Thoughts on the things I experienced over the past week: 1 Novel, 1 Non-Fiction Book, and 1 Very American Triple Feature.

Also: On the dedicated newsletters front, I published the first review in a while about Night School Studios’ Netflix horror game Unhinged. I have paused Double Fine Adventure, mentioned last week, so I can actually play Broken Age (Act 1) so I can finish Double Fine Adventure so I can write a big Thing about the state of gaming and game production and whatnot. Given everything that’s happening in the industry, there’s quite a lot to say!

Books

Don’t Fear the Reaper (Stephen Graham Jones, 2023)
I didn't really think that My Heart is a Chainsaw, included in the first edition of TWIRecap, needed a sequel, but I know that no self-respecting slasher homage ends after just one roll of the credits.

Don't Fear the Reaper feels less fixated on film than its predecessor, but strangely enough I think it's the opposite. The first book’s protagonist, traumatized by those events, has locked away her slasher knowledge but now multiple characters are there to pick up the slack, including a new killer who is recreating iconic kills like Silent Night Deadly Night's antler sticking and the arrow through Kevin Bacon’s throat from Friday the 13th. 

I don't know if I just got used to Jones’s specific brand of prose or if it's been toned down a bit, but I found myself breezing through this in a way I did not My Heart Is a Chainsaw. 

Unfortunately for me, the book spends more time in the full-on supernatural, which was my least favorite part of the first and remains so here. My guess is that the final installment will go even further down that road, which has put me in a bit of a quandary as I would like to see how the Indian Lake story concludes, but I'd rather not roll my eyes for 400 pages as a 20something (final) girl takes on a water walking girl witch, ya know? 

I guess we'll all find out in a future installment of TWIRecap!

The AI Con (Emily M Bender & Alex Hanna, 2025)
Not that you, a reader of this newsletter, would think otherwise, but reading a book like The AI Con really makes clear how slow “AI” progress really is in any way that actually matters. Though published in 2025 (and mostly written in 2024), it could be released this right now basically unchanged. If anything, its arguments are stronger now than they were then. And if you want to argue with a booster, there's a whole lot in here to arm yourself with: page after page of well-reasoned, heavily-cited examples of the danger that these technologies pose right now. 

And it's not like this is the only book to do that, but where Karen Hao’s Empire of AI (released a week before this one) or Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever (released a month after) are written by journalists who are good at breaking down complex concepts, The AI Con is written by academics for what I think they think is a general audience but is absolutely not one. Bender is a linguist and Hanna a sociologist who previously worked in Google's Ethical AI division, and you can tell: this thing’s got a dang index! And it's just dense: I found it legitimately exhausting to read, because each of the 180ish real pages (there are another 100 of endnote and index) has some fact or thought that I wanted to take for myself, but in reality I don't know how much of it I truly internalized. I should really read this like fifteen times and keep that dog-eared copy by my bedside for reference (why else have an index).

Still, it's an easy recommendation for us haters, and frankly a book that any booster should be forced to reckon with before they claim that a synthetic text extruder is going to do even the slightest bit of good for society.

 That Very American Triple Feature

America: Birth of a Nation (The Onion, 2026)
In case you weren't paying attention in history class, The Onion has put together a 26-minute documentary that will give you the only crash course you need. From the Georgian nudist colony to the Boston Water party to The 80s, all the news that was fit to print is given the sort of Ken Burnsian detail you would hope for in a doc (in which Ken Burns plays an unexpectedly pivotal role).

If you saw their doc on Jeffrey Epstein last fall, this will feel quite familiar. It's a delight start to finish. You'll laugh and you'll learn, and what could be more American than that?

Info Wars, that's what. I also watched the first episode of its new incarnation under The Onion and Tim Heidecker’s stewardship, and y'all it's funny as fuck. Heidecker said on The Vergecast that he will be playing his Alex Jones character for six episodes before it becomes something else, and I am very excited for those five episodes and also whatever comes next.

I subscribed to Info Wars in 2026. What could be more American than that? 

Jackass: Best and Last (Jeff Tremaine, 2026)
The first thing ever filmed by Johnny Knoxville for the pitch for what would become Jackass is the most America shit imaginable: he bought a gun, a kevlar vest, and some Hustlers… then shot himself in the chest from point blank range. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, he put the bullet in the wrong chamber, so he had to pull that trigger six fucking times before the guys watching/filming this happen knew if they were going to be accessories to murder.

I know this, because that footage is the opening to Jackass: Best and Last, a movie that tells you many, many times that it is the final film in this storied franchise. And I believe that it is, though I wonder if there will be some sort of life with the younger cast in the future. Certainly the core cast of crazies has to retire, because they’ve gotten too old to do the things that made them famous. 

Which is absolutely why so much of this film is made of clips. We see things that were never aired – like that gunshot – and things that they felt didn’t get enough appreciation – like their kidnapping of Brad Pitt. I didn’t watch Jackass growing up and in fact only sat down to fully engage with it beyond the occasional skit or clip in 2022, when the nearby AMC did a 10 PM screening of Jackass Forever in Dolby Cinema… which I found conceptually funny enough that I just had to go. And I had a great time!

And I think I might be a different person if I had watched this shit when I was a kid. I don’t know how, exactly, but I dunno I feel like I would have made different friends and not better ones, so it’s probably for the best.

But anyways, I’m not really a fan of watching people poop themselves or vomit because other people pooped themselves, so there are definitely parts of these movies (and this movie maybe especially) that I did not enjoy so much, but watching a guy walking along a balance beam with a taser attached to his penis that goes off and then he falls straight down onto his testicles? The whole theater “Ooooooooo”d in perfect unison. I loved it. 

And what could be more American than that?

Assassination Nation (Sam Levinson, 2018)
Obviously.

I mean, it’s my favorite movie (even if it’s not the best one)! I have already talked at extreme length about this thing, and having just rewatched my 40-minute video on the subject I agree with everything I said then and don’t really feel like I have a whole lot to note how much more apparent it’s become that the fear of humiliation makes bad people do horrible things in the years since. Like… that’s what seems to drive the entire ruling class, which is unfortunate because they’re just all so pathetic and easily humiliated!

America.