline, right at the end of a comedy action sequence, perfectly calling back to an earlier scene, perfectly summing up the tone and core idea of the movie, perfectly delivered. I just wish it had been the only one.
Because that’s the kind of self-aware gag that keeps popping up multiple times throughout the movie, and I know that I would’ve absolutely loved it if I’d seen it in 2018, but now only seven years later, it feels like the most dated aspect of the movie.2
The core idea of the whole thing is both that they’re characters who’ve been dropped into a somewhat cheesy action movie, and that they (and the audience) are never exactly sure how much of it is real vs how much was a planned part of the game. That’s reinforced with tons of tilt-shift establishing shots, to keep driving home the idea that it’s not real, or that we’re watching pieces being moved around on a game board.3
But Game Night is in the weird position of having a cast and direction so good, and a premise that’s so clearly established, that every time it makes a self-aware comment about action movies, it feels distractingly forced. Like someone who’s telling a story so engaging that you’re completely on board, but they keep reminding you that they know the story is silly, and that they’re in on the joke.
It’s a minor criticism overall, in what’s an outstanding modern take on an old-fashioned screwball comedy, so I call it out only because it seems like exactly the kind of thing I’d love. Normally I love it when stories indulge in meta-commentary, especially when it’s done as well as it is in Game Night. So I was surprised by how distracting it was. No matter how well-executed, it was kind of a drag that it kept repeating the idea at all, instead of acknowledging it once and then going back to being a genuinely hilarious screwball comedy.
I’m wondering if part of why it was so distracting was because nothing else in the movie feels too try-hard. Just the opposite, in fact: having the confidence to let scenes play out for full effect, without being too worried that they need to be trimmed down. The perfect timing of a guy slowly sliding exactly seventeen dollars across a table, one bill at a time. Or every single scene with Jesse Plemons.
The three things I knew about this movie after hearing about it over the years: it took people by surprise by how funny it was, the scene with McAdams saying “Yes! Oh no he died!”, and the idea that Plemons “steals every scene he’s in.” The last one seems like a weird way to put it.
He’s really great, and he seems to get exactly what makes his character work in a way that’s still remarkable even when every single member of the cast seems to innately understand exactly what they’re doing. But it’s also a bit like if you opened the door to your house, gave someone explicit directions to your house, rolled out a carpet towards your living room, laid out tools and a dolly, and then said that they “stole” your television. The movie is entirely set up to help his scenes work: slow camera moves into his face, awkwardly long pauses, stretches of uncomfortable silence. It’s not insulting anybody’s performance to say that the movie works because it feels like a perfect collaboration where everyone at every step of the process gets how to make it work.
And the self-awareness and meta-commentary seem kind of unnecessary, since the emotional “weight” of the story is based on a sweet idea that actually works. It shows four couples in various stages of their relationships — or by the end, five couples — and it keeps casually throwing in hints of what makes people “right” for each other. Our two leads keep referencing their attempts to have a baby, and his anxiety over the prospect of having to settle down.4 That’s the kind of thing that usually feels like something writers begrudgingly put into a Hollywood movie to try and give it some dramatic weight. It can’t just be funny or exciting; it has to mean something.
But here, it works, without feeling too maudlin or too simple, because it’s so deftly handled. Our “main” couple are subtly contrasted against couples in various different stages of a relationship: a fertility doctor who’s single and looking, a friend and his co-worker who seem mis-matched in every possible way, two friends who’ve been together since middle school, and the creepy neighbor who can’t get over his divorce. It doesn’t draw too much attention to itself, but feels like it quietly hits all the romantic comedy beats, mostly in the background. It makes the story feel like a romantic comedy, even though we started the movie with a speed-run through the romantic comedy portion of our leads’ relationship, and joined them after they’ve already settled down. Essentially, it’s a celebration of settling down, a quiet rejection of the idea that relationships stop being interesting or romantic once you’ve found the person who’s perfect for you.
I didn’t make the connection until after the movie was over, but the directors of Game Night, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, were also co-directors of the excellent Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. (And co-writers of Spider-Man: Homecoming). It makes perfect sense; both are movies that seem like they’re way better than they needed to be, and both understand not just how to combine comedy and action, but how to trust in a cast to know exactly what they’re doing.
