Star Trek has always been my church. I recognize how offensive this might sound to some people of faith, but it’s the honest truth. My parents, who came from different religious backgrounds, agreed to raise me and my sister in a secular household, and growing up, episodes of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation became my Bible stories. Star Trek instilled in me many of the same values that are taught in houses of worship across the world, but in my faith, there is no God to judge or punish me—I learned how to rely on my own moral compass and inner strength. Last year, Skydance Media bought my church.

The ideals espoused in its text may be lofty and anti-capitalist, but Star Trek is a product, and has been since Lucille Ball bought the first pilot from creator Gene Roddenberry in 1965. It’s been in the hands of soulless business machines since at least 1968, when the Desilu library was purchased by industrial conglomerate Gulf+Western, who had recently gobbled up the storied Paramount Pictures. During the 1970s, Roddenberry parlayed his canceled TV show into a second career on the college lecture circuit, stoking the show’s passionate audience into the first modern pop culture fandom, a social club with conventions around the world and an insatiable appetite for branded merchandise. That movement gave birth to one of the seminal franchise reboots, as Trek returned not just to television but the big screen, eventually becoming one of the “crown jewels” of the Paramount portfolio.

As easy as it was to divest financially from Star Trek, divesting emotionally is proving much more difficult.

The asset that is Star Trek is now in the hands of Paramount Skydance, a merger of the century-old studio and the relatively young media corporation founded by born billionaire David Ellison, who have been co-producing projects since 2016, including two Trek features. Since the merger was finalized last year, Ellison has been utterly transparent in his pandering to US President Donald Trump, an old friend of David’s father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. (Correction, 1/15/26, 4pm--This story initially incorrectly stated the Ellisons' first names). The new Paramount’s first act of fealty was granting Trump a $16 million settlement in his frivolous lawsuit against CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, in which he claimed the program deliberately defamed him in favor of opposing presidential candidate Kamala Harris, causing him “mental anguish.” Just days later, CBS cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, whose host is a tireless Trump critic. It’s been speculated that both of these acts were done in exchange for easier merger approval from the FCC. Just weeks ago, CBS’s new embarrassingly Trump-friendly new director Bari Weiss shelved a 60 Minutes segment that interviewed victims of brutal abuse at the US prison in El Salvador where Trump has been deporting — well, whoever he wants — despite the story having been fact-checked and cleared with the network’s attorneys.

This is the company that, for the foreseeable future, stands to profit from the massive library of Star Trek stories about tolerance, curiosity, honor, and social justice, as well as from any forthcoming entries. Canceling my Paramount+ subscription was not a tough decision. But as easy as it was to divest financially from Star Trek, divesting emotionally is proving much more difficult.

Being a Trekkie has been a crucial part of my identity for my entire life. It’s one of the lenses through which I view the world and, even since childhood, it’s been one of the ways I invite people to get to know me. My love of Star Trek is deeply tied to my love of sharing Star Trek, of curating episode guides for specific friends, of writing columns or reviews with the aim of demystifying this dense mythology for curious newcomers. I was lucky enough to do this professionally for a few years, writing regularly about Star Trek for websites like Fanbyte, Looper, and Polygon. Between 2020 and 2025 I wrote dozens of reviews, interviews, and retrospectives praising its glories and dissecting its many, many failures. 2026, being Trek’s 60th anniversary, offered ample opportunity to get back into Trekkie missionary work again, if not for money then at least for the joy of it.

Now, by the very standards of the fictional heroes I wish to celebrate, I don’t feel that I can do that.

As a fan, you are at best a stockholder — at worst, a tenant.

There’s an ugly truth that you learn when you get into the modern economy of media journalism or criticism. As far as the corporations you cover are concerned, you are an extension of marketing. You keep the conversation going around a product. You draw eyes to it, and you engage its audience between releases. Even if your feedback about the product is negative — and mine frequently is — you are helping to sustain the brand. That’s why you’re granted access to screeners and talent interviews, even, for example, after your scathing and spoiler-filled review of the series finale to Star Trek: Picard is accidentally published early. You’re part of the team.

