Father-Daughter Gaming Team | Games that focus on story and characters | Making fun of nonsense, kind of like MST3k, but video games | Weekly on YouTube
"IO Interactive missed the mark on every aspect of 007: First Light. We'll take it from here."
—Amazon
A weak pseudo-'anti woke' content creator would spend this moment demanding an apology from the gaming community for how he was treated while presenting a marketing thesis backed by data.
But I'm not that kind of guy.
Instead, I want to thank everyone who engaged with my account over the past week, whether you agreed or disagreed.
007: First Light clearly underperformed.
The first receipts are starting to come in.
Dear legacy media journalists:
In light of your Scott Pelley lunatic antics; apparently, you all need a reality refresher. So as a public service to your cratering brand, here you go:
1- You do not run the company that employs you. The executive management runs the company, subject to oversight by the owners and/or the stockholders. You are not part of that oversight process.
2- The company that employees you does not owe you an explanation of everything they do, especially with regard to personnel matters. In fact, your own legal / HR department will tell you it is problematic to discuss personnel decisions beyond a need-to-know basis.
3- People don't care who reports the story - they care about the quality of the story. Reading a teleprompter put together by the production team that did the story isn't the galactic-level skill you may think it is.
4- This one should be obvious, but when journalists are the story versus reporting the story, you all failed.
5- When you run a story that is critical of an individual, administration, or institution; allowing the subject of the story to comment ahead of time is not "injecting political bias into the story." It's Journalism 101, which apparently is no longer taught in Journalism 101.
6- We really don't care what a "former producer" or a "former correspondent" thinks about anything. There's often a good reason they are a "former" something, and that reason usually undercuts their credibility.
7- This one also seems obvious, but you're subject to - and only subject to - the same employment laws that affect everyone else in every other business. When the First Amendment was written, the "press" referred to the printing press, not some special class of citizenry that is exempt from laws that affect everyone else.
8- When you have a show that suffered one of the worst scandals in journalism history - revolving around the literal forging of fake memos - don't tell us it's a gold standard that never had a blemish in its history. You just look dumb when you do that.
You're welcome.
The richest man in America signed a document that could have gotten him hanged, and when someone sneered that he was safe because no one would know which Charles Carroll to come for, he picked up the pen and told the British exactly where to find him.
His name was Charles Carroll, and the colonies were crawling with men who shared it. His own father was Charles Carroll of Annapolis. So when the Declaration of Independence came to him for signing in 1776, a delegate made a cruel little joke. He said Carroll risked nothing by signing. There were so many Charles Carrolls that the King's men would never know which one to hang.
Carroll didn't argue. He leaned over the page and added three words to his signature: "of Carrollton." The name of his estate. His address. He was the only signer in the entire room who wrote down where he lived, and he did it on purpose, so that if the British wanted to come hang the traitor, they would know exactly which door to knock on.
That is who Charles Carroll of Carrollton was.
Here is what makes the moment even sharper. He was not a man with little to lose. He was the single wealthiest man in the thirteen colonies and the largest private landowner among them. While George Washington and John Hancock get talked about as rich men, it was Carroll who topped them all. When he signed, he was wagering the biggest personal fortune in America against a noose.
And he was the last man anyone would have expected to be there at all. Carroll was Catholic. In colonial Maryland, a colony founded as a Catholic refuge that had since turned on its own, Catholics could not vote. They could not hold public office. They could not worship in public. The most educated, wealthiest man in America was, in the eyes of the law, a second-class subject barred from the very government he was helping to create. He had spent seventeen years being educated by Jesuits in France and spoke five languages fluently, and back home he still could not legally cast a ballot.
So he became the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, putting his name on a revolution that he hoped would build a country with room for men like him. That was its own enormous bet, made by a man the existing system had already shut out.
Then he simply outlived everyone.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same astonishing day, July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the Declaration. When they were gone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton was the last living signer left on earth. For six more years he was the final human link to that room in Philadelphia, the last hand that had signed, a living relic of the founding that ordinary Americans traveled to see and shake.
He finally died in November 1832 at the age of ninety-five, fifty-six years after he wrote his address on a treason document and dared the empire to come find him.
The richest man in America. The only Catholic. The last one standing. He had more to lose than any of them, every legal reason to stay quiet, and he signed his full address anyway.
We remember the names we were handed in school. We forget the man who made sure his couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's.
Which Founding Father do you think history shortchanged the most?
In America, a stranger will rename you in a single breath, and you are simply expected to come when called.
I went to eat at a busy restaurant. A young man at the front asked for my name, to mark my place in line. I gave it the weight it has carried for eight hundred years.
"Nobunaga."
He smiled, nodded, and wrote it down with great confidence. Then he read it back to me, to be sure he had honored it correctly.
"Perfect. Banana, party of one."
Banana. He had heard my name, held it a moment, and returned to me something rounder and more cheerful. To refuse the name a host gives is to refuse his welcome. I bowed. I was Banana now.
Then he handed me a small black disc, said it would "light up and buzz" when my table was ready, and turned to the next guest as though he had not just placed a living thing in my hands.
I held it in both palms, the way one holds a small sleeping beast that may wake. I found a place to stand. I waited, ready.
It woke.
