Intro

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With a new year now with us, I feel like it’s time to follow up on some of the articles I wrote in the last one, in an article that’s basically the same kind of style as my Other Addendums entry, it’ll give you some info on how things have progressed on some topics since I last wrote about them and let you know a bit about what’s coming up next!

NMYH (and OA)

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I’ve got some updates for all 3 of the studios I covered in the original Never Meet Your Heroes article, I’ve started to look less harshly at Arkane after having given Deathloop another chance, since I originally played it they released a number of updates that managed to resolve its chronic crashing issues, leading to me playing it through, it was an excellent experience clearly made with care and heart, making it even more sad to know the studio is in a real weak spot right now.

It has made me curious to try their latest game, Redfall, that one that sent them under, even though the story about how badly mismanaged it was makes me think it’s still a pretty worse off game, but that’s something that’ll have to wait for now.

Running with Scissors seems to be in a mess right now, POSTAL 4 was totally devoid of updates for the entire year except for beta branch release in April, until finally releasing a new update last week with some fixes, tweaks and new modes, the long gap left me wondering if the company was basically on its death bed or if they were just trying to bundle a huge release into 1 big patch rather than splicing it out across the months.

Even with this new update I still can’t tell, but either way they definitely have been in some real trouble lately, in December they announced a new spin off game in the series called POSTAL: Bullet Paradise, a roguelite kind of game developed by a studio called Goonswarm Games, but this quickly broke out into a massive scandal in the space of a few hours.

At first I just had some mixed thoughts of the game but didn’t feel that strongly, the roguelite model, featuring characters across the POSTAL series, seemed like it had potential, but the game had some very weird presentation, with most of the visuals being made up of 3D models similar in style to the other spinoff, POSTAL Brain Damaged, but the enemies were 2D sprites that didn’t even remotely fit in with the rest of the style, sticking out like a sore thumb.

The real scandal then emerged as one of the promo arts Goonswarm had used had that faux Studio Ghibli style typical of AI slop, leading to strong community suspicions it was made with AI, this suspicion later extended to other elements of the game as well.

Though some of these accusations seemed off, with people jumping to assuming any artwork mistake was somehow proof of AI or pointing to the results of notoriously unreliable “AI detectors”, a few assets the suspicion seemed much more warranted.

Goonswarm themselves were also a very bizarre studio, with very little track record at all and lacking in even basic details of who they were or where they were based, their developers having Russian names, their site listing a throwaway address in Delaware in the US and their YouTube being made in Malaysia, this all led to lots of speculation on just why RWS had greenlit this project.

The response from RWS was characteristically dogshit, aggressively denying the AI claims and doubling down on the project, screenshots of their reactions from their Discord server trickled out with studio boss Mike J and community manager Zeron coming up with bangers like calling critics “tiki torch carrying fucks”, basically comparing them to Neo Nazis, calling them retarded, and demanding they leave the server if they wanted to stand by the accusations.

Goonswarm themselves also offered a similarly shambolic defence, posting a showcase of the main suspect artwork’s layers and linking to a download, when this was investigated it only increased the AI suspicion, with a bizarrely high number of layers, bits and pieces of seemingly generated versions of characters, and one layer just being a png of a middle finger, classy.

Thanks for the close up? pic.twitter.com/EmPGL2ymm4

— Jenny_MCII (@Jenny_MCII) December 3, 2025

The next day RWS quickly changed their tune, offering a tepid apology for overreacting and pledging to investigate the claims, shortly after company founder Vince Desi stepped in to announce the cancellation of the game without the investigation actually happening, summing up that elements of the game were “very likely AI generated” causing “extreme damage” to the company’s brand and reputation, in other words the investigation was no longer needed because the community pressure had become so intense that the truth of the claims didn’t really matter, the game was already buried in so much shit it wasn’t worth trying to salvage.

Goonswarm then announced that their studio was shutting down the next day, though they still tried to deny the AI claims as false, before admitting that their promo art “does appear to include or be influenced by AI generated material” another day later, followed by their CEO outright admitting AI use in a LinkedIn post.

As well as one of the most catastrophic game reveals I’ve seen in a good while it was also a point where the truly terrible attitude of RWS got a wider audience, if you just played their games and didn’t interact with their community spaces a lot it’s something that would be easy to downplay or never even see, but the spread of the scandal across social media, and inevitably the reactions to it from the company, allowed a lot more people to see RWS the way we have for a good while now.

The fact that the company partnered with these obscure people with seemingly very little in the way of background checks was another hint to me that they might be far worse off than they might want to admit, since Postal 3 they had always talked about wanting to either keep things in house or have good quality control on outsourcing, which they managed to do with Brain Damaged, Hyperstrange being a dev with a solid track record of releases that came out with a good product.

But to be fair, even that area of POSTAL is in a low, bizarrely after 3 years since release Hyperstrange released a DLC for Brain Damaged, a short 3 level pack (technically 4, but the 4th was just a boss level) that turned out to be very much in the sub par territory at best.

Ouch, it’s really not looking good for that franchise.

