gen z obsessed with obsession + murdoch guns for new media

🟨 liminal space

‘Backrooms’ creator Kane Parsons on becoming A24’s youngest ever director – deadline

While we’re on good horror, Kane Parsons may have cooked another instant classic. The signs are majorly positive, anyway. The 20 year old director is A24’s youngest ever and is being tipped by Deadline as a major disruptor for 2026, which feels fair given he has taken a short-horror concept from his YouTube channel in 2022 and created a whole-arse blockbuster before being able to legally buy a pint. The trailer is super familiar, and yet that yellow liminal space is eerier than ever with the creative prints of A24 all over it. This one might just revive the found footage genre in the best way possible. Read more

Murdoch’s son buys Vox Media assets worth $300m USD – thred

Murdoch’s offspring, James Murdoch, is buying Vox’s news site, podcast network, and New York Magazine for $300 million. Murdoch’s investment company, Lupa Systems, is reportedly looking to split Vox Media into two independent businesses, with brands like The Verge, Eater, SB Nation, PopSugar, and The Dodo sitting elsewhere. The funny part, ignoring the depressing swoop on ‘new media’, is that James had been positioning himself away from Rupert’s Fox News orbit, resigning from News Corp in 2020 over editorial disagreements and their regular spreading of complete bollocks. Maybe this signifies a more progressive Murdoch media empire, then. Or maybe papa dangled the trust fund over a barbeque. Read more

🎮 unreal, meh

Epic Games reveals a first look at Unreal Engine 6 with a Rocket League makeover – engadget

Epic Games has ‘teased’ us with the next generation of poorly optimised games. That’s right, Unreal Engine 5 is apparently giving way to Unreal Engine 6, which Epic decided to showcase through a brief – and frankly underwhelming – look at an airbrushed clip of Rocket League. The cars did look shinier than I remember from that one time I played the game during pre-drinks to be fair. The reveal hasn’t offered much beyond the vague promise that the future is going to look expensive. The gaming community isn’t exactly waiting with bated breath, though. Gen Z are way more interested in unique games that perform well at launch than ray tracing technology getting an upgrade. We’re all on fucking performance mode just to have the games running half decent anyway. Read more

EU politician says killing games is bad, but ‘wokeness’ and the Black samurai Yasuke are the real problem – pc gamer

A European Parliament debate about the Stop Killing Games campaign was intended to cover topics like whether companies should be allowed to sell digital games and later catapult their servers into oblivion. This subject is particularly important to Gen Z, who’ve been placing emphasis on physical ownership for years now, and the implications of these discussions could be big. Instead, however, the headlines have been stolen by a right-wing Slovak MEP who claimed that wokeness is ruining everything, interjecting proceedings with all the vim of a drunken grandparent at Christmas dinner. The chat about consumer rights turned into rants about Yasuke in Assassin’s Creed Shadows and LGBTQ+ themes being forced onto players. Milan Uhrík, do I get to keep my digital games indefinitely or not? A ‘no’ would be the only example of ‘fascism’ relevant to the agenda here. Read more

🥴 gen shafted

How Labour became the party of youth unemployment – the telegraph

The Telegraph is going in Cristian Romero levels of two-footed here, blaming Labour for a rise in youth unemployment and painting the party as having trapped young people in a jobless doom loop. Take the party-political framing with a shovel of salt, obviously, but the wider point is hard to dismiss. Young people are skint, overqualified, underemployed, and constantly told the economy needs them while refusing to give them anything tangible beyond tax invoices. ‘You’re the future’… just not when the future needs training, wages, housing, or a starter job that doesn’t require five years’ experience. Whether Labour can be blamed for all of that while their predecessors are absolved is dubious. Whether young people are being shafted again is not. Long live Britannia! Read more

The UK’s smoking ban already feels out of date – thred

Our own Flo has been writing about the UK’s smoking ban for under 16s, and it’s safe to say she isn’t super optimistic about its wider impact. The policy means anyone born after 1 January 2009 will never legally be able to buy cigarettes, which sounds sensible enough until you remember most young people have already moved on from standing behind a leisure centre coughing up Richmonds. The majority of nicotine being consumed by young’uns comes in the form of vapes and pouches, which are way easier to do discreetly. The smell of Pineapple Ice doesn’t cling to fabrics in the same way baccy does, either. But doesn’t it just say everything that the government is now going to war with vices that barely exist? Fucking dinosaurs. Read more

We hope you enjoyed this edition of the common thred. Thanks so much for engaging with our content.

All the best for the rest of the week!

Stay safe,

Jamie