In Respawn’s Jedi series, one of the constants across both games is the Mantis, a starship that’s kinda yours, but also not yours, but you use it enough that it may as well be. And I think, more than the combat or the jumping or the surprisingly Star Warsy tone of the games, it’s my favourite thing about them. At least in terms of what it brings to the table.
The Week In Games: Return To Hyrule
The Week In Games: Return To Hyrule
Partly because it’s such a cool ship! Just look at it. It’s got a kind of “weird design presented in a surprisingly functional way” thing that Star Wars does so well, like a B-Wing but bigger, only it’s a “wing” that’s also kinda like a keel or a sail that pivots “upright” while in flight (there’s no upright in space, I know, but it’s upright relative to the rest of the ship) and then rotates flat when landing. A little excessive, I know, but it used to be a luxury yacht, so it’s allowed a big flourish or two.
STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order Stinger Mantis Interior
That “surprisingly functional” thing continues through to the details and interior of the ship. Despite its premium heritage it’s a heavy and dense vehicle, with cables and pipes and vents everywhere, and landing gear that would look more at home on a bulk freighter than an Old Republic Roadster. The inside, meanwhile, is as far from luxury yacht as you can get; it was designed with the series’ rugged adventures in mind, with a team of Respawn and Lucasfilm artists looking to old submarines and the Millennium Falcon for that mix of adventure and cramped practicality.
I mostly love the Mantis, though, because of the way it ties the games together. The Jedi games are based across distinct levels, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to simply shuffle the player from planet to planet with nothing but a loading screen in between.
Instead, moving between levels in the Jedi games is a whole process. You end up at your ship at the conclusion of a stage, from where you can walk onboard, do some stuff, check out some relics and chat to your friends. Then you walk up to the ship’s map, select where you want to go (you don’t really have a choice, but the illusion helps here) and you’re away. The ship will take off—in real-time, leaving the completed world behind, which always looks cool—and then zoom into hyperspace. Only when the player sits down in their co-pilot’s chair will the ship exit lightspeed, the new planet will fill the windows and you’re ready for your next adventure.
Stars Wars: Jedi Fallen Order Traveling To All Planets On The Stinger Mantis Ship 4K UHD
It sounds so pedestrian, but I am 1.5 games into this series and it has been an absolute delight every time it happens, no matter how repetitive it threatens to become. The simple act of turning the end/beginning of a level into a whole thing, rather than just a cutscene, transforms the game. I don’t feel like I’m moving from one set of video game challenges to the next; I feel like I’m on an adventure, one that’s truly galactic in scale.
I sometimes, in the dead of night, wonder why I like the Jedi games as much as I do. When I break them down into individual components I’m not really a huge fan of almost anything that goes into them. I hate Souls games, the Tomb Raider/Uncharted stuff is fine but again, far from my favourite video gaming space, and I’m nowhere near as into Star Wars as I used to be.
But then I think about this ship, and the way it speaks to stuff I am very into, like Elite and Mass Effect and Privateer and Wind Waker (and even Assassin’s Creed’s ships and trains), games that have a central focal point for your journeys that serves as everything from a transport to a conversational hub. There are no Jedi games without Mantis, because so much of the game’s story, character and action revolves around it. Kinda like that whole ship revolves around that one, weird wing…
I still haven’t gotten around to playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order or its new (apparently fraught) sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but the more I see of the game’s extensive fashion and customization options for protagonist Cal Kestis, the more tempted I feel. However, one Jedi rebel hairstyle is getting a lot of attention online, and that’s the mullet. It turns Cal from a spacefaring twink into a good, ol’ fashioned (still spacefaring) lover of beer, blasters, and the Second Amendment.
Let’s Talk About Gotham Knights’ Predictable Ending
Though I’ve seen all the movies and played several games, I’m not a Star Wars fan. But I am a fan of Shameless actor Cameron Monaghan, who both voices and performs the Jedi and provides Cal’s face. As a gay man who lived in the rural south most of his life, I find his Shameless character Ian Gallagher incredibly relatable as he sorts through his identity, the conservative expectations of Middle America, and how he deals with patriotism in a country that does not care about people like him. Because I latched on so heavily to his character during my ongoing marathon of the show on Netflix, I’m drawn to Jedi: Survivor for the actor at its center more than any of the other good things the game has to offer. But looking at Monaghan with a mullet and mutton chops feels like looking into an alternate universe in which Ian never overcame the expectations enough to become his own person, and fell hard into some right-wing, gun-nut mentality. It’s unsettling, but I can’t look away, especially as jokes about the mullet are spreading online.
Cal looks extremely silly with the mullet in context, but that hasn’t stopped fans from latching onto the lewk and making jokes about the intersection of Star Wars lore and conservative, good ol’ boy politics.
The quote retweets on this tweet showing Cal in his full space redneck persona are full of zingers.
Ultimately, as much psychic damage as it does to me to see Ian Gallagher with a mullet, the jokes have been very good, and it does speak to how much customization Jedi: Survivor allows. Between this and the game’s scene-stealing alien, Turgle, I keep finding new reasons to maybe jump into Respawn’s take on a galaxy far, far away. Maybe after I finish Shameless and the rest of the Summer Games Hell is over.
Thousands of film and television writers who are members of the WGA are on strike for the first time since 2007, a move that could bring an immediate halt to the production of many television shows and possibly delay the start of new seasons of others later this year. What do you think?
“Typical self-centered behavior from Hollywood’s penniless elite.”
Shannon Hickel, Bassinet Weaver
Police Officers Explain Why They Are Resigning En Masse
“Jobs weren’t intended to be something you could live off of as an adult.”
Bart Watts, Unemployed
“Barely making enough money to survive is a small price to pay for being tenuously employed at your dream job.”
According to a report released by the Anti-Defamation League, incidents of antisemitism in the United States jumped to its highest level since the organization began tracking it in 1979, up 36% from the year before. What do you think?
“We can’t assume the attacks are antisemitic just because the people who do them happen to be antisemitic.”
Elizabeth Thatch, Cost Estimator
“Don’t look at me, I spread my racially motivated violence out across ethnic groups.”
Stefan Richards, Phobia Counselor
“Even after being canceled, Kanye remains a trendsetter.”
Gwyneth Paltrow is standing trial in a lawsuit filed by a man accusing the actress-turned-lifestyle influencer of violently crashing into him while skiing at a Utah resort in 2016, causing him several serious injuries and then abandoning him. What do you think?