But with our last studio, Starbreeze, there’s actually a bit of a hope spot. PAYDAY 3 didn’t end up croaking after the release of its Jacket DLC, as many (me included) were wary of, slowly trundling along with releases throughout the year, including 2 new DLC heists ( Party Powder and Delivery Charge) and a few feature updates, including the Overskill update which added some extra depth to the game’s deployable Overkill weapons as well as a passive EMP option and a massive overhaul of the game’s armour system, dubbed Armour 2.0.

The new releases motivated me to jump back into the game on and off, buying in on the new DLCs, and to be fair the heists were pretty decent, Armour 2.0 was also a major mechanical improvement to the game, giving player loadouts a lot more depth.

But in the background the game was still floundering, with the DLC heists all being “side hustles” with no overarching narrative like the first DLC heists and the heists of the original game and very long gaps between updates there wasn’t much of a sign of the future for the game, especially because the releases didn’t manage any notable increase in the game’s player population, there was no long term optimism to speak of and to make matters worse senior people at Starbreeze ended up quitting, including the game’s main designer Mio and long time community manager Almir Listo.

But after this worrying decline the trend was finally reversed as Starbreeze’s interim CEO Mats Juhl was replaced by an official new company boss, Adolf Kristjansson, who led a return to focusing on PAYDAY.

After Juhl had left the game to decline, massively reducing investment in it and laying off employees, Kristjansson realised the obvious, it’s not a very good idea to defund your flagship new product and hope it will somehow keep you afloat anyway, it’s also not a good idea to bet on new “golden goose” game releases to try and save you when you can’t get the current one right.

So PAYDAY 3 received a sizeable cash influx, allowing its team to grow again, while the studio’s other project the D&D themed “Project Baxter” went in the bin, leading to the company promising “New heists, mechanics, and narrative arcs” and a more consistent release window, basically what the game had badly needed ever since its first year out in the wild, they also managed to get the publishing rights to the game back from the Embracer Group owned conglomerate PLAION, putting the game in basically the best place to succeed, if they actually handle it competently from here.

This has started to materialise with the game getting another big mechanical rework, Skills 2.0, which massively overhauls the game’s skill system. 

The original release was tied to 3 stat boosts called Edge, Grit and Rush, Rush increasing movement speed, Edge increasing damage and Grit reducing it, with different skills allowing various ways to earn these boosts and benefit from them, alongside other abilities. The skills system also became substantially less linear, getting rid of the skill tree system from PAYDAY 2 and breaking the skills into dozens of different separate skill lines, with the skills in each line being something you could invest points into as you liked, rather than having to go up the tier list of the tree like in PD2.

It was a system I actually mostly quite liked, especially since I just generally like when sequels evolve mechanics rather than just copying old ones because “that’s what the last game did”, but it did suffer from a poor community reception generally, with people being irritated by the high importance placed on triggering the Edge/Grit/Rush boosts and not liking the skill system’s UI, so Skills 2.0 scrapped the 3 boosts and returned to a tree system like PAYDAY 2.

Although it did migrate some of the freedom of the original skill evolution in how it handled its tiers, PAYDAY 2 split each of its skill trees into 3 branches, each with 3 tiers, you could only invest in skills from higher tiers if you’d invested enough into the lower tiers, which could be annoying for making builds since you’d often have to invest in skills that were basically useless to you to be able to buy the skills you actually wanted at the top.

That’s still there to an extent, but something they did is unify the tiers system between the branches, so you invest a bunch into the first tier of a branch, you unlock the second tier of all the other branches too, making investment a bit more free form.

Up next is a new promised heist, and while Starbreeze is still being cagey about the game’s future from there it’s the first time in a long while the PAYDAY community has been able to realistically feel some genuine hope.

I’m admittedly still wary to a degree, alongside PD3’s revival Starbreeze have also reached out to another company to revive PAYDAY 2, not with all out new heists or anything, but with some quality of life updates, that’s obviously not the bad part, the bad part is while there seems to be some genuine interest in improving the game they also seem to want to treat it as a piggy bank to dip into to make up for their losses, as they did last time the company went down the crapper, they’ve done this by announcing a subscription for the game, where you can pay monthly for DLC access instead of buying up the massive DLC collection the game has directly.

Much as this might seem like an affordable way to experience a vast amount of content, obviously it loses its value soon enough as you’ll eventually have paid far more over time than you would’ve buying individually, and of course you don’t actually own the content you’re paying for. I just bitterly hate subscriptions, they’re a way of driving up revenue without actually providing anything new, and they undermine user sovereignty in the process, it’s parasitism we need less of, not more.

Also very frustratingly, in between all these grand plans for the game they actually outright cancelled the game’s Offline Mode, arguing that it would be better to make online mode “excel” instead. That was a very easy way to piss me off, because it doesn’t matter how good your online experience is, if it’s only playable online, it’s a ticking time bomb, and again something that takes away user ownership, and it’s just infuriating seeing Starbreeze keep trying to ignore this key need for the game that users have been demanding since Day 1.

