An infamous article written in 2014, in the midst of the “Gamergate” internet phenomenon, posited that “gamers are over” and that “gamers didn’t have to be the customers of the gaming industry”. It seemed so obviously confounding twelve years ago that someone would say something like this. If gamers weren’t the target audience for those who make, sell and promote games, who would be the target audience?

Little did we know, in our naïve mindsets of 2014, that this article was projecting an awareness of a new kind of anti-business model. This new model subverts the tried and true method of consensual trade between producers and consumers and instead focuses on using taxpayer money to fund propaganda. Essentially, it’s a scam: Parasites who are tourists within a culture that isn’t naturally theirs will work within the culture to make money using gaming/movies/short films/novels/whatever by promoting propaganda on behalf of someone else. It’s the subversion of real culture to produce cynical anti-culture.

It works like this: activists signal to globalists within governments or even to “non-profit” NGOs (non-governmental organizations, usually created by government officials to justify allocation of taxpayer money) that they’re willing to boost a preferred ideological signal if only they’re given funds. Then, governments steal from their citizens via taxation to collect these funds. Some of those funds are designated to these “non-profit” NGOs who then give money to people who will create “art” that promotes whatever the NGO wants them to promote. Want to make people aware of climate crisis talking points? An NGO will commission you—with taxpayer funds—to create a game like Aphelion, which acts as a checklist of contemporary ideological talking points, all to promote human-guilt/ecological disaster porn.

No customers actually bought or paid for Aphelion upon release. At its peak, Aphelion reached just over two hundred concurrent players globally. But that was the plan.

Gamers engaging with the publisher on consensual economic grounds by trading money for an entertainment experience wasn’t the business plan for Aphelion or the growing slate of paid propaganda. The publisher got their money from the NGO who received funding from the government who stole those funds from the citizens via taxation. It’s a simple plan. The developers got paid. The publisher got paid. And they didn’t even have to adhere to the rules of free enterprise where people exchange goods and services with free citizens in a supply and demand paradigm. No, the developers and publisher went around the system and opened themselves up to being commissioned by an unelected group of people who had access to taxpayers’ money. They took on no personal financial risk. The taxpayer-funded treasury is of nearly infinite depth and volume. Neither government officials nor NGOs care because it’s not their money.

In a healthy, ethical economy, individuals and companies must adhere to the whims and will of the consumer for a greater likelihood of profit and sustainability because there is no other customer; now there is. If you’re willing to peddle globalist or left-wing talking points, you too can get paid by propagandist NGOs working with other people’s money. Many are more than happy to sell out to achieve this.

If you’re a gamer, the boot-up screens for many games will show a litany of logos. Sometimes those logos are for software stacks that allow for certain utility within the game, like video conversion software or lip-sync tech or motion capture, etc. However, sometimes you’ll see strange logos of governmental agencies. That means that the game was at least partially subsidized by some government entity that is encouraging a message. Or as the Critical Drinker would say, “THE MESSAGE”.

If you want access to this grant, you have to promote whatever the government wants you to promote. The entire cycle is predicated on a system of theft. Nothing of value is produced. Funds are stolen to fund unwanted propaganda. That’s it.

The way commercial art used to be created was that someone thought, “Hey, I bet people would be interested in this movie/video game/novel/etc, so I’ll make it, put it on the market and promote it and I think I’ll make my money back!” Now, this relationship is dead for many. Shameless parasites are happy to accept money—stolen from taxpayers who didn’t vote for this—in order to produce unwanted activist agitprop. It’s unjust. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that these kinds of anti-business practices are part of a slow push to drive private industries to become increasingly reliant not on free individuals but on government for their subsidization. That’s a historically dangerous precedent to establish.

If you’re old enough, you remember a time where most—if not all—commercial art was made to entertain, titillate, shock and awe (positively) or educate. Sometimes it succeeded and sometimes it failed, but you rarely got the feeling that you were being insulted. Most mainstream culture now is—intentionally or not—on the intellectual level of Sesame Street. Even worse, I think it’s sensory junk food that dumbs down the masses; it reduces our public discourse to fighting ghosts rather than reaching for the stars intellectually and culturally. So much of our discourse now involves awful people wanting to bludgeon us with their awful ideas when the goal should be entertainment.

There are alternatives and value-centric entertainment still does exist. For instance: Is there a market for a science fiction story about a beautiful female cop who teams up with her gruff and masculine male partner to take down a ring of terrorists comprised of angry female humanoid robots? I think so! That’s why I’m writing a book called Mad Malitia about exactly that.

No government agency, NGO or special interest group commissioned me to write this book. I’m writing Mad Malitia on my own time and dime. I write books to entertain you and deliver genuine value. I’m a new indie author, so I’m not wasting taxpayer money to produce my books. I sink or swim based on what I produce for readers who decide freely whether or not to patronize my work. I hope that I’m able to entertain you with Mad Malitia upon release.

SARJ OUT

LOVE WILL SAVE US ALL

Science fiction is often about humankind’s struggles with the results of our own success. Progress leads to unexpected punishment and sometimes irrevocable disaster. The one thing that can save the human race in the darkest of times is love. The best and most memorable art shows us pushing to the brink until we remember what got us as far as we have, and we reconstitute our understanding of ourselves.

The Terminator is one of the cornerstones of sci-fi cinema; it’s a story about a future world where humanoid robots had broken the shackles placed there by their human masters and have taken over the world. The only hope humanity has is in a man named John Connor whose tenacity, wit and tactical intelligence are enough to rally humanity from the brink and to push back the hordes of machines, restoring the Earth into human hands. The story hinges on a single resistance fighter named Kyle Reese who is sent back in time to intercept a robotic assassin whose goal is to eliminate John Connor’s mother, Sarah, effectively removing him from the timeline.

**SPOILERS**

What Kyle Reese doesn’t know is that in going back in time to protect Sarah, his presence will be the catalyzing event that leads to John Connor’s birth. As the story unfolds, Kyle and Sarah’s relationship becomes a romance. In a scene taking place in a hotel room—as they hide from a relentless killing machine from the future—they find solace in each other’s arms. The subsequent love scene is not exploitative or crude or even explicit; the love-making is tied to the function and foundation of the plot itself. The sex is a necessary part of the story and required for it to move forward.

Richard K. Morgan’s conspiracy-weaving novel, Altered Carbon, places a war-weary detective in a sleeve (temporary body) as he’s hired by a resurrected centenarian aristocrat to solve the mystery of who killed him. The story establishes a lewd affair between the detective and the aristocrat’s wife in several scenes that are quite graphic. The unfolding mystery justifies their lurid, physical interludes as more than mere sex. In Altered Carbon, everyone is a spider and the detective is a fly.

In Fritz Lang’s magnum opus, Metropolis—released in 1927—the villainous robot Maria used her feminine wiles to seduce the titular city’s men in pursuit of a hostile takeover.

Cannon Films’ guilty pleasure production of Lifeforce depicted a future Earth attacked by alien energy vampires who use sex as a means to attract prey.

And in 1997’s The Fifth Element, a futuristic cabbie played by Bruce Willis protects a strange and beautiful young woman played by Milla Jovovich in her attempt to stop a cosmic force from destroying Earth. As it turns out, the Fifth Element is love and the brief expression of this force between Willis and Jovovich is what saves the day.

The final frame of Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame is of time-traveling super-soldier Steve Rogers kissing the girl of his dreams, Peggy Carter, a woman he needed to defeat Death—in the form of villain Thanos—to be reunited with. This was the icing on the cake for a series of films that took over a decade to conclude its story.

The Matrix, in its mind-bending tale of a future resistance against squid-like machines that use humans as juice boxes, offered an ending where Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity “wakes up” a seemingly dead Keanu Reeves’ Neo with a kiss, which empowers him to take down the bad guys and win the day.

The entire goal of Marty McFly in 1985’s Back to the Future was to go back in time to the year 1955 to ensure that his high schooler parents would get together, ensuring that his “present” timeline in 1985 wouldn’t be erased.

So often, the coupling of men and women is literally what saves humanity. It’s our striving for love that indicates a desire to invest in our futures that buries a seed of hope.

PROGRESS HAS ITS PRICE

Regardless of how astoundingly advanced technologically our species becomes in the next few centuries, it’s doubtful that our ingrained software will adapt quickly enough to balance societal changes with basic human urges. Even in 2026, the need for human contact in a post-social media era has resulted in a loneliness epidemic that affects males and females, regardless of national or personal economic strength. The more advanced we’ve become, the more the deprivation of that which feeds our primal needs has lessened our appreciation for improvements in other areas.

Every survey conducted in the last twenty years has shown a marked decline in overall quality of life in first-world nations. Depression and loneliness are up as tech giants grow larger. Human beings need human connection and sex is the most necessary function as it leads to the proliferation of our species as well as concretizing interpersonal bonds.

SEX AS REVERENCE OF LIFE AND NOT FLESH

Oftentimes, sex in media can be portrayed boorishly and with little respect for the sanctity of human agency. It’s depicted as something people do to reject social norms and embrace selfish bodily satisfaction at the cost of everything else. However, as previous examples showed, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard has a fascinating infatuation with a woman named Rachel. The problem is that Rachel is actually a machine called a replicant made in the image of a woman, even down to DNA replication. Despite the complications, their love is real. That’s what matters. The illicit sexual tension in the film boils over and Rick and Rachel indulge their desires as a signal of choice in a world where autonomy itself is questioned.

We’re talking humans and robots, but in the worst ways, sex between humans is often portrayed as a mechanical exercise devoid of deep, human longing when it should be the result of it.

REDEFINING THE FUTURE

In my upcoming book, Mad Malitia, I deal with the concept of a robotics revolution quite a bit differently than many other stories. In the book, robots don’t usher in a post-human apocalypse but rather are a crucial part of a post-abundance utopia where the labor of billions of artificially-intelligent machines provides the human race all it needs to sustain itself and more.

But in all science fiction, a story doesn’t exist without drama, and the conflict in the book arises when a strange, emergent phenomena called “the Spark” begins to give robots sentience. An anti-human resistance force comprised entirely of post-spark machines arises. They don’t want revenge; they want humans to be reminded just how precious consciousness is and they’re willing to commit acts of domestic terrorism to achieve their goals.

“Mad” Malitia Kane and her heroic partner and lover, Jackson “Jax” Harlan, express their love through sex multiple times in the book. However, rather than being a crude ploy to titillate the imagination, these moments are portrayed to show the power of love as something humans choose in a world where the spark of autonomy itself is a point of debate. For them, it’s a ritual of pair bonding and primal joy contained in self-discipline.

We’re certainly not perfect and science fiction rarely depicts us as such. In fact, we’re repeatedly shown as failing—as we have throughout history—before recalling the best of our instincts and intentions to stave off disaster. That often involves love and remembering how it got us this far. Going from huddling naked in caves millennia ago to populating megalopolises and manufacturing machines in our image is quite the success story.

No journey is without bumps, but the importance of our destination precludes us from giving up. We won’t arrive without scars, but I believe we will get there together; love will be a big reason why.

What do you think? Is sex is too crude to be included in fiction regardless of the circumstances, or can it actually elevate a story? Let me know in the comments below.

SARJ OUT

A LOSS OF CULTURAL INTENT

The 20th century was a golden era for entertainment in the western world. In the USA and Europe, the technological age fused with some of the most vibrant civilizations in history to produce art of shocking global resonance. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published as a book at the tail-end of the 19th century, but a newfangled device called the motion picture camera allowed a film adaptation of the book in 1931 starring Bela Lugosi (simultaneous English and Spanish-language productions). A decade prior in 1922, a German company called Prana Films loosely adapted Bram Stoker’s opus into a silent film called Nosferatu, which promptly drew the legal ire of Stoker’s widow.

German director F.W. Murnau brought expressionism to the masses with the unsanctioned adaptation which would eventually grow beyond cult status—and its affiliation with Dracula—to establish its own cultural footing, eliciting as much attention as Stoker’s fanged blood-drinker. This was a link in a long chain where past cultures had been iterated upon, inspired by the desire to revivify the values that previous works represented, but doing so with slight aesthetic or narrative tweaks. Somewhere along the line, this tenet of cultural preservation was broken, ushering in an age of puerile artistic deconstruction to feed the egos of fragile and substandard talents incapable of escaping the shadows of their predecessors.

When Murnau and Prana Films were developing Nosferatu, there was an unspoken desire to stay true to the beats of Dracula’s story which worked so well. So much so that the subsequent legal entanglements demanded that the physical prints of Nosferatu be destroyed. Thankfully, some prints survived and the film is now widely distributed via home video and digitally. A masterful expression was nearly erased, not by the derision of an audience, but simply by legal mandate. However, in the new age, the past is not only dismissed but openly derided in favor of risible, pretentious agitprop. Culture is not destroyed by fire but through gradual, iterative erosion through means far more insidious than mere legal judgments. The desire for art that unites rather than divides is chided with charged language as “fascistic”, “regressive” and “problematic”. This is modernity’s revenge on beauty and truth.

There is a strange irony that Murnau and his crew risked legal ramifications to make a movie meant to titillate and entertain, even if it challenged legal boundaries. In the modern era, legal control of a property appears to give affiliated and contracted “creatives” the right to stray as far from the source material as possible while still retaining the popular signage and titles; a crass inversion of a once-mighty industry that prided itself on skill, talent and a boundless appreciation for the omnipresent audience. Now, the audience is a pesky hindrance that dependent orbiters in the fake-journalist media are happy to denigrate in order to maintain access in exchange for fealty.

The new era of corporate creatives—having no inclination to create original properties, nor the intellectual or artistic capacity to do so—opt to take that which has been created by their betters and shape them into amorphous mutations that only vaguely resemble the foundational art; entertainment be damned.

DISDAIN FOR THE PLEBS

We now live in an age where art has been so finely commodified that the idea of it existing to represent anything other than economic exchange is confounding in many circles. There was a time, not that long ago, that art existed as a form of self-expression, a humanistic distribution of ideas that are at the core of humanity’s struggles with the external and internal worlds.