“Everything she does is so effortless!”
Pam Diaz, Memorial Decorator
“It’s nice to see there are still good roles for women over 30 in the legal system.”
Allen Puntier, Shark Wrangler
“What is he mad about? Having a beautiful woman break your ribs is every man’s fantasy.”
With just one episode to go, we’re nearing the end of Joel and Ellie’s long journey together. This week’s entry, “When We Are in Need,” corresponds with the game’s winter section, though the HBO adaptation isn’t using the same seasonal structure of the game, and here in TV land, it’s been winter for a while.
When I first played The Last of Us ten years ago, in some ways the winter chapter felt to me like overkill, the game leaning hard into desperation and depravity just to be as gritty and bleak as it could, in order to help sell itself as a “mature,” serious game. “Enough, I get it. Humanity is awful and given half a chance, we’ll all do grotesque, morally reprehensible things.” Replaying the game now alongside the show, the purpose of the chapter within the narrative is clearer to me. Of course it’s common for stories to put characters at their most hopeless and desperate points right before the resolution, but the way The Last of Us does it, separating the characters while both are in dire straits, drives home the importance of their bond to each other. It also, importantly, illustrates that while Joel may have started out as Ellie’s protector on this journey, he now needs her at least as much as she needs him. Let’s take a closer look at this week’s episode, and its similarities to the same stretch of the game.
Ellie meets David in the show vs. the game
This chapter has its own villain in the form of David, a preacher and a predator whose flock reside in the resort town of Silver Lake and are suffering through a particularly harsh winter. In terms of dialogue, it’s one of the show’s more faithful episodes. In fact, it’s almost as if writer Craig Mazin’s screenplay for the episode just took this section of the game, cut out most of the combat sequences, and from there, sought to embellish the dialogue and build on what the game reveals to us about David and his congregation. It continues to be interesting to me how, in the game, combat is perhaps prioritized as the most important element, while in adapting the game to a series, it becomes the least important.
Screenshot: HBO
The winter chapter immediately distinguishes itself from the rest of the game by having you play as Ellie for the first time. (Today, playing through the story in order, you’d play the Left Behind DLC before this, but when the game came out in 2013, this was a surprising shift in perspective.) Desperate for food, Ellie hunts a deer she spots in the woods with her bow and arrows. Nicked and bleeding from multiple arrows, the deer runs, ultimately collapsing, but when Ellie finds it, two others, David and James, have seen it too. Just as in the game, David (voiced here by Nolan North, who plays Nathan Drake in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted games) makes a deal with Ellie: penicillin for some of the deer meat.
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Screenshot: Naughty Dog
What’s unique to the game is that while waiting for James to return with the medicine, you have a multi-stage combat encounter fighting alongside David, involving a few standoffs against multiple waves of infected and a climactic battle with a bloater. Through it all, you might think that David is actually a new friend. He seems genuinely concerned for your welfare, and fighting alongside someone can be an experience that develops trust. Naughty Dog knows how to use combat as a tool for relationship-building, and here, they build up your trust in David a bit just to pull out the rug from under you and remind you that, in this world, the trust between Joel and Ellie is a rare and precious thing.
In the show, by the time Ellie first encounters David (played here by actor Scott Shepherd), we already have our reasons to be suspicious of him. The episode begins with him reading scripture to his flock, in the old steakhouse he’s converted into a church and town hall of sorts, a place where the abundant food of the pre-cordyceps past is sharply contrasted with the desperate circumstances of the present. (It’s an important location in the game as well, one you come to later, and the sign reading WHEN WE ARE IN NEED HE SHALL PROVIDE is a detail straight from the game.) The faces of the congregation’s members are lean and hardened, telling us much at a glance about what a difficult winter they’re having. A grieving daughter asks when her father can be buried and David says that it’s too cold to do so now, they’ll have to wait until spring. And outside after the service, David chides James (played by Troy Baker, the voice of Joel in the games) for his “doubt,” giving off the sense of a man who very much wants to maintain control.
Screenshot: HBO
Notably, in the show, Ellie hunts the deer not with a bow and arrows but with the sniper rifle, recalling in our memories the moment toward the end of episode six when Joel tried to teach her how to use it. When she takes a moment to focus with the deer in her sights, we can sense her recalling Joel’s words and trying to draw on what he taught her.
Both the game and the show have Ellie talking tough when she sees David and James near the deer she killed, with her calling James “buddy boy” and saying that if David tries anything, she’ll “put one right between your eyes.” The show, however, foregrounds David’s role as a preacher in their first conversation far more than the game does. In fact, perhaps the only real hint David gives off in the game that he has certain rigid moral standards might come when, after Ellie swears, he absurdly says, in the midst of a life-and-death battle against waves of infected, that she should watch her language. We definitely pick up on the fact that he’s a preacher eventually, but there’s no real character development done around it.
In the show, however, Ellie asks if David’s “hunger club” is some sort of cult, and he turns on the folksy charm, saying “Well, you sorta kinda got me there,” but saying that what he preaches is “pretty standard Bible stuff.” When Ellie wonders how he can still “believe that stuff” after everything that’s happened, he tells her it was actually after the world ended that he started to believe. “Everything happens for a reason,” he says in both the show and the game, and it’s here that whatever sense of trust you might have felt for David while fighting alongside him likely evaporates. His seeming friendliness reveals itself to be a guise for something more threatening, and he tells her that a “crazy man” killed someone in their flock recently at the university. A crazy man who just happens to be traveling with a “little girl.”
Ellie now understands that David is a threat if she didn’t before, but David lets her ride off with the medicine, telling her that there’s room for her in his group, that he can protect her. It’s almost as if he has some gross designs of his own for her.
Dinnertime at the steakhouse
One of the luxuries of HBO’s adaptation has always been that it can leave the perspective of Joel and Ellie behind entirely when it wants to, and here, we get more development of David’s congregation. In the kitchen, members of the flock lament their dwindling food supplies, and when a man brings in some fresh meat, one of them asks, “What is it?” “Venison,” he replies hesitantly, in a way that may have you asking, “Is it though?” Nonetheless, they put it into the evening’s soup.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
David and James haul the deer Ellie killed into the restaurant, but the room still seems quiet. Sensing what the tension is about, David tells them that yes, it’s true, “we found the girl who was with the man who took Alec from us.” Come morning, he says, they’ll track her trail, and “bring that man to justice.” The grieving girl from the opening scene raises her voice, saying they should kill both of them. David walks over and, in a moment that shows us just what kind of congregation leader he is, backhands her across the face. Things get worse still a moment later when he tells her that although she may think she doesn’t have a father anymore, “the truth is, Hannah, you always have a father. And you will show him respect when he’s speaking.” Kenneth is not wrong when he saysthe show makes David even more disturbing than he already was.
