Metal Monday

2.3.2025

Author

Owen McClintic
February 03, 2025

YouTube Obsession

It’s fortuitous that I just recently spoke about Astartes1 because Syama the original creator and their new studio Digital Bones, just released a trailer for Astartes II…

…and it is asshole puckeringly amazing. First off, it’s always good to see Traitor legions but they are over represented in 40K media and rightly so, they rule. However, seeing Orks, Tau and Tyranids gave me goosebumps. I get it too, Orks are especially difficult to represent in physical media without coming across as goofy comic relief2 so I am excited to see them being violent and grim.

Also, Syama is proving that they understand what is cool about 40K with one shot:

The absolute cyclopean waste of resources on display, an eons old, 10 kilometer long ship crashing through atmosphere, a millennia of history lost in seconds, pursing the will of a long dead emperor. It’s epic, tragic and grim. Can’t wait for 2026.

Reading

I think anyone who reads Metal Monday is very aware of how inept legacy media was at covering the last Trump presidency and how it is completely failing in the current presidential cycle. I’m also sure we have all experienced the utter bafflement that comes when interacting with older folks3 who still get most of their news through CNN or MSNBC.

Put succinctly by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day, in this scathing open letter to legacy media:

Welcome to 2025. No one reads your website or watches your TV show. Subscription revenue will never truly replace ad revenue and ad revenue is never coming back. All of your influence is now determined by algorithms owned by tech oligarchs that stole your ad revenue and they not only hate you, personally, but have aligned themselves with a president that also hates you, personally. The information vacuum you created by selling yourself out for likes and shares and Facebook-funded pivot-to-video initiatives in the 2010s has been filled in by random “news influencers,” some of which are literally using ChatGPT to write their posts. While many others are just making shit up to go viral. And the people taking over the country currently have spent the last decade, in public, I might add, crafting a playbook — one you dismissed — that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America. And that includes our free and open and lazy mainstream media. And they’re pretty confident it’ll succeed because, unlike you, they know how broken the internet is now and are happy to take advantage of it. While I’m sure it feels very professional to continue playing stenographer in your little folding chair at the White House, they’re literally replacing you with podcasters as we speak. So this is it. Adapt or die. Or at the very least, die with some dignity.

Ryan Broderick

Roasted.

I want to highlight some of my favorite independent news sources that keep me informed without having to spend an entire 24-hour news cycle with Wolf Blitzer.

Easily the best reporting on how money is being spent in American politics.

Excellent no-frills independent reporting. Articles rarely rely on frothy emotional appeal. Though you will get an email every other day to donate. Small price to pay for independent media.

With a refreshingly curt delivery and open malice towards the big media outlets, Ken will publish anything he deems newsworthy. He also talks about his decisions to publish certain items, walking me through the ethics of good journalism.

Good shit-posting about what is being shit-posted.

Absolutely the best independent tech news reporting.

Max read doesn’t always post news but because I relate to the rest of his writings, I find his more news centered content to be understandable. What I’m saying is: His reading suggestions are always spot-on for me so I believe we are calibrated similarly.

Though not necessarily breaking news, JSTOR Blog gathers interesting posts from everywhere, widening my scope of thinking. Which is essential for me to keep an open mind.

Like JSTOR, the articles in the New York Review are not always news worthy but they are well written and great examples of how to think critically about, well, almost everything.

Playing

I am still killing Nazis in Sniper Elite 5. It has not gotten old after 30 hours.

I do want to give some push back on how Sniper Elite: Resistance is being received by reviewers and players. What most reviews are dogging Resistance for is that there aren’t any major upgrades from SE5. I have not played Resistance but if that’s the biggest issue with it, I’m going to love it.

Where I want to push back is that The Sniper series is a budget game series from a small studio. They aren’t Activision pumping $700 million dollars into yearly sequels and justifying it by saying the now your guy can dive in any direction and upgrading graphics so marginally that the human eye cannot detect the improvements.

The world needs more mid-budget games that just offer more game with every sequel, especially when the gameplay loop is perfected like in SE5. Blowing smoke up our asses about better graphics is getting old.

Other Notables

** I love shit like this

1  Ok so I basically fellated Astartes.

2  Which they are comic relief but I don’t think that’s the mood Astartes II is going for.

3  Not much older in my experience. In my mind, people in their 40s are my age, but there is such a cultural gap when it comes to seeking news.