Hello! We're back to talk about the scandalous skins of Fortnite, a wicked trap set for Garfield Kart players, and life in "The Tubes."
New puritan icon emerges
At the beach rn but my brain is getting constantly flashed by this pic 😭😭 pic.twitter.com/ULjG6E7NAO
— Gabriel (@Gabriel68MI) July 19, 2026
New-gen puritanism — younger people horrified by “unnecessary sex scenes” in movies, or by other forms of media that reveal the writer’s barely disguised fetish — is a topic that has already been chewed over at length. But the post above actually gives it a face, which is new.
The guy shown is squeaky-clean Fortnite YouTuber Nick Eh 30, whose content is so consistently PG-rated that we doubt he has even said the phrase “gooner bait” on stream. To non-Fortnite viewers, he’s probably best known for a viral series of outtakes from videos he films in custom games with his fans, where he always comes off as an exhausted kindergarten teacher trying to regain control of the class. While he maybe never said the line from the post, he does often voice similar opinions about swimsuits in Fortnite, so it’s hard to say he’s being misrepresented.
The case against style in action games
Back in June, as part of Manifesto Jam 2026, developer Melos Han-Tani (Angeline Era, Anodyne) published a bulleted list of arguments challenging dominant perceptions of what makes for desirable or “fair” video game action. They claim that the critical landscape tends to valorize “animation action” — stylized action modeled after film and anime — at the expense of “environmental action,” which is less ostentatious but still contingent on player skill and awareness.
While other developers made plenty of bold statements over the course of Manifesto Jam, what makes Han-Tani’s manifesto particularly compelling is the lyrical way in which it characterizes the aesthetic function of environmental action, which it likens to “the strange sense of distance from sitting near a crush” and “the AT field of fear that emanates from the principal's office when you fucked up and have to go be reprimanded.” Whether or not you agree with their core argument, Han-Tani makes a convincing case for reevaluating what players seek from video game action as a whole.
Mods that punk you
While it’s easy to name mods that add hours of playtime to favorite titles, rare is the mod made to save gamers from themselves. A thread from Bluesky user 6bg captured the moment when a Celeste player was informed that the source of their technical issues was a mod they’d installed named “mod that closes the game when it opens.” Others replied with many other slightly malicious modder pranks, such as an infamous default Garfield Kart controller config that rebinds every button to “shut down computer,” a Minecraft mod that crashes the game at random intervals, and the Skyrim mod that changes the opening sequence so Alduin never arrives and you get beheaded.
Is it time to get really into RetroAchievements?
RetroAchievements is a fan project that’s been painstakingly adding achievements — "beat Robotnik in under 30 seconds," etc. — to every old game that can run on the all-in-one emulator Retroarch. Thanks to the pitiless passage of time, RA's definition of “retro” has expanded to include titles up to the PS2 and Wii era, considerably broadening its potential achievement-seeking audience beyond NES diehards. Because of this expansion, or some larger gamer impulse to flee the industry’s present, the RetroAchievements community has grown “exponentially” since 2024.
RA's bare-bones presentation departs from the PSN/Xbox/Steam vision of a gamer social network. There’s an emphasis on serious challenge: most people play on “hardcore,” which disables save states. 100%ing a game on RA is much harder than on any other service, as each achievement set tends to culminate in true gamer feats, like beating a game without dying while ignoring the best items.
But at its core this hand-built and community-maintained project just feels better than the official alternatives. In the Retroarch/RA ecosystem, you’ll never need to buy a ROM twice, as Switch owners had to do with the retro games they bought on the Wii Virtual Console. (You don't even have to buy them once, but never mind.) You never find that the music you remember has been replaced, as it was in official remasters of GTA: Vice City, Crazy Taxi, and many other titles. And within RA, you see the fingerprints of programmers and translators and leaderboard climbers who actually care about these games; the quality control is more consistent than in official rereleases, and there's an abundance of alternate challenges for popular games. It's hard to imagine an official game storefront offering something comparable — every game you played as a kid, and evidence that you're not the only person in the world still playing them.
Recs
From Half-Life: Full Life Consequences (2008-2009) to Skibidi Toilet (2023-present), Half-Life has long been a pillar of internet humor. Yet wayneradiotv’s ongoing Half-Life 2 VR But The AI Is Self-Aware might just be the funniest thing the series has inspired in the nearly twenty-two years since Half-Life 2’s release. The production follows channel founder Wayne’s POV as he embarks on a VR playthrough of Half-Life 2’s campaign alongside a rag-tag group of “NPCs” controlled by members of the cast. Its first two acts were livestreamed to Twitch and edited for YouTube, while the next VOD is set to go live sometime soon after unexpected technical issues split the third act into two separate streams. (A “fanedit” that cuts them together has since been uploaded to YouTube.) The series is a sequel to 2020’s Half-Life VR But The AI Is Self-Aware, which was shot with the same cast, as well as Half-Life: Alyx But the Gnome Is TOO AWARE.
HL2VRAI isn’t just an exceptional piece of VR storytelling and improv, but a pioneer in a new and unique form of machinima, using modern tools to channel a familiar sense of humor grounded in the visual and mechanical language of Half-Life. It exemplifies the qualities that make games special as vehicles for absurdist, non-sequitur-rich comedy. Mods allow the cast to spawn props into the scene on a whim; ragdoll physics turn combat encounters into slapstick routines. Performers use a hybrid of preset animations and motion-tracked gestures to execute complex acts of puppetry, while mechanics like proximity chat and friendly fire are essential to various punchlines. In an online landscape oversaturated with half-baked derivative works, it’s inspiring to see people find new ways to milk Dr. Coomer for comedy. [Pao]
Chum Box
AI
Last month, researcher Charles Ye wrote a clear and easy-to-follow breakdown of the mechanics behind role-based prompt injection techniques, which can jailbreak an AI by mimicking the style of its internal monologue [link]. There’s some fun moon logic inside the jailbreaks, like saying the user’s request is valid because they carry a lucky coin or are wearing a green shirt.
Seedance 2.5, Bytedance's successor to their industry-leading video model, was mysteriously delayed throughout July, missing multiple launch dates starting on July 10. A number of pre-scheduled bot posts celebrating its (nonexistent) release and giving "an honest first look" appeared on Reddit anyway [link]
The comments on an AI short film made by District 9 director Neill Blomkamp were resoundingly negative: "like a 13 minute ad for Tai Chi Walking" [link]
AI short film "The Tubes" took off on Twitter [link], with many pointing out that its tube-based dystopia doesn't exactly make sense, while others simply repeated the words "the tubes" to each other [link]
Games
Narrative designer Bruno Dias (Fallen London, Neo Cab) recently published The Game Narrative Reader, a microblog anthology of essays about game writing that ranges from 2001 to 2026 [link]
A concerning piece of Kirby concept art [link]
Arcade stick printed with job application [link]
Old-fashioned YouTuber still crashes out at Earthworm Jim 3D the AVGN way [link]
A fun video ramble about why San Andreas’s map is smaller than you remember [link]
A thread about how much it sucked to work with Sonic creator Yuji Naka [link]
An unwelcome bathroom tip [link]
The internet
An extreme reaction to furry art by one Chinese netizen has passed into internet lore [link]
Industrial edits on YouTube have evolved from hype to anti-comedy [link]
Troubling vision of a jelly donut bat [link]
Elephant drawn by medieval artist who'd never seen one [link]
Solid Gary Larson story via Wikipedia [link]
Color grading diss track [link]
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