It screamed. It flashed red. It leapt and shook in my hands like a captured spirit demanding release. A lesser man would have dropped it. I did not. I gripped it, steady, looked into its blinking lights, and told it, in a low voice, that its time had come. Then I carried it back to the host with both hands, the way one returns a hawk to its master.
He took it without looking and shouted across the entire room.
"BANANA! Party of one, your table's ready!"
A hundred strangers turned. I rose. I crossed that floor as Banana, spine straight, chin level, a man answering to his name. A child pointed at me. I gave the child a small bow. He had recognized me.
All through the meal they kept me. "How's it tasting, Banana?" "More water, Banana?" The check, when it came, said Banana, and thanked me for visiting. By the end the whole staff knew me. They waved as I left. "Night, Banana!"
So tell me honestly.
For eight hundred years my clan answered to one name. Tonight I answered to a fruit, calmed a screaming relic in my bare hands, and ate among people who were glad I came.
When the little disc lights up, is the table truly mine, or am I only keeping it warm for the next Banana?
Because I have already decided to return on Friday, and to ask, very humbly, for the same disc.
The U.S. military was the last redoubt the leftists needed to conquer to control our society.
They almost did it. Under Obama/Biden they turned the Pentagon into the Alamo. The DEI Marxists were swarming the walls, and a lot of them got inside the perimeter.
A LOT OF THEM.
But unlike the Alamo, this time reinforcements came in the nick of time.
The military was the last institution they needed to conquer to achieve total Marxist dominance over our entire nation.
THEY WERE SO CLOSE.
But then Pete Hegseth and his team came riding over the hill, defeated the attackers, and drove off the ones who got inside the walls.
The fact that they were so close to having it all, only to lose it all, is why we see so much wailing and gnashing of teeth today from the Pentagon “press.”
It’s glorious.
It's difficult to hate Electronics Arts as much as it deserves.
I never worked directly for them, but a small developer made up of close friends (as in they gamed at my house!) did a successful game for EA. EA paid for the development with advances. When the game was a hit, EA illegally withheld the royalties, obfuscating the matter by saying they had to "repay advances first" (despite the fact that the VERY FIRST QUARTER'S ROYALTIES would surpass all the advances combined). The small developer had been living paycheck to paycheck (EA advances aren't too big), and had planned to use the expected royalties to fund itself for more great games.
Well, without the royalties, the small dev was in immediate danger of bankruptcy, and they didn't have the cash to hire lawyers. If they hired a lawyer on spec, their counsel would face off against EA's huge team of a**holes who could draw it out forever. In hindsight, perhaps they should joined with other groups angry at EA, but they went under. Their company dissolved, and my friends found other jobs, scattering around the industry.
All the upcoming cool games they had been working on were destroyed by EA's short-sighted greed. If EA had instead funded them, then EA could have had a whole stream of successful games. But no, to get a few hundred thousand they murdered a goose with a golden egg.
I guarantee you've heard of the game they made, and may have played it. It was a big enough hit to have action figures made. Not giving the name here because EA is spawned from the bowels of Hell. That's just one single example.
Britain had a moment of silence for George Floyd. Our politicians kneeled en masse to show their outrage at his killing. "I can't breathe" became a slogan.
George Floyd died on the other side of the world. He wasn't British.
Henry Nowak *was* British and his treatment by the police was shocking and negligent in the extreme. Yet there is no minute of silence. There is no coordinated public campaign. There is no kneeling at sporting events.
And we all know why.
During the summer of BLM, some people said "All Lives Matter". This was treated as the highest form of racism and anyone who said this was immediately cancelled. Why? Because the people in charge don't actually think all lives matter in the same way.
They have created a racial hierarchy of victimhood where a career criminal who died through mistreatment by police in a foreign country with 0 evidence of racism like George Floyd is automatically sanctified because of the colour of his skin.
And Henry Nowak, a British man, one of ours, is automatically dismissed and ignored because of the colour of his.
This is the ugly fruit of so-called "anti-racism", an obsession with race that has created a two-tier society which treats people differently because of the colour of their skin.
This needs to stop.
You ask, “Why do the people of Los Angeles keep voting for the person who let their city burn and become a drug infested homeless encampment?!”
It’s like asking, “Why did the Germans keep fighting when Hitler was in the Bunker?!”
The Leftist elites in Los Angeles have ideologically captured enough gullible Liberals through a combination of the large percentage of Angelinos that get ‘free stuff’ and want to keep getting their ‘free stuff’ and the rest who are brainwashed by Democrat fear that while their town is a burnt out homeless
sh!tbox, somehow the other side is worse and it their ‘moral duty’ to keep those ‘evil’ republicans from running what part of their city that isn’t already ruined.
It's rather astonishing that he thinks this exculpatory for his action, rather than confirming the wisdom of Bari Weiss' decision to fire him for cause.
He’s the President of the United States — not your ex, not your personal villain, and not the cause of your misery. You don’t have to support him. That’s America.
But if someone is simply backing the sitting President and it makes you rage, cut people off, attack families, or act like garbage — you are the problem.
You’ve turned politics into a personality disorder: nonstop outrage and toddler meltdowns online. Grow up. He won. The sky didn’t fall. Pay your bills, care for your family, touch grass, and move on.
It's worth studying this exchange.
During hostile interviews, always refuse to concede to framing, and adequately prepare so you can challenge those frame games by pointing out the political biases of the interviewer to the audience.
Yusuf did very well here.