All Popkulturist machines coverage, newest first. Reviews and dispatches on the hardware and AI tools that have entered everyday life and stayed there. Some pieces arrive late on purpose, others while the launch event is still warm — when there's something useful to say before the buzz becomes the story. Tech criticism, not consumer guidance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
