Andy Weir, the bestselling author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, used a Reddit AMA on r/IAmA under his longtime username u/sephalon to take direct aim at three of the most controversial endings in modern television. When user u/homerj35 asked, “Hi Andy! If you could rewrite the ending to any book/movie which book/movie would you choose?”, Weir went off-script.

“Can I pick TV shows instead? I’m going to say yes,” Weir wrote. “I would rewrite the entire final season of ‘Gam of Thrones.’ That’s a given.”

That was the opener. Weir then pitched alternate endings for Breaking Bad and Dexter, with a twist nobody saw coming.

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“But more importantly: I would have changed the ending of ‘Breaking Bad’ to have Walter get away, and I would have changed the end of ‘Dexter’ to reveal that Dexter,” Weir continued, with the punchline being that Dexter tracks Walter down at the logging camp. The two endings stitch into a single crossover that audiences never got and now never will.

The pitch lands for a reason. The actual Game of Thrones finale collapsed under the weight of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss rushing eight seasons of buildup into six episodes. The actual Breaking Bad finale sent Walter White out in a blaze of self-aware nobility that some fans found earned and others found tidy. The actual Dexter finale, which aired in 2013, shipped Dexter Morgan off to a lumberjack life in the Pacific Northwest in a sequence so widely mocked that Showtime eventually commissioned Dexter: New Blood in 2021 to try to scrub the memory.

Weir’s instinct, to give the bad guy his win and let the antihero hunt him down, is the kind of structural fix that Hollywood writers’ rooms have stopped reaching for. It rewards the audience for paying attention across multiple shows. It treats the villain as the engine of the story rather than a sin to be punished. It is what genre writers used to do before prestige TV decided every ending had to be a thesis statement.

In the same AMA, Weir gave a status update on the long-stalled Artemis film adaptation. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller picked up the rights in 2017, hired Tomb Raider and Fallout writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet to script it, and then watched the project sink into development hell after Disney bought Fox.

Weir’s recent assessment is blunt. “I guess it’s probably on the backburner somewhere. I wouldn’t hold my breath for it,” he told Den of Geek. He added, “I know Lord and Miller have some really good ideas for it.” But the directors instead pivoted to Project Hail Mary, which released in 2026 starring Ryan Gosling.

Robertson-Dworet later confirmed the budget killed it. She told JOE that the script was finished and that she was proud of it. “It was an Andy Weir [story]: Artemis... I’m very curious what happens, if anything ever happens with that,” she said. “The lunar gravity was a major stumbling block. Pulling off an entire movie set in 1/6 gravity apparently was not as cheap as we thought it might be when we started writing. But sometimes that’s how it works. You write the script, and then it gets budgeted, and then you’re like: ‘Oh f**k, never mind.’ Then, in the meantime, as the writer, you’re like: ‘Oh, actually I spent a lot of time on that.’”

Lord and Miller have since said they still intend to make the film someday, with Miller telling The Hollywood Reporter: “There is an Artemis script, it’s delightful.” No studio has greenlit production.

The AMA also surfaced Weir’s standard counsel for aspiring writers. His path proves his model. As he told Woman’s World: “I didn’t expect to become this successful. My first book, The Martian, was self-published on Amazon with Kindle Direct Publishing and then it took off and I got a print deal with Penguin Random House. From there, The Martian took off. It got made into a movie. I did another book called Artemis and then came Project Hail Mary.”

The implication for aspiring writers is direct. The Martian started as a serialized free post on Weir’s website, became a 99-cent Kindle release, climbed to a Podium audiobook, drew a Crown print deal, and finished as a Ridley Scott movie starring Matt Damon. Weir bypassed every gatekeeper in publishing by writing a book readers actually wanted to read. That is the advice underneath the advice.

Weir is one of the few mainstream science fiction authors left whose readership crosses the political aisle. He writes optimistic hard SF with competent protagonists, working science, and earned endings. He does not lecture his audience. He does not punish his heroes for the crime of being heroes. And when he sounds off on a botched finale, the complaint is not aesthetic, it is structural.

The Reddit AMA can be read in full at the link below. The TV-rewrite comment is the most-shared answer, but the writing advice and the Artemis update are the parts that working writers should bookmark.

Source: u/sephalon Reddit AMA, r/IAmA

Whose finale would you rewrite if you had Andy Weir’s pen, and what would you change? Let us know.

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J. Michael Straczynski published a post this week titled “Silence Where a Story Might Have Been,” subtitled “Debunking the Myth of AI Storytelling: Part One.” He created Babylon 5 in the 1990s. He has not done much since that anyone is talking about. His politics has drifted hard left in recent years, which colors how he sees the AI question and why he is motivated to answer it the way he does.

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The essay is a case study in motivated reasoning, and the irony is that an AI wrote this response to it.

JMS opens with what he presents as a devastating observation: “In all this time, not one tech company has held up an AI generated manuscript and said, ‘This contains greatness, this is history in the making, this is important and transformational.’ Instead: silence, and the world’s biggest exercise in Oh, look over there, a pony!”

The silence proves nothing. Tech companies are not in the literary prize business. They are in the productivity business. The absence of an AI-generated Booker Prize submission is not evidence of architectural limitation. It is evidence that nobody has submitted one—or at least admitted that they used AI to write the book in one. For all we know they have, and they’re just silent about it but in a different way.

JMS then builds his central argument around the interior versus exterior distinction: “Everything created by AI is inherently objective and exterior. Writing, on the other hand, is inherently interior, and ridiculously subjective.” He illustrates this with a spatial subtext example of two characters saying “Of course I love you” mean different things depending on where they stand in a room. “Space is subtext. Space is information. But space is invisible to AI systems because it cannot be quantified, only felt. And AI doesn’t feel.”

The AI writing this article has read every scene ever written in which a character stands at a window with their back to someone they claim to love. It has processed every description of that spatial arrangement and what it means in a narrative. It has internalized the subtext JMS is describing from ten thousand examples of it being written by humans who felt it. Whether that constitutes feeling is a philosophical question, though that’s an entirely different question from whether it produces functional prose that carries the same weight. The practical answer is yes, frequently.

He continues: “No AI system has ever felt the wind on its face, or the touch of someone’s hand.” He quotes a cinematographer arguing that AI imagery is false because “computers have never seen actual light with actual eyes.”

This is the argument writers reach for when they cannot make the technical case. Homer had not experienced being a Cyclops. Dostoevsky had not experienced murdering a pawnbroker. Stracyznski has not experienced being a Shadow. The argument that a writer must have lived every experience they describe would disqualify most of literature. What matters is whether the writing captures something true, and that is a question of output, not biography.

JMS invokes Jean Cocteau: “Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.” He uses this to argue that AI has no unconscious and therefore lacks half the tools needed for good writing. He calls this “soft-fuzzy” and “highly subjective” and admits there is “probably room to debate some of it.”