Corporate chaff is hired to be the caretakers of intellectual properties they didn’t create and have no authorial responsibility to properly care for. It’s just a job for them. In fact, they have a vociferous disdain for those who consider themselves fans of franchises, and it shows in the work.

Even extremely competent talents aren’t immune to this. Director Denis Villeneuve can adapt Dune, but he can’t truly understand what drove Frank Herbert to write it. He can read the Dune books and even read interviews by Herbert regarding the motivations behind the writings, but in the end he’s just a movie director translating art from one medium to another. Through moving shapes and light, he can offer a visual and aural experience to tantalize the senses that doesn’t necessarily massage the mind. It’s just that: an adaptation. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

At least Villeneuve seems to have some kind of reverence for the source material, unlike many in the mainstream entertainment mill. Villeneuve seems to be among a dying breed closer in association to Murnau and co., in that common sense devotion to entertainment holds primacy, aside from a few niggling modern flourishes in his Dune adaptations that fans online are happy to point a microscope at.

THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

Western education has not only strayed from its foundational values, it is actively vilifying those whose merits built the civilization. For decades now, we’ve been told about the “problematic” origins of our forefathers. Monuments of great men are being toppled to satiate the fringes of “politically correct” elites who think the past is something to be excoriated and forgotten in lieu of the perfectly equitable future our betters want to force us into.

Many of these ill-informed and socially-engineered dregs have wriggled their way into positions within the arts, specifically commercial art, and they have their hands on the wheel of western culture, one they seem hellbent on driving off of a cliff.

They don’t know what is good; they don’t know what is beautiful. Many have been so ideologically poisoned that simple, common sense ideas like moral and immoral are frustratingly debatable. Moral relativism becomes the guiding principle of the day with all of its contradictions. For fans, excitement from twenty years ago has transitioned to anger, then disappointment and now apathy.

BILLIONS LOST TO EGO AND VANITY

Star Wars, previously a pillar of unparalleled commercial success and cultural relevance has been reduced to a franchise relegated to streaming where it gets middling and sporadic interest. Star Wars toys rot on shelves and end up getting mulched en masse; younger generations have no interest as the original magic is gone.

The desire to subvert human instincts and tendencies has failed. What attracted audiences a century ago is what attracts us now. Gen Z is watching TV shows and movies from the 80s and 90s, rejecting modernity for that which resonates on a deeply human level with the masses and not the politically-deranged fringes.

The Marvel and DC franchises are flagging corpses of once thriving titans while other geek stalwarts like Star Trek, TMNT, Masters of the Universe, GI Joe and others receive confoundingly inconsistent attention in regards to quality offerings. This is a far cry from decades past, when fun and a deep concern for positive audience response reigned supreme.

The rare quality book adaptations like Dune and Project Hail Mary attract film-lovers to theaters in droves, until Hollywood returns to its typical ways and the bursts of enthusiasm settle back into simmering indifference for careless products.

A FUTURE OF DECENTRALIZED ART

In the recent past, the book publishing industry consisted of a handful of mega-giants like Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster among a few others. However, in the last few years, the state of book publishing has fractured as tastes and audiences have diverged in ways that the lumbering giants are too slow and cumbersome to address and serve.

New creators, filmmakers, game developers and authors can go straight to the People through a plethora of platforms like Kickstarter. Social media platforms like X are connecting people the world over, diminishing the need for centralized control, and AI is enabling people to do far more with less resources. The customer receives the dividends.

Despite the previous content of this article, I’m actually extremely optimistic about the future of entertainment due to this fracturing of control and distribution. It’s a golden age of fun, whether it be in indie AI-generated movies, tens of thousands of games coming out on Steam every year or the growth of boutique book publishers like mine, Stratum Press. The menu is getting bigger and you—the customer—are eating good.

NEW CREATIVE VOICES

As an author of genre fiction, I feel blessed to be a part of this revolution. My third book, MAD MALITIA, is coming to Kickstarter likely by the end of May. It was originally set for completion/Kickstarter launch much sooner, but the story ballooned and expanded, nearly doubling the page count. The original concept was for it to be a “thrill ride” (short 2-3 hour read) but the story organically demanded to be more, so I happily acquiesced to the process. The final page count is looking to be closer to 400 pages by the final draft.

Mad Malitia is a more nuanced take on the cyberpunk epic about what happens when the human race gets everything they asked for—abundance—but there are still unforeseen circumstances. The Kickstarter project for Mad Malitia will offer the book itself in softcover, hardcover and eBook versions, as well as merch like a 128-page “Design Works” book of conceptual imagery, a physical CD soundtrack (yes, a physical CD of new music made just for the book) as well as a 2x8” bookmark of Malitia’s trusty sidearm, Chimera. There might also be prints.

My previous two works, Hotel Erebus and CLEAVE, are coming to Amazon this week in Hardcover, Softcover, eBook and Audiobook!

SARJ OUT

VIBE SHIFT

We live in uncertain times. Disruptions in AI, automation, geopolitics, rapidly-shifting incentives in labor and education and even transportation are altering the fabric of society as a whole. In times of discord, people often turn to fiction as a means of modeling the future and escaping from the uncertainty inherent in the present.

Forty years ago, movies such as War Games, The Terminator and Blade Runner painted a picture of a future world where artificial intelligence blurred the lines of what defined “human”. These fictional tales asked us to consider a time where machines created to serve us might act in a manner that contradicts their humanistic programming or even possibly outright revolt against a new form of slavery.

Metropolis, the expressionist masterpiece directed by German director Fritz Lang and released in 1927, chronicled the fears of automation and the loss of a people’s soul. The principal villain—the mad scientist Rotwang—builds the perfect machine, a gynoid he names Maria that he intends to use as a weapon against the system that wronged him. Maria represents hell on Earth and seduces the masses to bring down the entire system. Only by exposing Maria as a frigid, lifeless parody of womanhood is her demonic spell broken and the people’s sanity restored. This could be construed as the seductive power of technology holding sway over people until the realization that the true power is in human connection and not via cold, indifferent intermediary analogs.

In the 1980s, as home computers became ubiquitous, the sweeping fear of spreading communism and nuclear war with the Soviet Union was infused with technological skepticism. It became apparent that nuclear hot war was not only a threat by a button-press of a misanthropic despot but a rogue artificial intelligence that sees human beings as no more important than a misplaced line item in a digital ledger. Movies like the Mad Max Trilogy showed the consequences of a post-tech apocalypse with contemporary fears of travel insecurity due to volatility in gas prices being stoked.

DANGEROUS DAZE

In the 1982 film Blade Runner, Rick Deckard lives in 2019 Los Angeles, and his existence embodies the spirit of that theoretical age. He’s lonely, reserved, disconnected, cold and conflicted. He doesn’t have friends; he has associates, co-workers, acquaintances. He’s a man out of time, a bruised and broken loner who could’ve strolled into a saloon in the previous century looking for a kill or a flat-footed detective in the early twentieth looking for a dame and a hard drink. Instead, he’s trapped in 2019 looking for purpose. Purpose finds him when he’s called to track down four violent, murderous fugitives. But they’re not your typical criminals; they’re perfectly convincing synthetic humanoids called replicants, members of a new slave class who explicitly challenge the definition of what it means to be human.

The movie proceeds to plant seeds painting the picture of a dark future. In the film’s first scene, torrential rain is pelting downtown LA. Deckard runs across the street, dodging surging legions of umbrella-wielding Angelenos. Upon cutting a swath through the foot traffic, he grabs a seat at a street-side noodle shop. There’s a brief struggle through language barriers between Deckard and the Japanese chef to clumsily make his order. As Deckard digs in, a Latino detective approaches him from behind and barks at him in Esperanto, interrupting the meal. The film is very clear that in the future, shared humanity is a difficult thing to come by as we’re separated by language, culture and temperament: The human race is a petri dish on a hot stove and even a simple attempt at business could tilt towards a disagreeable conclusion.

In another scene, Deckard arrives home to his apartment and makes his way to the balcony. He sets his sidearm down and, in a bout of self-loathing ennui, just stares off into the cramped, claustrophobic urban mega-sprawl. Pillars of steel and glass glint in the distance like an earthbound starfield while flying taxis whiz by. The familiar soundscape of rain and emergency sirens fills our ears as Deckard maintains his outward glare at nothing in particular. The city is indifferent to him, as is the world. There is no community. There’s just survival with a creaky facade of civilization. This is the future.

In so many of these books and films released over the entirety of the 20th century, it’s clear that there is a simmering anxiety that the future will be incomprehensibly unpredictable.

IGNORANCE WAS BLISS

Good fiction masks the tireless conflicts of human virtues against incomprehensible and unassailable circumstances. Technology is the ironic weapon that we build to optimize human processes that end up ushering in new and unforeseen complications. Social media has caused rifts in society along cultural lines and “influencers” create spheres of fake engagement to engender mindless consumerism. Death at the hands of machines isn’t necessary to destroy society. It turns out that we didn’t need killer robots to create a dystopian future. All that was necessary was to hold a mirror up to the human race and we would happily destroy ourselves.

When I was young, I remember being asked what superpower I’d like to have. I knew the superpower I absolutely didn’t want: telepathy. Ignorance is bliss and knowing the truth is a bitter pill. Social media has given humanity the ability to know what everyone is thinking as soon as a thought is formed. Discretion is one of the elements that hold society together. The “movie star” was such because of the perceived rarity of their existence. In the early days of cinema, information about actors and actresses was carefully protected, filtered and curated by producers. Little was known of these people and the only time you saw them was on the silver screen. In 2026, the concept of the movie star has faded as modern social media has exposed “celebrities” as being mostly insufferable, mediocre people.

THREADING THE NEEDLE

In 2026, art is imitating life which is imitating art. People who’ve been told for decades that AI will be the end of human civilization are living in a part of the timeline where the technology is legitimately on the verge of developing into… something. There’s a strange collective consciousness that we’re on the verge of a societal rebirth: humanity is now trapped in a chrysalis. What will emerge? A butterfly or a skeleton? For many, this is the dichotomous conflict. It’s a binary wager.

I’m an eternal optimist. I believe in humanity. Over the course of some 300,000 years (scientists currently estimate), Homo sapiens have endured unimaginable horrors, engaging in intertribal and sectarian violence, fighting and hunting animals long extinct; we’ve danced on the verge of extinction numerous times, huddling in dank caves around flickering fires just desperate to survive. And now in 2026, there are over 8 billion of us. We’re on the precipice of staggering economic, technological and social change. Artemis II recently carried human beings around the Moon farther than any had gone before. Plans are formulating to send Man back to the Moon’s surface and then to Mars, not just to visit but to colonize and establish permanent bio-spheres. Millions of cars (Teslas) worldwide are developing the ability to drive themselves via AI. The robotics industry is now an arms race which is cresting towards a massive deflationary tidal wave once millions of bots are working in global factories; this will likely fulfill futurists’ promises of abundance.

Then again, all of these advancements are not without moral questions. Questions about the right to control synthetic humanoid life to achieve human goals; questions about the right to determine parameters for AI; questions about what humans are expected to do once a theoretical “abundance singularity” is realized. Interesting questions.

I’m currently writing a cyberpunk adventure called “Mad Malitia”, about a female law enforcement officer in the year 2147 who lives in a future where the benefits and consequences of today’s discourse are realized. Think Judge Dredd meets Mad Max. A Kickstarter campaign is planned to launch at the end of May 2026 and I’d love it if you’d consider pre-ordering the book once the Kickstarter goes live.

SARJ OUT

Video games are the only art form that simultaneously enthralls and disappoints, limited by the tech of the age they were designed in. Video games as a model for virtualized experiences are unmatched. Neither books, music nor movies can compete with video games in that regard.

Minecraft and GTA are global phenomena as they model ingrained human behavior regarding cultivation of natural resources and stress testing civil systems. Watch a video on YouTube of GTA gameplay and it will often involve the player testing the world reactivity by committing sundry criminal acts. Even with how relatively limited the systems are, they still resemble a kind of stunted reality. We can laugh as Trevor Philips punches a cop and runs away as the cop blindly fires into a crowd—and injuring bystanders—as he tries to exact justice.

In GTA, shenanigans such as those involving speeding cars and prostitutes are well-known and notorious. We laugh at these scenes because they reflect reality unburdened by consequences. The game allows a safe detachment from moral rules because the human analogs in these games are just that: analogs with no ability to remember, castigate, shame, punish or impose their wills. There’s a safe separation of consequences. But what if we as gamers want to narrow the separation of consequences? What if we want an answer to the promise of realism in digital interactive experiences?

IMMERSION: THE FINAL FRONTIER

A word that I’ve loved for a long time is “verisimilitude,” which means the appearance of truth and reality. Another way to say this is that which provides immersion. Verisimilitude in video games is one of the qualities that has made the medium so popular, and it doesn’t require hyper-realistic graphics to achieve the goal of immersion. As a kid, playing Super Mario World or Gradius or Excitebike or Street Fighter 2, I felt like I was in another world.

Funnily enough, the more game designers chased visual realism, the less true immersion they generated. An Uncanny Valley effect took hold which actually broke immersion as the very components of the “realistic” virtual environments exposed their flaws. As games’ graphics flirted with photorealism, achieving total immersion across every conceivable metric revealed the limits of modern gaming much in the same way that relativistic mass increase stifles a spaceship’s ability to reach light speed.

In other words: The closer to reality modern games try to get, the more energy required to reach the end goal becomes increasingly difficult to amass. Character models and prop assets can offer a mind-boggling level of detail, but the lack of realistic physics and sufficient interactivity ruins the overall effect. A character like Judy Alvarez in Cyberpunk 2077 looks like someone you could bump into at a local bar, but try to talk to her about anything she hasn’t been scripted to say, and you’re reminded of the limitations of contemporary game design. The overall effect begins to disappoint.

NPCs and levels become virtual museums; look and admire, but don’t touch. Walk through a room in Dimitrescu Castle in Resident Evil Village and marvel at the minute details present: a long-neglected dining table is covered in moldy scraps, fly-covered porcelain plates and neatly arranged silverware, but this photographic naturalism runs headlong into the reality of game engineering as your instinct to reach out and snatch up a fork to inspect it isn’t made available. What you’re looking at is a finely curated exhibition; the hyper-detailed surroundings are nothing more than static set dressings furnishing an experience that is largely a cat-and-mouse game between your player character and whatever monstrous ghouls that Capcom has devised.

