Weekly Update for Week of 7/7/23

Pick a card, any card.

It's the six of diamonds.

You don't fucking tell me the card.

That's not the it's not the six of diamond.

S is this your weekly update?

It's the six of diamonds again.

And it's also the weekly update for the week of July 7, 2023. How's it going, Ian?

It's going well. Had a nice 4 July. I hope you did as well.

Yeah, it was fine. It's very hot. Very hot in Southern California. Hot here, I will say. It looks like you live in a trap house now that you're moving. And in the background, there's like a closet with a shower curtain.

Well, the shower curtain closet has already been there. It used to be there used to be things in it that made it not look as sad.

It being empty makes it look like you're about to get swatted.

Yeah, it's real bad now.

I mean, we're doing a little moving.

We're doing little things until this weekend. In a couple of days, actually, two days from when this drops. And then we're doing the big truck move to the new house. And then that'll be it.

This will just be we'll have, like.

Three weeks to just clean this fucker.

Out, which I'm excited to finally do.

Yeah, I'm going to say that your set up, right? I'm excited for the new setup because your setup right now looks like al Qaeda took a twitch streamer hostage.

Just need that flag that al Qaeda.

Let him use his own setup for the hostage video.

Right. It's real, real bad.

So here's a fun thing about 4 July.

So fireworks are legal here. And I lived in La.

For 15 years, and there were illegal fireworks being set off all the time.

And I thought, it'll probably won't be that different.

Holy fucking shit. It sounded like a war was happening around my house last night.

Oh, how was the pupper?

Well, it's weird because we have two, so the Chihuahua hates thunder. So we were like, all right. And he's never had a problem with fireworks before, but he's never really dealt with thunder. So now we like, oh, the fireworks will remind him of thunder. There were fucking bombs going off literally above our house. And he didn't really have a problem.

But the puppy, he wasn't shaking.

The Dachshund mix, he wasn't shaking this is Hank or anything, but he clearly was not pleased with the way that his life has turned out. He was, like, hiding behind things and just looking up at this guy like, are these fucking hillbillies ever going to stop?

Luckily, the ordinance in La.

Yeah, well, I don't know. Yeah, I think he is. But yeah, it was a fucking lot, man. And it was just like the ordinance.

Is like, for five days before 4.

July, you can shoot off fireworks until 2 hours after sunset, which is like 1130. And then, oh, 4 July, you can shoot them till midnight and then five more days after until 2 hours after sunset.

So there's going to be another five.

Fucking days of fireworks. But I think most people blew them off, all of them off yesterday because it was insane.

It was not that insane here.

Really?

In Pasadena?

No, it was fine. Yeah, but I mean, I don't really give a shabbat fireworks.

Nor do I.

It's just when you are literally sitting there, fucking sitting in your house with your dogs and it sounds like someone's setting off a bomb in your backyard.

It'S fucking pretty hard to ignore. Yeah.

Well, what games have you been playing? Have you been playing games? I have not been playing any, I.

Will tell you that. Fortunately, the PlayStation Five and the Xbox have been boxed up and they are at the new place. I'm living at the new place, but the TV is still at the old place. So nothing on those. The Steam deck, I don't think I've gotten any. The sale is next week, I think, the Steam sale, and I'll probably get a few games, but I've just been.

Playing like, Marvel Midnight Suns a little bit more.

I did go back to that, but.

Like Midnight Suns of Anarchy, midnight Sons.

Of Anarchy, which would be a perfect crossover. Yeah, I haven't really been playing a lot.

I've been playing a lot of games.

Of shit in a Scion XP and driving it 5 miles across town.

Hell yeah.

I actually have been playing Resident Evil Zero on my switch light.

Okay. A little bit. How's that? It's good.

Yeah, I like it.

Sure.

I like that game.

Yeah.

But let's take a look at everyone's favorite segment of this podcast, video game News, where we look at the front page of Kotaku and Verbatim, read you.

The articles and then sort of comment on them sometimes when we have something.

To say about it.

So, let's see. Real Madrid and Barcelona's League is now named after EA sports don't care. Soccer is boring.

Yes, it is.

This horror game gives you a virtual girlfriend from hell.

Go on.

Okay. What now?

Go on.

Fairy Tales and Drew Barrymore Movies taught me that a girl with butterflies in her stomach might be easily convinced by some weird guy, either a literal beast or an everyman who acts like one. But the fluttering is a product of purity. This is poorly written.

Fucking horrible.