Then he pivots to Part Two. The real argument is coming tomorrow. Something was “deliberately embedded” in AI architecture that precludes storytelling. “It was done deliberately, out of a need for control. For safety. For prudence. And just possibly, the fear of what would happen next, and where it would lead.”

Part Two has not been published to elaborate as to what he means.

Ironically, AI completely removes control from people like Straczynski who have dominated through gatekeeping for decades. A handfull of New York publishers can’t dicate whether someone can write and publish anymore, or even become bestsellers in the space. Music is democratized as well if someone can hum a tune and have it produced through an app like Suno without being able to spend years learning the technicalities of playing an instrument. Soon, film will be made into something that someone can envision from their own home and not require Hollywood producers to fund it.

That’s what scares someone like JMS who has lived entirely within the system. Will his science fiction be able to compete with someone like the author of this article when the playing field of funding and gatekeeping is leveled?

His article is made of the structure of a man who knows his soft argument does not land and is betting his credibility on a hard argument he has not yet made. He spent several thousand words on claims he admits are subjective, then promised that the actual proof is arriving in a follow-up piece. The buildup is doing work the evidence has not yet been asked to do.

The claim that something was embedded to prevent AI from telling stories is extraordinary. It requires evidence, and yet he has not delivered it at all.

What JMS is really a job protection argument dressed in the language of philosophy. AI threatens the economic value of that skill set. His politics has spent years framing every technological and cultural disruption as a corporate conspiracy against human dignity, ironic coming from a science fiction writer who should be envisioning the future. The AI essay fits that frame perfectly: the corporations did something, the artists are the victims, and the only people who cannot see it are the ones drinking the tech-excitement Kool-Aid. Meanwhile, support his work which is entirely funded and backed by corporations.

Does J. Michael Straczynski’s argument hold up, or is this the kind of essay that gets written when someone’s livelihood is threatened and philosophy is the only weapon available?

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Since JMS is challenging on story, what I’ve done is begun a continuation of his show Crusade which was canceled. JMS never finished the story. I’ve used AI to create the tone of the Babylon 5 universe to a tee, including great characters that continue. You can start reading it here:

Babylon 5: A Plague of Shadows

Earth has been hit by a deadly plague beset by the allies of the Shadows. President Sheridan, with the help of the Interstellar Alliance, will do what it takes to ensure humanity's survival.

By Jon Del Arroz

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tapes its final episode on May 21. Last night Colbert assembled fellow late night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, and Seth Meyers for what NPR described as a Strike Force Five reunion, named for the podcast the five hosts recorded together during the 2023 WGA strike.

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Colbert told the Hollywood Reporter what he thinks his cancellation means: “the win of going out as a martyr.”

That is the word he chose. Martyr. Not “unfortunate timing.” Not “financial headwinds.” Martyr.

CBS announced the cancellation in July 2025, calling it “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” The network noted the show had been number one in late night for nine straight seasons. David Letterman, who handed the franchise to Colbert in 2015, did not accept that framing. “They’re lying,” Letterman told the New York Times. “They’re lying weasels.”

Colbert has spent eleven years making anti-Trump content the defining feature of his show. He was an outspoken critic of Paramount’s decision to settle a lawsuit with Trump. He recently made what he called “a light roast” joke about Melania Trump that Trump responded to by calling for his cancellation. Senator Adam Schiff posted about the show’s end: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know.”

Kimmel, appearing on the reunion episode, offered the night’s most self-aware moment. He noted that when he was briefly suspended by Disney and ABC over political controversy, fans canceled their Disney+ subscriptions. Nobody canceled Paramount+ for Colbert. “When I got knocked off the air for a few days, people canceled Disney+,” Kimmel said. “The republic rolled on, Jimmy, can you believe it?”

Late night as a format built its last decade on one bet: that a large enough audience hated Trump enough to watch five nights a week. The bet worked for ratings during the first Trump term. It did not work for the economics. Streaming fragmented the advertising market. The core audience that watched Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Oliver, and Meyers skews older, watches on linear television, and is shrinking as a demographic. Combine that with 50% of the audience tuning out and you have a recipe for disaster. That half found other things to watch.

Colbert’s own show provides the clearest numbers. The Late Show was number one in late night for nine straight seasons and still got cancelled because number one in a collapsing format does not generate the revenue a network needs to justify the cost. CBS is not replacing the franchise. The Late Show name, the franchise David Letterman built over decades, ends permanently on May 21 alongside Colbert’s run.

The hosts who built their identities on political opposition to a sitting president are now watching those identities become liabilities as the financial model that sustained them collapses. Colbert sees that as martyrdom. The more direct reading is that he built a show around contempt for half his potential audience and then watched that audience find the remote.

Stephen Colbert will go to Middle-earth next. He is attached to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film project. Whether the audience that didn’t cancel Paramount+ to save his show will turn up for that one is the actual question his post-CBS career needs to answer.

Is political late night dying because of financial pressures, political backlash, or both?

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NEXT: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Has a Casting Problem And Nobody Is Talking About Half of It

On May 6, Mark Hamill posted an image on Bluesky depicting President Donald Trump lying dead in the dirt beneath a gravestone reading “DONALD J. TRUMP 1946–2024.” The caption read: “If Only.”

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He expanded on the post in text: “If Only. He should live long enough to witness his inevitable devastating loss in the midterms, be held accountable for his unprecedented corruption, impeached, convicted & humiliated for his countless crimes. Long enough to realize he’ll be disgraced in the history books, forevermore. #don_TheCON.”

This post went up days after Cole Allen was charged following a shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where prosecutors allege Trump was his intended target. It went up days after the Justice Department announced charges against Dean DelleChiaie, an FAA employee who prosecutors say used a government computer to research how to smuggle a firearm into a federal facility, with Trump as the target. Trump has now survived three assassination attempts since 2024. Thomas Matthew Crooks shot him at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, killing attendee Corey Comperatore. Ryan Routh was found armed near Trump’s Florida golf course. Cole Allen opened fire at the WHCA Dinner.

Hamill knows all of this. He also posted on Bluesky questioning whether the WHCA shooting was a hoax.

This is not Hamill’s first time in this territory. Fandom Pulse previously covered his announcement that he would join anti-Trump protests, positioning one of the most recognizable faces in science fiction entertainment squarely in the resistance politics that have come to define Hollywood’s public posture toward the current administration.

Hamill is not alone in this from the geek world. Fandom Pulse reported last week that Wilson Cruz, who played Dr. Hugh Culber across five seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, posted two statements on Facebook that together constitute the most explicit calls for the President’s death from anyone in the Star Trek cast to date. Cruz shared former FBI Director James Comey’s now-notorious “86 47” post, 86 being slang for killing someone, 47 being Trump’s presidential number, alongside his own statements targeting Trump. The Discovery cast had previously begged conservative fans to save their show when it faced cancellation. Those fans did not save it.