2025-12-19 11:05:00
I’ve already gone off on tirades about generative AI, whether it’s in regards to finding reference art, or how it so obviously reads like the work of grifters and con men, or how it’s used to make execrable propaganda videos. And it always feels like I’m just stating the obvious. Circling around an idea without ever really getting to the heart of it.
And I’ve come to this conclusion: it is so obvious, and that’s why it’s so confounding. There are so many serious concerns already, and new ones seem to keep flaring up every week.1 And these aren’t like vague or subtle concerns that require altruism or long-term foresight. It’s not like expecting the average American in the 60s or 70s to be able to grasp the dangers of microplastics, or, hell, expecting me around 2006 to appreciate just how profoundly toxic Facebook and Twitter would turn out to be. These are blatantly obvious bad things that are doing bad things to real people right now.
I’ve kept thinking that if you dig down deep enough, there’s some unifying thing (spoiler: there is) that justifies all of The Discourse (spoiler: it doesn’t). Because the one thing I know to be absolutely true is that the advancements in machine learning are a breakthrough, able to parse and process data in ways that feel genuinely magical. But every time I’ve tried to make the leap from that into coming up with a justification for generating an end result — the limited and narrow domains for which it still makes sense, once the hype bubble has burst — I’ve come up short.
It feels like everything is building off the basic assumption that of course these systems have a reason to exist, without bothering to convincingly justify their existence.
I guess if nothing else, it’s helped me better appreciate Lovecraft-themed horror games. I could never quite wrap my head around the idea that simply seeing something that shouldn’t exist could drive you insane. I think I get it now, because it’s maddening to see so many people flat-out denying the obvious. I’m extremely aware that “gaslighting” is a term that’s become so overused in online discussions that it’s become almost meaningless, but: we can all see that that’s exactly what’s going on here, right? Right?
Just one example: the way that Google’s Gemini has now been put at the top of every search result page, even though it is, to put it tactfully, utter dogshit.
I keep seeing a screenshot going around of someone typing in the prompt “is marlon brando in heat,” and Google’s AI Overview responds that no, he’s not, because Marlon Brando was a legendary Hollywood actor, and being “in heat” refers to the reproductive cycle of animals, and therefore does not apply to humans.23
Now, I still don’t know if that’s a genuine screenshot, or if it was faked in order to make a point. I don’t even know if that point was “let’s point and laugh at how shitty generative AI is!” or the more insidious “isn’t it amazing that generative AI is getting tripped up on the same linguistic issues that humans can, these systems are just like us!!!” Not being able to trust anything is one of those many concerns that’s a whole topic in itself.
But I can at least post a screenshot of the results when I typed the same query into Google:
I guess at least it gets the context of “in Heat” right. But it’s still just obviously, unacceptably bad on every conceivable level. Maybe the least offensive thing about it is that they’ve invested billions of dollars into a technology that makes it so that computers can’t do basic arithmetic.
The factual errors mean that none of the information is reliable without checking its sources, and it now requires more steps (intentionally) to get to those sources. It’s unnecessarily wordy, wasting your time, which entirely defeats the purpose of a summary. And like all generated AI text, it reads like someone bullshitting you to pad out a word count.
When I was first writing this post, I’d started to go off on a whole rant about how this was so much worse than the stupid “reproductive cycle of animals” version, because at least that one was funny. This is just wrong and bad in a dozen different uninteresting ways. Which is insulting, considering that it’s coming from the flagship product of one of the richest companies on the planet.
That’s what made it finally click for me: the realization that if I worked for Google, I’d be embarrassed by this.
It made me remember the year I wasted by applying to various jobs within Google. Even though I’m bringing that up several years later, I’m not really bitter about it4 because at the time I was already old enough to know that working at a place that’s a bad culture fit is just a miserable experience. To be fair to Google, only one of the interviews treated me with open contempt, and only most of the recruiters or hiring managers outright ghosted me. But several of the people I spoke to were perfectly nice!
But even then, there was this unsettling feeling that the power dynamic was completely off, even by the already skewed standards of a job interview. I got the unmistakable vibe that the people I spoke to were interested in my experience and my ideas in the same way that you make small talk with a child, asking them about their favorite Pokémon.