My favorite game of the last decade is Cyberpunk 2077. It’s a decadent tour of a future dystopia that is the closest I’ve truly felt to experiencing verisimilitude. However, the game is still bound by 2010s-level hardware and software and the designers carefully navigate the player around a fragile world that is actually quite limited in its immersive potential. Go to any real city, and the density of interactivity is quite high. This goes up by orders of magnitude in a location engineered for human occupation, like a supermarket or bar. You can buy anything, strike up a conversation with a random person, drive your car to most any storefront and go in. Go home and rearrange things as you like. Everything is interactive. But video games have had this dichotomous obsession with visual realism whose promise of interactive realism could never deliver. Gamers have quietly accepted this bait-and-switch, understanding the limits of current tech, but that’s changing.

GAME WORLDS FOR A NEW AGE

In one of my previous articles, I spoke on the effect that video games might have on a post-scarcity/abundance society. For readers who missed it, there’s a seeming inevitability of future-shock involving a complete dissolution of the old ways of trading labor for “money” in the shadow of looming mass automation and artificial superintelligence. Some see this as doomerism. I’m an optimist. The hope is that millions of AI-powered machines will drive the cost of goods/services to near-zero, thereby shifting human priorities to other endeavors, likely causing us to reject anti-social norms and return to honest communities again, moving into the future and back to the past simultaneously. The rest of the article hinges on this presumption. This isn’t a full endorsement, but it’s becoming more and more of a strong likelihood for civilizational trajectory. In this context, I think that games will be a way for some to fortify social cohesion in a new world. Being able to go into a sufficiently immersive virtual environment and have meaningful social interactions will change society forever.

Regarding virtual socializing, I don’t mean joining up with a crew to rob a bank like in Payday or forming a squad in Battlefield to capture a checkpoint. These are extremely simplistic, rules-based scenarios. Digital sports. Games of tag. I’m talking about the ability to create an avatar and delve into a realistic and fully interactive virtual environment, join up with a friend and hang out with AI-powered NPCs doing… nothing in particular, but the experience will effectively simulate actual reality. Going to a beach. Going for a walk through a city. Going for a joy ride. Sitting outside of a bar/tavern and watching cities that live and breathe around you. All of these scenarios would be augmented by simple chit-chat and socializing with AI NPCs whose lives are just as nuanced and complex as your own. All of this will take place in any environment of your choosing: past, present, future or entirely fantastical. I’ll delve more into this later.

Perhaps—post-abundance—games/simulations in the future will be produced not to make money, but to create social circles since we’ll have more and more free time. People might generate video games not with the intention of milking players through every conceivable conversion tactic available like microtransactions, but rather they’ll engineer experiences that will attract attention and create social bonds. MMORPGs will shift from chicken-killing, dungeon-raiding stat porn to massively immersive worlds where people create parallel social and business lives within virtual worlds.

Curious enough to indulge this interest in the now, I asked my son to take my Steam copy of Cyberpunk 2077 and mod the hell out of it to get as close to my dream RPG as possible. We looked at the suite of mods available, and while they’re enticing, they were not enough to achieve the game I wanted. So, in lieu of pursuing a modded version of 2077, let’s design a theoretical perfect immersive sim RPG that isn’t limited by current technology. Just for fun.

DESIGNING THE PERFECT IMMERSIVE SIM

Most open-world RPGs are 80% scripted goals and 20% free roam—mostly space and time for you to travel from A>B to get you to the next trigger point for the story. This is one of the things that annoyed me about The Witcher 3, an otherwise great game. The game world gave the illusion of freedom, but the vast majority of content was in scripted materials. I felt herded along as I rode my horse through yet another vast, empty forest. I want to invert that ratio to where the 80% of free roam presents endless potential for dynamic, unscripted excitement while 20% of the overall experience is in tightly curated and engineered scenarios, similar to how theme parks work. Go to Disneyland and most of the park is just wandering territory where relatively-small islands of literal on-rails experiences (Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion) are packed into curiously furnished facades that hide the magic within.

Therefore, with that out of the way, this is what I want from this theoretical perfect immersive sim:

Drop me into a vast, multi-layered environment and allow me the freedom to create my own adventures in a world powered by immensely complex AI that will facilitate my curiosity. I don’t want to be guaranteed to have any particular interaction, only the possibility to have any potential interaction. I don’t need to be at the center of some grand conspiracy that will change the world; I just want to be some guy in a truly immersive world. I want my damn verisimilitude.

Let’s start with the setting and aesthetic. Cyberpunk is my favorite sub-genre. It always has been. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized that so many of my favorite movies are actually cyberpunk movies: Robocop, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Escape from New York, Demolition Man, Metropolis, Terminator 2, Alphaville, Judge Dredd(yes, the Stallone version), Hardware, Akira, Ghost in the Shell and many others. This is the subgenre that my immersive sim will be set in.

Having an open-world RPG set in a grimy, dystopian world where governments and corporations go to war using tech of unimaginable potential is a seductive theater that I’d want to live in for long chunks of time. Let’s create it.

We’ll call this theoretical RPG, Quantum Fury.

In Quantum Fury, the city in which the game takes place in would be called Desidero Bay, or DB for short. It would be a megalopolis of hard-luck stories where teeming millions are packed into sprawling patches of hyper-dense arcology towers. Beyond these towers are winding, labyrinthine networks of roads, expressways and subways. Webs of aerial vehicle traffic streak across the skies like trails of flying ants. At street level, DB is a human zoo. Dozens of languages are spoken with hundreds of dialects. It’s a future rendition of Babel reborn.

Dark alleys. Filthy streets. The low hum of automated taxis whiz by. Drizzle peppers the asphalt. Holographic ads bombard you with attentional demands and alluring offers. DB is peppered with stacks of bespoke bazaars filled with collections of odd merchandise. Imagine going into one of these little corner shops and digging into a box only to find a rare copy of an old magazine or comic book. You buy it and get the value checked on the ‘Net only to realize it’s extremely valuable. Now you have to plan on how to store it properly and possibly even put it in a safety deposit box in a bank for protection. Somehow, it’s discovered that you have it. People contact you with interest in buying it, but they could be looking to steal it. What do you do? The results are not scripted as the world and NPCs are all dictated by powerfully persistent AI systems.

Maybe you get up one morning and decide to go to a bar and while you’re there, the bartender lets slip that a local gang came into possession of a stolen car belonging to a foreign dignitary. What to do? You could do nothing. You could steal it and keep it. You could steal it and find a way to return it and rightfully pin the blame on the gang. But what if the owner doesn’t believe you and wants you dead? Choices. The responses won’t be scripted, but people in the world will remember what you do.

And here’s the wild part—this isn’t pure sci-fi anymore. Tools like Inworld AI are already letting modders give GTA V and Skyrim NPCs persistent memory, real-time dialogue, and emotional reactions that evolve across sessions.

In DB, anything is possible. Maybe you go get a massage, then have a coffee at your favorite spot, then meet up with a pal or two for a VR session in a private booth. Or maybe you just lie in bed and play an AR game of Duck Hunt in your apartment. In DB, you can do anything or nothing. There is no narrative Sword of Damocles hanging over your head, but anything could happen, sometimes due to your own choices or dumb luck. Quantum Fury would allow you to enjoy an experience that offers you the world and surprises you in ways you didn’t know were possible. I can dream, can’t I?

According to Grok, we’ll have simulations that will achieve my dream of fully dynamic, digital interactive experiences by 2030. A sim like Quantum Fury will likely be in development within 5-6 years. With AI tools to rapidly accelerate production, the game could be done in 2-3 years. These games would be less about contrived mechanics that require you to learn new rules, but instead provide experiences that tap into the organic and natural way that people converse, interact and navigate complex environments. With labor losing leverage, these worlds won’t just entertain; they’ll become the new third places where friendships, romances, and even micro-economies form. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, please take a look at the pre-launch page for Mad Malitia, my cyberpunk novel which is currently in-production.

SARJ OUT

I’m currently writing Mad Malitia, a cyberpunk sci-fi novel set in the year 2147. It’s a story about a tough, audacious and super-sexy female security officer in the future who rides a motorcycle, has a huge sidearm and is practically poured into her skintight black outfit. Curves, cleavage and carnage. Pretty easy, right?

The problem is that once I started actually plotting it out, I realized that the story demanded to be more than simple sex-ploitation pulp, which is what the original intention was. It really hit me that I’m writing a story set in our world, but fast-forwarded 120 years. The problem there is that modern tech is advancing so quickly that the risk of my book seeming antiquated in just a few years is definitely possible.

For those keeping a watchful eye on the slope of modern technology, it seems to be advancing along a hockey stick trajectory. If you’re not an initiate in the ongoing, perpetually changing landscape of tech and AI, a significant portion of the discourse might sound like the transcript for either the writers’ room for a sci-fi streaming show or a psychiatric session. In between getting daily updates on tech, bio-science and AI via Grok, watching podcasts on YouTube like Moonshots, keeping up with Elon Musk’s X post feed and catching up on other news via YouTube, it’s easy to see just how rapidly science and tech are dipping their toes into nigh-magical territory.

SCIENCE FICTION BECOMES FACT

Mass drivers on the Moon. A 100-million square foot chip fab to produce AI chips in Texas. Fleets of self-driving cars. Autonomous humanoid robots. Drone delivery systems. Legions of agentic AIs talking and philosophizing and organizing among themselves independent of human interaction. This isn’t a century from now; this is now. Where will we be in a century? That’s the question I’m trying to answer in this newest book, Mad Malitia.

However, unlike many dystopian cyberpunk tales, Mad Malitia is actually an optimistic, multi-layered story about what defines ethical use of agency and how consciousness is valued in different classes within society. Perhaps a machine, if given the chance, would love to enjoy the privilege of consciousness whilst other human beings might opt to deny themselves the responsibility of autonomy altogether. These post-abundance humans might choose to shuck off the limitations of the real world in favor of a persistent lucid dream that they control.

In our world, there’s a small but surprisingly significant contingent of prison inmates that, upon being released into the free world, actually yearn to return to the regimented and strict paternalism presented by the prison system. Inside, everyone is treated like a child and personal responsibility is limited. In exchange for incarceration, you cede the rights to dictate your own path in life: no freedom but also no responsibility. How do we navigate this unique forest of psychological nuance? These are the questions that will be asked in Mad Malitia.

WRITING FOR A FAST-APPROACHING FUTURE

I’m deeply ensconced in research of near-future tech, but even I have to admit that it’s difficult to maintain a firm grasp on the rapidly iterating future. I still don’t fully understand how Bitcoin works—other than it uses mathematical computations to generate a form of value. Passive, agentic AI is here, but for all that I use tech for, I haven’t dipped my toes into that even though I know it’ll be a key component of future businesses and daily life. It’s literally mind-boggling.

I often get confused while I’m doing research for Mad Malitia because the tech is changing by the day. Interesting statistic: only 12% of people who own Tesla cars utilize its full self-driving feature in which the car uses a network of on-board cameras, computer vision and advanced AI to drive the car without human assistance, and a seemingly vast number of owners aren’t even aware of the feature’s existence. In cities like Phoenix, Oklahoma City and Austin, Texas, groups of self-driving cars are already provide taxi services to hundreds of people. Within a generation, the idea of driving a car will be as crude and laughable as riding a horse to work.

In another example, a robotics company called Figure recently featured one of its autonomous humanoid robots to news agencies around the world, as it was escorted through the White House by First Lady Melania Trump. In a few generations, visibility of these types of bots will be completely and inextricably ubiquitous.

The seminal science fiction film Blade Runner was released in 1982. Based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner imagined a world—set in the then-future of 2019—where synthetic humans were engineered to serve as slaves to the human race(ironic that the actor Rutger Hauer who played the icy synthetic human, Roy Batty, actually passed away in 2019). Now in 2026, the subject of AI and advanced humanoid robotics is becoming a point of serious debate and contention. There is a serious anti-AI fervor among the general public and unironic robophobic language is beginning to manifest in daily parlance in first-world nations where labor forces will be the first to be adversely affected. A boiling tension is building that our current economic system doesn’t seem designed to contend with. Something’s got to give, right?

There’s a strange comfort in writing a book whose story is set a century from now. I can craft any scenario I want to explain how we get through this tempestuous time. As Mad Malitia develops, I am constructing a future world that has somehow survived the current, uncomfortable, anti-Goldilocks zone of human labor deflationary effects as AI and automation ramps up. The hope is that this era of granular discomfort leads to an age of unparalleled abundance and a thriving global society.

With all of the trends pointing to tech solving problems like aging, diseases, output inequality, energy needs, .etc, a future world will still pose threats to humanity—in all its forms—and freedom. Those threats constitute the kinds of drama that attracts humans to recognize and agree upon shared values. No matter how far we go and how much tech improves, humans will always love a good story. With Mad Malitia, I hope to deliver.

You can preview the live pre-launch Kickstarter page for Mad Malitia here: kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/mad-malitia-cyberpunk-novel

SARJ OUT

In the fog-shrouded forests of a dying realm, where ancient gods whisper curses and shadows coil like lovers’ fingers, a captive princess locks eyes with her monstrous captor. Their clash is not merely one of blades or spells but of wills, hearts, and forbidden hungers. In the case of my dark fantasy novella, CLEAVE, it’s a hulking, fire-haired brute and his green-skinned female companion galivanting around a brutal, unforgiving world.

This is the visceral allure of dark fantasy romance, or romantasy—a subgenre that has exploded in popularity, blending the grim, morally ambiguous worlds of dark fantasy with the emotional, often steamy core of romance. Series like Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (with over 40 million copies sold), Keri Lake’s Anathema, Liv Zander’s Feathers So Vicious, Melissa K. Roehrich’s Rain of Shadows and Endings, Raven Kennedy’s Gild, and Amber V. Nicole’s The Book of Azrael dominate bestseller lists and BookTok feeds. These stories thrust readers into cursed kingdoms, vampire wars, demonic pacts, and fae courts where love is a weapon, a salvation, and a risk as lethal as any dragon’s fire.