The scene ends with shots of these hungry people eating their dinners, the thought lingering in our minds that it may be Alec they’re eating.
Hungry…for vengeance!
The next morning, David’s men do indeed come a-huntin’. In both the show and the game, Ellie does the only thing she can think to do: try leading the men away from Joel, who she’s injected with penicillin but who is still hovering on the edge of consciousness. In the show, she presses a knife into his hands and tells him to kill anyone who comes into the house, though he doesn’t even look like he has the strength to sit up.
The show gives us another brief exchange between David and James, as David insists that Ellie be brought in alive. James says he doesn’t mean to question David’s “sense of mercy” but the girl would just be another mouth to feed, and that yes, she may die if left alone out here, but perhaps that’s God’s will. David simply gives him a withering look, but it’s abundantly clear that David’s interest in keeping Ellie alive has nothing to do with mercy.
Ellie rides through the neighborhood on her horse—the neighborhood which, in the game, has a small army of David’s men on the streets—and eventually, her horse is shot out from under her. In the show, it’s James who does this, and David has to stop him and some other men from killing Ellie. Carrying her off himself and ordering a few men to haul the horse carcass, he tells the remainder of his men to go door to door hunting Joel. “You’re so hungry for vengeance? Deliver it.”
In the game, however, another extended combat sequence begins, as Ellie must sneak by or kill a number of David’s men. What we get here that we don’t get so much in the show is a lot of deep dissatisfaction among the flock with David’s leadership, with many men expressing doubt in David and suggesting that soon, his role as leader be put to a vote. Despite your best efforts, though, David does eventually capture and subdue Ellie, while his own delusions of grandeur about his own benevolence continue to manifest. “I’m keeping you alive here,” he says, as he jokes the consciousness out of her.
Ellie left Joel behind
In both the show and the game, Joel finally comes back to life, as if awakened by the cosmos just in Ellie’s hour of need. The Police have a song about that called “Synchronicity I,” but I digress. In the show, some poor bearded sap enters the house where Joel is stashed in the basement. Ellie was smart and hid the door to the basement behind an old piece of furniture, but the poor bastard rolls well on his perception check and notices something’s up. It would have been better for him if he hadn’t.
As he comes down the stairs, spotting the bloody mattress Ellie’s had Joel on for days, we know Joel has finally regained awareness, and is hiding down there somewhere. Yes, it turns out Joel has regained the strength not only to move, but to stab and choke the life out of a man. That’s the Joel we know and love!
Meanwhile, Ellie wakes up in a cage—in the game, to the sight of a man butchering a human body right in front of her, though in the show, it’s just David sitting there, waiting for her to wake up. In the show, which continues working to make David more overtly disturbing than he is in the game, he tells her that she’s in a cage because “you’re a dangerous person, you’ve certainly proven that,” and there’s an unmistakable hint of amusement and even admiration to his comment.
Screenshot: HBO
Joel’s back in action
Joel, desperate to find Ellie, tortures two of David’s men to get her whereabouts. It’s a startling juxtaposition with an exchange between Ellie and David in the game. When Ellie calls David an animal, he protests that she and Joel have killed a great many people too. “They didn’t give us a choice, it’s a video game,” she says. (Well, okay, she doesn’t say that second part.) “And you think we have a choice, is that it?” David says. “You kill to survive. So do we. We have to take care of our own, by any means necessary.”
I don’t really subscribe to that logic, but his words do on some level indict Joel, I think. Some may feel that Joel and David are points of contrast, one’s violence rooted in hate and delusion, the other’s in love and necessity. I certainly don’t think Joel and David are the same, but I also don’t think there’s anything innocent or acceptable about what Joel does here. And I’m fine with that. I want characters in my media who sometimes do awful things. What’s always troubled me about the reaction to Joel, though, is just how many people who played the game seem to think that everything he does is totally justified, while recognizing that the actions of others in the world aren’t. It’s as if we don’t want to closely interrogate the actions of the person we play as, the one we most closely identify with.
This may be a conversation for next week’s finale, but it seems clear to me that the game, and the show, at least want us to think about the lengths Joel goes to here, lengths that include brutally murdering one man after he tells Joel what he wanted to know, and then killing the other, too. When the second man declares that he won’t tell Joel anything, both the game and the show give us the chilling and memorable line in which Joel, referring to the man he just killed, says “That’s okay, I believe him.”
Cordyceps showed David the light
The show expands significantly on David’s conversation with Ellie, and makes it much more unsettling. He speaks to her—a 14-year-old girl—as if he sees her as some kind of equal, a kindred spirit, because they both have “a violent heart.” He fought to restrain his violent heart for a long time, he says, before he was shown the light, not by God, but by cordyceps. “What does cordyceps do? Is it evil? No. It’s fruitful. It multiplies. It feeds and protects its children. And it secures its future with violence, if it must. It loves.” I appreciate the expansion of David’s ideas here, because I think the notion that love and violence can overlap is at the core of The Last of Us, and while David is clearly deranged, the debate over whether Joel’s violence is a manifestation of love rages on.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
David, plainly a man who is used to having people respond to his charisma, makes the mistake of thinking that Ellie might be seduced by him as well, when, in both the game and the show, he puts his hand on the bars of the cage and makes it clearer still that his ideas about her are, to put it mildly, inappropriate. It’s a deeply sad moment to me, the realization that even in this world where society as we know it has collapsed, Ellie, like most women in our world at one time or another, in one way or another, still has to deal with the threat and the supreme bullshit of predatory men. Both versions punish David for his arrogance and delusion, as Ellie, briefly playing along, takes his hand and then snaps something in it before finally telling David her name. Tell the others, she says, that “Ellie is the little girl that broke your fucking finger!”
