Vexed to nightmare

The world is in a general haze of distortions and toxic feedback loops, sung into being by a chorus of death rattles of old men clinging to undeserved power, their tombs yawning beneath them, their nails scarring the world with some semblance of significance as they’re dragged into inevitable oblivion. It is the rest of us, with little power but much life, that have to live with their scars.

We are marred by ghosts. Haunted by the loudly inane.

It’s not enough that none of us have money, no way to create a future, as the world hurtles toward cosmic doom made manifest by the corporations and suits that religiously follow profits over people. Now everyday we battle Final Bosses who are determined to be as offensively and loudly boring as possible, destroying everything they can.

So what’s left but what the rest of us create.

To that end, I want to look at games and TV shows – and maybe movies and books – and yell about them, as our flattened world is poured into a growing pit of annihilation. And law. Because sometimes I am also a lawyer.

Here’s hoping you stick with me, as I note interesting articles, events, posts, whatever I find fancy or weird or bad. I’ll be posting my hot takes on here, that will be too long for Bluesky (follow me). I’ll be noting reviews and other writings I’ve done.

It’s all going to die and burn one day, so maybe we do this together for a while.

Severance as corpo reality show

So Severance is good shit.

The hit Apple TV+ show, that made those of us who’ve worked in corporate sit up, tugged on my horror senses immediately. The horror I’m talking about is of course cosmic and weird horror.

This is the genre that deals with indescribable gods, unfathomably large constructions, the futility of individual human action, the pointlessness of existence, the ever-present notion we are but vessels for an incomprehensible design.

All of that describes corporations of course.

In Severance, the characters are workers at a mysterious billion-dollar corporation called Lumen. The hook in the show is that when the characters get to work, their outside selves are effectively “severed” and a new version of themselves that works in the company wakes up. These inner workers, or “innies”, have no memory of themselves outside the company and are effectively newborns – albeit ones who can talk, eat, read and sleep.

They are the perfect worker for a corporation: Functional, conscious, dependent on the company, with no outside influence to create ideas of rebellion or resistance, but are capable at creating a work product that generates profits.

When these innies “leave”, their real-life outside-selves, “outies”, wake up. The outies know nothing about the innies and may end up being completely different people.

It’s a great concept, where some of us may thought “I’d love that”: Basically you take a nap for 7-8 hours and wake up having achieved the work for the day. Of course, you have consented to the creation of a possible separate entire person who knows nothing about the outside world. Your “innie” does not even know your name.

Severance plays with unfathomably large, incomprehensible corridors, Escher-like in their construction. It’s beautifully delivered and nauseating when you watch it.

It captures the inherently inhuman aspect of corporate work, the soulless drudgery of creating a work product for a non-human entity for unfathomable reasons. How is that not the perfect description of cosmic horror?

In fact my favourite horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, wrote so-called “corporate horror” stories with ease because the environments were verisimilitudinous with the weird horror of it all.

Here’s his description of the end result of profit.

I’d rather not spoil where Severance goes, but as a horror fanatic, I look at it each week with newfound fear.

Corporations hate creatives

Speaking of corporate horrors, you cannot even take a breath without profit chasers baying for blood for their numerical gods and gutting their own talent to appease their own made up avatars of success. The latest to be dragged to the altar and split open are the talented studios Monolith, Player First Games, and WB Games San Diego. As Nathan Grayson at Ethan Gach notes.

Monolith created the wonderful Mordor games, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, with the magnificent but completely ignored and Nemesis System. It was also working on a Wonder Woman game.

Well, now those just die. The security, talent and well-being of the talented creatives now torn from Monolith’s body by WB Games execs.

Nathan Grayson over at the wonderful Aftermath notes:

The staggering number of closures just this year is eyewatering: According to one reliable estimate, 38 (!) studios were shut down or experienced lay-offs in 2025 alone. We’re barely beyond February and already close to 40 video game studios, some major ones like Monolith and Bioware, have been gutted if not killed. Barely into 2025, and about 1,200 people have lost their jobs in this toxic industry.

As someone who spends a significant portion of his life playing and writing about games, I’ve of course wanted to be part of writing a game. But when even veteran creatives like Bioware’s Trick Weekes and Karin Weekes-West are shelved, what hopes do the rest of us have?

Games are not allowed to grow, to dig their roots into the world to find growth and fruition. But regardless, it is the arbitrary goals set by moneyed suits who seem to scatter a line of salt on the ground and call it a margin; they demand it be crossed or else the beast must be gutted for the gods of capital. There’s no reason to do this, they do not and will not ever have “their numbers” because they set the numbers. Do not forget that even if they had some good reason to cut down on costs, why should it be studios and workers who suffer? Billions go into bonuses and exec salaries that far outweigh the average worker — all of which is unearned as execs and CEO’s do not do anything of great import.

I’ve been asking for years what a CEO does, and what warrants the enormous salaries and bonuses, and have never once managed to find an answer. Because, as Severance shows, it’s all unfathomable and we are at the whims of loud stupid gods.

This is similar to TV shows that, despite rave critical and audience reviews, are gutted barely a season in — creating a vicious cycle where we’re all too sceptical to invest because of gutting but that lack of immediate, huge audience is ruled as insufficient to sustain the show so a self-fulfilling prophecy is created and bye-bye to the show.

The world is stupid and run by ridiculous monsters.

Final vestiges

Eurogamer has a nice summary of an interview with BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk, who spoke to Simon Parkin about what it was like working under corporate overlords and through arbitrary restrictions.

With Assassin’s Creed: Shadows on the horizon, this is a great summary of where the “lore” currently is. It’s under an hour and does a great job of summarising and sighing at the ridiculous series I love so much.

Non-gaming news…

Nature points out that under the huge gutting by the new Trump administration of all aspects of US agencies and bodies is having a terrifying impact on post-docs and PhD students.

Maybe news you missed last month, because you’re not an international lawyer or South African, but my country and Malaysia launched a campaign to try uphold rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). As the Guardian reported, “the move comes as both the ICC and ICJ face unprecedented challenges to their authority in cases relating to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and people-smuggling in the Mediterranean.”

South Africa launched a landmark case against Israel last year, alleging violation of the Genocide Convention. The case is ongoing, with South Africa having obtained various binding interim measures by the court, almost none of which seemed to have been adhered to by Israel in its continued military efforts - viewed as a genocide by many leading scholars and major fact-finding missions.

The ICJ only rules on cases between nation states; it’s findings will not be criminal and no individual will face prison. However, the ICC is a criminal court and the ICC Prosecutor did obtain arrest warrants for Israeli leadership for war crimes including starvation and crimes against humanity (genocide was not listed as one of the crimes).

In 124 countries, Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant are fugitives from justice that the state parties to the ICC must arrest.

Just on Monday, Germany, a state party to the relevant law, appears to be openly defying its international obligation to arrest.

Thanks for reading… maybe see you soon

T.