Of no relation to the Backyard Sports baseball/soccer/etc… games, Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This At Home, and its sequel There Goes The Neighborhood is the distilled nadir of human culture in the most vile time of mankind’s cultural output: The early-mid 2000s. (Don’t argue this with me, I grew up then).
It’s a video game that awkwardly tries to shift traditional wrestling games, Tekken-style 3D fighters, and Smash Bros style “environmental fighters”. All while doing none of it very well and reeking of nu-metal. This is a time capsule. A very very bad time capsule.
There’s a great Youtube documentary out on so-called “sports farms”
These are those bizarre table tennis and truncated other sports leagues that appeared in public consciousness in 2020 when everything else except a few Y-tier soccer leagues shut down. The video is great and shows OSINT geolocation coupled with a knowledge of how offshore books love to sponsor big-name teams for the sake of advertising.
I had to get a book that claimed the exact opposite of what every other serious piece of scholarship on the German nuclear weapons program said (it was not even close to making a bomb). So I read Hitler’s Miracle Weapons. The art and models are very nice and if this was an acknowledged alternate history, I’d have little but praise for the book.
Unfortunately, the book makes tons of leaps of faith (to put it mildly) and makes the claims that:
Germany had built and tested nuclear warheads but didn’t use them for “reasons” even though it intended to
Said warheads ranged from small suitcase nukes to 20 megaton monsters
The American nuclear bombs were taken at least partially from German technology.
It does provide a lot of sources, but they feel circular. Moreover, it simply moves on with absolute confidence to the next wunderbomb, speaking as if it was an acknowledged fact that Germany had an arsenal more diverse than a postwar nuclear power. This is a kooky book, but it’s the detailed kind of kooky book. Make of that what you will.
So a trailer for an “adaptation” of George Orwell’s Animal Farm directed by Andy Serkis and starring Seth Rogen as Napoleon the Pig has been released, with predictable reception.
So the main antagonist, judging by the trailer and gossip, goes from being Pig Stalin himself to a human named…. Pilkington. Using that name makes it all look even worse. Because first off, in the book Mr. Pilkington and his Pinchfield Farm represent the West in general (and Churchill’s Britain more specifically). But even beyond that, the name is obscure, meaning that yes, you’d needed to look at the book and not just grab the rights like what seemingly happened with Starship Troopers.
It gets even worse as one realizes the name is extra-unsuitable given that here Animalism apparently works perfectly until Napoleon is tempted by an Evil Capitalist human. Because in the book, Napoleon actually is tempted with his “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” by agreeing to sell timber to Mr. Frederick of Foxwood, who naturally stiffs him and invades anyway.
Yes, Glenn Close’s villainess being named “Pilkington” instead of “Frederick” means that the filmmakers looked at someone who was literally based on Hitler and said “let’s use the stand-in for the west instead because Evil Capitalist Elon Musk Cybertruck Lol.”
NFTs, or “Non-Fungible Tokens”, were one of the most shameless fads of all time. Unlike previous market bubbles like tulip bulbs or Death of Superman comic books, these offered no practical value. In fact, what they even are is hard to explain. The closest normal person equivalent is a receipt.
So normal cryptocurrencies are “fungible” in the sense that as long as they’re in circulation, one dollar bill is functionally the same as another. Non-fungible means distinct, like say, an explicit receipt. Why would you spend a million dollars on a receipt for a transaction of a picture of a badly drawn monkey? The answer is a combination of get-rich suckers and wash trading (despite the name, not directly money laundering).
But I digress. So Red Ape Family, about a family of bored red apes who steal a drive full of the most valuable NFTs and go to Mars, is…. to call it a toy commercial would be an insult to toy commercials. More like a get rich quick infomercial made by someone with no talent whose sense of humor was a single episode of later Family Guy.
The existence of this is more interesting than any of the “gags” itself.
I’m excited, writing it was the smoothest experience I’ve had in a long time. 2025 actually saw me able to write and complete two full-length books in one year, something I hadn’t managed before. So enjoy this pop epic of a plane factory in Ohio!
An early Jon Land novel that somehow escaped my eye until now, Labyrinth has every note I know him for. There’s a super conspiracy with super weapons to take over the world, infighting within said super-conspiracy, and a crazy plot that ends in a crazier set piece (this one involves old warbird propeller planes).
This by Jon Land’s standards isn’t the best simply because it’s too conventional. If this was my first Land book I’d probably have loved it more, but I know he can do goofier (and thus better) in hindsight. Oh well.
I was looking at histories and such concerning the post-WW2 decline of general aviation in America. Most of the stated reasons center around costs, regulation, lawsuits, and changing demographics. None of these I’m denying were factors, even major ones. But I came across something that was very eye-opening and was not mentioned in most of the usual ones.
That was the decline in its practicality. One amusing side-part of the “flying car” discourse is that in a way, in the early postwar period, flying cars in the way we think of them kind of existed. See, in the early postwar period, as long as you could afford something that still always cost at least the equivalent of six figures today just for the airframe (ie you were a rich professional), flying in your own aircraft over the Depression-adjacent countryside was frequently the quickest and most convenient way to get from point A to point B. Whether it was for the luxury of a getaway or the necessity of business travel, there was a practical use.
Later on this eroded with two big things, which I shall provide graphical illustrations of.
Yep, better roads and better, cheaper, and more accessible commercial air travel. Which meant a lesser actual need for private planes, which naturally had giant ripple effects. At the very least it’s an underappreciated piece of the pie.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 