That being said, they did mention adding Peer to Peer hosting as a possible alternative, which would basically be an offline mode in itself, if they actually implemented that, basically putting the game back in user hands like PAYDAY 2, I’d be a lot less rattled, either way it’s ridiculous that it’s taken them this long to even seriously think about cleaning up a mess they never should’ve played in the first place.

Crime Boss (and OA)

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Crime Boss, meanwhile, has continued along a high point without having to climb there in the first place, they successfully delivered their entire roadmap on time, including several very reasonably priced character packs with new abilities and weapons, a new heist chain and a new map for the Rockay Rumble survival mode, alongside some other tweaks and patches, most notably a rebalancing of the final story mission for the game’s heister, Ranger, which allowed me to finally finish it and upgrade his character.

The only thing I haven’t done yet is Baker’s alternate ending to the Roguelite where his gang gets caught but he escapes the crackdown, which still has the troubles I mentioned the first time, being chronically slow to reach with all the upgrades I’ve earned slowing police investigations down and it just being a tough mission overall, so I’m only 99% done with the game for now, but that’s more than enough for me for now.

Like with PAYDAY it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, something I was very disappointed with was the demotion of roguelite to a bottom menu option in the game’s title screen, with the Multiplayer being turned into a regular “Play” button, making it come off as the primary mode, it used to be the other way around.

Though Crime Boss has a very fun multiplayer, the Roguelite is really the core of the game, offering far more mechanical depth and a uniqueness that made it stand out from PAYDAY in the first place, so I don’t like seeing it treated as a kind of sideshow.

Even so, In-Game Studios are clearly a good bunch, embracing value for money and sticking to their pledges, that’s what I like to see!

Mirage DGR/Mirage Revival

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As Massi mentioned in his “Part 0” teaser article, Mirage Arcane Warfare, one of the games we covered a few years ago for Dead Game Review, has experienced an impressive community revival in the last few months.

Spurned on by community member Timbones, who reached out to gauge interest mid way through the year and then began organising routine events, several people stepped forward to host servers again, Massi included, and the Mirage Leftovers community became consistently active for the first time in around 4 years, basically its first real activity period since the release of Chivalry 2.

I was slow to participate at first, since much of the time he was dedicated to playing 1v1 Duels, which I can sometimes enjoy but often really don’t, not wanting to have combat constantly stalled by the etiquette of waiting for agreement to fight and having to let others 1v1 in peace, I much prefer a collective bash up, but games started to shift towards the game’s regular modes and I began to take on a community organiser role, having earned some cred from my work with Massi on the original Mirage DGR.

This led to the game’s second special event (the first being an arena Tournament), where I pitched a randomness mode where we would cycle through game modes with every map change, adding much more variety to the game, this made Mirage much more exciting because in the past servers had often been very minimal in what they hosted, often just cycling through the 3 stock Team Objective maps, leading to constant repetition and gameplay being more dull.

The event really convinced me to give Mirage more of a shot, and we now have much more map variety in most servers, making the game far more fun, I’ve since helped with advising on the organisation of our next event sessions, the Mirage Campaign Events, where Tim and another community bONES developed a map rotation connected by lore blurbs, with the maps played in the event defined by which team won or lost the previous match, a really interesting event series that has added in a sense of a storyline that the game never actually managed.

When Massi wasn’t attending these I recorded them myself, later sending them over to him for eventual use on a more long form DGR video about Mirage, which should cover community member interviews as his second Unreal Tournament video did, with a much more positive spin thanks to the revival success, earning the changed Dead Game Revival title, instead of Review, we’re not doing an autopsy on a corpse, we’re truly practicing necromancy, and it’s fucking cool.

The community also experienced a big shift with promising experiments unlocking the game’s cosmetics, that was previously gated behind its now dead rank system, and making it so cracked copies can join games, meaning that we have the whole of the game in our hands and its survival is no longer finite.

It’s a big change from where the Leftovers were in the past, basically begging an indifferent Torn Banner for help putting together the missing pieces of the game, now there’s nothing to beg for, I think that’s something that would make Soter Dave especially, the now passed former pillar of the Leftovers and a die hard advocate for Mirage, very happy indeed.

This success has led to us working on what will be ED’s second sister site, dedicated to Mirage, which Massi has already made notable progress with, I’ve been working on my own little slice of it by collaborating with Tim on his Mirage Compendium, basically a lore doc that digs through the backstory elements Torn Banner revealed in various preview blogs and buried away in the map design, but didn’t really bother to highlight, no one else will document it, so we have, and Tim was really excited to have me bring my research skills to the task, which has expanded the Compendium from around 4 pages worth of content to 16 and counting. Though we still need to work out what format to host it with, it’s a promising project for sure.