Here the game begins to employ the effective device of having us switch back and forth between Joel and Ellie at intervals, as Joel heads into town to find her, killing plenty of David’s men along the way while a blizzard gathers strength, raising the sense of drama and letting you pick off your prey in the low visibility. Yes, of course he’s doing it for her sake, to protect her, to help her, but by now, it also feels very much like he’s doing it because he doesn’t know what he would do without her. Of course historically, games once relied too often on putting underdeveloped women in peril and just focusing on the men who had to rescue them, but The Last of Us earns this setup by humanizing them both, by developing their connection, and by presenting their relationship as one of mutual care and benefit. By now, Ellie has taken care of Joel and saved his life about as much as he’s done for her.
The show also now switches back to Joel’s perspective, showing him heading into town and finding Ellie’s stuff, not to mention human bodies strung up on meathooks. Better hurry, Joel.
The trick up Ellie’s sleeve
In both versions, David (with James’ help, in the show) hauls Ellie out of the cage to cut her up into “little pieces,” since she didn’t take him up on his excellent offer. Just as they’re about to start cleaving, however, she announces that she’s infected, prompting David to roll up her sleeve and reveal the wound on her arm. David says it can’t be real, James says it looks pretty fucking real to him, and that’s the last thing he’ll ever say, as Ellie takes advantage of their moment of hesitation to sink a meat cleaver into James’ neck and dash out of the room.
Screenshot: HBO
Here, the game becomes a kind of boss fight, as Ellie must sneak around the restaurant and stealthily attack David while a fire begins to spread. In the show, his ego more evidently implodes as the restaurant, his church, burns down around him. It’s a breakdown on multiple levels, with this deluded, awful, terrifying man shouting “You don’t know how good I am!” In both cases, it’s up to Ellie to protect herself, to defeat this supremely shitty, predatory man, whose intentions to inflict sexual violence on Ellie, implied but still clear in the game, are made much more explicit in the show. And in both cases, it’s immensely cathartic and satisfying to see her finally kill him, and not just kill him but stab him again and again until she herself is a blood-spattered survivor, a horror movie final girl. But part of what gives the final girl trope its awful potency is that the kinds of sexualized violence these women so often fight against can’t be killed by killing just one bad man. It’s a threat we all face, all the time. Ellie survives, of course, but the stare she gives in the wake of it, the way she reacts at first when Joel approaches her, suggests that she’s forever changed by the experience. Ellie is all of us.
It’s okay, baby girl
Joel shows up just after her fight is won, and as subtle a detail as it is, the fact that in the show, just like in the game, he calls her “baby girl” in the wake of the horror she’s just endured is tender and very meaningful. It tells us that there’s no longer any pretense of division or obligation between them, of Joel doing this just as a job, of her just being cargo.
By putting both characters in such desperate circumstances, and then having them finally come back together in the end, this episode and this stretch of the game are the cementing of the connection between Joel and Ellie that the story needs before it heads into its final chapter. That’s next week, when we’ll finally settle the discourse about whether or not Joel’s actions are justified once and for all. See you then.
Veteran actor Tom Sizemore has died at the age of 61.
AsRolling Stone report, Sizemore was “found unconscious after suffering a brain aneurysm from a stroke at his Los Angeles home in the early morning of Feb. 19″. Having been kept alive on a ventilator for the past two weeks, his family made the decision over the weekend to “remove him from life support”, and he subsequently “passed away peacefully in his sleep”.
Sizemore, an actor you almost repeatedly saw described as “troubled” over the course of his career (he had long-standing drug problems and in 2003 spent seven months in prison on domestic abuse charges), was one of the most memorable stars of the 90s, owning every second he appeared on the screen in everything from Heat to True Romance to Saving Private Ryan.
For me, I can just never get his “very upset undercover agent” Point Break character out of my head. I will, even today, say the line “YOU THINK I LIKE THESE CLOTHES?!?!” every time I’m forced to put on a tie. Incredibly, the dude is only in this movie for like a minute. Point Break goes for two hours! And here I am saying it’s one of his most iconic performances. That’s what Tom Sizemore would do to a movie.
Tom Sizemore in Point Break
As you’d already know, this being a video game website, Sizemore was also famous for his role as Sonny Forelli in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
The game opens with Sizemore’s performance. He’s miles away from where the game’s actually set, you will barely see his face and yet he’s entrusted with setting up the whole damn thing, tone and all, and he absolutely nails it. Even when you can tell the parts where he’s just reading off a script with little idea of the context or what’s coming, it’s still good.
Sonny Forelli (GTA Vice City Definitive Edition) GTA Character Stories (GTA TRILOGY 2021)
His WHERE’S THE GODDAMNED MONEY phone calls are also excellent:
Gta Vice City – Sonny shouting at Tommy
Here’s some behind the scenes footage of the game’s voice cast—and man, what a cast—in which Sizemore makes a brief appearance:
GTA Vice City – Behind the Scenes (Voice Over Session)
In a statement following his passing, Grand Theft Auto developers Rockstar Games point out that Sizemore’s “effortless cool and phenomenal character work” had been “an inspiration to all of us” years before Vice City.
Pick your processor, RAM, GPU, and more Whether you are in the market for a new laptop or desktop or if you a specifically looking to build something to game on, you can do so here and you’ll save up to 52% off.
Bird flu, at this point, is somewhat of a misnomer. The virus, which primarily infects birds, is circulating uncontrolled around much of the world, devastating not just birds but wide swaths of the animal kingdom. Foxes, bobcats, and pigs have fallen ill. Grizzly bears have gone blind. Sea creatures, including seals and sea lions, have died in great numbers.
But none of the sickened animals has raised as much concern as mink. In October, a bird-flu outbreak erupted at a Spanish mink farm, killing thousands of the animals before the rest were culled. It later became clear that the virus had spread between the animals, picking up a mutation that helped it thrive in mammals. It was likely the first time that mammal-to-mammal spread drove a huge outbreak of bird flu. Because mink are known to spread certain viruses to humans, the fear was that the disease could jump from mink to people. No humans got sick from the outbreak in Spain, but other infections have spread from mink to humans before: In 2020, COVID outbreaks on Danish mink farms led to new mink-related variants that spread to a small number of humans.
As mammals ourselves, we have good reason to be concerned. Outbreaks on crowded mink farms are an ideal scenario for bird flu to mutate. If, in doing so, it picks up the ability to spread between humans, it could potentially start another global pandemic. “There are many reasons to be concerned about mink,” Tom Peacock, a flu researcher at Imperial College London, told me. Right now, mink are a problem we can’t afford to ignore.