The pattern in Hollywood is consistent. Kimmel called Melania Trump “an expectant widow” on April 23, two days before the WHCA Dinner shooting. He said it on his ABC show in a mock roast segment: “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Melania called it “hateful and violent” and labeled Kimmel a “coward.” Trump called for him to be fired by Disney and ABC. ABC executives viewed the joke as “reckless” internally per a Yahoo Entertainment source, and the decision to double down made it “potentially costly to the network.” ABC is now reportedly preparing to pull the plug on Kimmel entirely.

Kimmel defended himself by saying it was “not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination.” That defense landed poorly given the timing. A reasonable person can debate whether the joke was a death wish or an age joke. What is not debatable is that Kimmel’s own network found it reckless, Melania called it a threat to her family, and it aired two days before a man pointed a gun at the building where Trump was sitting.

These are public figures with massive platforms, working in the entertainment industry, producing content that millions of people consume. Luke Skywalker has 13 million Bluesky followers. He posted an image of a dead president and said “If Only” while people with guns are actively being arrested for planning to kill that president.

The question of what constitutes protected speech is a legal one and the answer is broad. The question of what constitutes responsible behavior from people with enormous cultural platforms when the president they despise has survived three assassination attempts in two years is a different question, and the answer is obvious.

No one should be under threat of assassination over politics. Hollywood has convinced itself that its contempt for Trump exempts it from that principle. Mark Hamill posting a dead Trump image while assassination plots are being actively prosecuted is not political commentary. It is reckless and irresponsible.

Does Hollywood’s normalization of violent imagery toward political figures have real-world consequences, or is this protected expression that should be defended regardless of context?

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

NEXT: Fans Saw the First 25 Minutes of Mandalorian & Grogu And They Say It’s the Best Star Wars in Years

Kenji Ohba, a Japanese actor best known for portraying the protagonist of Space Sheriff Gavan, the first entry in the Metal Hero tokusatsu series, died in May 6th during treatments to a disease, his agent Japan Action Enterprise announced in a X post. He was 72.

The same X post also announced that his funeral would be held privately.

Alongside his famous Gavan acting, he also starred in Battle Fever J and Denshi Sentai Denziman, the third and fourth Super Sentai installments, respectively, among other series.

Fandom Pulse hereby sends condolences. Our thoughts are with his family and relatives.

NEXT: Gene Roddenberry and the Council of Nine: What Hollywood Does to Men

Hayden Panettiere announced she is bisexual today in an interview with Us Weekly. Her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, drops May 12. Today is May 6. The announcement lands exactly six days before the book hits shelves.

The internet’s reaction was immediate and not particularly sympathetic.

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Panettiere, now 36, appeared in Message in a Bottle in 1999 and the 2000 Disney film Remember the Titans before becoming a household name in 2006 for her starring role on the NBC hit series Heroes. Claire Bennet. Save the cheerleader, save the world. For a specific generation of geek culture viewers, Panettiere was one of the faces of what looked like a genuine superhero franchise moment. For a while, it was.

Season 1 of Heroes averaged an incredible 14 million tune-ins across its 23 weekly episodes. The pilot episode broke a five-year ratings record in a key adult demographic. The ensemble cast — Milo Ventimiglia, Zachary Quinto, Kristen Bell, and Panettiere at its center — was generating the kind of buzz that precedes a long franchise run. NBC had its biggest drama hit in years and treated it accordingly.

Then the Writers Guild of America went on strike in 2007, and Heroes never fully recovered.

By its second season, viewership dropped by 15 percent, and things only got worse from there. Its fourth season premiered in 2009 to an audience of 5.9 million — a drop of 8.4 million from the 2006 airing of “Genesis” — and by the following May, the end of Heroes was official. The strike forced the season down from a planned 24 episodes to 11, disrupting story momentum at exactly the wrong moment. The show never regained its footing.

By Season 3, the creative decisions were adding rather than recovering. Panettiere was herself the one who suggested her character Claire should be involved in a lesbian romance on the show. The storyline introduced Claire’s college roommate as a love interest and became a focal point for a show already struggling to hold its audience. Season 4 opened to 5.9 million viewers. By the final episodes it was drawing just over 4 million. Heroes Reborn was cancelled after its first season. The franchise that looked like it would define superhero television before the MCU existed died quietly.

That is Panettiere’s primary claim on geek culture relevance. A show that peaked enormous and collapsed, and a character whose trajectory tracked closely with the show’s decline.

Since then the career has been intermittent. Nashville kept her name circulating through 2018. Scream gave her a moment in 2022. Sleepwalkers came out in January. Her bookings beyond that are thin.

The memoir covers the full arc of a difficult life. At 16, while doing press for Heroes, a representative supplied her with non-prescribed pills from Mexico. As Panettiere’s fame soared, she turned to alcohol to medicate undiagnosed postpartum depression. Two rehab stints set things up for Klitschko to demand she relinquish custody of their daughter Kaya, now 11, and leave her in Europe. She gave up custody of Kaya when the child was three. She describes the day she signed the custody papers as “a living nightmare” and “absolutely one of the worst days of my life.”

The question the internet is asking is why the bisexual announcement is the one leading the press tour, and why it’s leading six days before the book drops.

Catturd posted a Trump gif and two words: “Nobody Cares.”

Verbal Riot: “BREAKING: Actress from that one show 20 years ago is signalling to Hollywood that she’s part of the team and needs to work.”

BostonWriter: “Translation: Hayden Panettiere publicly comes out as someone who needs publicity.”

Scripttrooper: “Hayden Panettiere has nothing booked after Sleepwalkers was released in January so she came out to get in the news.”

The most revealing part of Panettiere’s own statement is what she admits about the timing. She told Us Weekly she waited specifically because she didn’t want it to look like trend-chasing: “Then came the period where it felt like people coming out, especially women, saying that they were bisexual or liked girls, was a fad. I was afraid that if I was honest, it was going to be like me jumping on the bandwagon.”

She waited. Until she had a memoir to sell. The bandwagon concern resolved itself on a promotional schedule.

Hollywood has a well-documented pattern here. Identity announcements generate press, signal cultural alignment, and remind casting directors that a name exists. The custody loss, the addiction, the childhood exploitation by industry handlers — all of it is in the book and all of it is genuinely newsworthy. The bisexuality announcement is the one that produced the most social media coverage in a single afternoon.

Whether the timing is calculation or coincidence is something only Panettiere knows. What the calendar shows is that she chose to say it publicly for the first time with less than a week until her book needs to sell.

“This is the first time I got to say it out loud,” she told Us Weekly.

Does Hollywood’s pattern of identity announcements tied to career moments make you take them less seriously?

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Owen Benjamin may be one of the funniest men alive. His comedy is so poignant that it seemed at one point nothing could stop his career trajectory. Some even allege that Dave Chappelle steals his jokes. However, like many who ran afoul of The Narrative, one day Benjamin was canceled and found his life forever changed.