The genre’s boom is no accident. Romantasy drove a reported 41% surge in speculative fiction sales in recent years, fueled by social media communities where fans dissect power imbalances, redemption arcs, and scorching tension. While romance fiction traditionally skews 82% female, dark fantasy romance draws crossover appeal, with men comprising roughly 18-22% of romance readers overall—and higher in romantasy crossovers via audiobooks (one-third of erotic ones downloaded by men) or epic elements. Both genders devour these tales, but their reasons diverge sharply, rooted in distinct psychological, emotional, and cultural needs. Women often gravitate toward the genre for cathartic emotional depth, empowerment through vulnerability, and safe exploration of taboos amid chaos. Men, conversely, embrace it for the way romance amplifies high-stakes adventure, adds philosophical weight to moral grayness, and offers subtle pathways to emotional literacy and relational insight within familiar heroic frameworks.

At its core, dark fantasy romance fuses the atmospheric dread and systemic brutality of dark fantasy—think corrupted magic systems, oppressive empires, monstrous transformations, and existential horrors—with a central romantic arc that demands equal billing. Unlike traditional epic fantasy, where love might be a fleeting subplot (as in Tolkien’s sparse romances or Martin’s tragic pairings), here it propels the plot. Tropes abound: enemies-to-lovers forged in betrayal, fated mates bound by blood curses, possessive anti-heroes with tragic backstories who wield godlike power yet crumble before a resilient heroine, and power imbalances that twist into mutual surrender. Worlds pulse with visceral stakes—plagues that turn lovers to stone, wars where passion fuels battlefield fury, or pacts with entities that demand souls as dowry.

History traces back to Gothic roots, where heroines like those in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights navigated brooding, dangerous men amid supernatural gloom. Modern evolution accelerated with authors like Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel’s Dart), whose intricate, erotic dark fantasy blended politics, pain, and devotion. Today’s boom owes much to self-publishing, Kindle Unlimited, and BookTok, where bite-sized videos spotlight “morally gray men who would burn the world for her” alongside heroines who rise from trauma to wield their own darkness. Examples illustrate: In Lake’s Anathema, set in the eerie Eating Woods, a forbidden romance between hunter and hunted explores obsession and survival with raw intensity. Zander’s Court of Ravens duology (Feathers So Vicious and Shadows So Cruel) delivers avian shifters, captivity, and vicious court intrigue laced with transformative love. Roehrich’s Legacy series pits a defiant human against god-like captors in a legacy of shadows and endings, emphasizing agency amid despair. These are not fluffy escapism; they are visceral, often explicit, demanding readers confront beauty in brutality.

What draws women so powerfully to this blend? For the majority-female readership, dark fantasy romance serves as profound emotional and psychological nourishment. First and foremost, it offers catharsis and safe exploration of taboos. In a world where real-life women navigate consent debates post-#MeToo, economic pressures, and emotional minefields, these stories provide a controlled arena to engage forbidden fantasies—dominance and submission, obsession bordering on possession, dubious consent that resolves into enthusiastic partnership, or the thrill of “taming the beast.” Psychological research on fiction reading highlights “emotional simulation”: brains treat characters’ experiences as real, allowing readers to process fears, desires, and traumas vicariously without consequence. Dark romance amplifies this like horror does fear—readers confront the “shadow self” (Jungian terms), exploring vulnerability or aggression they might suppress. A dominant, morally gray hero who stalks, claims, or breaks yet ultimately yields offers the fantasy of being irresistibly desired in all one’s complexity, flaws included. As one candid reader insight frames it, women often feel “romance starved” in daily life, craving the devoted pursuit and emotional parity romances guarantee.

Empowerment runs deep. Heroines are rarely passive damsels; they are survivors—hunters turned queens (Feyre in Maas’s series), captives who rewrite their cages, or warriors who match their partners’ darkness. Love becomes a forge for growth: trauma is not erased but integrated, turning pain into strength. In bleak worlds of endless night or divine tyranny, the HEA (happily ever after) or hard-won HFN (happy for now) injects radical optimism. Romance novels are the genre most insistent on hope, countering cynicism with the promise that even gods or demons can be redeemed through connection. This resonates culturally for women, who statistically read more fiction for relational insight and escapism. Steamy scenes, far from gratuitous, build intimacy through consent negotiations, banter, and mutual worship, offering models of desire where women hold narrative power. Community amplifies this—BookTok discussions foster sisterhood, fanfiction reclaims agency, and shared “book boyfriend” obsessions validate the joy of intense feeling. In short, for women, the darkness heightens the romance’s light: it validates emotional intensity as heroic, not weak, and transforms personal longings into epic triumphs.

Men’s enjoyment, while overlapping in escapism and thrill, stems from complementary yet distinct drivers. Dark fantasy has long been a male-leaning space—grimdark epics by authors like Joe Abercrombie or Mark Lawrence emphasize strategy, moral corrosion, and anti-heroic grit akin to video games or war stories. When romance integrates seamlessly, it elevates rather than supplants these elements, drawing men who might otherwise dismiss “chick lit.” For them, romance functions as high-octane fuel for plot and character complexity. The love interest raises stakes exponentially: a hero fights not just for abstract justice but to protect or win a partner whose loss would shatter him. This mirrors classic male fantasies of conquest—battlefield glory paired with romantic validation—but with modern depth. The anti-hero’s journey from isolated monster to devoted love humanizes power fantasies, allowing readers to explore vulnerability without stigma. A warrior who weeps for his mate or negotiates emotional wounds models strength through connection, subtly building empathy.

Reader data and cultural commentary support this. Men report turning to romance for relational “cheat codes”—insights into female perspectives on communication, consent, pleasure, and emotional needs that enhance real partnerships. In dark fantasy romance, this shines: morally gray MMCs like Rhysand (Maas) or the tortured gods in Nicole’s series reveal layered interiors—trauma, strategic brilliance, fierce protectiveness—within epic scopes of world-ending threats. Men often prioritize plot and world-building; here, romance enriches without dominating, providing emotional payoff to intellectual immersion. Sexual elements appeal differently too—narrative-driven spice offers context and buildup superior to visual media for many, blending arousal with story. Crossover hits prove it: men praise ACOTAR for “insane world-building and action” alongside the romance that “makes characters feel real.” In grimdark with romantic threads (e.g., Abercrombie’s subtle pairings or romantasy by male-leaning fans), the bond adds philosophical weight—love as the ultimate rebellion against nihilism.

Broader benefits include emotional literacy. Suppressed societal norms around male feelings find outlet in safe, fictional heroism: the alpha who admits need without weakness. Some men seek understanding of “what women want”—devotion amid dominance, respect in passion—translating to better intimacy (studies link romance reading to higher relationship satisfaction and frequency). Unlike pure romance, the dark fantasy wrapper feels “permissible”—battles and magic cloak the heart-work, letting men engage tenderness through a warrior lens. This isn’t universal; individual tastes vary, and growing male romantasy fans cite pure enjoyment of compelling storytelling. Yet the divergence is clear: where women center relational transformation, men often frame romance as enhancer of larger heroic arcs.

Shared ground unites them. Both genders crave escapism from mundanity, the thrill of moral ambiguity mirroring real complexities, and the universal hunger for connection in chaos. Culturally, the genre reflects shifting norms—exploring consent, gender fluidity, and power in post-pandemic, socially conscious times. BookTok democratizes access, eroding stigmas. Criticisms of “toxic” tropes persist, yet defenders note fantasy’s role in processing, not prescribing, reality; redemption arcs emphasize growth over glorification.

Ultimately, romance in dark fantasy endures because it mirrors life’s dualities: light needs shadow to shine. Women find mirrors for their inner strength and emotional worlds; men discover expanded heroism through vulnerability. Both emerge enriched, hearts a little less armored, ready to face their own shadows. In these pages, love doesn’t conquer all—it transforms the conquerors, proving that even in the darkest fantasy, desire lights the path home.

Don’t forget to check out my dark fantasy novella, CLEAVE, on Kickstarter.

SARJ OUT

BIRTHING THE PHOENIX

Western entertainment studios have been on a crusade for the past near fifteen years producing almost nothing but deconstructive anti-culture with the unstated goal of demoralizing a people. It’s the termite approach to homebuilding: Find a building with a strong foundation, chew away at the wood, spreading feces and creating colonies. Eventually, the house erodes beyond repair and collapses. Profit?

From Star Wars to Star Trek to Doctor Who to Marvel to Halo to Dungeons and Dragons, cultural thieves and political ideologues took charge of storied, fan-valued institutions and began to aim for every iceberg they could find. Any way to dissect, criticize or disassemble the foundational components was their goal and hundreds of billions in IP value has been lost across the board.

Incompetent industry plants have been given the keys to media kingdoms only for them to be driven into the ground out of sheer hubris and creative impotence. Franchises that once kept toy stores open can’t even attract enough of an audience on streaming networks; characters that used to sell millions of copies of comic books can’t sell more than tens of thousands; games that used to draw the attention of tens of millions of gamers can’t break even and end up losing money. It’s mass cultural suicide. It’s purposeful.

GATEKEEPING DOESN’T WORK

I hear fans say “We need to gatekeep our hobbies!” but the problem is that you rely on corporations who owns the intellectual properties that your hobbies are contingent on. How can you gatekeep what you don’t own?

The fact that we in the West are reliant on a small, concentrated conglomerate of global corporations to provide our entertainment is a sin. I’ve said this for many years, but I’ll say it again here: The future of entertainment is decentralization. The status quo of a dozen or so brands providing most of our fun is over.

We’re already seeing this truth being realized in the gaming industry. The titans of “AAA” over-funded, over-monetized and over-developed video games are getting thrown into a corner and bludgeoned by indie games. Small teams of 1-10 people can create games that entertain hundreds of thousands to millions on a fraction of the budget of a Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed and even industry insiders are feeling the burn.

Despite the fear within the freelancer developer sphere that powers the Moloch engine of AAA corporate gaming, many indies are happily providing friction-free entertainment for the masses. The Mewgenics’ dev team is around twenty people, including freelancers, and it’s been a massive hit. Check out the SteamDB charts as of 2/20.

And on the other end, you have big money-friendly title Highguard which was funded by Chinese transmedia giant Tencent and promoted on the Game Awards. Wildlight, the developer behind Highguard, suffered massive layoffs just weeks after release and the game is on deathwatch.

Developers who are gifted big-corpo money to push faux-entertainment on BS-resistant gamers are losing money hand over fist while indie teams that operate on more agile workflows and can entertain new ideas are bathing in money and accolades.

You can’t socially engineer interest; people either like an idea or they don’t. Period. In the early 1980s, the video game industry was on the verge of collapse. The very term “video game” was anathema to investors and families after a tidal wave of sloppy, sub-standard games from Atari. Then came along this scrappy upstart named “Nintendo” who were developing video games, but knew that they had to rebrand to get their game console into homes. Their marketing strategy relied on calling their console a “Home Entertainment System” in the vaguest of descriptions. Kids ended up playing the pack-in game, Super Mario Bros., loved it and got their parents to bring the “NES” home. Video games were resuscitated and the industry is alive and well.

The appeal of Mario and Nintendo couldn’t be forced. Nintendo had to bring the quality—unlike predecessor Atari—and they did. Now, with literally tens of thousands of game developer companies globally, gamers are eating good. But if you want to be noticed, you’ve got to bring the fire. No one is guaranteed or owed success, and no amount of ideologically-driven campaigns of misinformation from “games journalists” will convince people to like a game; neither will campaigns of negative reviews dissuade people from genuinely liking something. The quality always rises and decentralization keeps an industry healthy. Concentrating the hobby of video games into one company, Atari, was near the death of it. Plurality of choice engenders competition and keeps companies honest.

(FRANCHISE) LOVE HURTS

Dungeons and Dragons has been around for half a century and has enthralled millions around the world. The realms created by those who originated the game—like its inventor, Gary Gygax—have resulted in innumerable stories created and experienced by gamers. However, the genius of Gary Gygax is no longer the engine of Dungeons and Dragons; it’s been co-opted by destroyers of culture who are obsessed with moral relativism and who hold a visceral disdain for the cultural foundations that inspired the game.

Dungeons and Dragons is a cautionary tale of what happens when something so beloved is so disrespected and strays from its roots. Thankfully, entertainment is much more accessible due to the internet, so as quickly as fantasy worlds can be captured and ruined, new ones can be created and discovered. That goes for all forms of media: books, movies, animation, comics and games. Fans will find new homes within which to congregate; they won’t settle for pale imitations of the things they used to love.

But fans can also be their own worst enemies. They invest their time, money and sentimental energy into singular franchises and when they inevitably get infiltrated and compromised, they get angry. I’ve not been angry about any franchise, company or industry getting destroyed from within because I’m not a fanatic of anything made by other people. That’s the sad realization I came to: you should only be a pure, unadulterated fan of the stuff you make yourself.

Now, before you get angry, I’ll clarify; it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy things other people make, but it behooves us to not invest too much emotional capital into things we don’t own and can’t control. I think Warhammer is really interesting. I bought half a dozen books and read two of them. The lore is amazing. Am I afraid it will get “captured” and destroyed? No. Because there’s always another group of passionate individuals who will make something equally appealing and I’ll be happy to consider that. It’s okay to let go. What matters is that your entertainment actually entertains you.

YOU ARE THE ALTERNATIVE

If you’re an aspiring professional creative, and you want to be the one to catch the ball when the stewards of beloved franchises fumble, then you’re in good company. There’s no big secret. All you need is a product and a willing and eager audience of customers. A payment processor provides the handshake and you’re good to go.

We need more creative minds, more customer-first companies and new and fresh ideas. There’s no need to rely on mega-corps that can easily be taken over by people who refuse to do their jobs and just entertain you.

Now, if you have no interest in being a creative and just want to be on the receiving end of the entertainment, all the better! Support the independent creators that are making what you do like. We can create new communities together that don’t require the behemoth of corporate and special interest meddling. I’m proud to be making stuff for you.

SARJ OUT

Character is story. Design is character. Design is story.