Ukrainian Divide

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As The Ukrainian Divide was finally wrapped up in January 2025, I started bonus content, ultimately expanding into 6 bonus scripts that were developed until near the end of the year, these are:

• Whatever Broe, a response video to a YouTuber called Jake Broe, tackling his dodgy historical accounts of roughly the same time period we discussed in Episode 2, including WW1/The Interwar, World War 2, the Cold War and the Post-Soviet collapse

• The new NATO expansion grift, an episode exploring how NATO’s denialist arguments on the past promises of its leaders not to expand the alliance, which we first mentioned in Episode 2, have evolved

• Demystifying the Black Sun, an episode dedicated to a more detailed discussion of the Neo-Nazi Black Sun symbol shown in Episode 3, exploring its origins, the growth of its use in the Neo Nazi scene and more evidence disproving the propaganda about it being an “ancient” symbol

• Cutting Boneface, a video about how we cut references of Kent McLellan, a Neo-Nazi from the US who claimed to have been a foreign fighter for Right Sector and the Azov Battalion, from Episode 3

• How Adam Something Lies To You About The Gravel Institute, another response video, tackling how YouTuber Adam Something misleadingly presents a video on the Ukraine conflict as Russian propaganda, a finished version of a segment that was planned for Episode 4 but never made it out of the note taking stage

• The stuff that didn’t make the cut, an episode about topics that was were cut from the documentary, topics that considered were considered but ultimately not included, and parts of topics we did include but missed out for one reason or another

As we got to roughly the half way point of 2025, me and Massi talked about what we came to call “Elwood accountability”, where basically I would work with him on content plans, agreeing reasonable time frames, chasing him up on his progress with them and if it came to it criticising missteps, with him crediting me as a good manager, so I put forward what I called a Divide completion plan to work on the bonus material by June and release the Omnibus Cut of the documentary (which will have all 4 episodes in one single video) by July. 

But when this overlapped with the revival of Mirage, prompting Massi to become a community host, create the Mirage Part 0 vid and then make a Dead Game Review for the original Chivalry, as well as Demystifying the Black Sun becoming a progressively longer script as our research grew, much as the original Episode 3 did, we were knocked off course. Though I still managed to get a bunch of work done, with me managing to complete work on the Far Right Repo for the Multimedial release on time, that was a nice confidence booster.

As part of the far-right research for Demystifying the Black Sun, I encouraged him to take a trip to Wewelsburg Castle, where the symbol that became known as the Black Sun was made during the Nazi era. Since he had told me he’d been paying for the Germany Ticket, a special cheap subscription that allows train travel on local lines across the whole country, Wewelsburg would be fairly reachable for him, and it turned out he’d been considering the idea himself.

By late July I ended up coming to a realisation, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see it for myself, but if I wanted to visit I’d have to arrange it quickly. For one because I didn’t want to hold up production of the project, but also because the EU was introducing the Entry/Exit System, a series of new border rules that would demand UK tourists hand over extensive travel info and biometric data before entering, complicating what was previously a very simple process where as long as you hadn’t already stayed in the EU too long, you could just show up and they’d stamp you through.

At first it wasn’t really a feasible idea since I was suffering from terminal brokeness, but after getting a large paycheck from work I quickly pitched a Germany trip to Massi, where he agreed to host me for a second time, so I quickly booked a 2 and a half week trip from late August to early September.

This turned out to be a very productive work trip, especially because except for the Wewelsburg visit, we weren’t actually planning to do any recording. In the first Germany trip, I came there planning to finish all of Divide’s script and record it all too, since I still didn’t have a good microphone at home and wanted everything recorded on the same mic for consistency, but in this second trip it was all just about ironing out the scripts.

It ended up marking my most productive point in the year, as we finished all of the scripts, worked on other projects (where I got 4 articles over the finish line) and managed some extensive shoots.

After talking with the Wewelsburg Museum and explaining our project, Massi actually managed to get us special permission to film in the tower where the Black Sun is found, leading to us touring the museum, chatting with the staff there and getting exactly what we needed research wise.

You’ll get to learn more about that in the video itself, but basically it’s already made the Black Sun episode one of my favourite projects of ours to date, being the first time we actually went out to do a field trip and the first time I got my own on camera segments.

After the Wewelsburg shoot we recorded 2 more on camera segments of me delivering the narration, for Whatever Broe (which was Massi’s idea) and then for Black Sun as well, a last minute suggestion of mine where I thought since we already had extensive pieces to camera, we might as well go even further.

It’ll take a while longer yet before the episodes are all released, as they’re pretty much each mini documentaries in their own right, and when I say “mini”, they’re probably all in the territory of an hour or so at least, so my perception of what a small project is has been massively warped by making something 10 hours long.

Anyway, the point is it’s a big job, and one that’ll be balanced with other projects in Massi’s pipeline, as before Mirage will take away time as he works on the DGR project, and I don’t feel as desperate for it to have a quick release with the main episodes having been out for just shy of a year now, these are just what they’re called, bonuses, Divide itself is finished business, but still, these episodes have a ton of potential, and I’m looking forward to seeing when the Omnibus Cut is finally ready, with the file runtime spelling out just how huge a project we made.

I Am London/Tracking and Tubing

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I managed to beat last year’s event count by just 1, going to 107 events, including starring in 2 music videos as an extra, hanging out with Aziya as she played one of her Foundation FM radio hour shows, going to 13 Face Down and 7 Voodoo overnighters, 3 festivals and 81 other flavours of gig, for most of the year I was a month ahead of 2024 in my gig count, on track to end at at maybe 120 or something in that range, but ended up only going to 3 shows in December, massively cutting back as my wallet ended up in a low spot.