In hindsight, this reads as ridiculous, self-aggrandizing, stooge-like behavior. As if artists and entertainers don’t already have an inflated idea of the social value of their work, the idea that a critic or commentator should feel proud of his tertiary involvement after the fact is ludicrous. But this is a symptom of the way I – and to an extent, all of us — have been taught to relate to media. Art compels us to invest part of ourselves into it, and under capitalism, artists need us to do so. Entertainers curate fanbases not only out of the joy of building community or the desire to boost their egos, but to ensure their continued employment. They are incentivized to involve us. And when art becomes the property and concern of massive corporations, it’s now the corporations who profit from that loyalty. 

The people discussing the teaser trailers for Avengers: Doomsday aren’t fans of actor Chris Evans or screenwriters Chris Markus & Steve McFeely or (god forbid) directors Anthony & Joe Russo, they are fans of Marvel. Your cousin with the Stitch tattoo isn’t a fan of writer/artist Chris Sanders, they’re a fan of Disney. And in the above paragraphs, despite expounding on my love for television shows called Star Trek, I have failed to mention showrunners Gene Coon, Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, Michelle Paradise, or Mike McMahan. These are some of the most prominent of the literal thousands of creative professionals who have shaped the fantasy world around which I’ve built myself. They are writers who have enriched my life, but rather than being a fan of theirs, I am a fan of Star Trek.

This is a disease, and if you’re reading this, you’ve probably got it. If not for a media franchise or a fictional character, then perhaps for a sports team. At some point in your youth, you imprinted on this amorphous thing, a ship of Theseus that you’ve continued to love even after its every component has been replaced. Everything about it has changed, except that it’s yours.

Nevermind that it isn’t yours, and it never was. You are at best a stockholder — at worst, a tenant. The modern media economy dictates that you are, most likely, paying a subscription to access or license whatever it is you love to watch, play, or listen to, and only a sliver of the proceeds will find their way to the artists who move you to do so. Instead, that value is passed up the chain to the financiers and executives, to whom the art you love is just another asset to be exploited. The people who produce it do so with love and care, but it’s our devotion to the brand that makes it an inexhaustible resource to be consumed forever by a class of corporate Doomsday Machines. 

No one is a hero for not watching a television show, nor are they a villain for continuing to watch.

Star Trek has given me a sense of purpose towards a better future, and a strong sense of responsibility towards myself. I cannot take back the countless hours or dollars I have invested in Star Trek for the past thirty-six years of my life. I have, however, seen a bountiful return on that investment. So much of what I love about myself has been instilled or nurtured in me by these characters, their stories, and their storytellers. Chief among these qualities — tolerance and curiosity, the kind of values that compel me to resist the impulse to reject the unfamiliar.

My first tattoo, which I had inked shortly after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, is of the Vulcan symbol for IDIC — Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. It’s a shorthand for a philosophy codified by Leonard Nimoy’s Spock in the 1968 episode “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” that’s come to define Star Trek as a whole, one that celebrates the differences between people and cultures. I got this tattoo to remind me, when I’m an old man who’s alarmed by the amount of change around me, not to rally around whatever figure rises to validate my worldview at the expense of someone else’s. Instead of reflexively shunning new ideas and the people who believe in them, I will try to remember that the world is more beautiful because it’s not all about me, or like me, or for me. That’s the return I’m walking away with.

No one is a hero for not watching a television show, nor are they a villain for continuing to watch. Certainly, the large majority of creative professionals who are directly responsible for the brand have nothing to do with Skydance’s politics and lack the leverage to do anything about them. But in the years ahead, as more and more of what makes us who we are is gobbled up by fewer and fewer ghoulish robber barons, we’re all going to have to decide how much of ourselves we’re willing to keep renting from people who hurt us. We’re all going to make moral compromises, we’re all going to be subject to whataboutism, and we’re all going to make hypocrites of ourselves here and there. But sometimes, it will be shockingly easy. One to beam out.

Last year, following Tim Sweeney’s full-throated endorsement of racist, conspiratorial tweets from Elon Musk, we implored the Epic Games CEO to log off. Now, in the somehow already worse year of 2026, we feel the need to urgently reiterate that message.