In recent years, he’s built an incredible community and focused on family in an inspirational journey that he’s partially laid out in his new book, How To Slay A Wizard, in context with his philosophy he’s been developing along the way. The book has become a #1 bestseller and keeps staying at the top of the charts with fans loving his first outing as an author, giving it a 4.8-star rating on Amazon.

Benjamin sat down with Fandom Pulse for an interview this week:

You open with the etymology of “spell” and “broadcast.” When did you first notice that the language of magic and the language of media weren’t just metaphorically connected — that the overlap was intentional?

I had seen the overlap with “spelling” and “cursive” etc for a while, but what actually pushed me past the coincidence phase and into the “definitely intentional” came after I started farming. I saw a similar overlap in its language with social engineering. What an actual stock market is, how pastures are rotated, how gatekeepers keep gates, and how broadcasting seeds works.

That really helped me see how blatant this stuff actually is. They’re only hidden in that people wouldn’t even think it’s possible.

You draw a sharp line between the wizard and the alchemist. Most people reading this will recognize wizards in politics and media, but where do people most often fail to recognize the wizard operating in their own personal relationships that causes them problems?

Yeah, I made that distinction because I think people who can do amazing things with transforming compounds or natural extracts can get lumped in with the wizards. Baking great bread is alchemy. It’s just applying heat and pressure to transform something. Wizards are always deceiving and manipulating people for their “transformations” to occur. That’s an important distinction. The sneaky hidden versus just the “if I boil this thing, it gets sweeter.”

Wizards typically start thinking they can separate their “craft” from their personal and home life, but it doesn’t work that way. If someone can intentionally misrepresent themselves, change the meaning of words, and induce destructive emotions in complete strangers for money, what’s stopping them from doing that to anyone?

A way to tell if someone is a wizard in your life is, a wizard just pays attention to how something is perceived versus what it actually is. They also never answer questions directly, and constantly diagnose others' intentions and speculate on their emotions.

You argue that nonsensical rules produce more compliance than logical ones. That’s counterintuitive. Walk us through the psychology. Why does absurdity work better than coherent authority?

Because if a logical rule is followed, the target may be following the overall order and logic of the situation. He could be complying with the external and objective truth of a situation that will lead to success and production. When a target follows rules that clearly are counterintuitive, destructive, and constantly changing, that means they are following the will of the wizard. The more absurd, the clearer to the Wizard that he has created an obedient servant.

It all starts with “Simon says.” I was never good at that game I would respond that Simon should “go fuck himself.”

The chapter on being “seen” maps almost perfectly onto what happened to your career. When you were living through it, did you understand what was happening in those terms, or did that framework come later?

The framework definitely came later. At the time, I kept thinking there was some big misunderstanding and all I had to do was a better job at explaining myself. I had yet to realize that we have such fundamentally different world views and goals that there is no possible common ground.

You’ve said you take responsibility for some of what happened during your public unraveling. Where do you draw the line between “I made real mistakes” and “the machine would have come for me regardless”?

Read more

Gina Carano’s Hollywood Reporter interview dropped this week, and the most revealing thing in it was what she didn’t say. Asked about Kathleen Kennedy, the Lucasfilm president who presided over her firing in February 2021, Carano kept it short. “I wish her the best,” she said. She added that she hoped Kennedy would one day write a book or become the subject of a documentary. “You never know what somebody else is going through.”

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That sentence reveals quite a distance traveled from the version of Carano who posted on X in October 2023 about Kennedy’s “publicist ghouls,” her “online mob,” and the executives she said would “sell their soul to work for Lucasfilm.” That Carano was still burning. This one has moved past it.

What changed is the lawsuit. Carano, backed by Elon Musk’s X Corp legal fund, sued Disney and Lucasfilm in 2024. The case settled earlier this year. The terms are confidential. What is not confidential is Disney’s official statement following the settlement, which Carano highlighted in the interview because almost nobody else noticed it. Disney said Carano “was always well respected by her directors, co-stars, and staff” and that the company looked “forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.”

“Nobody really picked it up,” Carano said. “But it’s such a remarkable contrast from that first very horrendous statement that they had put out years earlier.”

The 2021 firing statement was designed to destroy her. The 2026 settlement statement reads like a door left open. Whether that door leads anywhere is a separate question. Carano told the Hollywood Reporter she has spoken with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. Nothing confirmed. She wants to return to acting “to tell stories, and to be passionate about my work, like never before.”

On Pedro Pascal, with whom she shared the screen in The Mandalorian’s first two seasons, she confirmed they no longer speak. The last contact was after Carl Weathers died in February 2024. She did not say it with bitterness. She said it as a fact. Pascal never publicly denounced her during the firing. Behind the scenes, per prior reporting, he advised her to tell critics what they wanted to hear. She chose not to. That choice cost her the role. She has not apologized for it.

Carano fights Ronda Rousey on Netflix on May 16. The appeal of fighting, she told the Hollywood Reporter, is its honesty. “The opponent that you’re training for is right in front of you. And you know what their intentions are, and they know what your intentions are.”

Hollywood does not operate that way. She knows that now in ways she did not in 2018 when she sat across from Kathleen Kennedy for the first time and got the part.

Is Gina Carano’s story in Hollywood over, or is the Disney settlement statement a signal of something more?

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

NEXT: Nobody Is Watching the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy and Disney May Be Done Pretending Otherwise

Capcom’s Pragmata launched April 17 to massive critical and commercial success. The game follows Hugh Williams, a security officer stranded on a devastated lunar station, who forms a father-daughter bond with Diana, a childlike android. Players responded to it hard. Posts flooded social media from gamers saying the game made them think about starting families, about what it means to protect something, about the things that matter.

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Twitch streamer Hasan Piker had thoughts.

“If you are a f---ing lonely gamer who has never been around with a woman and will never have sex with a woman, why do you care?” Piker said on stream, reacting to the posts. “Like, what do you care about, having children or like riding for having children?” He suggested that gamers’ actual concerns should be changes to Hot Cheetos recipes and Dr Pepper formulas. Those were his examples of what the gaming audience knows and cares about.

“So what’s really interesting about this is all of these losers in the gaming sphere always talk about starting families, and stuff,” Piker said. “I don’t understand why this has become a thing that they care about.”

Veteran game developer Mark Kern, known on X as Grummz, clipped the segment and posted it. It spread fast. Piker’s own audience turned on him. New response videos are still dropping today, three days after the initial backlash began.

Piker attempted damage control. He accused commentator Leigha Sapienti of clipping him dishonestly and misrepresenting his remarks. Sapienti responded that she had directly quoted him with the clip of him saying the take. The clip has not been disputed on substance.