At first I actually had managed to save money by cutting out Voodoo, which I stopped going to since I didn’t really the enjoy the post-band period which lasts several hours through the morning, especially due to Electrowerkz being a much more cramped venue than Face Down’s SCALA, which saved me not only on the ticket costs but travel too.

But then I lost a lot as I started going on a bunch of long distance gigs, turning it into a monthly tradition to go on at least 1 every month, visiting cities across England including Southampton and Hastings in the south, Reading and Bristol in the west, St Albans in the east, Birmingham in the midlands and Manchester and Sheffield in the north, taking pride in massively expanding my gig spots map.

Even though it was costly I never had any regrets, enjoying getting to see more of the country when I’m basically usually always glued to my region otherwise and getting to surprise the artists I go to see that I came all the way just for them.

I have plenty of yapping to do about this year’s chapter of the gigging experience, but I feel like that’s best served in its own article, which I’ve been thinking of calling This is England, a reference to a classic movie I got to see in my film studies classes and the expansion of the gig spots, tying in with the old “I Am London” of the last article, now I’m a lot more.

So much travel has taken me across a lot more of the UK’s rail network too, much as the destination matters more than the journey it’s interesting seeing the diversity of the system, with so many different brands, liveries and vehicles making up the iconography of the network, as well as travelling on all the networks I used in 2024 again (Thameslink, Great Northern, Southern, Southeastern, South Western Railway and Greater Anglia) I added the long distance Avanti West Coast, East Midlands Railway, Great Western Railway, London Northwestern Railway and Cross Country services to the list. 

Plus of course the local London lines, including 11 of the 12 Underground lines, 4 of 6 Overground lines, the DLR and the Elizabeth line.

As if that wasn’t enough I also travelled on a tiny slice of Manchester’s Metrolink tram network, then when I was abroad I went on a bunch of different systems, the 2 Eurostar brands (Eurostar Blue, the original Eurostar, and Eurostar Red, previously Thalys), DeutscheBahn’s ICE and Regio networks, the Cantus, Rhine Ruhr Express and Kassel RegioTram of Germany, and a line of Belgium’s Brussels Metro.

Now that’s a lot of travel!

It hasn’t always come with the usual joy of knowing I’m going places at lightspeed, the vast majority of my journeys have been smooth, chill and on time or close enough, but there have been some real stinkers.

Avanti cancelled my train to Manchester only around 50 min before it was due, releasing the restrictions on my advance ticket allowing me to board the ones before or after, I had to get the one before to arrive on time, leaving me sprinting to the station and having to sit on the floor for around an hour of the 2 hour journey when everyone else got the same idea, my ICE into Germany was delayed by around 40 minutes, which since I then had to connect with a Regio that only ran hourly made the delay even longer, horror show scenarios where all I want is to get where I’m going and I desperately want off the trains.

Many of these trips have had parts of them, from journeys to arrival shots to zooms on route maps, recorded for a potential video, although I’d planned to do a shooting day where I’d travel across London just to get lots of footage across the network for this idea I never actually got around to it and basically ended up thinking I wouldn’t want to take trips just for the sake of filming, so instead I’ve just been recording spontaneously when there’s some free time on the way to other things.

I’ve been thinking about getting back into my own videomaking for some time now, having been out of practice on editing for years since I didn’t have the resources to make anything actually good, especially with my older crappy mic that make recordings staticy and dogshit, a problem Massi’s gift at the end of my first Germany trip solved.

But burdened by Divide I basically moved into article making since it was far easier and less time consuming, it’s something I want to get back to now.

A video adaption of the Tracking and Tubing article, with a bunch of structural edits and references to my wider journeying since the article was originally made, was basically something I thought of as a great way to get into the swing of editing again, especially since all of the train footage gives me a huge array of b-roll that means even for a long form video I’d have no problem filling a timeline, but with so much stuff to work on, so many places to be, I didn’t find the time yet.

Relatively soon I want to look into giving it a try, since soon an SSD that can hold all the footage, which currently sits on my phone’s SD card, will be added to my desktop setup, and showing the network as it is right now is a kind of time sensitive thing now, with the whole UK system soon to be absorbed into the nationalised, homogenous, Great British Railways, which will soon replace the huge array of liveries, brands and colours with its own single style.

A change I’m very much not a fan of, representing a loss of distinct route identities which besides losing some variety flare is a terrible idea for wayfinding, and on top of that the design they picked is a shoddy stylisation of the UK flag, I’m not a flag hater, being a decent fan of my country, but it’s obnoxious to plaster it everywhere to try and score some cheap patriotism points, as I recently saw when a “Raise the Colours” movement tangled the England flag to as many lampposts as they could reach across the country, and once it reached near my area I saw it and instantly cringed.

The only place for so much flag spamming is my glorious city in Tropico 4, where I built so many flagpoles the airplanes would crash into them on approach if they had any collision.