I realized that if, during the interview process, someone had asked me, “Is Marlon Brando in Heat?” and I’d responded with the AI Overview response above, I’d have been summarily escorted off of the campus. And yet here it was, the result of a multi-billion dollar investment into defacing their core product. The difference is that they can get away with it.
And I mean, I get it: this sounds like the kind of observation made by the most tedious person you know on social media, who always tries to frame every single issue in tech as an example of class warfare. I still use Instagram (albeit increasingly begrudgingly) even after decades of hearing people screaming “you’re the product!!!” because it’s exhausting to overthink everything, instead of occasionally just shrugging and doing what’s most convenient.
But it’s remarkable to me how every single concern about generative AI that I can think of ultimately breaks down into a question of keeping as much money and power as possible in the hands of the “right” people. That’s the unifying thing, the aspect that has adult human beings putting forward the most preposterous ideas, and defending things that we can all immediately tell are indefensible.
And it’s useful to look at all of it from that perspective, since the investors and evangelists5 have increasingly tried to take a “bad cop/good cop” approach to pushing this dogshit onto us. When it’s not an outright case of “you’ll use this stuff because we say you’ll use it, so just get on board and stop your whining,” then it’s claims that this is all some grand, democratizing technology that will make everybody’s life better, so what’s everyone so upset about?
Billionaire Mark Cuban has been particularly vocal with this, saying essentially that all of the histrionics of terminally online people are just protesting progress, complaining about something that will obviously make creative and technical people’s jobs easier.
At the time I’m writing this, the CEO of a previously-beloved game studio is burning through their accumulated good will by trying to defend their use of generative AI in the pre-production and concept stages, insisting that it’s a benefit to the actual creative human beings making the game and not ending up in the final product, so what’s the problem?
You can respond that it’s during the concept stages where the most satisfying and interesting work happens, since you’re not just deciding on what works, but learning what doesn’t work and why. Using generative AI images as reference to create something original is like using Velveeta to make a bold new take on mac and cheese.6 Everything distinctive has been averaged out into a Sucker Punch-style blandness; it may look fine on the surface, but feels ultimately empty.
And all of that’s completely true, but it’s also ultimately circular and unproductive, because it doesn’t address what’s so appealing about using generative AI during the concept stage:
Even the most charitable interpretation is that they’re demanding efficiency from the exact part of the process that benefits the most from being inefficient. The part they’re not saying out loud is that they’ve already made a value judgment of the human work that’s valuable vs the work that can be replaced by generative AI without losing anything significant.
Even if you see yourself as pragmatic, you’re not swayed by any higher-minded arguments about the magic of the creative process and the value of learning by doing, and you only care about the end result, the end result seems apparent: making the hierarchical structure more rigid, putting the creative work into the hands of fewer and fewer people at the top, obviating the work of “lower” people.
And even if you’re fortunate enough to be one of those people comfortably high enough in the hierarchy that generative AI is being sold to you as a tool to make your job easier, you’d have to be pretty naive not to see it as a clear case of training your replacement.
In every industry, trying to automate the work of entry-level employees means denying opportunities to people to learn and develop their skill sets. That’s not some touchy-feely take demanding that companies be altruistic, either: it’s just plain common sense. Generative AI isn’t a tool to aid workers; it’s a worker.
After all, the technology that can parse a natural language prompt to generate an image, a passage of text, or a block of code, could have instead been devoted to generating hyper-relevant search results specifically tailored to a query. “Here’s a bunch of examples of how other human beings have solved this problem, or expressed this idea.” Wouldn’t that be the ideal of democratizing technology? Fostering collaboration between people, sharing ideas and showing each other what we’ve learned?
None of the companies seem to be particularly interested in this, though. Because collaboration isn’t a growth industry. There’s not much monetization opportunity in pointing people to other people’s work, aggregating original sources and giving proper credit. What if you could instead create a kind of money-laundering scheme, not just for wealth, but for creativity and copyright?
