Me in 2007: I’ll make a game that exposes the secret links between Big Oil and U.S. covert interventions in Venezuela. Gamers will finally see through smoke and mirrors! Trump in 2026: We kidnapped Maduro, we’ll run Venezuela, and steal its oil.

Latin American Coups promoted by the United States

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

Unbelievable: the Trump administration is locking ICC judges out of their bank accounts and online services. Let 2026 mark the end of the dollar’s dominance and the fall of U.S. tech monopolies. www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

Most of the billionaires who own superyachts are converging on the small island of St. Barts for NYE, and Maduro has the chance to put on the funniest fireworks display ever.

I have watched about a hundred movies this year and they were all very good / interesting / memorable. Definitely worth my time. I can't say the same for video games, and I'm trying to figure out why... letterboxd.com/molleindustr...

The Shape of Time by Zitao YE is a beautiful interactive meditation on how we perceive time. Ideal for this limbo between Christmas and the end of the year. Browser - 15min yezi.itch.io/time

Finally a card game with no metaphors and frou-frou symbolism! Just a good, simple game about a man who hates an animal!

I enjoyed The Cabin Inspector, a short “anomaly detection” game in which you determine whether mass-produced cabins are haunted or not. Funny, scary, with a story cleverly woven into its loop. Games can't rely on many traditional horror devices, it’s exciting to see new genres native to the medium.

Jmail is incredible! A great way to browse Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, photos, flights, files, and properties via a neat, Google-like interface. www.jmail.world

Why We're Boycotting Xbox: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybj1...

In U.S. healthcare, as in higher education, you get all the outrageous costs and inequalities of the private sector PLUS all the political subordination of a public system, because these organizations can’t function without government subsidies. www.axios.com/2025/12/18/t...

I loved this one so much. I’m usually turned off by "wrong" and romanticized retro aesthetics, but Ruin isn't quite a retro game. It feels closer to the blurred memory of playing games as a child. ~15 min - Browser

Interesting phenomenon of visual artists online being accused of using AI and having to post videos of their process in response. Having to perform as artists 24/7 isn’t new, but now art-making content becomes evidence. What do we call it? The Professorification of the Viewer? Audience as CAPTCHA?

Mario 65 - You have to respect how Nintendo keeps reinventing its franchises henold.itch.io/mario-65

I love video games

Between Bugonia, Eddington, and One Battle After Another, the most prominent film auteurs are having a blast inventing a magical realist USA in which the left does terrorism and fails miserably...

"Monsters in glass cages. This WAD is intended as a tool for WAD authors to give an easy way to examine animated sprites without getting killed by them." From Doomscroll, a big collection of Doom mods playable in your browser: doomscroll.cx

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I'm starting to think it wasn't a good idea to put all the world's communications in the hands of three American companies www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

The Render Ender

I enjoyed this four hour dive into the high tech Rube Goldberg machines Disney has developed over decades to solve the daunting problem of minimum-wage performers blurting inappropriate things while wearing a Mickey Mouse costume. youtu.be/NyIgV84fudM?...

I finally played Horses. It’s a tight cinematic horror game with a unique, uncompromising vision. It’s admittedly uncomfortable to play, but more due to the lack of agency than the graphic depictions of abuse (it’s actually milder and goofier than your typical A24 arthouse horror).

In the age of centralized platforms, you can get a reverse Streisand effect, with ban controversies prompting additional bans out of cowardice or middleman solidarity.

I played Dispatch, an influencercore thisispolicelike with dragonslairlike elements. It has excellent TV-grade writing and dazzling animation. And yet, had it been a TV show, I would have certainly skipped it. Why? Was it the romance? The moral dilemmas? The fact that I paid for it in advance?

Help create the future of the games industry! On Dec 3, workers will be coming together to draft a Game Workers' Bill of Rights. All game workers are welcome — union members or not. Sign up here:

Cold take: I do agree that it is (or will soon be) nearly impossible to avoid AI-powered tools. If the backlash continues, studios will simply not disclose uses that are undetectable to players (coding, text editing, hybrid pipelines) and favored by employees. www.gamesradar.com/games/opposi...

Gallery: Sorry, your art was not accepted for our exhibition, but thanks for applying. Me: What? I never applied. Gallery: Oops! [verbatim] "I was using an AI tool to organize a spreadsheet of exhibition submissions. It incorrectly invented a few names during the sorting process, and yours was one."

Thinking about the recent passing of Steve Kurtz, co-founder of Critical Art Ensemble. He was a key figure in the tactical media scene, which I looked up to when I started Molleindustria. A deep cut: in 1998 the CAE co-created one of the earliest art games and Game Boy hacks: Super Kid Fighter

[At the skin lounge] Me: [chanting] skin, skin- Other patients: skin, SKIN Secretary: [pounding her clipboard] SKIN, SKIN, SKIN!

Today I learned that the US poverty line is still calculated as 3x the minimum food diet in 1963, a metric completely disconnected from today’s cost of living. Here's a clear post explaining why middle and working class families are effectively getting poorer. www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-...

For @404media.co this morning: a group of immigrant rights organizers are helping people use Fortnite to practice what to do if they encounter ICE agents in the wild. And I got to see it. www.404media.co/ice-defense-...

No bailouts. The US should extort these companies when the crash happens so they get minimal compensation in return for nationalizing the entire panopticon industry and then destroying it once harvested for socially useful parts. It won’t happen but it should

Steam, the go-to destination for childlike anime smut, is so worried about one scene in this art game that it isn’t even letting the developers resubmit it. www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..." https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1

Yo dev I heard you like platforms so I put a platform inside your platform so you can pay a fee while you're paying fees

We sat down with the creator of the satirical solarpunk videogame 'Future? No Thanks!' and the conversation did not disappoint. Link in comments for the full interview 👇🔗🎮 🌞

I've been playing Q-UP, a brilliant and deeply weird incremental game with an esports theme. It starts with a simple coin flip and spirals into a fugue of emergent mechanics. I'll post some thoughts here as I idly play… store.steampowered.com/app/3730790/...

The media’s obsessive need to reframe broader capitalist restructuring (precarity, gig work, underemployment) as personal lifestyle choices.

OMG every sentence in this article is appalling www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Affirmation: I will live a fulfilling life of gamemaking without ever knowing who the hell Geff Keighley is

Me, updating a game from Unity 2020.3.24 to Unity 2020.3.49

Poignant piece by one of Fetterman’s former staffers. It’s also a good reminder that much of this guy’s sparkling social media presence was the work of some overqualified young writer from Brooklyn.

I have a bold theory: Guitar Hero is responsible for the worst decade of rock music in half a century. Guitar Hero peaked around 2007 and quickly declined. It boosted interest in classic rock, AND YET the 2010s were objectively awful for new guitar-driven acts. www.theguardian.com/games/2025/n...

Lovely introduction to game design, distilling decades of thinking by Raph and many others. I can't wait to discuss it in my classes.

The Authoritarian Stack: a concise interactive feature on the takeover of democratic institutions by tech oligarchs. The U.S. may already be cooked, but the rest of the world still has time to shift toward sovereign platforms. www.authoritarian-stack.info

Future? No Thanks! Is officially releasing on the same day as GTA VI (whatever that is) so this gives 6 more months to finish it!

To be fair, they basically invented the turgid kitsch style that’s now the default for AI slop

good morning specifically to the FBI agent who introduced Mamdani’s dad to Marx

The bad news is that *even in the current climate* liberals, capitalists, and mainstream media will form a united front with the fascists to oppose a center-left candidate. The good news is that they can be defeated.