Fuck. Okay.

Horror, including horror video games. Perverts the love sick. What the fuck?

What am I happening?

Stroke or is this nonsense?

What is happening?

I can't even read this. Trash. Trash?

So there's a game where you have a fucking whatever.

Yeah.

You have a girlfriend or something.

Great.

The Skyrim Modding community has its own deepfake porn controversy.

Okay, let's hear about that.

I'm interested.

Numerous pornographic mods that use AI voice cloning technologies are now available on Nexus.

Mods so you can fuck. What's her name?

Jennifer Lawrence.

Yeah. Or something like that.

Or date her in that game way.

Nerds.

Yeah.

Fucking nerds.

Hot new steam shooter. That is definitely a collection of words.

Yes.

Hot New Steam Shooter is the first good battlefield game since 2016. It's called battle. Bit remastered. Might not look incredible, but it's one of the best online shooters. 2023.

I have seen streamers playing that. It looks terrible. The game looks fun, maybe, but the graphics are intentionally bad. I guess it's definitely picking up steam.

A lot of people are playing it.

I'm going to make a Twitch account and my Twitch name is going to be Hot News Steam Shooter.

Yeah.

Speaking of twitch, the big game last week was I think it's called Only Up.

Did you see anything about this game?

These streamers? No one's got an original idea. So someone starts playing it and then everyone starts playing it. So it's like a third person game.

Where it's just this huge course where.

You'Re just trying to climb, climb, jump, vault over things, bounce on trampolines, and the hook is you get to a certain point and you don't really know how to make the next crazy jump. And if you miss, you fall like for two minutes and then wind up at the beginning. There's no saves. It's fucking. I saw some pretty funny videos of people fucking up their jumps and stuff and watching their faces as they realized that the last 3 hours of their stream meant nothing. Only up. And I'm not a big fan of this guy, but Doctor Disrespect had a pretty funny reaction when he missed a jump.

Didn't that dude do like a weevy apology for saying something racist?

I don't think he ever actually apologized to that. I think his crybaby apology was for.

Cheating on his wife.

Oh, yeah. That's what it is. Hilarious. God damn. Did you see that weepy? The ukulele apology from that Miranda thing? Fuck was that? She's like a groomer. That's pretty funny.

But I didn't know anything about her. I didn't know anything about anything. But I was like, on Twitter. Someone was like, this is the Citizen Cane of YouTuber apology videos. And then there's this fucking weird woman playing ukulele and being like defiant against people. And then I read that she's been grooming children. I was like, how are you defiant? Just say I'm sorry. I'll go away for a couple of years.

Yeah, I saw someone post a meme about it. And it was Frank from It's Always Sunny. And he's walking. He's like, we got to do a song about how we don't diddle kids. How diddling oh, don't diddle kids. It's not the right thing to do. Oh, god, I swear, every internet famous person is either a pervert or like an Andrew Tate guy, which is also a pervert. A certain type of pervert.

Yeah. I feel like the older you get, the less you recognize celebrities. Like even big celebrities. But now we're in this world of YouTubers and twitch streamers and stuff. That was big news. And I had no fucking idea who this woman was. And I had to really look her up just to find out what she did before I found out what her offense was, which is grooming children, but what the fuck?

Yeah, which a bunch of, like, dudes, for sure. A bunch of dudes who have made questionable comments about 16 year old girls were like, see, it's not just dudes doing it right.

It's not just us.

Big boon for those losers.

Oh, my God. Yeah.

It's so fucking insane.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

Well, moving on. Popular horror game Friday the 13th unlocks everything before getting pulled.

Okay.

They are removing that from the store. I'm assuming it's a licensing thing.

It is, absolutely. There was that lawsuit between whoever and whoever about who owns the rights to.

The it's like there are certain people.

Who own the rights to the first.

Movie because the character of Jason wasn't the killer in the first movie.

And then there's someone who but I think they gave all of it to the rights of the owner of the I might be wrong about this, but I remember it was just I remember when the puzzle game which was awesome, by the way, the Friday 13th puzzle game on Steam came out and they were like, hey, we're going to same thing. We're going to release all the DLC because we can't offer this anymore because the rights are gone. But it's yeah.

What the fuck?

That's why it's always good to have a physical copy. Of course, the outer world was pitched as more casual as a more casual Fallout meets Firefly RPG.

That seems sick. Yeah.

Here we go. Here's one that I'm looking forward to review. 2020 three's worst game has entered the Chat Golem. I was hyped for this game.