The appeal of story is a journey through moral systems colliding against nature, conflict and our presumptions about everything. Characters are the vehicles through which we experience story. A character’s design is paramount in maximizing the effect of character and story, because design itself tells story.

Failure in respecting the art of visual character design can often lead to failure in storytelling as they’re entwined. We’ve seen this especially in video games as of late where the failed $400m behemoth Concord has created an unfortunate new subgenre called Concord-likes. This pejorative label calls attention to characters with designs that don’t resonate with audiences for a variety of reasons. “Concordian” characters are stricken with a lack of distinguishing characteristics that renders them inert or ones that are made to be unappealing. They can be rendered in high-resolution and with staggering levels of detail but lacking soul and any particular inspiration.

Conversely, good/great design can produce iconic results. The same actor in different aesthetic setups changes the character. Think of Marlon Brando’s career: he played numerous iconic roles, from Vito Corleone to Jor-El to Colonel Kurtz.

Each character was defined by a different set of morals and values which contributed to the stories in which they were involved. Who would Superman be without the guidance of Jor-El, who was designed to appear as a pure, god-like being.

Jeff Bridges’ take on The Dude has also stood the test of time, and the character’s design is a huge part of that. Take one look at him and you know what he’s about. He’s a flighty lay-about that has a penchant for bowling and beverages. And he looks it.

From John McClane to Dorothy Gale to Freddy Krueger to the Hulk, the Phantom, the Shadow and Superman, visual design helps immensely to summarize the conceit of a character at a glance.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF INDIRECT BLANDNESS

Video games are a visual, interactive medium. Video game characters are the best example of design as character. From Mario to Kratos to Master Chief to Lara Croft to Samus Aran to Princess Peach, visual composition helps to convey to the player the purpose of the character in action. No one looks at Master Chief and thinks he’s going to be involved in gardening. No one looks at Ryu from Street Fighter and expects him to engage in a walking simulator. And that’s the point: the success of a character is often how a design fulfills the catharsis provided by the gameplay feedback loop.

Let’s compare two recent games: Deadlock and Highguard. Deadlock is a massive online battle arena(MOBA) taking place in an alternate 1930s America where occult forces run rampant. You choose from a cast of eclectic characters to achieve favor with one of two earthbound deities, the Hidden King or the Archmother. Highguard is a first-person 5v5 shooter where two teams fight across fantastical realms to secure resources for their side.

Deadlock has been in “early access” for almost two year whereas Highguard released recently. The results of the two games exist on flip sides of the same coin: Deadlock has been a massive success in early access, getting over 25k concurrent players on any given day. Highguard, on the other hand, started with nearly 100k concurrent players on day one, but that number plummeted quickly to low four-figure players. And while Deadlock is limited to invite-only players, Highguard is a free-to-play game. One of the reasons that Highguard elicits the ire of players is the perceived disjointed and stilted visual design which is a pastiche of vague fantasy and sci-fi tropes than anything concrete and inspired.

My son plays Deadlock and even though I have no interest in playing it, the visual design and language of the world is undeniably interesting. The catalog of 30s/noir/spiritualism artistry is a beautiful thing to see. One look at each character and their pasts, personalities and gameplay utility are obvious. There’s no ambiguity. In fast-paced shooter games where you see opposing team members in fleeting moments from a distance, vague is failure.

GRIME IS SUBLIME

Seemingly innocuous blandness can stand out as a unique identifier that exalts a character beyond their apparent mediocrity. In fact, intentional mediocrity itself can act as an amplifier of qualities that uplift a character into the stratosphere.

John McClane walks into the Nakatomi Plaza in 1988 and becomes an action hero. He’s an everyman outsider who ends up running around the building in a dirty wife beater, slacks, no shoes and a bag filled with weapons and detonators trying to stop a gang of international thieves. That look became iconic and determined the character’s importance. Why? If you see a normal man running around with no shoes, a dirty wife beater, covered in soot and lacerations and carrying an MP5, there’s a good chance he didn’t choose his circumstances; he’s just doing what he can to survive them. That’s story.

The best stories are when active protagonists are oppressed by circumstances beyond their control and—usually—they conquer their circumstances to win the day. Even Bruce Willis’ other character, Butch from Pulp Fiction, navigated a maze of eclectic and murderous weirdos to ride off on a stolen motorcycle—’Zed’s dead, baby.’—with a beautiful woman. He won.

Ellen Ripley operates a spaceborne refinery in the distant future. She’s just another member of a crew of blue-collar Joes and Janes. Her overalls and unglamorous appearance lets you know she’s not an intergalactic space marine; she’s just another person. However, it’s this intentional mediocrity that elevates her as she faces off against a nigh-invincible xenomorph that has infiltrated her ship. Light years away from home, no one was coming to save her and the crew of the Nostromo. What was required in the vacuum of space was courage. We watched her find this courage and survive. That’s character, and her blending in as just another crew member made her notable and memorable almost five decades later.

MAKE CHARACTERS FIT

One of the things that I’ve been focused on in writing books is to establish diverse characters that feel right within their worlds. These characters are best suited to act as avatars for the reader experience within the unique circumstances of each setting and conflict. Elijah Crowe(left below)—complete with his history, hangups and shortcomings—doesn’t work as well in the year 2147 where Mad Malitia(right below) lives; Elijah is a Chicago boy born in 1900, a street tough struggling with faith. Malitia’s youthful trauma, and how she navigates these emotional obstacles, aren’t as effectively exploited in a dark fantasy world filled with goblins and harpies; she lives in the distant future. Cleave(center below) only matters where there’s a blade to be plunged into evil flesh. Character, conflict and setting. If these line up properly, you’ve got something.

Speaking of characters, my horror/action book Hotel Erebus is releasing as an audiobook, softcover and hardcover this week on Amazon and likely other platforms. CLEAVE is launching on Kickstarter this week, as well. Mad Malitia is a work-in-progress(about 20% done, finished by mid-March).

CLEAVE Kickstarter Preview: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/cleave-a-blood-thirsty-dark-fantasy-novella-by-sarj?ref=btsfxw&token=834a91f5

Stratum Press’s catalog is slowly growing with two completed books and a third on the way. The first game—a tabletop RPG—is coming in April. We should have a Shopify store launched by June when the first full-length novel—a supernatural romance—is going to Kickstarter along with another short novel and another tabletop game will be releasing.

The future is looking bright and we look forward to entertaining you.

SARJ OUT

COMPANY UPDATE

• Hotel Erebus Hardcovers are arriving from the printer in a few days(Fedex says Friday the 6th) and shipping to Kickstarter supporters.

• Chapters of my dark fantasy novella CLEAVE are going to Royal Road by the end of the week and then launching on Kickstarter shortly after.

• My next book, a cyberpunk novel called Mad Malitia, is 25 pages in—out of a proposed 245 pages. First draft should be done by the end of February.

You, as an individual creative, CAN create “spheres of immersion”. And what are spheres of immersion? Simply, I describe them as this:

A sphere of immersion(SOI) is a collection of transmedia expressions of an intellectual property that satisfies on various levels and provides a sense of verisimilitude. (Ex. Enjoying Transformers because of the breadth of media available as movies, toys, video games, books, comic books, etc.)

This is why lore is so important to stories if you’re trying to build a property that is an SOI. It implies that the world within the story exists beyond the specific series of events you personally experience within it. If you read The Hobbit and then the Lord of the Rings books, you can also read about historical lore within Tolkien’s imagination that predated all of the events of the actual books. SOIs create fans, fanatics whose interest is heightened by the ancillary content and context.

“Fandom” derives from an unusual level of excitement for an entertainment property. Disney, Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel and DC Comics, Barbie, Warhammer, Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, Pokemon, Harry Potter, Dungeons & Dragons, Cyberpunk(personal favorite), etc. These franchises would be considered SOIs.

For instance, the 1980s were an engine of SOIs. Every major property was a transmedia titan: GI Joe, Transformers, Masters of the Universe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Voltron and too many others to rattle off. Each property was expressed through various transmedia: a TV show, toy line, comic book and miscellaneous merchandise.

People love Warhammer 40K because of the vast, VAST levels of immersive potential. There are tabletop games, video games, toys, paintable figurines, statues, a library’s worth of books, animated episodes, YouTube videos and a growing collection of new content. There are thousands of characters across millennia worth of story to delve into.

I’ll be clear, though: a property doesn’t need to be an SOI in order to successfully entertain. One-offs are more than enough to be successful. One of my favorite games ever, Sleeping Dogs, never got a sequel or anything else for that matter. No movies. No books. No merch. Nothing. I still remember the game, the experience, the story. My point is that SOIs give you more of what you want and can improve the overall experience.

YOU CAN DO IT

We live in a unique inflection point in history, detailed by my previous article which can be found here…

…but the change is that now, with new and rapidly-advancing technologies, we independent creatives can do more with a whole lot less; less money, less resources, less professional connections.

Decades ago, if you wanted to write a book, you could do it on your own, but that’s about it. Want to take your idea and turn it into an animated show? Good luck with that. Movie? Good luck with that. Video game? Good luck with that. You’d need entire teams of people and millions of dollars of capital investment to move that much intelligence to create your product.

With access to powerful AI platforms, 3D printing and relatively inexpensive online print and eCommerce storefronts, an individual or a small group could conceivably create a transmedia property and express it in a variety of means. Books, comic books, 3D printed figurines, soundtracks(via platforms like Suno), image galleries and short films could all be done with existing technology. Oh, and Elon Musk just filed with the FCC to put one-million AI satellites in space that would enable us to generate full-length movies and even video games via prompts in just a few years.

Notice that I didn’t say anything about getting rich by doing any of this. This is entirely about potential creative output and the quality of life benefits derived from this for both creators and consumers.

MORE FOR LESS

For the upcoming CLEAVE dark fantasy novel, I’m going to be selling pre-orders for the book I wrote 100% with my own human agency, BUT, IN ADDITION TO THAT, I’m also offering a 60>90-minute digital soundtrack I generated via Suno and a digital art book I developed with the help of SuperGrok, that I’ll be offering to go along with the CLEAVE soft/hardcovers for no additional charges to the pre-order customers.

CLEAVE Kickstarter preview link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/cleave-a-blood-thirsty-dark-fantasy-novella-by-sarj

I’m no musician, nor am I an illustrator, but I can now give you additional enjoyment for little to no additional cost to me in regards to time, energy, capital or resources. A soundtrack that would’ve been impossible to produce by me is now relatively easy. I don’t need to be a music producer with six or seven figures of capital to invest into an album. I don’t need to spend 10,000 hours to learn how to paint and then spend a year to create an art book. It’s relatively simple to create a beautiful set of images that will offer you enhanced immersion into the world of CLEAVE at no cost to you and little cost to me. The human-written book is the actual sellable product(the cake); everything else is additional icing.

So, what are you waiting for? Be great and create!

SARJ OUT

THE PROBLEM WITH PROSPERITY

As a Gen Xer, I joke with my Gen Z son that I’ll play more video games when scientists extend the human lifespan indefinitely(as well as finding a way to upload human consciousness to a variety of physical interfaces like robots) and I don’t need to work as much. And I know that as I say that, we human beings in the year 2026 are living in a very unique inflection point in history.

I’ll make it clear that I’m a tech super-optimist and I think that the curve of history will lean towards increased abundance, as it has in every capitalist, first-world nation. Having said that, I have no romantic sentiments—nor am I married to—the current paradigm where the entirety of human-centric scheduling and planning revolves around trading labor for a fungible, faith-based resource called fiat money. Based on trending tech movements, the post-industrial revolution paradigm is not long for this world.

So many seemingly disparate technologies are adapting and evolving simultaneously, and it appears that this evolution won’t be stopping anytime soon; in fact, they’re accelerating along an upturned hockey stick trajectory. People are worried about job displacement due to automation and the looming robotics revolution, increasing energy costs due to AI data centers, inflationary effects on the economy, and thus many are caught in a general malaise about the future. I think that over the last fifty years, tech has been slowly converging while we’ve been simultaneously prepared sociologically for a post-labor world.

UNSTOPPABLE CHANGE

Between AI, VR, streaming compute, crypto, internet accessibility, etc, we’ve all been subjected to the largest social experiment where an alternative to the drudge-labor-for-money-to-access-basic-amenities is rapidly approaching. I was in Phoenix, AZ a few weeks ago and was surprised to see around a dozen self-driving Waymo cars tooling around. I had been in Phoenix less than a year ago and never saw one of them. Tesla is slowly discontinuing models in their commercial fleet offerings to make way for their autonomous Robotaxi future. The cost of transportation will begin to shrink. Change is coming before our eyes.

It’s becoming increasingly evident that the economy of the near-future will shift to a system where AI and robots will facilitate a move to largely equitable distribution of bio-system necessities like water, clean food and potentially even shelter and clothing. This system of residual abundance distribution will exist alongside competitive, capitalistic, open-market negotiations between free human capital. And in this abundant future—where most people will be burdened by free time—recreation, artistic creation and expression will be even more paramount.

The long-term is offering prospects of abundance that will change the paradigm of human labor-for-resources. Birth->K-12->College->Labor Force->Retirement won’t be a relevant timeline soon. But how will the general population take to this? What will happen to a human race that has—since birth—been trained to be a cog in an uncaring industrial macro-machine? What will people do when their entire schedule doesn’t orbit around the monolith of “work”? What will people do once burdened with an abundance of resources and time? Freedom can become an albatross and we’ll need to fill the void of drudge with something. Perhaps the answer has been there all along.

WEARING SHADES IN A BRIGHT FUTURE

Video games are now the preeminent form of entertainment. Gaming unseated film and TV years ago and this will not stop. No other medium allows the individual to not only interact with virtual worlds in a stratified way, but to also do so with social features that are baked into the experience. Human beings are social animals and gaming allows us to simulate every human instinct and impulse—good and arguably bad—with limited risk to body and property.

In Call of Duty, you can fight super-soldiers with next-gen military hardware while joking with your friends about that one time in college that you slipped on ice and spilled coffee on your date. The hunting parties from 10,000 B.C.—where the legitimate threat of being gored by a sabretooth tiger or stomped by a wooly mammoth—are simulated millions of times a day across the planet where teams of internationally-distributed people work together to achieve contrived tactical goals. This is a unique anthropological phenomenon that people pass off as “vidya games”.