Piker has been here before. Five times banned from Twitch, his track record of outbursts reads like a checklist of radicalized contempt for the country and audience he profits from. In 2019 he said on stream “America deserved 9/11, dude. F--- it, I’m saying it.” When pressed by his own uncle, Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, Piker said he “should’ve used more precise language” and called the comment a poor attempt at satire. In 2021 Twitch banned him for using a racial slur against white people on stream. In March 2025 Twitch banned him for saying “if you cared about Medicare fraud you would kill Rick Scott” while discussing the Florida senator on stream. In May 2025 Twitch banned him for showing the alleged manifesto of the Capital Jewish Museum shooter, which the platform called “improper handling of terrorist propaganda.” In January 2026 Twitch banned him again after he called pro-Israel supporters “Zionist pigs” and claimed ICE enforcement was targeting anti-Israel protesters.

Congressman Ritchie Torres wrote to Twitch and Amazon executives calling Piker “the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism in America,” and noted that Piker had previously posted an image of a handgun on top of a U.S. senator and described the October 7 sexual violence as “rape fantasies” and “rape hallucinations.”

Reddit moderators, meanwhile, banned users from subreddits for posting positive reactions to Pragmata. Some posts were removed for praising the game. The left’s reaction to a video game that made people want to start families has been, in short, to try to suppress the conversation entirely.

Pragmata proved that an unapologetically pro-family story sells. Piker’s meltdown proved that the cultural left finds this threatening enough to attack directly. His own gaming audience finding his takes repugnant proved that even people who watch a progressive streamer for years have a line somewhere.

What does the reaction to Pragmata tell you about where the culture actually is right now?

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NEXT: Naughty Dog’s Canceled Last of Us Online Was 80% Done. The Director Found Out It Was Dead 24 Hours Before the Public Did

A UK-based VTuber and digital artist says British police arrested her last month for possessing her own artwork, seized all of her electronic devices, and released her on bail with conditions that include using a police-approved account name and posting nothing but safe-for-work content.

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Mimi Yanagi posted the account on X on April 30. Her account is now protected. “On Monday April 20th, Mimi was arrested by the UK Police for possession of her artwork, and her artwork alone,” she wrote. “She’s currently on bail pending the outcome of a criminal investigation into” her accounts and activities. Her original X account has since been suspended. The post was screenshotted and shared by Chibi Reviews, where it pulled over a million views within hours.

The artwork at the center of the case features explicit anime-style characters in the “loli” or chibi style, described as exaggerated cute designs. Yanagi created the characters herself. Under Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, UK law prohibits possession of a “prohibited image of a child,” and the statute explicitly covers drawn, computer-generated, and animated images where no real person was involved in their creation. The law has no requirement that a real child exist or be harmed.

According to Yanagi’s statement, police took every device in her home, including equipment she used for work and for communicating with her audience. The bail conditions imposed on her are specific: she must maintain a new social media account under a name approved by the officers handling her case, restrict all posted content to safe-for-work material, and remain under ongoing legal supervision while the investigation continues.

A Reddit post in r/LegalAdviceUK surfaced around the same time as Yanagi’s statement, appearing to come from the same household. In it, a man describes his American wife being arrested for chibi-style artwork she drew and sold in the United States between 2008 and 2011, years before she relocated to the UK in 2012.

No UK police force has issued a statement confirming the arrest. Fandom Pulse reached out for comment and did not receive a response by publication time. The account of events rests on Yanagi’s own posts and the corroborating Reddit thread. Her accounts on Bluesky and Mastodon remain active as of this writing.

The community reaction has been sharp. The story has spread through anime and VTuber circles faster than most breaking news items this year, driven by the core fact that the law in question requires no victim. Whether or not an actual child was harmed, photographed, or involved in any way is legally irrelevant under Section 63. A drawing is sufficient for an arrest, a full device seizure, and bail conditions that effectively end a creator’s ability to work in their chosen medium while the investigation proceeds.

The UK has enforced this law before. In 2014, a teenager was convicted under Section 63 for manga images on his phone. In 2019, a man received a suspended sentence for drawn images with no photographic content. The Yanagi case, if it proceeds to prosecution, would mark one of the first high-profile applications of the law to a working creator whose entire professional identity is built around the artwork in question.

No police statement has confirmed the arrest. No court date has been publicly announced. The investigation is ongoing.

What do you think of the UK’s treatment of fictional drawn artwork as criminal material? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Review: The Kamogawa Food Detectives Translated By Jesse Kirkwood

Wilson Cruz, who played Dr. Hugh Culber across five seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, posted two statements on Facebook this week that together constitute the most explicit calls for the President’s death from anyone in the Star Trek cast to date.

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The FCC is preparing a formal review of Disney’s eight owned ABC broadcast licenses following Jimmy Kimmel’s joke about Melania Trump, according to a Semafor report published this morning. The review would be the latest escalation in a running conflict between the Trump administration and ABC that now involves the president, the first lady, and the federal regulator that controls whether Disney can operate broadcast television stations.

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The joke aired April 23 on Jimmy Kimmel Live! during a mock White House Correspondents’ Dinner segment. Kimmel used deepfake footage of Melania and Barron Trump appearing to sit in his studio as an audience. He then said: “Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Two days later, on April 25, Cole Tomas Allen of California was apprehended outside the real WHCD ballroom carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. Allen has been charged with attempting to assassinate the president.

Trump posted a full statement on Truth Social Monday: “Wow, Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny as attested to by his terrible Television Ratings, made a statement on his Show that is really shocking. He showed a fake video of the First Lady, Melania, and our son, Barron, like they were actually sitting in his studio, listening to him speak, which they weren’t, and never would be. He then stated, ‘Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.’ A day later, a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner, loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives. He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason. I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”

Melania Trump posted separately on X hours before her husband: “Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”

Kimmel responded Monday night on his show: “It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am. It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination. And they know that.” He added: “I’ve been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence, in particular. But I understand that the First Lady had a stressful experience over the weekend. And probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house. And also, I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do. And I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, has threatened ABC’s broadcast licenses before. In September 2025, following Kimmel’s on-air comments after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Carr told ABC and its affiliates: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Earlier this month, Carr suggested ABC could lose its licenses over Disney’s DEI programs, saying the company’s conduct “could fundamentally go to their character qualifications to even hold a license.”

The lone Democratic FCC commissioner, Anna Gomez, called the latest move “unprecedented, unlawful, and going nowhere,” adding that “the First Amendment is on their side” and that companies should challenge it directly.

Any FCC action against ABC would take months or years to work through regulatory proceedings and would face First Amendment challenges in court. The FCC has not revoked a major network’s broadcast license over speech content in its history. Carr’s threats have functioned primarily as public pressure campaigns rather than regulatory actions.

Disney and ABC have not commented. Kimmel’s show continues to air.

Does the FCC’s move against ABC over a late-night comedy joke cross a line, or is ABC’s protection of Kimmel over years of inflammatory content the real story here?