No, you weren't.

No, I knew it was going to be bad once we actually started seeing gameplay footage, but I really liked the idea. I'm a big Lord of the Rings fan.

But you thought the Golem could hold his own game? Like just walking around, swimming around.

I still think he could.

You still think there's a Golem game out there? It just hasn't been made.

There is, yeah. I think it just takes. It takes. I'd love to see like a Hadeo Kojima Kojima golem game or a from Soft. A from soft game.

A dark soul.

Golem game. Hell yeah.

That'd be fun.

Let's see.

And that developers said they're not making games anymore. They've been shamed out of making games.

Have you seen anything about this?

I've just seen the memes about what it looked what column looks like.

It looks so fucking bad. It looks like Ocarina of Time.

Right?

Well, okay, I'm not defending them.

They might be complete incompetence, but is.

There a thing where you have to be worried about Peter Jackson and Newline suing you and Amazon suing you and all these different rights holders of it if you get too close. So you're like, we have to kind of do something different on what he looks like.

Right?

Because the Peter Jackson one is pretty iconic. And then you have, like, the cartoon one, and then you have fucking I'm sure there are other ones are going to be TV ones pretty soon.

Yeah.

I'm not going to give them that out.

Okay.

Because he just looks like fucking dog shit.

He does.

The whole game looks like ass.

Yeah, it does.

It's not even just like that. The models look bad. The whole fucking game looks like shit. Like, these screenshots are just truly awful. And apparently the gameplay is really bad and it's bugs. And that's just very disappointing.

If you're into the idea of a GoM game, I'm sure it is very disappointing.

Hey, shadow of mortar was sick.

Shadow of Mortar is one of the best fucking games of that generation. I will not 100%.

Also Two Towers and Return of the King on PlayStation Two. Legendary will be there.

The crime that that fucking Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor got whatever happened in the in the Warner Brothers game shake up. And it basically got shelved that should have been in every fucking game for a decade.

Absolutely, it was.

I don't know if I've told you this. I know I haven't told on the podcast. I was playing this game and I kept running into this one fucking guy. And he would always enemy ORC and he would always kill me. But I'd get some good shots in. So every time I ran into him, he was more fucked up looking. So I just turned it into a bit so I just fucking kept doing it and letting him kill me. And one time the audio cue when he ran, they did the close up of him. He's all fucked up. Half his face is metal patches. He's got scars everywhere. And I swear to God it was done in not anger. The voice actor was just like, I hate what you've done to me. Greatest moment in fucking video game history for me. I was like, it was perfect. And then I did the thing where I made him war chief and then put the hand mark, mind controlled all of his lieutenants, waited for the meeting mission, and then had them all turn on him and finally kill him. But oh, God, I love that fucking game. Shadow of Mordor.

Ten out of ten.

So good.

Yeah.

I want to say that that might have been the first PS Four game I bought.

Was it okay?

Yeah, it was up there. Truly incredible.

It was destiny for me. But I think it might have been the second or third game because I.

Did have the destiny. And I still do the white Destiny edition.

I did, too. I think I still have mine. Somewhere and it doesn't work anymore.

But yeah.

Okay. Disney deletes streaming movie that only released in May. I did hear about this crater, I guess, from the producers of Stranger Things. So they did a movie and it came out, and now it's gone.

And that's gone for tax reasons.

Yeah.

This whole HBO Warner Discovery fucking thing. I don't think people truly understand the reverberations of what's happening, what's going to come from this shit, from this dude taking over and basically just, like, fucking destroying this company to turn fake money into real money as fast as possible.

Do yourself a favor, audience. I don't like to advertise other podcasts, but listen to the behind the Bastards podcast episodes on Jack Welch, the GE guy from the will see so many fucking parallels to this Zazlov guy where it's exactly as you're saying, where he.

Isn'T that the guy that Jack Donahue from 30 Rock is, like, loosely based on?

I think so. But by the way, Zabzlov, this is his hero, is Jack Welch. And he did I know the stock is down, but I think we've talked about this. But he is out of the playbook of just trying to please shareholders by doing fake money things, by selling unprofitable divisions and shuddering bo and tap. All he's doing is trying to juice the stock price. He doesn't care about the company. He doesn't care about movies, TV, any of it. He's just a stock price guy. And he sucks.

It's also worth looking up. It'll take some reading, but it's worth looking up. The AOL takeover of Time Warner never.

Made sense to me because AOL was.