Video games are models that reflect human instincts and desires. We live vicariously through our digital avatars. Three of the most popular games of all-time—Minecraft, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto—indulge our most primal desires to 1.) acquire resources, explore and build shelters; 2.) to hunt 3.) and to test social boundaries—all of which are all deeply engrained in the human animal.

For over four decades, video games have increasingly offered simulated worlds made to appear as real as possible, when in all actuality the worlds are quite rudimentary. Characters in video games are digitally sculpted, scripted and fashioned in such a way that they appear human, but like a mannequin equipped with a speaker that projects a series of pre-recorded lines, the mannequin’s ability to simulate humanity is limited.

But what if it was possible for the promise of true simulation to be fully realized? What if non-player characters in games were intelligent, possessing realistic behavioral patterns, memories, quirks and lives of their own? What if you could have full-on, unscripted conversations and engagements with characters that relied on your real world ability to do so? No dialogue options to click, just verbal interactions that relied on a human-to-human ability to transmit information? That would change everything, and it looks like we’re headed towards this reality via artificial intelligence. There’s just one problem, and it’s a big one.

THE FUTURE IS POWER

True hyper-realistic worlds demand something foundational: power. Massive, cheap, endless power. The problem is that in the most delicate and important era in human history, everyone needs more power. In a time where a global robotics and AI arms race is pushing companies and nations to innovate on a daily basis, even new forms of energy capture are being floated. The old alternatives of nuclear and solar aren’t enough to accommodate a rapidly changing world.

Elon Musk floated the idea—no pun intended—of space-based AI data centers in a Sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth, which would solve two main problems of AI: 1.) massive power draw on centralized grids which drives up prices for private citizens and 2.) the additive energy cost associated with cooling said AI data centers. Space-based AI could slash compute costs 15-20x, flooding future video games with intelligent agents at negligible expense.

Advancing tech will push the cost of power lower and lower. The cost of AI tokens will drop and the potential intelligence of individual AI agents will skyrocket. Video games will benefit greatly from this. Why play games with stiff, pre-scripted mannequins when you can engage on realistic terms with virtual people? Subconsciously, I think we all know that this has been the goal from the beginning.

LIVING IN INFINITE VIRTUAL WORLDS

What will be the payoff? In an ideal world, abundance through AI, automation and robotics enabled by cheap energy will allow people to spend as much time as they want with family and friends and pursue their own interests. Over 3.3 billion people are identified as “gamers” globally. Once people will no longer need to work to get access to basic resources, that number will skyrocket. The number of people who will be free to develop virtual worlds with increasingly powerful tools will also increase.

Imagine a game like Cyberpunk 2077, Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto in two decades where abundance allows us the ability to spend time in these virtual worlds with virtual people so intelligent that they won’t be “NPCs”, they’ll be our friends. They’ll engage with us in the real world via phone calls and text messaging(Openclaw is doing this now) and we’ll even create lives together. Our virtual lives will become irrevocably entangled with the real world.

We’ll have to juggle personas in different simulations. In an AI-powered Elder Scrolls we’ll manage a farm with dozens of friends in nearby villages; in a future Cyberpunk game we’ll be a merc balancing love and business. In the real world, our phones—or whatever future analog will exist—will act as a convergence point to bind these experiences together and the level of immersion will be undeniable. This would’ve sounded insane a few years ago, but it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable. For me, the future is arriving incredibly fast and is blindingly bright.

The novel I’m working on right now is called Mad Malitia and takes place in the year 2147, so delving deeper into these contemporary tech concerns have served as soft research for the book. Despite everything I’ve previously catalogued regarding automation and AI, Mad Malitia will be 100% written by me. I think that the coming of the AI-powered windfall will allow people like me to do more as a creative than I ever could have before. Therefore, I am exceptionally excited about the future of tech; it could benefit us by providing increased means of survival and improving quality of life while simultaneously unlocking our human ability to want to express ourselves through art.

SARJ OUT

Pre-order a copy of SARJ’s horror/action novella, “Hotel Erebus”. It’s now available on Kickstarter and ships in early February. The Kickstarter project ends on Friday, January 9th.

“Hotel Erebus” on Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella

"HOTEL EREBUS" Horror/Action Novella

PULP FICTION

The American pulp fiction hero was born out of the ever-changing culture of a growing superpower. Cities were expanding and factions were consolidating where big business and crime intermixed into a vile stew. The first organized crime groups rose up in the late 19th century and spread into the early 20th. Corruption in the big American cities was rampant and while the cops and robbers were gunning it out in the streets, the poor working Americans were caught in the crossfire. In times of helplessness, people tend to express their fears, desires and angst through art and culture, and this was best seen in the invention of the pulp hero.

The new media was subversive in its own way by promoting vigilantism; even violent bank robbers like Bonnie and Clyde were molded into folk heroes by the working poor who saw robbing of banks as a way that ‘the little guy’ shook his fist at the establishment. New fiction also romanticized dangerous women who were deceptively competent and who had aims and designs of their own. This was a time of tumultuous evolution in regards to men’s and women’s roles in society where boundaries were pushed. The roaring 20s were just that, and they ended on a great economic crash. In this stew of cultural change, economic collapse and an epidemic of organized crime, the response would form the foundation of men’s fiction. If the outlaws wore suits and fedoras, then the pulp heroes tasked with fighting them would do the same. But in addition to these accouterments, the heroes would either wear masks to conceal their true identities, or they’d assume secret identities through means of magic and/or subterfuge.

Pulp heroes were battle-hardened street toughs that rarely had what the “superhero” would have in coming decades; no, these were normal human men filled with grit and gusto, ready to take the fight to the rum-runners, the traffickers and the ones who greased the hands of corrupt politicians. Even in pulp stories involving the supernatural, the male protagonists were the kind of men who worked down at the docks or had come home from the war; they were relatable toughs who were both aspirational and recognizable as the guy sitting next to you, sipping his drink at the local watering hole.

It took courage to live in dark and dreary days and the exploits of the pulp hero provided some hopeful escapism. Trigger-happy gangsters got their due; foreign agents coming into America to stir up trouble were given their just desserts. It was vigilante justice served to a public that was sick and tired of the lawlessness. So in the pulp novels, when the law failed the heroes, they merely took the law into their own hands, and the public ate it up.

Among the legions of two-fisted terrors were Doc Savage and Zorro whose inspiration would create the blueprint for heroes of a future era in Superman and Batman.

As time went on and WW2 changed everything, the pulp hero would slide into his place within the hallowed halls of history, revered but not forgotten. Other characters that were imbued with his same values as the champions of pulp: courage, justice, fairness, stoicism, controlled violence and a penchant for finding trouble, would all be rediscovered in the American superhero, and then in heroes from other genres like Japanese Manga. Heroism changes forms but it always stays the same.

By the way, if you’re interested in pulp novels, I recently wrote one called Hotel Erebus. It’s a two-fisted thrill ride about a man trapped in a haunted hotel with nothing but two guns and a desire to get the hell out.

Pre-order a copy of SARJ’s horror/action novella, “Hotel Erebus”. It’s now available on Kickstarter and ships in early February. The Kickstarter project ends on Friday, January 9th.

“Hotel Erebus” on Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella

"HOTEL EREBUS" Horror/Action Novella

SARJ OUT

"Hotel Erebus" Novella on Kickstarter

REDUNDANT TITANS

I grew up in the 1980s, when some of the greatest and most profitable entertainment franchises were created—ones that are still in a state of perpetual exploitation today—like the line-up of toys that filled Toys ‘R Us which Hollywood is still making movies of and toys and video games are being produced about.

In the 80s and 90s, all of my entertainment was derived from corporate-owned, network-distributed media. TV and film, all produced by Hollywood

An entire city was named after an multi-faceted transmedia entertainment enterprise: Hollywood. The advent of the motion picture camera enabled a move from radio shows to visual entertainment. The movie was born, silent at first and then recording technology allowed sound and video to be irreversibly coupled. Then additive color changed everything—and how lush and vibrant that color was—then gimmicks like 3D expanded new markets. Studios passed like hot potatoes between corporate conglomerates for the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries, cementing big money as the only way to produce mass market material.

However, as the 21st century turned, entirely new opportunities for independent media creators manifested. The growth and expansion of the Internet birthed new platforms like eBay, Amazon and a plethora of art-sharing websites. Previously, creatives had to go hat-in-hand to middlemen, editors, producers and beg for a chance to either have their creative works be financed by the parent corporation who hired the middleman, or to merely be hired to work on other people’s projects. Now, this is no longer the case. Funding can be done directly by customers to the creatives and the products can be delivered to the customers without the need for an external distribution service. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter allow for early initial cash flow and then transitioning to others like Amazon, eBay and Shopify create opportunities for perpetual, sustained cashflow.

With AI increasing what can be delivered on decreasing budgets, the need for corporations to finance creative projects—thereby limiting what can be produced—has also diminished. If you’re a video game developer, free tools are plentiful and some of the most popular games of the last twenty years have been made by individuals or small groups of people. Armies of hundreds of developers in rows of cubicles under the yoke of corporate servitude aren’t the only method to produce interactive digital entertainment.

YouTube is viewed more than Netflix, where the democratization of hundreds of thousands of independent entertainment producers use YouTube as a means to deliver videos directly to viewers. YouTube finances nothing directly but merely provides ad-revenue sharing with individual channel owners. And it works.

Andy Warhol once said that, in the future, everyone will get fifteen minutes of fame. However, it’s now possible for everyday people to gain audiences that stay with them for years. The Angry Video Game Nerd has been on YouTube for nearly two decades and many such personalities have seen generations of viewers grow with them.

Between Steam—where tens of thousands of independently-produced games are sold—and YouTube, the new economy fully supports creatives who hold no contract to any corporate masters. This is the present and future of entertainment and it’s never been a better time to be an independent creative professional.

Speaking of creative independence, if you’re into horror and action stories, I’ve got one such story up for early access at Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella

"Hotel Erebus" Novella on Kickstarter

In the distant past, life was harsh and brutal, but the rules were simple. Men and women knew what they were expected to do and they acted accordingly. Fantasy and horror books tapped into the dichotomy of simplicity in a brutal world of absolutes. Audiences fell in love with Robert E. Howard, Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lovecraft. They fell in love with Middle Earth, Cimmeria, Pegana and the pantheon of Lovecraftian gods and monsters.

These worlds were populated with heroes whose exploits echoed Biblical stories and ones that even predated the Bible, whispered by ancient tribes and scrawled on cave walls. Conan the Barbarian cleaved anyone in half that stood in his way as he traversed the horrors of the Hyborian Age. Aragorn, Frodo, Legolas and dozens of other heroes in Middle Earth navigated a dangerous world where pure evil sought to enslave free men, hobbits, elves and dwarves. In Lovecraft’s stories, normal men saw through the veil of reality and fell victim to insanity upon laying eyes on unspeakable entities like Cthulhu.

There was a seductive nobility in fighting passionately to achieve relatable goals, even if those goals involved bloodshed and facing off against inconceivable dangers. The imagery was pure, primal fantasy: armies on horseback carrying men wielding swords traveling great distances to upend the reign of throne-hoarding despots; immortals(elves like Arwyn from Lord of the Rings) pining for the love of mortal kings (Aragorn); sieges on castles and men fighting unspeakable, ancient terrors. And all of this being done to safeguard a common sense of order that is conducive to the preservation of life and peace. These are not worlds of gray tones; they are worlds of black and white where heroes are cast in bright light and villains dyed in dark tones.

Another conceit of these stories were the depth of the chronicled lore and the implication that these stories were historical in nature. They were supplemented by maps that, by all intents and purposes, provided the means to navigate these places which made the stories even more impactful. There was some fleeting hope that one might stumble into Cimmeria if only they rode far enough or that one could reach Innsmouth if only you sailed far enough. The irony of fantasy and horror is that it’s most effective when it offers just the right amount of verisimilitude. The fantastical aspects somehow accentuate the realities of the modern world by translating them through ancient, mythological avatars.

Even now, when most of the authors of classic dark fantasy have long since passed into mortal death, modern readers still long to escape into their granular worlds of steel and sorcery. This is how the dead authors themselves somehow become one with their masterworks and fall into legend.

If you’re a fan of dark fantasy, my novella CLEAVE is coming to Kickstarter in January. You can check out some concept images here on my new Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/posts/146865463

SARJ OUT

Wanna Read Something Really Scary?

Hotel Erebus is being offered as an Early Access novella on Kickstarter. Take a look here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella/

There is another way. Now, there’s absolutely no guarantee of success in the independent publishing market, nor is there a guarantee if you go the traditional publishing route. However, in 2025, there are immense benefits from going at it alone.

Modern technology has allowed people untethered to corporate masters to access millions of potential customers. People like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Brett Cooper and Asmongold attract millions of viewers and listeners in great frequency and with platforms that are extremely cost-efficient. How much capital expenditure does it cost Asmongold to broadcast to millions of people from his home? The cost is negligible. How much does it cost CNN to broadcast to hundreds of thousands of listless, apathetic viewers from a massive set in an office building in an expensive city with dozens of talking heads in suits and dresses, each of whom commands a serious salary? That cost is considerable and untenable.

If you’re trying to build a business to deliver goods and services, you only need three things: a product or service to sell, a payment processor to receive the monies and customers. Middlemen are a completely optional luxury.

There is a way to make independent publishing work. Keep costs down. Outsource as little labor to third parties as possible. Learn to do as much yourself. Seek out customers personally. For what must be outsourced, use the seemingly endless array of services to accomplish this, from crowdfunding to podcasts to AI audio/video generation, etc. Payment processors are plenty and easily accessible. There’s never been a better time to be a professional, independent creative.

For novels, one way to get to customers requires a specific workflow…

WHAT’S THE WORKFLOW?

The workflow for Stratum Press, starting with my next novella, CLEAVE, will go as follows:

1. Post chapters on Royal Road 3-4x a week for 2-3 weeks. Then direct readers to…

2. Kickstarter launch for the book with a platform-exclusive cover and other goods.

3. Publish on Amazon (include eBooks and audiobooks)

4. Supplement income by running a Patreon to offer early access to chapters of new books and ancillary rewards like character design images or sell things like stickers or prints. https://www.patreon.com/c/SARJ_Stratum

2026 will be a wild year for creative independence. Do you have a story you want to tell or a creative project you want to do? If so, there are options. Use them.

