All Popkulturist essays, newest first. Longform pieces on games, screens, and the culture around them. No recaps, no rankings, no listicles — those have somewhere else to be.
My first Gamescom begins on Monday, 24 August, at gamescom dev, where a keynote asks what the industry’s ‘reset’ has done to the people inside it. The public arrives on Thursday to halls full of people who still love what it makes.
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.
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.
In Germany the show wasn't even called Ninja Turtles. It was Hero Turtles, the censored cut with the word and the nunchaku edited out, and I loved a sanitised version of four characters built as a Frank Miller parody without knowing any of it. A love letter to the Turtles, the 1990 film, and the exact point where my love runs out every time.
Valve meant to sell its living-room cube for around 750 dollars. It costs 1,049, and the missing three hundred did not go into the machine. It went into a bidding war for memory and storage against the data centres, and you were never told you had entered it. I bought both Steam Decks on day one, and I will be sitting this one out.
It is the most valuable entertainment product of the decade, and it does not exist yet. On anticipation as an asset class, the Polymarket bet, and the week you could finally pre-order a game nobody has played.
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.
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.
Lately there's this thing happening and I still haven't figured out what to call it. I'll put on a show everyone keeps telling me I have to watch. Half an hour in, sometimes sooner, there's that feeling — the feeling of having signed up for something rather than just getting to enjoy it.