For two animals with very different body types, mink and humans have some unusual similarities. Research suggests that we share similar receptors for COVID, bird flu, and human flu, through which these viruses can gain entry into our bodies. The numerous COVID outbreaks on mink farms during the early pandemic, and the bird-flu outbreak in Spain, gravely illustrate this point. It’s “not surprising” that mink can get these respiratory diseases, James Lowe, a veterinary-medicine professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me. Mink are closely related to ferrets, which are so well known for their susceptibility to human flu that they’re the go-to model for flu research.
Mink wouldn’t get sick as often, and wouldn’t be as big an issue for humans, if we didn’t keep farming them for fur in the perfect conditions for outbreaks. Many barns used to raise mink are partially open-air, making it easy for infected wild birds to come in contact with the animals, sharing not only air but potentially food. Mink farms are also notoriously cramped: The Spanish farm, for example, kept tens of thousands of mink in about 30 barns. Viral transmission would be all but guaranteed in those conditions, but the animals are especially vulnerable. Because mink are normally solitary creatures, they face significant stress in packed barns, which may further predispose them to disease, Angela Bosco-Lauth, a biomedical-sciences professor at Colorado State University, told me. And because they’re often inbred so their coats look alike, an entire population may share a similar genetic susceptibility to disease. The frequency of outbreaks among mink, Bosco-Lauth said, “may actually have less to do with the animals and more to do with the fact that we raise them in the same way … we would an intensive cattle farm or chickens.”
So far, there’s no evidence that mink from the Spanish farm spread bird flu to humans: None of the workers tested positive for the virus, and since then, no other mink farms have reported outbreaks. “We’re just not very susceptible” to bird flu, Lowe said. Our bird-flu receptors are tucked deep in our lungs, but when we’re exposed, most of the virus gets caught in the nose, throat, and other parts of the upper respiratory tract. This is why bird-flu infection is less common in people but is often pneumonia-level severe when it does happen. Indeed, a few humans have gotten sick and died from bird flu in the 27 years that the current strain of bird flu, known as H5N1, has circulated. This month, a girl in Cambodia died from the virus after potentially encountering a sick bird. The more virus circulating in an environment, the higher the chances a person will get infected. “It’s a dose thing,” Lowe said.
But our susceptibility to bird flu could change. Another mink outbreak would give the virus more opportunities to keep mutating. The worry is that this could create a new variant that’s better at binding to the human flu receptors in our upper respiratory tract, Stephanie Seifert, a professor at Washington State University who studies zoonotic pathogens, told me. If the virus gains the ability to infect the nose and throat, Peacock, at Imperial College London, said, it would be better at spreading. Those mutations “would worry us the most.” Fortunately, the mutations that arose on the Spanish mink farm “were not as bad as many of us worried about,” he added, “but that doesn’t mean that the next time this happens, this will also be the case.”
Because mink carry the receptors for both bird flu and human flu, they could serve as “mixing vessels” for the viruses to combine, researchers wrote in 2021. (Ferrets, pigs, and humans share this quality too.) Through a process called reassortment, flu viruses can swap segments of their genome, resulting in a kind of Frankenstein pathogen. Although viruses remixed in this way aren’t necessarily more dangerous, they could be, and that’s not a risk worth taking. “The previous three influenza pandemics all arose due to mixing between avian and human influenza viruses,” Peacock said.
While there are good reasons to be concerned about mink, it is hard to gauge just how concerned we should be—especially given what we still don’t know about this changing virus. After the death of the young girl in Cambodia, the World Health Organization called the global bird flu situation “worrying,” while the CDC maintains that the risk to the public is low. Lowe said “it’s certainly not very risky” that bird flu will spill over into humans, but is worth keeping an eye on. H5N1 bird flu is not new, he added, and it hasn’t affected people en masse yet. But the virus has already changed in ways that make it better at infecting wild birds, and as it spreads in the wild, it may continue to change to better infect mammals, including humans. “We don’t understand enough to make strong predictions of public-health risk,” Jonathan Runstadler, an infectious-diseases professor at Tufts University, told me.
As bird flu continues to spread among birds and in domestic and wild animal populations, it will only become harder to control. The virus, formally seasonal, is already present year-round in parts of Europe and Asia, and it is poised to do the same in the Americas. Breaking the chain of transmission is vital to preventing another pandemic. An important step is to avoid situations where humans, mink, or any other animal could be infected with both human and bird flu at the same time.
Since the COVID outbreaks, mink farms have generally beefed up their biosecurity: Farm workers are often required to wear masks and protective gear, such as disposable overalls. To limit the risk to mink—and other susceptible hosts—farms need to reduce their size and density, reduce contact between mink and wild birds, and monitor the virus, Runstadler said. Some nations, including Mexico, Ecuador, have recently embraced bird-flu vaccines for poultry in light of the outbreaks. H5N1 vaccines are also available for humans, though they aren’t readily available. Still, one of the most obvious options is to shut mink farms down. “We probably should have done that after SARS-CoV-2,” Bosco-Lauth, at Colorado State, said. Doing so is controversial, however, because the global mink industry is valuable, with a huge market in China. Denmark, which produces up to 40 percent of the world’s mink pelts, temporarily banned mink breeding in 2020 after a spate of COVID outbreaks, but the ban expired last month, and farms are returning, albeit in a limited capacity.
But mink are far from the only animal that poses a bird-flu risk to humans. “Frankly, with what we’re seeing with other wildlife species, there really aren’t any mammals that I would discount at this point in time,” Bosco-Lauth said. Any mammal species repeatedly infected by the virus is a potential risk, including marine mammals, such as seals. But we should be most concerned about the ones humans frequently come into close contact with, especially animals that are raised in high density, such as pigs, Runstadler said. This doesn’t pose just a human public-health concern, he said, but the potential for “ecological disruption.” Bird flu can be a devastating disease for wildlife, killing animals swiftly and without mercy.
Whether bird flu makes the jump into humans, it isn’t the last virus that will threaten us—or mink. The era we live in has become known as the “Pandemicene,” as my colleague Ed Yong has called it, one defined by the regular spillover of viruses into humans, caused by our disruption of the normal trajectories of viral movement in nature. Mink may never pass bird flu to us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be a risk the next time a novel influenza or coronavirus comes around. Doing nothing about mink essentially means choosing luck as a public-health strategy. Sooner or later, it will run out.