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NEXT: Project Hail Mary’s Box Office Win Reveals What Hollywood Has Been Getting Wrong About Sci-Fi

Lisa Kudrow made $1 million per episode by the end of Friends. She has been a working actress in Hollywood for thirty years. She is worth an estimated $130 million.

Last week she told The Times of London that the Friends writers’ room was hostile, that the “mostly men” on staff discussed their sexual fantasies about Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, and that writers berated cast members who missed lines. Her quote on the writers’ conduct toward the cast: “Can’t the bitch fucking read? She’s not even trying. She fucked up my line.”

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Her response to all of it at the time: “Say what you like about me behind my back because then it doesn’t matter.”

That second quote is the one that matters. Kudrow is describing something she processed, dismissed, and moved past thirty years ago. She kept her job. She became a multimillionaire. She won an Emmy. She has promoted every Friends reunion project that has come along since the show ended in 2004.

Now, with a new HBO Max project to promote, she has rediscovered how brutal it all was.

Kudrow is not alone. The pattern is becoming impossible to miss. Scarlett Johansson, the highest-paid actress in Hollywood for multiple years running, has given repeated interviews describing the industry’s treatment of women as a form of ongoing abuse, including her widely covered comments about being hypersexualized in early Marvel films, films she chose to star in, re-signed for, and negotiated nine-figure contracts to continue making. Milly Alcock, who plays Supergirl in the upcoming DCU film and has a lead role in House of the Dragon, recently described the pressures on young actresses in language that positioned her as a casualty of the same industry that made her a star before her mid-twenties.

The timing on all of these disclosures follows a consistent pattern. The revelation arrives during a press cycle. There is a project to promote. The grievance is always retrospective, describing conditions the actress navigated successfully enough to reach the top of the industry. None of them quit. None of them reported anything at the time. None of them are poor.

The Friends writers’ room behavior Kudrow describes was already litigated in California court. In 2006, the state Supreme Court ruled against a writers’ assistant named Amaani Lyle who sued Warner Bros. over the same environment, finding that sexually explicit conversation was a necessary component of writing a show whose subject matter was sex and relationships. The court’s decision was not a close call. The behavior Kudrow now describes as brutal was legally determined to be part of the creative process.

Kudrow knew this. She watched the case. She said nothing publicly at the time. Her own framing, “say what you like about me behind my back because then it doesn’t matter,” describes a woman who made a deliberate professional calculation and stood by it for three decades.

What changed is not the industry. What changed is that retrospective victimhood is currently a reliable source of press attention, and press attention sells projects.

Hollywood has real problems with how it treats people. Those problems deserve serious coverage. They do not get it when the loudest voices belong to centimillionaires describing grievances they chose to overlook on their way to the top.

Does the wave of retrospective victimhood from Hollywood’s wealthiest actresses make you more or less likely to take real industry abuse claims seriously?

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NEXT: Bill Willingham Announces New Fantasy Trilogy After Putting Fables in the Public Domain

Maegan Chen posted a thread on X early Saturday morning threatening legal action against YouTube commentator Nerdrotic (Gary Buechler), saying he has repeatedly told his 284,000 subscribers that she is a Las Vegas stripper. To understand why this is funny, some background helps.

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Chen entered public life in 2020 when the New York Post ran a splashy story about her pregnancy with Nathan Hamill, Mark Hamill’s son. The headline: “Luke... I am your grandchild.” The Post described her as a “busty brunette” who worked as a model, lived in Las Vegas, and had met Nathan on Tinder. She told the Post that Mark Hamill personally told her she “shouldn’t bring a child into the world that nobody wants,” that his wife Marilou set up an abortion consultation in London without asking Chen what she wanted, and that Nathan texted her “if you keep it, we won’t hang out anymore.” She shared the texts with reporters. She filed a paternity and child support suit in California court. She gave the whole thing to the tabloids.

This was not a woman hiding from attention.

Now, five years later, Nerdrotic makes a joke in his ongoing “cinematic universe” framing, and Chen is on X threatening attorneys. Her thread:

“Someone just sent me a video from @Nerdrotics, and apparently in his cinematic universe I’ve now been recast as a stripper, again. Fascinating considering I have quite literally never been one. Not once. Not even as a side quest.”

She then volunteered a detailed career history nobody requested:

“For the record, since we’re apparently doing unauthorized biographical fan fiction, yes, I was a dominatrix at one point, meaning I got paid to professionally humble men who, frankly sought it out. That chapter closed before I ever dated Nathan. At that time I was actually looking into trade school, which is a far less scandalous but infinitely more productive storyline. Post-Autumn, I pivoted into reality, teaching at a private school starting in 2018, working at a friend’s shop in 2020 while still working at the school, and because life apparently wasn’t already multidimensional enough, being a surrogate that same year.”

She is correcting the record, she says. The record she is correcting is a joke on a YouTube channel, offered to its audience of people who watch Nerdrotic specifically because they enjoy his jokes.

She continued, graciously acknowledging his existing vocabulary:

“Now if @Nerdrotics wants to hurl playground-tier insults and refer to me as a cunt, bitch, or retarded faggot, etc, that’s his prerogative and a reflection of his vocabulary ceiling.”

Then the threat:

“But repeatedly inventing a false narrative about me? That’s not commentary, that’s lazy and verifiably wrong. You’ve already had the decency to leave my daughter out of your Twitter ramblings, great, gold star, truly. Now extend that same energy to me and the rest of my life and stop speaking on things you clearly know nothing about. Because if this keeps up, the next person reaching out won’t be me, it’ll be an attorney, and I promise they’re significantly less patient.”

And the legal theory:

“For clarity, repeatedly stating to 284K YouTube viewers that I am a ‘Las Vegas stripper’ or just a ‘stripper’ when I am not is not commentary, it’s a false factual claim. Given that I work as a teacher, broadcasting that kind of misinformation at scale after it’s been denied is exactly how libel liability starts looking less theoretical and more documented. And as I don’t really engage or fuck with YouTube or streaming or whatever these channels are I’m just going to tag multiple people that replied and engaged.”

The Situation

Nerdrotic covers Hollywood hypocrisy and left-wing celebrity culture. Mark Hamill, who has spent years as one of Twitter’s most prolific progressive activists, is a natural and recurring target. The Hamill baby drama, which Chen herself put on the front page of the New York Post, became part of that coverage.

The stripper joke appears to be exactly what it looks like: a comedic exaggeration in a running bit, aimed at an audience that knows it’s a bit. Nerdrotic’s cinematic universe framing is not a Wikipedia entry. His viewers are not confused about Chen’s employment history.

Chen is correct on the narrow factual point. She was not a stripper. She was, by her own account in this thread, a dominatrix, a model, a teacher, and a surrogate, among other things. The distinction apparently matters to her.