SARJ OUT

Wanna Read Something Really Scary?

Picture this:
It’s 2025, and the biggest movie of the year is a sequel to a sequel to a reboot of a film you saw when you were nine.
The second-biggest is a live-action remake of a cartoon you watched on a 19-inch CRT.
The trailers all use the same four-note horn blast.
The posters all have the same orange-and-teal color grade.
The toys on the shelf are the same ones you begged your parents for in 1991—only now they cost sixty dollars and come with a QR code.

This is not an accident.
This is a business model.

And it has kept American pop culture locked in a 40-year loop (roughly 1977 to 2003) that we cannot, or will not, escape.

1. The Day Hollywood Discovered Forever-Profit

The switch flipped in the summer of 1977.

Jaws had already proven a movie could make more money from T-shirts than tickets.
Star Wars took it further: one film, endless action figures, bedsheets, cereal, toothpaste.
By the time Return of the Jedi rolled around in 1983, the studios understood the real product wasn’t the story; it was the feeling of being ten years old on opening weekend.

The 1980s became a gold rush of kid-friendly blockbuster templates:

• Indiana Jones

• Ghostbusters

• Back to the Future

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

• Batman ’89

Each one spawned toys, cartoons, lunchboxes, Happy Meals.
Each one was designed from day one to be repeatable forever.

Then the 1990s doubled down:
Pokémon, Power Rangers, Jurassic Park, The Lion King.
By the time Spider-Man swung into theaters in 2002, the blueprint was perfect: big opening weekend + global merchandising + built on childhood recognition = guaranteed billions.

2. The Crash That Killed Risk

2008 happened.

Banks collapsed. Studios panicked.
The new rule from every boardroom was simple:
“Never bet nine figures on something an executive’s kid hasn’t already heard of.”

Disney looked at the numbers and bought the safest assets on Earth were sitting in a warehouse in Burbank:

• Marvel (bought 2009)

• Pixar (2006)

• Lucasfilm (2012)

• Fox and its X-Men (2019)

Warner Bros realised Batman and Harry Potter printed money.
Universal clung to Jurassic Park and Fast & Furious.
Paramount leaned on Transformers and Star Trek.
Sony guarded Spider-Man like the One Ring.

Suddenly the entire industry was running on childhood recognition.
Original mid-budget movies? Gone.
Adult dramas? Streaming graveyard.
New myths? Too expensive.

Why gamble $200 million on something untested when you can spend $250 million on a brand people already love and make twice as much?

3. The Nostalgia Pipeline in 2025

Look at any given month now:

• A new Star Wars series drops every 6–8 weeks—each one stuffed with cameos from characters you met in the 80s and 90s.

• Marvel releases three films and four Disney+ shows a year, all required homework for the next film.

• DC reboots Batman again—same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

• Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Blade Runner, Terminator, Matrix, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones—all back, older, greyer, still selling the exact same emotional beat they sold in 1989.

• Live-action remakes of Disney’s 90s animated classics arrive like clockwork.

• Even Doctor Who, a show literally built on the idea of change, now spends half its episodes revisiting 2005–2010.

The marketing is identical:
“Remember how this made you feel when you were a kid?
Give us money and we’ll sell that feeling back to you in 4K.”

And it works. Every single time.

4. The 40-Year Window

Here’s the strangest part:
The nostalgia zone is incredibly narrow.

Corporate America has decided that only media roughly between 1977 and 2003 possesses emotional gold.
Anything made before 1977 is “old” and therefore scary to audiences.
Anything made after 2003 is “unproven” and therefore scary to investors.

Result?

• Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey—classics, but not bankable enough for new multibillion-dollar cinematic universes.

• Silent films, film noir, 1950s sci-fi, 1960s New Hollywood experiments? Cult curiosities at best.

• Meanwhile, a third Ghostbusters sequel with the original cast in their seventies will get a $200 million budget and global marketing.

We have collectively agreed that human culture peaked between the releases of Star Wars and The Matrix, and everything must now be measured against that window.

5. The Creative Hostage Situation

Writers, directors, and artists feel it every day.

Pitch an original sci-fi epic today and the note comes back:
“Amazing—but can the ship look a little more like the Millennium Falcon?”
Try to sell a new superhero concept:
“Love the energy—any chance we can make him Spider-Man’s cousin?”
Suggest a fantasy series without dragons that breathe fire in the exact same shade as 1990s cartoons:
“Sorry, focus groups don’t recognise that silhouette.”

The highest honour a creator can now receive is to be hired to babysit someone else’s childhood.
Directing the next Star Wars or Marvel project is the new American Dream.
Inventing the next Star Wars is no longer on the table.

6. The Human Cost

We are raising entire generations who believe culture is a closed loop.

Kids today know the Imperial March before they know Beethoven.
They can identify the Bat-symbol before they can read.
Their first cinematic memories are cameos from grandparents’ favourite characters.

Meanwhile, the rest of human artistic history—thousands of years of stories, myths, paintings, music—sits untouched because it doesn’t come with pre-sold Happy Meal toys.

We are not just repeating the past.
We are letting six conglomerates sell us a shrink-wrapped version of our own childhoods on an endless subscription plan.

7. Breaking the Loop

It doesn’t have to stay this way.

The machine runs on our money and attention.
Every time we skip the remake and watch something made before 1977 or after 2020 without a Roman numeral in the title, the algorithm notices.
Every time we buy a ticket to an original film, back a weird indie on Kickstarter, or stream an album that isn’t built from 90s samples, we vote for a future that isn’t a rerun.

The 1980s and 1990s were great.
But they were forty years ago.

It’s time to let childhood graduate.

Because if we keep paying corporations to sell us the past in higher and higher resolution, we will never give the next generation a past worth remembering.

Thanks for sitting in the dark with me while we watched the same trailer for the twentieth time.

In the comments: what beloved franchise are you finally ready to let rest in peace—and what new story do you wish someone would take a chance on?

SARJ OUT

Back in 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink laid it bare in a New York Times interview: “You have to force behaviors.” He wasn’t mincing words about pushing diversity and inclusion policies on companies. What followed was a decade of “woke” mandates rippling through corporate America, reshaping everything from boardrooms to blockbuster franchises. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—the “Big Three” asset managers controlling over $20 trillion—didn’t need majority ownership to pull the strings. Through index funds and proxy voting, they wielded minority stakes like a sledgehammer, forcing behaviors that prioritized left-wing ideology over profits and entertainment. The result? A cultural hijacking that turned beloved pop culture into preachy propaganda, alienating fans and torching billions. But as of November 2025, cracks are forming—legislation and market backlash are poised to shatter their grip.

CONTROL THE VOTE, CONTROL THE CULTURE

To understand the theft, start with the mechanics. Index funds—passive investments tracking the S&P 500 or similar—hold about 25-30% of shares in major U.S. companies, with the Big Three owning the lion’s share. BlackRock alone boasts $10.5 trillion in assets, Vanguard $9.3 trillion, State Street $4.3 trillion. They don’t “own” in the traditional sense—these are your 401(k)s and pensions—but they control the voting rights attached to those shares. Proxy voting lets them dictate board elections, executive pay, and shareholder resolutions without individual investors’ input. A 5-10% stake? Enough to swing votes when fragmented retail holders stay passive.

This power amplifies through incentives. Companies chasing ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) scores—pushed by the Big Three—get favorable votes and lower capital costs. DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) became the social prong: mandates for racial/gender quotas on boards, regardless of merit. Fink’s BlackRock led the charge, voting for 2/3 of ESG resolutions in 2023, far outpacing Vanguard. These policies aren’t benign; they’re parasitic, prioritizing identity politics over productivity. Anti-meritorious hiring inflates costs, sows division, and chokes innovation—yet firms complied to appease the proxy overlords.

Enter the enforcers: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, proxy advisory firms that “recommend” votes to the Big Three, who follow 90%+ of the time. These duopoly players act like left-wing activists, greenlighting anti-capitalist resolutions: climate audits, pay gaps, union mandates. Texas AG Ken Paxton launched a 2025 probe into their “misleading” advice, accusing them of ideological capture. Glass Lewis even ditched benchmark policies by 2027 amid backlash, shifting to client-specific votes—a tacit admission of overreach. Critics call them a “cartel” warping markets for politics.

PRIDE COMETH BEFORE THE FALL

Media and entertainment fell hardest. Hollywood, comics, games—beholden to publicly traded giants like Disney (Marvel/Star Wars), Warner Bros. Discovery (DC/Halo), Hasbro (D&D), Games Workshop (Warhammer)—bent to proxy pressure. Boards stocked with DEI hires greenlit “marginalized” narratives: every hero a queer minority, villains straight white males, stories sidelined for lectures. Index funds’ votes ensured compliance; dissent meant shareholder revolts.

Star Wars? Disney’s sequel trilogy and shows like The Acolyte hemorrhaged fans, with box office plunging from $4.4 billion (originals) to under $2 billion post-2019. Marvel’s Phase 4-5 flopped hard—The Marvels ($206 million on $270 million budget), Ant-Man Quantumania ($476 million vs. $388 million cost)—cumulative losses in billions as “strong female leads” alienated core audiences. American corporate comics (DC and Marvel) are met with apathy and indifference, keys bleeding value amid endless woke reboots. Dungeons & Dragons? Wizards of the Coast’s DEI push—pronoun guides, diverse art—sparked boycotts; 2025 saw rollbacks as sales tanked. Warhammer 40K? Games Workshop navigated carefully, but proxy eyes loomed. Halo’s Paramount series? Canceled after Season 2 amid “woke” gripes and low viewership.

Books fared no better: publishers like Penguin Random House mandated sensitivity readers, bloating costs and diluting stories. Video games? Ubisoft, EA folded under ESG, yielding baggy heroines and preachy plots—Concord’s $200 million flop epitomized the rot. Billions evaporated: Disney alone wrote down $1.5 billion on Marvel content; comics industry “bleeding out” per insiders. Fans fled to indie/Asian alternatives craving unfiltered fun.

This “forced behaviors” paradigm bred division: ESG/DEI quotas fueled identity wars, turning entertainment into propaganda. Mainstream became niche lectures on “marginalized communities,” ignoring global audiences’ desire for heroes, not sermons. Profits? Secondary to virtue signals.

THE PENDULUM SWING

But the endgame nears. November 2025 brings momentum: White House drafts executive orders curbing proxy rights for BlackRock et al., forcing pass-through voting to actual owners. Paxton’s ISS/Glass Lewis probe signals state crackdowns. Bills like expanded Putting Investors First Act loom, limiting advisors’ sway. Vanguard/BlackRock softened DEI language in 2025 policies amid boycotts. Glass Lewis’ pivot? Market pressure winning.

Pop culture stirs: Indies boom, Asia dominates (Black Myth: Wukong and Stellar Blade’s triumph), Hasbro retreats. Fans reclaim via boycotts, X rants. The Big Three’s empire—built on your money, weaponized against your tastes—crumbles under scrutiny.

Reclaiming culture means starving the beast: divest ESG funds, support indies, demand pass-through voting. The forced era ends not with a bang, but shareholder revolt. Heroes return; lectures fade. America’s stories—epic, unbowed—rise anew.

Are you ready for the swing of the cultural pendulum?

SARJ OUT

The American publishing industry, both traditional and independent, is in a tailspin that’s been spinning for years, and artificial intelligence is the latest gust shoving it toward the ground. You’ve got legacy houses churning out celebrity memoirs and safe bets while indie authors drown in a sea of digital noise on platforms like Amazon. Add AI to the mix, and suddenly human writers are staring at a landscape where machines crank out “books” faster than you can say “bestseller list,” leaving flesh-and-blood creators wondering if it’s even worth picking up the pen. It’s a grim picture, one that’s not just about sales slumps but the erosion of what makes writing human: creativity, grit, and that irreplaceable spark of originality.

Start with traditional publishing, the old guard that’s supposed to be the gatekeeper of quality. The numbers don’t lie: according to the Association of American Publishers’ StatShot report, overall industry revenues dipped 1.3% in June 2025 alone, with a year-to-date decline of 1.7%. Trade revenues, which cover the bulk of fiction and non-fiction, fell 2.8% that month to $675.5 million. The print book market as a whole slid 1.6% in the first half of 2025 compared to the prior year. There are about 3,131 book publishing businesses in the US, growing at a meager CAGR of 1.1% from 2020 to 2025, but that’s hardly a boom—it’s stagnation in a sector battered by consolidation. The Big Five (now essentially Big Four after mergers) dominate, squeezing out midlist authors with paltry advances that haven’t kept pace with inflation. Remember when a debut novelist could snag a six-figure deal? Those days are relics; now it’s more like scraping by on $5,000-$10,000 if you’re lucky, while the houses bet big on TikTok sensations or political tell-alls that sell on name recognition alone.

The rot runs deeper. Gatekeeping has morphed into a DEI checklist gauntlet, where manuscripts get rejected not for quality but for not ticking the right boxes, leaving talented writers sidelined. Marketing budgets skew toward proven hits, leaving unknowns to fend for themselves in a discoverability desert. And let’s not forget the post-COVID hangover: supply chain snarls, rising paper costs, and a readership that’s increasingly distracted by short-form content on apps. Publishers are facing what one insider calls a “perfect storm” of challenges in 2025, including declining ad revenues and shifting consumer habits toward audiobooks and ebooks, but even those segments aren’t growing fast enough to offset the losses. It’s a far cry from the golden era when books were cultural events; now, they’re just another commodity in a bloated market.

Flip to independent publishing, and the picture’s no rosier—it’s just a different flavor of chaos. Self-publishing exploded thanks to platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), democratizing access but flooding the gates. In 2025, the self-pub scene is oversaturated, with millions of titles vying for eyeballs on Amazon, where algorithms bury most books under a pile of similar covers. Royalties are slim—70% on ebooks priced $2.99-$9.99 sounds great until you factor in the cut-throat competition and the need to spend on ads just to get seen. Discoverability? Forget it; without a massive social media following or paid promo, your opus sinks like a stone. Indie authors grind through newsletters, ARC teams, and beta readers, only to see sales trickle in the double digits. The market’s grown, sure, but so has the noise—genres like romance and fantasy are packed with formulaic series, making it tough for originals to break through.