As a card carrying socialist I should be a big fan of rail nationalisation, but I care less about who runs the network and more about how well they run it, privatisation has been an absolute lottery for that, with some companies delivering strong performance and others being a total shambles, but it’s a struggle to believe the rhetoric about a railway that belongs to us, that’ll deliver for us, when it’s being promoted by a government that absolutely sucks ass, speaking of which…

UK politics

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Like I mentioned in my local democracy article, our establishment 2 party system, where power bounces between Labour and the Conservatives, is giving way to a 5 party system, right now the dissident right Reform Party leads in the polls, while Labour, the Conservatives and the Greens fight for 2nd place and the Lib Dems sit a little bit behind them, but all 5 both have a solid chunk of the voter base, that’s a scenario that would’ve been genuinely unthinkable only a few years ago.

The Greens have risen in credibility as a left wing party after Labour gave up that ground, moving to the centre and in many areas even hard right to try and win over Reform voters, a ridiculous failing strategy given that those voters weren’t interested in them in the first place, with Labour in reality losing more votes to Greens and Libs than Ref, reminding me of Kamala Harris’ failed outreach in the US, where she kept thinking that embracing Republicans could win them over and ended up losing progressives and gaining nothing, leading to the Dems loss to Trump.

It already feels like we’re in the late stage era of the Conservatives where MPs are completely out of touch with reality trying to bat for a garbage leadership, while others start to wonder if it’s already time to boot the leadership out to try and save the party’s skin. Our PM, Starmer, was already about to face a challenge from lefty Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, but he was distracted from it after a terror attack in the city, leading him back to local focus, but if the party remains on this chronic low point it’s easy to imagine someone else stepping forward.

In fairness, the government actually isn’t doing too bad at meeting its promises, though they’ve broken some big ones on economic growth and not raising tax, but where they’ve really poisoned the well is with all the new schemes that weren’t in the manifesto, like the ridiculous PA terror designation, their embrace of the censorious Online Safety Act and hard right pivots on migration, especially pushed now by the country’s home secretary Shabana Mahmood. Hailing from a wing of the party called Blue Labour, a niche faction with only 7 MPs that her appointment elevated to prominence, she started her first day overseeing a mass arrest of protesters and praising the police for doing it, then became the face of an intense immigration crackdown designed to appease people who will never support her.

The authoritarianism is only escalating as police threaten to arrest people for Pro Palestine chants, outrageously using a terror attack in Australia as an excuse, and major tech crackdowns are also on the horizon, with speculations that VPNs could be subject to tougher checks to stop people working around the OSA and even more shockingly demands for device level nudity blocking, where smartphone users would have all their devices scanned to block them viewing or taking nude images unless they submit their ID, not only an insanely authoritarian concept but an infantilising one that intensifies the government’s concept that the internet should run on guilty until proven innocent.

As I see these people try to grab the country by the throat more and more it just leaves me progressively more radicalised, despising these people and wanting their institutions to collapse. It’s especially made me look more harshly at the police, I’ve always had a skeptical view of them as no matter how good a person you are, being in the job of enforcing the law leaves you only as good as the law is, and as our laws become more sinister and throttling that only gets worse. 

Just to put it into perspective, “terrorism” arrests have gone up by over 600% as the vast majority of suspects are people protesting the Palestine Action ban, basically guilty of saying a phrase or writing a slogan on a bit of card, not building homemade IEDs or planning truck rammings.

As if that wasn’t enough I recently watched a documentary from the BBC’s Panorama showing a police station in London’s Charing Cross, where cops were seen displaying blatant institutional racism and extreme police, purposefully torturing their prisoners, then learned about how in the Manchester attack one of the victims was actually killed not by the terrorist, but by a cop, with the media dancing around the incident using passive language as praise was heaped on the first responders anyway, a kind of insane POV I’d never seen over here, only reading about it being used in US media.

I was also personally failed by the police myself as they instantly closed the case when I reported an attempted robbery on the tube, where 2 guys tried to steal my phone while I was filming some footage for the Tubing video, I wanted to take advantage of having an empty carriage to myself, but they walked in and then stood by the door until the moment it closes. You don’t stand by the door facing the way out, ready to leave, then wait til the last second, for no reason, so I knew what they were about to try and dodged the grab attempt, with the 2 of them running away, the grabber getting stuck in the door as it closed, wriggling his way out onto the platform and sheepishly apologising with a wave as I smugly gave him the middle finger while we went off into the tunnel.

Once I got home I reported it, offering to send the footage and giving time info so they could potentially ID the suspects, not even because I wanted them to catch a case over what they did to me, they missed me after all, but so they’d be known and could be quickly chased up if they went after others, because I obviously wouldn’t have been their first target.

But after a length faffing report process the police told me they wouldn’t even look at it because their policy wasn’t to investigate thefts under £200 in value, and since nothing was actually stolen since it was only an attempt, the value was technically £0, so they closed the case then repeatedly sent me analytics emails asking me to rate their performance, which I ignored because what was I supposed to tell them? That they were useless and left me thinking that next time around I won’t bother contacting them?