Milan Fashion Week has just wrapped up, and while this is not normally the kind of thing we would be covering on this, a website about anime, reality television and comic books, 2023’s show featured a surprise inclusion: Blizzard’s Diablo series.
Danish label Han Kjøbenhavn had a whole damn line inspired by (and officially licensed by) Diablo, with founder Jannik Wikkelsø Davidsen—who tells NME he played the game “back in the day”—showing off three separate outfits, two of which you can see in this post.
For those about to say in a comic-book-guy voice “nyyahhhh these don’t look like Diablo characters”, or “I will not be wearing these to my local GameStop, thank you”, please know that this is Milan Fashion Week. This is runway shit. This is designers going wild, art in motion, stuff designed for you to look at and feel something, not wonder when you’ll be able to order it on Amazon or get it with the collector’s edition of a game.
Watch the show, play the game If you’re intrigued by the new show starring Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, consider picking up the source. The 2013 survival horror game recently got a full-on remake for the PS5 with The Last of Us Part 1 and now it’s coming to PC as well. You can pre-order the Steam version of the game for 10% off from most Green Man Gaming which is set to release on March 28.
“For me, darkness is beauty. How do you balance those two things? That generates an [entirely] new feeling”, Davidsen told NME. “What we’re creating has a lot of volume and language in the garments we’re working with, so in that sense I’m trying to mirror the journey within Diablo as well as my own journey.”
In terms of things you can wear, Davidsen says Han Kjøbenhavn—who sell a ton of everyday gear like sweaters and tshirts, albeit at premium fashion label prices—will be releasing “something which is more everyday wearable” in the near future.
Logan Paul, the YouTuber and wrestler has been saddled with a class-action lawsuit over “fraudulent actions” regarding his NFT game, CryptoZoo.
After a year of investigation, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen, a YouTuber who looks into fraudsters and fake gurus in the crypto space, discovered that Logan Paul’s CryptoZoo was something of a scam. CryptoZoo, a blockchain game that was supposed to function like passive income for Paul’s ardent fans and early investors, actually wound up being a rug pull for just about everyone involved because Paul’s team preemptively sold the in-game currency, zoo coins, before everyone else. Aside from some of the folks hired to work on CryptoZoo, who allegedly made thousands of dollars, others interested in the “game” lost hundreds if not thousands, according to Coffeezilla’s multi-part investigatory series.
Initially, Paul was furious with Coffeezilla’s year-long investigation, calling him the “Keemstar of crypto in finance” and threatening to sue him in a since-deleted YouTube video. Paul has walked that statement back, apologizing to his fans and Coffeezilla while also putting forth a three-step plan to “finish and deliver” CryptoZoo, which has been basically broken since its August 2021 launch. Now, as Coffeezilla tweeted on February 3, Paul has been hit with a class-action lawsuit.
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It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
The plaintiff, a Texas police officer who poured about $3,000 of his own money into CryptoZoo in the hopes that it would yield big returns, filed the litigation in the city of Austin. According to the suit reviewed by Kotaku, the plaintiff is seeking damages north of $75,000 for “conspiracy to commit fraud,” “fraudulent misrepresentation,” “negligence,” “unjust enrichment,” and more. The plaintiff named everyone involved with the game’s creation, including Paul and former lead developer Eddie Ibanez. In the end, the plaintiff wants repayment for copious damages, from attorney’s fees and the costs of action to civil penalties and mental anguish.
Paul has not responded to the lawsuit at all since it was filed. However, he did make an appearance (and got injured) during WWE’s 2023 Royal Rumble event on January 28. His YouTube accounts, including his Impaulsive podcast, have been pretty quiet since February started. As all of this is going on, though, Paul’s likeness is slated to appear in developer Visual Concepts’ WWE 2K23when it comes out on March 17.
WASHINGTON—Claiming that previous laws were inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that domestic abusers could not be barred from owning an instrument of vengeance. “According to the court’s historical interpretation of the Second Amendment, Americans cannot legally be prevented from purchasing or wielding a method with which to carry out a violent act of retribution,” Judge Cory Wilson wrote in the court’s opinion, adding that per the founding fathers original intent, every American, including domestic abusers, had a God-given right to enact lethal vengeance against whoever they felt was worthy of their ire. “Be it the ex-girlfriend who so heinously wronged you, a coworker who looked at you in a weird way, or a sonuvabitch judge who ruined your life, all Americans have the right to bear whatever arms they need to destroy their enemies once and for all. Without the right to dole out justice and reckoning, we are nothing as a country. This type of senseless violence is what we were built on.” At press time, the court also struck down a mandatory waiting period that Judge Wilson claimed made it take too long for those who had been wronged and were blinded by rage to finally get sweet, sweet revenge.
One of the biggest female streamers on Twitch wants to take a harder stance on revenge porn—nude photos that are posted online without their owners’ consent. Imane “Pokimane” Anys said in a recent Twitch stream that it should be “illegal” to possess nudes without their owners’ consent, and that she wanted to work towards “facilitating legislation” against it.
“There are some companies that I’m going to message…not companies. Organizations that are involved in certain causes. I’m going to be like…Listen: If you ever need someone to…” Pokimane made talking hand gestures on stream. “I’m your girl. Because I think if you wanna pass a bill, you usually go in front of a group of politicians and you explain your cause…I’ll do it.” Kotaku reached out to Pokimane to ask which organizations she planned to work with, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Pokimane was initially vague about what she was taking a stance against, but she eventually clarified that she was talking about revenge porn. “I think it should be illegal to even have your phone, your PC, on your anything…having photos that someone doesn’t consent to you having.”
There are several reasons why she is taking this stance now. Pokimane talked about how her viewers would message her about how their former partners would leak their nudes. She felt that those individuals were rarely punished for “ruining” girls’ lives. “So many things online go without repercussions and they really shouldn’t,” she said.
The U.S. currently has laws against revenge porn in nearly every state. But as Hasan Piker pointed out in a recent stream about Pokimane’s comments, enforcement against revenge porn is complicated and murky. Cops are hardly the most empathetic or competent investigators of gendered violence. Besides that, surveilling every electronic device for revenge porn would be a massive privacy violation. “The only way you can tackle revenge porn is at the point of distribution,” he said.