A company that had nothing. It had a high stock price, but everyone knew that this bubble was bursting, of course. So they leveraged their fake money in the stock market to buy Time Warner that had actual assets and then basically just destroyed that company.

Yes.

Sold it off piecemeal to turn fake money into real money. And that's exactly what's happening here with HBO Discovery and all that. And the only people that lose are people who love movies. And I've seen some takes online where people are like, well, these studios have always only cared about money. And that's true, at least in, like, the that and before that, they cared about money, but they also cared about leaving an impression. They wanted to make the next fucking Godfather. They wanted to make something that lasted. There was ego wrapped in it. And honestly, I think that was a time where ego was a good thing. Because now this is like ego list. Just like, number manipulating.

Yeah, it's gross. It's garbage. It's later stage capitalism. It's not even late stage.

This is end stage capitalism. Absolutely terminal capitalism. You should be pissed off about this. And it's not about like, oh, my God, you can't watch fucking this shitty Disney movie, or you can't watch.

What is it?

There's like a bunch of documentaries that were taken off, like HBO Max. It's not about that, right?

No.

Because it's about the destruction of art in general.

Yes.

These people don't care about art. They don't see and that's, like, why the writer strike is happening. And that's why we have this big hullabaloo about AI. It's not about these people being greedy and wanting to make more money. That is the creatives it's about art continuing to exist. And these fucking morons think that they'll just get computers to churn out algorithmic slop, and we'll just be like, yes, please. That's why people online get mad that we get a million fucking Marvel movies. It's not that the Marvel movies are bad. It's not that they're devoid of art. The problem is they're getting so they're getting churned out at such a rate and such a formula that eventually this will just be like algorithmic slop.

Of course. Yeah.

That's what it's about. And they're not taking huge swings, which is why yeah, I'm super hyped about a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon.

I'm set for Oppenheimer. Like, I am fucking pumped for Oppenheimer.

These are still people willing to take big swings on movies. And I think that's super duper important.

This was like 15 years ago. I first heard someone refer to.

I.

Think I was doing a web show, and someone said, content, and my ears perked up. I'm like, that should be like an insult for something bad. I was saying it's content. But it has become more and more accepted to call pieces of art and works of art and creative works content. And now we're and now we're into content creators instead of director.

Right?

Now, I know there's that big flap with the maxing, but it's fucking the way they view all this stuff is just an ROI return on investment. They don't care about anything, about how it makes an audience feel enjoyment, people smiling when they walk out of theaters. None of these fucking assholes are going to go and stand in the back of the theater on opening night like all those old fucking even in the guys used to. They don't fucking give a shit. They're just going to look at their fucking stock price on Monday morning after their big opening.

And some of them I wouldn't even say that they just don't care about it. I think that some of them are actively antagonistic towards art as a form. Right. Maybe they are pissed off that they don't have it. They don't have any sort of, like, artistic sensibility.

Yeah.

And that, to me, is the fact that AI, as it's being called it's not AI, but right now is all about replacing artists. And I'm like I'd like to see someone come up with an AI CEO, because I have a feeling that would actually fucking work.

Hell yeah.

All you have to do is plug in all the shitty books that all these fucking assholes like leya Coca and fucking Jack Welch have written. And you'll get a very successful CEO, because that is something that an AI can do. It can't fucking write a book.

They won't do that, though, because an AI is probably also less likely to do something illegal. And that's what they need the CEOs for.

Exactly.

Fuck them.

Well, I'm going to get off my soapbox.

I do, too.

But next week, if you like hearing us talk about this kind of stuff, let us know.

Yes.

And we'll keep doing it, because I'll die on this hill. I don't care.

Same. I'm with you. It's gross. It's gross what's being done.

So we hope you all had a very pleasant 4 July and have a very pleasant weekend this weekend. Ingest some art.

There you go.

Watch a movie. Listen to some music. Read a fucking video game. Read a fucking book. Listen to a book.

Yeah, book on tape.

Friend of the pod. That narrator dude on whatnot, tim Page. He's an audiobook narrator. He narrates a lot of smut. Go listen to him.

Maybe you get a little Jackoff time in there, a little J O. Yeah, maybe he does such a good job.

You're like, all right, well, I need a minute.

Hey, for some people, that's an art form. Absolutely.

No question.

Yeah, but make sure you follow us on social media at Discreet Error Pod. You can follow me at funeral. Casual games.

I'm at Ian Golden Games.

And we will see you next week.

See you then.