It’s not like these issues are some new thing obviously, it’s just that they’re more in my face.

I’d like it if we had, and I know this is a radical idea, a decent government actually standing with us, building institutions we could trust, with a sense that they’re really just there to help us and protect us rather than strangle us, but not only this one never going to deliver that, we’re also basically going to play the lottery at election time as a winner takes all system has to somehow fit up to 5 different winners.

As if that wasn’t enough, it could’ve been 6, for basically all of 2025’s second half there has been an attempt to kickstart a new lefty party nicknamed Your Party, an initiative of ex Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and another Labour defector, Zarah Sultana, but the party basically dropped out of relevance after fumbling its launch several times over.

First Sultana announced the plans for the party before getting Corbyn’s agreement, leading to tensions between the two of them, but they seemed to smooth over enough as she was brought into Corbyn’s Independent Alliance in parliament, formed with several independent MPs who overthrew their local Labour candidates in protests over Gaza.

The party then managed to get hundreds of thousands of people to sign up to its mailing list, getting a sizeable base of support, but then after moves to actually from the party stalled Sultana decided to launch a membership platform, collecting membership fees, without the backing of the Alliance, prompting them to encourage everyone not to sign up and threatening to sue.

They later launched their own membership platform, eventually jointly planning to merge the two systems to have a unified membership, but still didn’t agree because the rest of the group didn’t want to take on the liabilities that would come from part owning the company managing Sultana’s platform.

The squabbling petty spats massively undermined the party’s credibility, causing one Alliance MP to quit the party entirely, and led to a notable shift in POV for the left.

Despite badly losing 2 elections as Labour leader, causing him to quit as the party’s leader, Corbyn still has had a lot of credibility in the progressive base as an organiser and activist, but botching the YP founding has left most realising that he’s just not the man for the job, much of that progressive base are now looking to the Greens instead, bolstered by the rise of their new leader Zack Polanski, a confident, unapologetic leader who has managed to seriously engage people, helped along by the fact that he actually had a party already.

Your Party was formally founded in November, with its nickname becoming its official name, but has pretty much dropped out of relevance, barely getting any mention anymore.

Busy Day in Damascus

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After Mohammad Al-Jolani (or as he now prefers to be called, by his real name not his hold alias, Ahmad Al-Sharaa) entered Damascus with his Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham militia he managed to take hold of the vast majority of Syria, with his new Syrian Transitional Government ruling over former Assad controlled parts of the country as well as the northern areas formerly controlled by Syrian Rebel groups, including the former HTS backed “Syrian Salvation Government” and the Turkish proxy “Syrian Interim Government”.

Al-Sharaa disbanded HTS and moved most of its fighters into a new Syrian Armed Forces, with the former Turkish backed groups agreeing to integrate with it, creating a mostly unified Syrian state where he was appointed as President, but he’s still failed to bring the whole thing back together.

Although the northeastern forces of Rojava have agreed on paper to integrate into this new Syria in practice it hasn’t happened, with repeated clashes between government forces and the SDF, and in the south things aren’t much better.

As well as having to deal with the extended Israeli occupation in the region, rebel groups from the country’s Druze minority have prevented the new government from entering the majority Druze Suwayda province, forming their own government called the “Supreme Legal Committee in Suwayda” to rule outside of Al-Sharaa’s reach.

[ war map]

To provide more credibility to his new government, Sharaa arranged for “elections” to be held in the country in October, but these were not terribly democratic to say the least, with Sharaa himself getting to pick 70 MPs of Syria’s new parliament, while 122 seats were “elected”. Not elected by Syrians themselves, mind you, but by several hundred delegates per region, making the election a highly closed off elite process.

It has been argued that after decades of dictatorial rule and just over a decade of war the country just isn’t ready for proper elections, and that’s probably a genuine point, but it’s funny to me seeing this elitist process being celebrated as a milestone for people power, with the fact that barely any people are involved in it being dismissed as a small shortcoming at worst.

A lot of people talking about Syria are basically still in victory fever, trying to focus on the image of Al-Sharaa as the revolutionary who toppled a dictator, and not the other side of him, where he acted as a dictator himself for years, now holds a tight grip on the country, and still has that not so forgettable backstory of being a former Al-Qaeda terrorist.

Swapping the olive fatigues for a business suit, he now wants to play the role of the moderate figure of reconciliation, earning extensive international recognition, but at home his country is still divided, even if the gunfire of the civil war exists in more quiet corners now.

The country has definitely avoided the worst case scenario of something more like Libya or Afghanistan, where every militia goes off on their own agenda, turning the country into a wild west shambles, but the continued instability and failure to unify large corners of the country will be a blight on it for a while to come.

Upcoming

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I have a few bits of unfinished business to wrap up as we go into 2026, article projects that I started last year but haven’t managed to get over the finish line for one reason or another, these include:

Reviving V, an article about my second playthrough with Cyberpunk 2077, and some unnamed articles about WD Legion and Far Cry Primal, Reviving V and Legion got very difficult to progress with because they were basically full summaries of my playthroughs, leading to my thoughts on them, from what I did in missions to story beats, with longer games, especially Cyberpunk, that can be a tough format to keep up with without it feeling draining and exhausting.