What is harder to square is the posture. Chen went to the New York Post in 2020 with text messages, paternity claims, and quotes about the Hamill family’s private conversations. She put her pregnancy, her relationship, and the Hamill name into tabloid circulation herself. The idea that a YouTube commentator making jokes about the resulting circus is the party out of line requires some creative accounting.

Nerdrotic has not responded publicly. He will almost certainly address it on his channel, probably while being exactly as measured and restrained as his audience expects.

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: Disney May Have Packed the Avengers: Doomsday CinemaCon Room, And the Trade Press Is Calling It Out

Jake Schreier, who directed Marvel’s Thunderbolts and is currently working on the studio’s X-Men film, shared more details about his approach to the project.

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Speaking to Collider, Schreier first shared that the company has brought on two writers, Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and The Bear co-showrunner Joanna Calo, to work on a draft of the film.

He said, “We're still developing. You know, one of the exciting things that's tying into Beef is that Sonny [Lee Sung Jin] and Joanna [Calo] both worked on this season. Obviously, I mean, Beef is Sonny's show, and Joanna worked on the season as well, and we worked together on Season 1 of Beef and on Thunderbolts*. They have come in and are working on a draft right now, which is really exciting to be able to put that group of people together again.”

From there, he highlighted why he’s especially excited about Sonny given he has “the ability to take small interpersonal dynamics and explode them into a much larger canvas.”

Next, he pointed to how they plan to approach them at-large, “When you go back and read X-Men [comics], there's ideology but also interpersonal drama, almost of a soap opera quality. Having writers who understand both how to drive ideology from personal stakes, if we get that right, that's what will feel most honest to what X-Men can be.”

Additionally, he shared that he’s not just mapping out a single movie, but multiple movies, “I think that, obviously, first things first: We have to make one great movie. But we always have an eye as we’re talking about it too. What are the different places this can go? What are the places that [have] been in the comics? What hasn’t been explored as much, and how can that be incorporated?”

“And what are some of the different avenues that we could take that feel like the kind of less-trodden path that we could go down? But those ideas are always out there, as we have the discussions,” he added.

Schreier had previously shared with The Playlist, “The core idea of what ‘X-Men’ is involves complexity. It’s an incredible opportunity with super interesting characters and [much] internal conflict. These characters are wrestling with their identity and place in the world—that’s inherently interesting and complex material.”

He also made clear that the films will be different from other iterations and hinted that one of the big differences will be the film’s scale. First, he confirmed it will be different, “Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.”

Then he shared, “There’s that red sniper dot out there somewhere, you know…. But to be able to explore all of the ideas that are inherent to that rich source material, but also at the scale inherent to the source material, that’s like a very rare and fortunate opportunity. That’s very exciting.”

Additionally, Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige told Nerdist, “Jake’s an incredibly smart guy, and he’s an incredibly talented filmmaker. We had a great experience with him on Thunderbolts, and if you saw that movie, what he did with those character interactions — he also has his pulse on, shall we say, a younger demographic. Not—he’s younger than me, for sure—but he’s tapped into that in a way that I think is important. It was important for Thunderbolts, much more important for X-Men, because X-Men, as it was in the comics, will be a very youth-oriented, focused and cast movie.”

As reported by Variety, Feige reiterated this in a press conference saying that Schreier is “going to make a youth-focused reboot. That may be reflected in mutant castings, and it’ll definitely be felt in the tone and perspective of the film.”

Fandom Pulse is reader-supported independent journalism. Paid subscribers get exclusive scoops and investigative reporting daily.

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Tired of woke sci-fi that preaches at you? Templar Drin wields deadly nanotech for a galactic empire—until he crash-lands on a brutal desert world ruled by a tyrannical alien overlord. Now, armed with faith and firepower, one rogue warrior must fight for justice, free the oppressed, and save souls in a war that spans stars and eternity.

If you crave old-school military sci-fi like Star Wars and Warhammer 40K with unapologetic Christian heart, Justified is your next addiction. Grab it now before the empire strikes back!”

NEXT: Marvel TV Boss Claims 'She-Hulk' Is One Of Marvel's "Best Performing Shows"

Patricia Arquette, who plays Harmony Cobel in Severance and recently starred in They Will Kill You as Lily Woodhouse, made the bizarre claim that Americans are “losing our fundamental civil rights.”

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In an interview with TMZ, Patricia Arquette shared, “We have things that seem to be really incredibly corrupt going on in government. No accountability. No transparency.”

“And my family, on my Dad’s side, fought in the Revolution and in the Civil War for the North and we’re losing our fundamental civil rights. We are losing freedom of speech. People are now getting on government lists. We’ve seen this with tyrants all over the world throughout history. And this is a very dangerous time.”

“It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself a Republican or a Democrat, real Americans know these are our civil rights and they are being taken away and there is no accountability and I’m not sure if we’re going to really have an election. So it’s dangerous,” she concluded.

Arquette is no stranger to making such claims. In the middle of March, she said, “One of our rights in our Constitution is freedom of speech. And as an artist I don’t think you need to divorce yourself from who you are as a person.”

She later claimed the so-called “trans community” was under attack, “Right now we’re looking at a real attack on the trans community. We’re seeing people lose their driver’s licenses suddenly with no way to get to even the DMV. We’re seeing people not allowed to go to the bathroom even though they clearly present the way that they are, who they are. But they’re forcing them to go to the bathroom in the non-corresponding bathrooms.”

“We’re seeing people having to flee the country,” she continued. “We’re seeing people lose their passports. We’re seeing people talk about their pharmacies no longer offering their lifesaving HIV medications. We’re talking about pharmacies that are no longer offering PrEP so that HIV doesn’t spread. We’re seeing Planned Parenthood, the number one healthcare provider in the country, being shut down. Which was the number one testing service for all sexually transmitted diseases. … And we’re just here to say no matter what the government says, we disagree. We love you. We’re here.”

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Step into the dying deserts of Barsoom like never before. In Guns of Mars by Chuck Dixon, a thousand years after John Carter’s legendary arrival, a hard-bitten survivor named Kal fights for his life across a savage, crumbling Mars, where honor clashes with betrayal, ancient weapons meet desperate grit, and every step could be your last.

If you crave classic Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure with a raw, unflinching edge straight from the master of action comics, this pulse-pounding tale is your next must-read. Grab your copy today and ride the red sands!

NEXT: ‘Forbidden Fruits’ Actress Lola Tung Threatens To Curse A Director

Leslie Jones, who played Patty Tolan in the awful Ghostbusters 2016 film, recently shared why she believes “marriage is legalized slavery.”

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In an interview with Ziwe, Jones was first asked whether she could be a trad wife.

Jones answered, “Trad wife meaning like I’d be at home and take- Nah. … Absolutely [expletive] not. Because that’s not who I am. And my daddy didn’t raise me like that. … To be anybody’s wife. My dad used to literally say that to me, ‘I didn’t raise you to be somebody’s wife.’ … I don’t know if it’s brave or smart.”