If you’ve ever tried training a machine-learning model, you’ve seen what an involved task it is to aggregate and tag all of the training data. (That’s why we’ve had websites asking us to click on pictures of stop lights and cross walks for decades). To get the enormous data set required for even the dogshit Gemini response above, you need the kind of resources that only huge companies with billions of dollars of investment can manage.
Not to mention having the legal weight to render copyright invalid, the funds required to pay for class action suits, and the lobbying power to get local governments to see dollar signs in their eyes and ignore all of the environmental concerns surrounding increasingly huge power- and water-hungry data centers. There’s nothing at all democratic about any of that; it’s all about making it so that only the richest companies can control it.
Even if you’re working on your own, not swayed by the whole DIY philosophy, by the idea that the best way to learn is by doing, or by arguments that “if you take shortcuts you’re only hurting yourself!” it should still raise alarms when you find yourself getting increasingly dependent on tech that demands you treat it as a black box owned by a huge company.
I’ve gone back and forth on what I consider to be an “acceptable” level of using stuff like VSCode or ChatGPT to generate code. Is there a domain or an application where it makes sense? I never use it myself, just on principle; I’d almost always prefer to do it myself rather than rely on something I might not understand. But for other people?
To me, it just feels like regressing back to the time when I’d just started programming, when everything was locked down. I could never afford Borland C++ or Turbo Pascal, or even Microsoft BASIC for the Mac. It seemed absolutely impossible for me to make a game without getting a job at a big developer or publisher, simply because I couldn’t afford to buy the tools. So today, it’s still astounding to me that compilers and IDEs are included with operating system releases, and even more astounding that full development packages like Blender and Godot are freely available.
Now that we’re heading in the right direction, why are people eager to go back to being dependent on OpenAI or Microsoft or anyone else?
You’ll frequently see people comparing generative AI to cryptocurrency and the blockchain, because the hype bubble is so familiar. But the similarities run even deeper, because they’re both pyramid schemes at their core.
That’s why they both have the constant refrain of “get on board or be left behind.” It doesn’t work for the people at the top unless all of us at the bottom ignore all evidence that it’s a bullshit scam, and instead furiously clap our hands and believe in fairies.
If this were genuinely democratizing technology, why do I have to rush to get on board or be left behind? Doesn’t it seem like I could just hang out, being slow and enjoying a weird sense of satisfaction from learning things, and wait for the geniuses to figure everything out? Based on the results above, Google’s Gemini was clearly shoved into everyone’s face long before it was ready for the public, which makes me wonder what was the big hurry.
If I were the suspicious type, I’d start to think that maybe this isn’t the futuristic vision of an anti-elitist creative utopia that will benefit everyone, like they keep claiming it is. I’d start to think it was just another scheme to keep all the power, money, and information in the hands of the “right” people.
Meanwhile, I’m going to do a price comparison on building my own PC exactly how I want, now that the cryptomining bubble has burst, and video card prices have gone down… oh wait hang on, they’re still crazy high. And also I can’t afford RAM since those prices have quintupled because of the demand for AI data centers. I guess my only options were buying NVIDIA stock 10 years ago, or buying a pre-built PC from a big company that can afford to buy components in bulk. Sorry, that’s completely irrelevant to this whole post, though.
2025-12-17 02:00:00
If you love tortured puns and have a dim memory of beginning French, have I got the Christmas post for you!
First up is “Ah Ouais” by Papa Wemba, a musician from the Congo who had an interesting career and helped popularize world music to wider audiences. Hearing this track makes me reminiscent for the optimism of the early 2000s, when it felt like we were building towards a global community.
Today we’re pairing it with “Le Festin” by Camille and Michael Giacchino, from the soundtrack to Ratatouille. I guess my prejudices are showing, because I just assumed that even with my very rudimentary understanding of the French language, it’d be trivial to find tons and tons of French pop songs about eating. I always thought that that was a big part of what being French was all about.
But I had no luck at all. The best I could find was “The Feast,” which as a Disney song composed by an American to sound French, seemed like a cop-out. But then I listened to it again, and I remembered that the reason it’s so familiar is because it’s just a really nice and evocative tune. And it works here because it’s à propos de manger. And in a larger sense, isn’t agreeing to things and enjoying eating things the true reason for the season?