Primal had this issue to an extent, but was partly stalled because I wanted to experiment with discovering its mission structure in a new playthrough, because some of its missions can be started way earlier than the game actually telegraphs, but obviously uncovering that could be a good chunk of trial and error, causing me to leave the article on the back foot.

Games of Interest is an article where I bundle a less extensive discussion of a bunch of different games into one project, it’s still a long write up but not one that goes beat by beat of everything I did in the games, being a broader reflection, it’s mostly finished but has a few sections left to line out, and was made a longer job to finish when I decided to add a 6th game to the lineup, Dispatch, at the very end of the year.

2 Ways to Play D&D (a WIP title I might change later) is another late bloomer article started in December when I finally put in the time to play Baldur’s Gate 3, which (in case you’re living under a rock) is an RPG inspired by the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game, I got the idea to compare it with my experience with tabletop D&D, a custom campaign organised by Massi called Soulbound Derelicts which we played back in 2023, so far my only tabletop experience. This one is only in the note taking stage since I still need to finish BG3, having gotten up to the end of its second act of 3.

It’s had some really really exhausting, tough combat encounters that have seriously tested my patience with the game even though I love so much about it, I’m absolutely not going to give up on it but need to work out if I want to tough it out on its standard difficulty or tweak some elements to lower difficulties through its custom mode option, making it less painful to finish, I tried to avoid this so I could play the game the “intended” way the devs lined out, but as the article will go into, at times it had some really frustrating design that’s made me more open to turning it down to save myself from suffering.

The Gender Gulag (another working title, but one I’ve stuck with more) is actually an even earlier article, first started back in 2024, it’s probably the toughest article I’ve ever worked on, basically every writing project I work on for some time now has 2 key things to it, I see it to completion and I keep going from the first draft, even if there are extensive changes I basically never do full rewrites, the closest I got to this was the conclusion to Ukrainian Divide, a current events section where current events outpaced the original version.

But with Gender Gulag I worked on a first version in April and May, before deciding it just didn’t hit the mark, starting from scratch with a second version made from May to June, but I then abandoned that version as well, since then I planned to pick it up again and finish it by the end of 2025 but did managed to, barely even looking over my old work and working on all my other projects instead.

It’s really tough because it’s a project that’s got some very personal elements to me, a very broad subject matter and the need to balance some intense tonal shifts, it has a cohesive through line about the concepts of gender roles that are hard rooted in society, basically dismantling a completely fraudulent social divide and the idea that that divide is natural rather than man made, talking about the value of doing that, in seeing the world more realistically and creating solidarity that doesn’t really exist right now, as many refuse to understand each others problems or see our commonalities, and the intense damage done by basically segregating social values and problems by gender, presenting tendencies as if they were absolutes.

But I need to work out how to go from the lighter parts of discussing that problem to the much darker areas, like going from “hey, did you know pink used to be a manly colour” to “we need to reframe how we talk about sexual assault”, it’s hard enough to talk about a topic like that as is without creating a massive tonal whiplash that makes the article feel like a mess.

But it’s one that I think could potentially be one of my most important write ups, a message I see a lot of value in, so I need to figure out how to bridge those gaps and share those thoughts.

Lastly is another unnamed article based around Israel/Palestine, an extensive Ukrainian Divide style article that would cover the history of how the region became divided in the way it is today, including the events of ancient times, the rise of Zionism and the Arab Revolt, and exploring modern narratives saying my own piece.

I easily knew what I wanted to say in terms of modern times, putting forward an Anti-Zionist message arguing that Zionism’s fundamental premise is a sinister apartheid project, not an empowering liberation movement as its believers want it to be seen, how you can’t claim a right to build a safe haven for refugees by making hundreds of thousands more in the process in an ethnic cleansing campaign and using apartheid methods to preserve the accomplishments of that campaign.

But exploring older historical nuances demands a lot of fact checking and deep diving that not only would be very time consuming but also something I was wary of going back into after dedicating several years to giving the Russia-Ukraine conflict the same treatment, so while some parts were written much of the article only exists as unfinished notes, it’s not like that conflict is going to end any time soon even if it changes from phase to phase, so there will still be a place for that write up no matter what, but it’s something sitting on the sidelines for now.

Conclusion

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Of course there’s more in the pipeline beyond these, with lots of article concepts I’ve toyed with but not actually worked on and some stuff that got to note taking/writing stage but ended up in a limbo I either can’t or don’t really have time to get them out of, but for now I want to wrap up the unfinished business, then later see if I want to write those ideas or leave them behind and do something else, until a concept turns into actual work, note taking or words on the page, I don’t feel too tied to it, so it’s a very open door what I pull out for 2026, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be plenty busy either way.

Changelog

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• Edit 1 - 08/01/26 - Added extra images and embeds
• Edit 2 - 24/01/26 - Added Games of Interest link
• Edit 3 - 04/02/26 - Typo and link fixes