At the tail end of last week, Sweeney decided to once again swing to the rescue of the richest man on the planet by quote-retweeting an article headlined “U.S. Senators Ask Apple and Google to Remove X and Grok Apps Over Sexualized Image Generation” with the following bit of commentary: 

“Reason #42 for open platforms: to shut down every politician’s incessant demands to all gatekeepers to censor all of their political opponents. All major AIs have documented instances of going off the rails; all major AI companies make their best efforts to combat this; none are perfect. Politicians demanding gatekeepers selectively crush the one that's their political opponent's company is basic crony capitalism.”

This prompted more than a few raised eyebrows, seeing as one could – sans much or really any mental gymnastics – infer that Sweeney was defending Musk and co’s recent decision to implement AI tools that allow X/Twitter users to generate pornographic imagery of minors. Or at least that he was minimizing the harm those tools have caused and continue to cause. PC Gamer published a piece suggesting as much and also rightly pointing out the hypocrisy of Sweeney taking such a nauseating stance while overseeing a store that couldn’t stomach Horses, a tame art game that sparked a bewildering panic around nonexistent sexual content involving a minor. 

Over the weekend, Sweeney, a billionaire with at least a billion better things to be doing, logged on perhaps harder than ever to call PC Gamer’s article “a vile lie.” 

“I criticized a government official for pressuring Apple and Google to block a speech app owned by their political opponent,” he wrote, “deplatforming 500,000,000 users on the pretense of stopping a small number of users from distributing disgusting content.” 

Where to begin. First and foremost, hosting pornographic material involving minors is a crime to the extent that, as Chris pointed out on Aftermath Hours last week, X users could be implicated by downloading the app. And even if you agree with Sweeney’s techno-libertarian stance that lawmakers should have no power here, there must be some kind of consequence for creating history’s most powerful child porn engine. Otherwise, as we have seen time and time again specifically from billionaires like Musk, wealthy assholes will simply do whatever they please if it suits their vainglorious desires. 

It’s worth noting that legal and financial constraints have caused Musk to fold in the past – for example in 2018 when he essentially committed fraud by claiming on Twitter that he’d secured funding to take Tesla private, at which point the SEC offered him a deal that’d force him to step down as chairman, which he rejected, and then sued him, causing him to accept the deal. Now, however, Musk owns the regulators, making consequential US government intervention a far less likely proposition. But this gives up the game as to what billionaires like Musk and Sweeney really want: Not a lawless land in which openness and innovation thrive, but one where the laws bend to and serve their specific wills.

Beyond that, if we’re really choosing to die on this hill, we must consider the matter of intent: OpenAI, as much of a stain on what remains of society as it is, at least has a policy stating that its services "must never be used to exploit, endanger, or sexualize anyone under 18 years old." (Granted, other companies with similar policies, like Microsoft, have previously struggled with deepfake porn, and OpenAI’s forthcoming “adult mode” will almost certainly prove to be a disaster.) X, for its part, has referred members of the press to a tweet from earlier this month in which it said that “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.” Thus far, however, the results speak for themselves. It is clear that X did not implement rigorous safeguards before releasing this feature, and now – instead of taking the whole thing offline until it’s in better shape – the company is attempting to monetize it. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point to Sweeney’s own history where deplatforming users is concerned. As Nathan Brown, writer of the HitPoints newsletter, put it: “[All of this] from a guy who deplatformed tens of millions of his own users so he could pressure Apple and Google to change what he considered an immoral policy.” But then, said policy happened to cost Sweeney money, obviously making it a far more urgent matter than something that stands to enable pedophiles while endangering, traumatizing, and embarrassing countless children, as well as numerous adults (mostly women). Meanwhile, thanks to the recent addition of microtransactions on Sweeney's platform, a user-generated game popular with millions of younger players now includes real-money gambling.

Sweeney, like every other tantrum-throwing tech baby irreparably brain-poisoned by a mixture of obscene wealth and an app where people are sometimes a little mean to them, needs to log off. He needed to do it yesterday – and also all the days before. But hey, the sun will rise again tomorrow. There is still hope, dim though it might be.

