Quickfire Round ⚡️

• After watching season 1 of the Netflix adaptation, I’ve been reading The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, and I completely get why it’s considered a modern classic graphic novel. ⏳
• I finished The Forgotten City, a small indie game on Xbox Game Pass which finds you flung backwards in time to a forgotten Roman city which suffers from a supernatural curse — if even one person commits a sin, all the city’s inhabitants will be turned to gold. A great, thought-provoking, short game. ⚱️
• Speaking of which: shoutout to Xbox Series S and Xbox Game Pass, probably the best value-for-money gaming purchase I’ve ever made. 🎮

Read This 📖 Andrew Tate is a Problem

Andrew Tate is ruining a huge swatch of younger boys with a brand new distribution model for Misogyny™.

His popularity has boomed on TikTok (despite not having his own TikTok account) by running what amounts to a multi-level marketing scheme to lonely guys who are already probably a little bit misogynistic. Keeping it short: he runs a Discord server called ‘Hustler’s University’, where people pay to access. They also, and this is key, get a cut for any referrals that they bring in.

What this has led to is thousands of Tate Bros posting his most controversial, misogynistic, homophobic clips on the platform, with their referral codes conveniently attached.

What are some of his most controversial takes? Here’s a sampler from Ash Sarkar’s piece in GQ Magazine:

He’s argued that women are a man’s property, shouldn’t drive, and shouldn’t leave the home if they’re in a relationship. He claims only to date 18 and 19 year olds as it’s easier to “imprint” on them, and in a now deleted YouTube video, Tate claimed that “about 40 per cent” of the reason he moved to Romania is that he believed police in Eastern Europe would be less likely to pursue rape allegations.

That’s not even the half of it — he’s also been investigated for domestic violence, rape and literal human trafficking.

The thing is: this is exactly what TikTok is great for, and why he’s surged in popularity over the past few months. This content gets engagement, and gets recommended to people who already lean towards consuming anything remotely similar to this.

Teachers in New Zealand have already been seeing his growing influence in school classrooms. We’ve seen this before, with other figures in the “Manosphere” radicalising young men on YouTube for years now, and we still haven’t managed to figure out how to combat it.

Watch This 🍿 Prey

It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a good Predator movie that could be actually be considered a Good Standalone Movie, but that’s exactly what we got with Prey (2022). Prey takes place in the 1700s and follows Naru, a young Comanche hunter who’s still trying to prove her worth as a hunter to her tribe.

It’s a premise that could raise eyebrows at first — Hollywood hasn’t exactly had the best track record with representing Native people — but it seems Prey is successful in that regard. I won’t speak to much on this, given I’m not Native American, but it’s really nice to see.

Prey is simple, concise, and never loses sight of what it’s trying to do. Naru’s journey here gripped me til the end, with her being forced to fight more than just one type of Predator (fuck colonialism). Bonus points for the final sequence being pure Final Girl satisfaction.

Honourary mentions:

• There’s a new special surprise episode of The Sandman out now, and it involves cats.
• The final season of Locke & Key was released, and I didn’t realise how much I loved this family.

Listen to This 🎧 Mura Masa

Mura Masa is absolutely one of those artists that I consistently go back to, because of how varied his discography is.

His first self-titled album was a wildly-influential electronic pop album (you’ve definitely heard this synth from ‘Firefly’ in 2017–2018 floating around the music sphere) which toyed with pop and hip-hop. His second album, R.Y.C., veered into disenfranchised, glitchy guitar anthems with the likes of Clairo and Wolf Alice.

These singles from his upcoming album demon time have me excited, because from what we’ve heard, it seems like a culmination of everything he’s toyed with before, in one package.