Pokimane seemed optimistic about preventing revenge porn by stigmatizing it. “If [an ex] shares [nudes] with someone, that person should be so scared of having that photo because the person whose photo they have—didn’t consent to giving it to them.”
Berlin’s AquaDom, the largest freestanding cylindrical aquarium in the world, burst last week, sending a wave of 264,000 gallons of water, glass, and tropical fish pouring into the center of the German capital. What do you think?
“So the fish are in control now, I assume?”
James Gustafson • Chief of Complaints
“Yet another mass-casualty event at the hands of the Germans.”
This past spring, Amanda Goldberg crouched in the leafy undergrowth of a southwestern Virginia forest and attempted to swab a mouse for COVID. No luck; its nose was too tiny for her tools. “You never think about nostrils until you start having to swab an animal,” Goldberg, a conservation biologist at Virginia Tech University, told me. Larger-nosed creatures that she and her team had trapped, such as raccoons and foxes, had no issue with nose swabs—but for mice, throat samples had to do. The swabs fit reasonably well into their mouths, she said, though they endured a fair bit of munching.
Goldberg’s throat-swabbing endeavors were part of a study she and her colleagues devised to answer an unexplored question: How common is COVID in wildlife? Of the 333 forest animals her team swabbed around Blacksburg, Virginia, spanning 18 species, one—an opossum—tested positive. This was to be expected, Goldberg said; catching a wild animal that happened to have an active infection right when it was swabbed was like finding Waldo. But the researchers also collected blood samples, and those were more telling about whether the animals had experienced previous bouts with COVID. Analysis by the Molecular Diagnostics Lab and the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech revealed antibodies across 24 animals spanning six species, including the opossum, the Eastern gray squirrel, and two types of mice. “Our minds were blown,” Goldberg said. “It was basically every species we sent” to the lab.
That animals can get COVID is one of the earliest things we learned about the virus. Despite the endless debate over its origins, SARS-CoV-2 most likely jumped from an animal through an intermediate host to humans in Wuhan. Since then, it has since spread back to a range of animals. People have passed it to household pets, such as dogs and cats, and to a Disney movie’s worth of beasts, including lions, hippos, hyenas, tigers, mink, and hamsters. Three years into the pandemic, animals are still falling sick with COVID, just as we are. COVID is likely circulating more widely in animals than we are aware of, Edward Holmes, a biologist at the University of Sydney, told me. “In all my 30-plus years of doing work on this subject, I have never seen a virus that can infect so many animal species,” he said. More than 500 other mammal species are predicted to be highly susceptible to infection.
Given that most people nowadays aren’t fretting too much about human-to-human spread, it makes sense that animal-to-human spread has largely been forgotten. But even when there are so many other pandemic concerns, animal COVID can’t be ignored. The consequences of sustained animal transmission are exactly the same as they are in people: The more COVID spreads, the more opportunities the virus has to evolve into new variants. What’s most alarming is the chance that one of those variants could spill back into humans. As we’ve known since the pandemic started, SARS-CoV-2 is not a human virus, but one that can infect multiple animals, including humans. As long as animals are still getting COVID, we’re not out of the doghouse either.
Perhaps part of the reason COVID in animals has been overlooked—apart from the fact that they’re not people—is that most species don’t seem to get very sick. Animals that have gotten infected generally exhibit mild symptoms—typically some coughing and sluggishness, as in pumas and lions. But our research has gone only fur-deep. “We certainly can’t ask them, ‘Are you feeling headaches, or sluggish?’” said Goldberg, who worries about long-term or invisible symptoms going undiagnosed in species. And so animal COVID has lingered unchecked, increasing the chances that it could mean something bad for us.
The good news is that the overall risk of getting COVID from animals is considered low, according to the CDC. This is partly explained by evolutionary theory, which predicts that most variants that emerge in an animal population will have adapted to become better at infecting the host animal—not us. But some of them, strictly by chance, “could be highly transmissible or virulent in humans,” Holmes said. “It’s an unpredictable process.” His concern is not that animals will start infecting people en masse—your neighbors are far likelier to do that than raccoons—but that in animals, SARS-CoV-2 could form new variants that can spill over into people. Some scientists believe that Omicron emerged this way in mice, though evidence remains scant.
A troubling sign is that there’s already some evidence that COVID has made its way from humans to animals, where it mutated, and then made its way back into humans. Take white-tailed deer, by now a well-known COVID host. Every fall, hunters take to the golden meadows and reddening forests of southwestern Ontario to shoot the deer, giving researchers an opportunity to test some of the hunted animals for COVID. The species has been infected with the same variants circulating widely in humans—a handful of Staten Island deer caught Omicron last winter, for example—which suggests that people are infecting them. How the deer get infected still isn’t clear: Extended face time with humans, nosing around in trash, or slurping up our wastewater are all possibilities.
The researchers in Canada found not only that some of the animals tested positive, but also that the variant they carried had never before been seen in humans, indicating that the virus had been spreading and mutating within the population for a long time, Brad Pickering, a research scientist for the Canadian government who studied the deer, told me. In fact, the new variant is among the most evolutionarily divergent ones identified so far. But despite its differences, it appeared to have infected at least one person who had interacted with deer the week before falling ill. “We can’t make a direct link between them,” Pickering said, but the fact that such a highly diverged deer variant was detected in a human is very suggestive of how that person got sick.
This research adds to the small but growing body of evidence that the COVID we spread to animals could come back to bite us. Fortunately, this particular spillback does not appear to have had serious consequences for humans; rogue deer variants don’t seem to be circulating in southern Canada. But this is not the sole documented instance of animal-to-human spread: People have been infected by mink in the Netherlands, hamsters in Hong Kong, and a cat in Thailand. Other spillbacks have probably occurred and gone unnoticed. So far, no data show that the animal variants that have spread to humans are more dangerous for us. Even if a potential animal variant isn’t the next Omicron, it could still be better at dodging our existing treatments and vaccines, Pickering said.
