The Rotation — stuff from the cultural zeitgeist

Busy week of things happening across movies and games and more:

• Oscars
• SXSW
• NVIDIA DLSS5 Tech Demo
• Independent Games Festival / GDC
• Project Hail Mary Review

🎮Games

The one topic that seemed to dominate the gaming space last week was NVIDIA's newly announced AI-based DLSS 5 technology which purported to "enhance" games graphics with "infuses pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials."

Naturally, the first reaction from the gaming community was to whole heartedly reject this feature as "ai slop" because it's essentially an ai-generated alteration to an artist/developer's original intended model or scene. I think it put people especially on edge because the first example NVIDIA used was a human face from a beloved gaming character - Grace Ashcroft from Resident Evil 9.

Judge for yourself in the minute long clip above, do you think it looks "Better"? I have to admit, it wasn't necessarily a "this is shit" first reaction from me, because it was very short and my brain quickly processed a more "realistic" difference. It definitely looks * different * than the original model, which some argue is the big reason it is bad - because it's fundamentally altering what the intended visual for the character. Developers quickly weighed in on how much of a perversion that this technology would be to their work.

I also have not been in the trenches of gamer social media recently (for mental health purposes, obviously), and it looks like there are definitely people trying to fight the good fight against the weirdos altering gaming character graphics to fit a manosphere/incel-type of stereotype. Not to mention the big cascading effects on the jobs for human developers and artists were this to go unchecked.

I'm all for employing and nurturing as many qualified humans as possible so I'm in solidarity of at least regulating and questioning the NVIDIA's of the world that are pushing unsolicited ai advancements. At the same time, it says a lot about our times that the immediate knee jerk reaction to this sort of new technology isn't a passive "whoa, cooool" (which is what the corporate PR folk imagined, I'm sure), but a hardened resistance to fighting for humanity.

The most fun part of all of this, hands down, was the cornucopia of memes that flowed from the DLSS 5 Off/On comparison shots - here's a couple below, but do yourself a favor and go scrolling sometime if you want some chuckles.

🚨Breaking News🚨

It looks like OpenAI is shutting down Sora, the ai slop video generator that Hollywood was freaking out over last year that would ruin the film & TV industries. Turns out 15 second meme generators aren't what people really want to spend money on.

It's especially wild because Disney had signed a $1 billion deal with OpenAI revolving around this technology last year as well. They're exiting the deal now, of course, but it goes to show how fast and reactive the current technology and entertainment landscape is nowadays...

☝️Independent Games Festival 2025 Awards

I'm a huge fan of Indie games because they represent the best of creativity and innovation that is possible with the medium even without large resources. Every year, the IGF awards happen around GDC (Game Developers Conference) time, and I always keep an eye on the nominees and winners as they usually are a good bellweather for discovering something cool.

This year's winners were announced, and I'm excited to check out many of these games as they come out. Titanium Court won the grand prize and it's quite interesting as a blend of match 3 puzzler with some strategic battling and quirky pixel art style. There's a demo you can play now on Steam which piqued my interest after spending some time with it.

If you're at all looking for something new, affordable, and innovative to play, check out the nominees to see if anything excites you. I definitely added a few games to my wishlist in the grand prize and narrative sections (I'm a huge stories guy).

🎞️Movies

🏆Oscars

Welp, The Oscars finally wrapped up last week after an abnormally long awards season due to the LA Marathon and Winter Olympics and I gotta say, mid-March is just an insane time to still be talking about the previous year's work in an awards sense. Ratings were actually down year over year despite what seemed to be a really big commerical year for the nominated movies. The top two front runners, Sinners and One Battle After Another (OBAA), were actually seen by many normal filmgoers so I was a bit surprised at the ratings thing, but it could just be that a lot of people are already doing stuff in mid-March as the weather is getting better and Spring Break is already in swing.

As for my take on the winners, I'm generally cool with them! My only heavy rooting interest was in Paul Thomas Anderson winning one, not only because he's my favorite current working director, he was also insanely overdue for this past work. OBAA was my favorite film last year, but I would have just been as happy to see Sinners or any of the other films take home the big award (though F1 would have definitely raised an eyebrow).

It was actually a pretty solid year for Best Picture in that I either enjoyed or respected what all of the nominees brought to the table. I'm generally not into taking sides for these awards if I can help it, so it was a bit weird seeing some of the thinkpieces and culture war rhetoric that were starting to brew over some of the nominees.

↙️SXSW

South By Southwest also concluded last week, with the Film portion the only part of the festival that I pay attention to nowadays after the music section was just neutered post-pandemic amidst the Penske media takeover. I feel like SXSW film gets more "fun" genre fare than Sundance or Cannes (stuff like Everything Everywhere All At Once) and there's definitely room in my life for those kinds of movies. I'm excited to see the opening film, Boots Riley's I Love Boosters, as well as BenDavid Grabinski's Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, which steams on Hulu starting on Friday!

I haven't seen tooooo much other consensus chatter on any can't miss movies, though I do try to watch the competition jury winners for Narrative and Documentary films since those tend to be gems more often than not:

NARRATIVE FEATURE COMPETITION Winner: “Wishful Thinking,” directed by Graham Parkes

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE COMPETITION Winner: “Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story,” directed by Ayden Mayeri

If I get a chance, I also try to comb the rest of the winners list, including the audience favorites, to see if any other films look interesting enough to add to my watchlist for the upcoming year. SXSW really needs to avoid Oscars weekend, though, as the entire film industry-media-influencer complex is too busy to cover and showcase all the films in the festival . To be fair, the Academy Awards have been slowly encroaching further and further back as the years go on. I remember when we had late January / early February Oscars! That's the perfect time to have them because everyone's still on a global winter hangover with nothing better to talk about!

🚀Project Hail Mary

Oh, the other big movie news was the huge success of Project Hail Mary opening at the box office with $140.9 million globally, $80.5 in the US which is good for the second best non-franchise opening weekend ever behind Oppenheimer - pretty darn amazing given how no one other than film / sci-fi book nerds were anticipating it just a few months ago.

I watched the movie in IMAX 70mm in the second largest IMAX theater in the world last week and can whole heartedly recommend it to anyone - it's the very definition of a "crowd-pleaser" for everyone young and old.

🍿Blockbuster Trailer Debuts

Very smart of Hollywood to take a cue from Geoff Keighley's Game Awards and drop two trailers from the most anticipated films in 2025 right after the Oscars:

• Dune: Part 3
• Spider-Man: Brand New Day

🔚In Conclusion

The most catchy song I heard last week wasn't K-Pop, but Afroman's (Yes, that Afroman from 20+ years ago who did the "Because I Got High" song) diss track for one of the cops that raided his house for bullshit reasons. It's also one of the more incredible, feel good stories the public's heard this year. The wronged good guy won for free speech and the crooked cops were not only rejected, they were humiliated by some truly clever song and video writing.

Seriously, watch these videos, they're hilarious and they're catchy af.