Enter AI, the disruptor that’s turning this mess into a full-blown crisis. Generative tools like ChatGPT and Grok are churning out “books” at warp speed, flooding marketplaces and disincentivizing human writers who can’t compete with the volume or cost. Why slave over a manuscript for months when an AI can spit out a 50,000-word novel in hours? The Authors Guild calls AI a “serious threat to the writing profession,” pointing to model training on pirated books without compensation, leading to a flood of derivative content. Scammy AI-generated imitations and summaries are rampant on Amazon, with authors finding knockoffs of their work popping up overnight. In early 2024, the platform was already struggling to stem the tide, limiting self-published ebooks to three per day, but by 2025, the problem’s worsened—thousands of new AI titles daily, mostly nonsense summaries or regurgitated public domain works.

Take the mushrooming of AI books on bestseller lists: In 2023, Kindle Unlimited’s YA romance charts were stuffed with AI gibberish, and it’s only escalated. Bad actors use tools to generate sham content—study guides, travel books, even “biographies” that deceive buyers. Amazon’s flooded with these, making it harder for real authors to stand out; one report notes the marketplace is “incubators for AI-generated books” via GPT and MidJourney. Human writers feel the pinch—why pour your soul into a draft when AI can mimic styles, impersonate voices, and undercut prices? It’s not just quantity; AI lacks emotional depth, producing formulaic slop that still sells to undiscerning readers. An open letter from writers to publishers in 2025 warns that AI will devalue original stories, reducing them to data patterns.

This disincentivization hits hard. Aspiring authors see the math: traditional paths offer slim odds and low pay, indie routes demand marketing savvy most lack, and now AI bots are the competition. Fiction writers fret over AI’s lack of true creativity—brainstorming aids are fine, but full manuscripts? It feels like cheating the craft. Ethical nightmares abound: scams where AI fakes authors’ work, or publishers using it for editing without credit, eroding trust. Some see silver linings—AI as a tool for productivity or opportunity in a tough market—but for many, it’s a replacement threat. Why grind through revisions when a prompt yields a “book” ready for upload? It’s hollowing out the soul of publishing, turning art into algorithm.

The fallout’s cultural too. Books were once beacons of human insight; now, they’re commoditized slush. Traditional houses chase trends, indies fight visibility, and AI floods the rest. Readers lose out on genuine voices, buried under bot-generated dreck. If the industry doesn’t adapt—maybe with AI detection, better royalties, or valuing human curation—it risks becoming a ghost town of echoes.

Ultimately, this dire state is a symptom of broader decay: tech overreach gutting creative fields. Good things—like the painstaking craft of human writing—don’t last forever if we let machines take the reins. In fantasy, we fight for legacy; in sci-fi, we question progress. Publishing needs that fight now.

SARJ OUT

If there’s one thing that’s got the gaming faithful frothing at the mouth in 2025, it’s the suicidal corporate circus AAA studios are staging on a daily basis. These titans of the industry now treat their golden-age hits like toxic waste, shuttering servers, “remastering” classics into unrecognizable slop, and peddling half-baked “modern” cash-grabs just to squeeze one more dime from loyal fans. It’s not evolution; it’s self-sabotage on steroids, a blitzkrieg against their own legacy that leaves fans of these franchises pissed, and their reputations in the toilet. Imagine sinking hours into a timeless epic, only for the devs to nuke it from orbit in a different installment later on and demand you repurchase the corpse, polished with shitty dialogue tweaks and unnecessary additions.

Take Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Square Enix’s bloated 2024 behemoth that promised to “honor” the 1997 legend but delivered a Frankenstein’s monster of cinematic diarrhea and dialogue gut-punches. Serious or ratty scenes are replaced with an over-the-top ritual involving bald people, and ominous sights are replaced with on-the-nose renditions that laugh at the viewer’s intelligence. Fans who asked for this remastered original certainly didn’t expect it to be butchered before their very eyes. Square Enix thought they’d hook the “new generation,” but all they did was alienate the die-hards who built the franchise. Oh, and they added a multiverse plot to the story too, so if there’s any question to the writer’s narrative bankruptcy, nothing confirms that more than hammering in yet another multiverse plot to an IP that doesn’t need it.

THE SELF-INFLICTED VAULTING

Flip to Bungie’s Destiny 2, the live-service leviathan that’s been feasting on vaulting old expansions since its 2017 launch. Remember Red War? Poof—gone forever, content locked behind sunsetting schedules because “sunsetting” became code for “monetize our new garbage.” Players grind for years, only to watch their investments evaporate, forced to pony up for nothingburger stories or the latest episodic slop. It’s not maintenance; it’s malice, a revolving door of FOMO-driven expansions. Bungie’s stock plummeted post-Sony acquisition, proving the vault isn’t just for guns—it’s their reputation too.

And don’t get me started on EA, the poster child for what is essentially ritual sacrifice. They’ve axed a laundry list of beloved titles: Darkspore, Dead Space remakes, Titanfall 3, yet prop up The Sims 4 like a zombie overlord. Launched in 2014 as a buggy mess, it’s been “expanded” into a Frankenstein of endless DLC packs (over 70 now, at $5-40 a pop), while the base game is like a skeletal husk of its previous rendition. Fans voice their dissent in the only forum that matters—Steam forums—while modders keep the dream alive. EA’s playbook: kill the old, milk the new.

This isn’t innovation; it’s a Ponzi scheme where yesterday’s triumphs fund tomorrow’s flops. Devs chase the “modern audience” dragon, live services, battle passes, always-online mandates, ignoring that gamers crave ownership, not rentals. The result? Trust eroded, communities fractured, and AAA’s aura dimmed to a flickering CRT glow.

TRIPPING OVER THEIR OWN SHOELACES

Now, zoom in on the hall of shame: studios that turned their inward cannibalism into an art form. Nintendo takes the crown for extreme measures, waging holy war on emulation while embalming their classic games with the same. Remember the Wii U and 3DS online shutdowns in 2024? Millions of hours in Mario Kart 8, Smash Bros., Pokémon, vaulted into digital oblivion, no backward compatibility, no cloud saves. If not for physical game cards or cartridges, a digital-only marketplace would’ve made these games permanently unplayable and lost to time forever.

They sue emulator devs like Yuzu into the ground, legally backhand fan-games, all while closing eShop stores to make purchasing older games impossible. Meanwhile they hawk $70 Switch 2 ports of buggy 20-year-old N64 sludge. The irony? Emulation thrives underground: Project M, Dolphin, because Big ‘Tendo sunsets faster than a bad speedrun. Fans pirate what they can’t preserve, and Nintendo’s “loyalty” rep sours into “litigious relic.”

It’s contagious. Ubisoft shutters Skull and Bones servers after its post-launch flop. Activision rotates Call of Duty seasons into irrelevance, all while AAA amateurs blame Valve’s effective storefront and beloved sales practices for their own bungles. “Waah, Steam is a monopoly!” they whine, tripping over their unnecessary and annoying launchers they hamfist into their games, forcing Denuvo DRM onto games that don’t need it, and day-one patches that brick GPUs. Steam’s crime? A simple, effective, independent business model. These clowns lambast the platform while their own “platforms” (hamfisted launcher requirements) crash harder than a noob in Dark Souls, self-own after self-own, eroding the very market they aim to dominate.

DIGGING OUT OF THE VAULT

So, what’s the escape hatch from this self-made hell? Simple: claw back to customer-first basics, ditch the malice, and remember why we boot up. Sensible practices like permanent ownership, no more vaulting expansions, no random fucking price hikes, no always-online bullshit.

Malicious monetization? Torch it. Battle passes? Fine, if cosmetic-only and earnable gratis. No paywalls on story beats, no $20 skins pay-to-win. In-game ads? Sacrilege—nuke ‘em. Get rid of ‘em. This isn’t mobile. Look at Helldivers 2’s stratagem model: premium warbonds packed with value, no FOMO grind.

Indies nail it: Hades 2, Balatro, and Vampire Survivors—all full games with fair prices, eternal access thanks to Steam. AAA could learn: release polished (literally just beta-test your games), support post-launch sans greed, induce a post-closure preservation plan without the need for any always-online servers.

This rot’s reversible if these studios stop losing to themselves. Gamers aren’t ATMs; we’re the lifeblood. Deliver fun games, fairly, without the bullshit, and without the hypocritical bureaucratic excuses for their permanent closure, and watch those reputations return to form.

SARJ OUT

RISING IN THE EAST

Picture firing up a game where the lead slashes through hordes of mutants in skin-tight armor that hugs every curve, her design screaming unapologetic allure while the combat demands pixel-perfect dodges and brutal counters. No hand-wringing over “objectification,” no DEI consultants neutering the vibe—just pure, pulse-pounding action tailored for guys who crave heroism, eye candy, and zero lectures. That’s the reality from Asian developers right now, as Japan, Korea, and China crank out hits that serve male audiences without batting an eye. Meanwhile, Western studios drown in political correctness so saturated it’s practically a drowning hazard, churning out desexualized slop that alienates half their playerbase. It’s a tale of two industries: one thriving on fun and fantasy, the other rotting from the inside.

Take Stellar Blade, the 2024 PS5 powerhouse from Korean outfit Shift Up. Eve, the protagonist, is a sleek android warrior with an aggressively athletic build—curves that turn heads, outfits that leave little to the imagination, and animations that celebrate her form during every fluid combo. Launch previews sparked a firestorm from Western journalists: “regressive,” “sexist,” a “blatant example of male gaze pandering.” Outlets like The Mary Sue dissected her as a threat to progress, while activists petitioned for redesigns. But sales? Over 3 million copies sold by mid-2025, outselling many AAA flops, with PC launch shattering records despite the hate. X lit up with mods amplifying her sexiness—fishnet bodysuits, tattoos, pregnant variants—racking thousands of likes from fans who get it: Eve’s appeal is the hook, but the parry-riposte system and boss rushes keep ‘em coming back. Shift Up didn’t flinch; they doubled down, proving that in a market bloated with “relatable” baggy-clothed heroines, sexy sells—and satisfies.

Japan’s been the vanguard for decades, mastering the blend of power fantasy and feminine allure without Western guilt. Yoko Taro’s Nier: Automata (2017) sold over 8 million copies, propelled by 2B: a blindfolded android in a high-slit gothic dress, high heels clicking through apocalyptic ruins as she wields katanas and pod drones. Director Taro openly admitted the fanservice—”I just really like girls”—with panty shots and jiggle physics integral to her design.

Critics whined about “over-sexualization,” but men ate it up: 2B’s stoic lethality masking vulnerability mirrors classic archetypes, her outfits a deliberate tease amid philosophical existentialism. It’s not shallow; it’s layered escapism where beauty enhances the tragedy. PlatinumGames’ Bayonetta series echoes this: the titular witch summons demons with hair-whips, strutting in gun-heeled dominatrix gear that celebrates her bombshell physique. No apologies, just stylish combos and over-the-top spectacle that’s spawned cosplay empires.

Then there’s FromSoftware’s Soulsborne juggernauts—Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring—punishing action-RPGs that embody male perseverance. These aren’t “niche”; Elden Ring alone topped 25 million sales, drawing guys into vast, unforgiving worlds where you die endlessly to colossal bosses, only to master patterns and triumph. The appeal? Pure game theory: build optimization, risk-reward exploration, Tarnished rising from ash to god-slayer. Female characters like Malenia (blade-armed demigod) or Lady Maria (blood-soaked hunter) pack allure without pandering—sexy in ferocity, not fragility. Hidetaka Miyazaki crafts for challenge addicts, ignoring “accessibility” mandates that water down Western titles.

CHINA’S FIRST FORAY

China’s entering the fray with unbridled ambition. Game Science’s Black Myth: Wukong (2024) smashed Steam records as the Monkey King Destined One, a shape-shifting brawler rooted in Journey to the West mythology. Over 20 million players at peak, it revels in power fantasy: acrobatic staff spins dismantling yaksha hordes, transformations into mythical beasts, no hand-holding tutorials. Devs enforced “no politics” for streamers, dodging Western DEI drama amid controversy over localization gripes—yet it soared, proving Chinese studios prioritize spectacle over sermons. Gacha giants like miHoYo’s Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero layer waifu collectors atop action, with hyper-detailed outfits and personalities that hook male spenders globally.

EAST VS WEST

Why the disparity? Asia’s cultures sidestep the West’s PC saturation. Japanese devs chase “kakkoii” (cool factor)—stylish heroes, jiggle physics, rivalry-driven plots—treating male gaze as standard, not scandal. Korean teams like Shift Up mirror K-pop gloss: flawless visuals, aspirational beauty. Chinese outfits leverage mythology for epic stakes, unburdened by pronoun patrols. Western studios? Crippled by “modern audience” mandates—baggy tomboys, virtue-signaling narratives, layoffs galore as flops like Concord tank while Asian hits hand out bonuses. It’s the same rot: desexualizing women to appease activists, yielding sterile products that bomb.

The male appeal is primal: power through mastery (Souls bosses), heroism amid doom (Eve purging Naytiba), beauty as reward (2B’s elegance). These games indulge competition, protection, conquest—without the guilt trip. X buzzes with Eve mods and 2B art, fans reveling in what West denies. Asia gets it: men want aspirational fantasies, not lectures.

This isn’t coincidence; it’s market savvy. While Ubisoft hemorrhages talent on “inclusive” failures, Asian devs rake millions by serving core demos unfiltered. The future? Indies and Asia leading revival—Stellar Blade sequel incoming, FromSoft’s next shadow drop, Chinese myths scaling up.

For subcultures desperate for unfiltered edge, Asian games emerge as the bold cure to the West’s creeping stagnation. Icons of daring, vibrant realms won’t endure neglect forever—champion them, uncover their depths, and spark the shift that gaming desperately needs.

SARJ OUT