But there is also, frankly, a lack of data. Local wildlife-surveillance efforts led by researchers like Goldberg and Pickering are ongoing, but they do not exist in most countries, Holmes said. An international database of known animal infections, maintained by Complexity Science Hub Vienna, is a promising start. An interactive map shows the locations of previously infected animals, including large hairy armadillos (Argentina), manatees (Brazil), and cats (everywhere). At the very least, with animal COVID, “we need to know what species it’s in, in what abundance, and genetically, what those variants look like,” Holmes said. “It’s absolutely critical to know where [the virus] is going.” Without this, there is no way of knowing how often spillback occurs and whether it puts humans at risk. And we can’t tell whether new COVID variants are also putting animals in danger, Goldberg said; a devastating Omicron-like variant could emerge in their populations too.
The steps we need to take to mitigate the animal-COVID problem—and prevent other zoonotic diseases from jumping into humans—are clear, even if they don’t seem to be happening. Eliminating wet markets where wild animals are sold is an obvious preventive measure, but it has been difficult to implement because the livelihoods and diets of many people, especially in the global South, depend on them. As climate change and land development decimate even more habitats, wildlife will be forced into ever-closer quarters with us, fostering an even more efficient exchange of viruses between species. Unlike mask wearing and other straightforward options for curbing the human spread of COVID, preventing its transmission to, from, and among animals will require major upheavals to the way our societies run, likely far greater than we are willing to commit to.
Humans tend to act like COVID ends up afflicting us after traveling through a long chain of species. But to think so is like living in the Middle Ages, Holmes said, when the Earth was considered the center of the universe. As we learned then, we are not that important: Humans are but a node in an immense network of species that viruses move through in many directions. Just as animal viruses infect us, human viruses can spread to animals (measles, for example, kills a variety of great apes). There are definitely bigger problems than animal COVID—no one needs to hunker down for fear of sneezing deer—but as long as animals keep getting infected, we can’t overlook what that means for us. Paying attention to animal COVID often starts with a single swab—and a snout to stick it in.
Academy Award winner Al Pacino may have opened the 2022 Game Awards, a night of industry recognition and expensive marketing for the biggest games around, but it was a new type of internet celebrity who closed it out. “I want to nominate this award to my reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton,” said a young kid with long hair who appeared onstage suddenly after Elden Ring was crowned Game of the Year. He was wearing an ill-fitting coat, sneaking up on stage behind the the Elden Ring development team.
Security followed, and chaos ensued online as everyone tried to figure out what the hell had just happened during host Geoff Keighley’s otherwise heavily orchestrated three-hour event. But this was far from the first time the young man, whose name Kotaku believes to be Matan Even, had sprung to brief internet fame through internet-pilled trolling, even if it might have been his weirdest.
After the ceremony finished, Keighley tweeted that the “individual who interrupted” the event had been arrested. Five hours later, however, Even was already tweeting. “Today there is a lot of talk, and speculation,” he wrote. “More information will be released on all fronts sooner than later.”
When asked about what transpired after the incident, the LAPD media relations office contradicted Keighley’s account, saying a report had been taken but no arrest was made. When asked to square that, a spokesperson for The Game Awards provided a more detailed account.
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They said Even was taken to a “secure area” inside the Microsoft Theater by TGA security staff where he was then questioned by venue security as well as “TGA-hired onsite LAPD officers.” They said he was then taken into custody and transported to a local police station for booking by the TGA-hired LAPD officers in their patrol vehicle. When asked about that version of events, a representative from the LAPD would only confirm that the individual had been transported to a station. Since no arrest was made, it’s unclear how long he was held for questioning.
While this may be the first time Even risked arrest, it was far from his first publicity stunt. Before stealthing his way on stage at one of the gaming industry’s biggest events of the year in front of an audience of over a million people, Even crashed a BlizzCon panel, went viral for pranking the L.A. Clippers fan cam, and appeared on right-wing conspiracy show Infowars at least twice.
The Clippers stunt came in October 2019. Amid the Hong Kong protests, Even momentarily appeared on the fan cam at the team’s home stadium, only to immediately hold up a black t-shirt that read, “Fight for Freedom Stand with Hong Kong.” China had blacklisted the Houston Rockets after their general manager tweeted out a picture of the same t-shirt just a couple of weeks earlier.
The next month, Even interrupted a BlizzCon 2019 panel with a similar message in support of the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard had suspended Overwatchpro Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai the prior month for doing the same, and along with the NBA and other companies, came under fire at the time for its failure to stand up for Hong Kong’s democratic protesters.
As Motherboard points out, this made Even a ripe target to be co-opted by right-wing political actors who saw the opportunity to attack seeming liberal hypocrisy on the issue. But Even was also apparently already a big fan of at least one of Infowars’ hosts, Owen Shroyer. He said as much in a 2019 appearance, calling Shroyer his “favorite person on Infowars,” while in a second appearance in 2020 Shroyer called Even “one of the young stars of the conservative movement.”
While Even’s own social media activity appears to be almost exclusively concerned with the Hong Kong protests and censorship by the Chinese government, his journey from protester to Infowars guest is also a perfect example of the ambiently reactionary online pipeline that can lead one from Googling political issues to ending up on right-wing content channels. (Even was seemingly 12 during his first Infowars appearance.) It’s also a reason why some were quick to interpret his nonsensical remarks about Bill Clinton and Orthodox Judaism as potentially antisimetic.
Prior to last night, Even’s last tweets were from March 2021 and were about concerns over the rise in hate crimes toward Asian Americans. Infowars, meanwhile, has seen founder Alex Jones successfully sued for hundreds of millions by the parents of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims. Most recently, however, the site tried to hold court with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who used the appearance to praise Hitler, a heel turn that comes amid a larger wave of antisemitism in conservative circles.
It was in front of that backdrop that some worried Even’s stunt was secretly some racist 4Chan deepcut. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who interviewed Even earlier today, said he appeared to understand Hebrew, and called him “almost certainly a Jewish prankster.”
He’s also disavowing his previous Infowars appearances, even while continuing his trolling in messages with other journalists.
“I never was an avid viewer [of Infowars] nor am I now,” he told Motherboard. He reportedly went on to call Clinton “a true inspiration, especially in the gaming space.”
Former President Trump has claimed the Constitution can be terminated to reinstate him as president, falsely citing election fraud as grounds, after Elon Musk released information about Twitter’s role in limiting access to a story about Hunter Biden,. What do you think?
“What’s gotten into him lately?”
Elwood Staunton, Unemployed
“The Founding Fathers had some pretty strong feelings about candidate offspring and their laptops.”
Ferdinand Beser, Ingot Stacker
“Before we say no, let’s hear how much money he’s offering.”