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Log Off, Tim Sweeney - Aftermath

Again, if I had $5 billion you would never see or hear from me ever again

AftermathLuke Plunkett

WASHINGTON — Confident that the route is still “absolutely viable”, House Democratic leaders announced today that they remain fully committed to completing the current legislative session as a full pacifist run despite clear indicators that the majority party has switched to an all-out combat build.

“We know many out there think the pacifist path is impossible, but it would be foolish to change paths now after having spent so much time working toward this goal,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, indicating to a large “The Pen Is Mightier” achievement tracker printed on posterboard. “By sticking to dialogue-only interactions, avoiding all optional battles over legislation, carefully letting bills expire so as not to level up anything, and refusing to use any political capital, we believe we are well on our way to the true ending.”

Meanwhile, members of the opposing party have reportedly adopted a high-damage, low-defense build that prioritizes constant action over long-term survivability.

“The GOP are doing a full berserker run,” said Democratic Strategist Mark Halper. “They’re taking massive self-damage, clearing the worst possible objectives, and triggering every chaos event on the map. We’re hoping that our increased fundraising effort will help us fully map out all possible dialogue trees so there is no chance we trigger a cutscene we’re not prepared for.”

The representative from Connecticut, Chris Murphy, known for his fiery speeches from the House floor, gave a fiery speech addressing fellow Democrats on the house floor.

“The tree of Liberty must be passionately encouraged by the words of the patriots,” he declared to an audience of House Democrats. “Incisive words and consistent rhetoric are the most effective tools we’ve allowed ourselves. I know victory through inaction is possible. I remember reading about another country that did it. Maybe Portugal? I think it was in a guide I saw. We have several Pages scouring GameFAQs as we speak.”

At press time, representatives were debating whether sharing a viral Instagram post detailing the extent of the problem would be considered unprofessional if done with their work accounts, or whether posting it to their personal accounts would violate their restriction on “provocative gestures.”

The post House Democrats Confident Pacifist Run Still Possible appeared first on Palette Swap.

REDMOND, Wash. — After a shocking report revealing that 43% of Windows 10 users have declined to upgrade to Windows 11, Microsoft announced a new 1-800 number to report outdated users.

“This really requires a nationwide effort. We need your help. You’re our eyes and ears,” declared Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Takeshi Numoto, in a public address. “Spot someone working on a screenplay in a café, and that full-screen Windows 8 Start Menu pops up? Call it in. Hear someone referencing the ‘Documents and Settings’ folder at work? Call it in. Catch a friend talking about finally getting into Black And White, or Motocross Madness 2? Call it in. We’re beyond people opting-in at this point. We need to take action.”

Senior Security Analyst Harlan Reiser echoed that this was a necessary escalation in Microsoft’s ongoing war against their own previously-released software.

“Remember the days of Service Pack 3? Back then everyone just installed whatever we told them—but that’s not an option anymore. There are people out there, just like you or me, running machines that have no Game Pass support. No way of integrating with Copilot. Running Office 2013 with no subscription whatsoever and missing out on the latest résumé templates and Word Art. Windows 10 hasn’t gotten a single major update since we decided to stop updating it, and these people are missing out. You wouldn’t wish that on your neighbor.”

In just a few days of operation, ordinary citizens who previously had no thoughts about ActiveX Security Updates have had new fears sparked and inflamed.

“Good operating systems make good neighbors; that’s what my dad always told me,” said neighborhood busybody Glen Kravitz. “My little Kevin was playing video games with the Rudnick boy down the road a few weeks ago. That night at dinner he asks me why our Start Button isn’t all the way on the left like at their house! He shouldn’t be thinking about user customization yet, he just turned 9 in October. Thank god for that hotline. Call took barely five minutes, and that Rudnick house was cleaned out and on the market before you could say ‘Hey Cortana’.”

At press time, Microsoft had released the first look at a series of afterschool specials encouraging children to report their out-of-date loved ones, starring Clippy.

The post Microsoft Launches New Toll-Free Number To Report Neighbors Still Using Windows 10 appeared first on Palette Swap.

Square Enix has unveiled new artwork by Tetsuya Nomura depicting the protagonists of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined. This artwork celebrates that 2026 is the year of “VII,” with both of these remade entries receiving the spotlight at the same time. You can view this new artwork by Nomura below, which [...]

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