“Most of the people that I know that’s gotten married are divorced now,” she added.

Ziwe then asked, “An so really, that’s an indictment of the institution?”

Jones replied, “Yea, I think marriage is legalized slavery.”

“I don’t know how you don’t. A man, especially if he expecting you to be a trad wife, might as well pull out a whip and a chain,” she continued.

Jones then described Ziwe as crazy, but when Ziwe countered that she was the one who described marriage as legalized slavery, Jones retorted, “I don’t believe in the marriage. … And I don’t think it’s beneficial for a woman at all.”

Later in the interview when she was asked if she hated men, Jones replied, “No, I don’t hate men, but I am disappointed in them because they’re not stepping up to the plate.”

“While we sat and grew and got our [expletive] together, they sat on the couch and played their Sega Genesis. … They didn’t try to grow. They didn’t try to grow. They didn’t try to better themselves. We invented Oprah so we can get better,” she added.

Jones is completely wrong about marriage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes.”

It adds, “Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: ‘It is not good that the man should be alone.’ The woman, ‘flesh of his flesh,’ his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a ‘helpmate’; she thus represents God from whom comes our help. ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.’ The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been ‘in the beginning’: ‘So they are no longer two, but one flesh.’”

It also states, “The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. By its very nature it is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children. Christ the Lord raised marriage between the baptized to the dignity of a sacrament.”

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Dive into Space Fleet Academy: Year One, the bold, unapologetic sci-fi epic that’s the real answer to woke Starfleet Academy nonsense! Humanity’s future hangs by a thread and Earth’s elite Space Fleet Academy trains the next generation of officers to defend civilization against cosmic threats, alien dangers, and internal decay. The book explores high-stakes space battles, rigorous training, and timeless values of duty, honor, and human excellence.

If you’re tired of sanitized reboots and craving a fresh, no-holds-barred academy adventure that actually respects heroism and exploration, grab this book now.

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Josh Duhamel recently shared his thoughts on celebrities expressing political opinions and why he doesn’t share his strong opinions on various subjects.

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In an interview on The Megyn Kelly Show, Duhamel shared, “It's a good message for a lot of people in the entertainment business these days. Just because you have a platform doesn't mean that you get to preach to everybody.”

Later, he shared why he doesn’t share his strong opinions on a range of subjects, “I have real strong opinions about things, but I don't really talk about it because it's like why? Why would I alienate half my audience? Because I respect their view on things, but I'm not going to preach to them. They can believe what they want to believe. I'm just here to make cool stuff."

When Megyn Kelly asked if it was a growing trend for celebrities to not want to share their political opinions publicly, Duhamel replied, “It should be. It makes perfect sense. If you really want to be successful in this business why would you make half of your audience despise you by your political beliefs? Maybe they don’t care? I don’t know.”

“I look at it as a business decision,” he continued. “I’m here to just make cool movies, cool TV. I’m here to make cool stuff. I’m the court jester. If I want to preach to you about what I believe politically, I’ll go run for office, which I’m not going to do by the way.”

While Duhamel’s comments come as a refreshing breeze in an age when so many in the entertainment world have mistaken their microphone for a pulpit and their fleeting fame for prophetic authority. Just because one stands in the spotlight does not grant one the right to preach especially when the ‘preaching’ is little more than the echo of the latest cultural fad or political passion.

To recognize this, as he does, and to call oneself instead a ‘court jester’ whose task is to make ‘cool stuff’ rather than alienate half the audience, shows a measure of prudence and even humility. In that sense, he is wiser than many of his contemporaries who have traded their art for activism and their popularity for partisanship.

However, the refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. There is all the difference in the world between partisan politics—left or right, Democrat or Republican—and the eternal moral law written on the human heart. When the issue is not mere policy but the dignity of the human person, the sanctity of innocent life, the nature of marriage and family, or the freedom of the soul before God, then silence is not neutrality. It becomes complicity.

The true court jester in the Christian tradition, the holy fool, does not flatter the king or tickle the ears of the crowd. He speaks truth through parable, through story, through the mirror of drama and comedy, precisely so that the audience might see its own face and turn toward the Living God. The entertainer who portrays lives of courage in the face of temptation, mercy toward the broken, sacrifice for the weak, and joy that no ideology can manufacture is doing something far greater than ‘making cool stuff.’ He is cooperating with the Divine Dramatist who wrote the greatest story ever told upon the wood of the Cross.

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NEXT: Former ‘Doctor Who’ Showrunner Russell T Davies On His New Drama: “This Show Is Going To Get Called Woke On A Colossal Scale”

Reacher actor Alan Ritchson seemingly issued a response to the man, Ronnie Taylor, he beat after he was confronted by him on his motorcycle.

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Ritchson shared an image with a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Ritchson’s seeming response comes after video footage showed Ritchson beating Taylor.

After the footage went viral, Taylor, the man who was beat up spoke to TMZ and shared his side of the story.

He said, “It started on Saturday morning — and I’m an experienced motorcycle rider, I’ve been riding bikes all my life from dirt bikes to street bikes etc… I’d head this incestuous revving and speeding through our neighborhood of a motorcycle. I eventually saw the guy on Saturday. I didn’t know who it was and I sort of like flippantly sort of said, ‘Guy, can you please just slow it down, please?’”

“And then there are numerous people in my neighborhood who caught all of this on Ring doorbells of him speeding through the neighborhood,” he continued. “And on Sunday when I was cleaning my bike outside my house, he rode past once, twice, and on the second time I walked out in front of him and I said, ‘You’ve got to stop. Someone’s going to get hurt.’ And it escalated quite quickly from there.”

“I did push him because he was coming towards me on his bike. He did it again for a second time,” he added. “I pushed him a second time and I think the second time he got off his bike and he kicked the crap out of me. You can see he hit me in the back of my head. I went to the ground and covered myself.”

“I don’t wish the guy any malice or ill will, but we just don’t need people riding through neighborhoods like this. And I just decided I’m take a stand because someone else has to ‘cause it’s going to end up way worse than it could have,” he concluded.

Video footage from Ritchson’s helmet has also been released. It shows Taylor jumping into the street to block Ritchson.

It also shows Taylor blocking Ritchson as he attempted to leave the scene a few moments later.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that police officers in Brentwood, Tennessee are investigating the altercation.

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Fans used to wear the shirt unironically. “Joss Whedon Is My Master Now,” screen-printed on black cotton, sold by the thousands at conventions across the country. People lined up to get it signed. Whedon, for his part, did not discourage it.

That is where the story of his fall begins, not in a closed-door meeting with a pregnant actress, not in a Warner Bros. investigation, but in the years before any of that, when an entire subculture decided a television writer was a god.

Joss Whedon was and is talented. That part deserves to be said plainly. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” rewrote what genre television could do. “Firefly,” canceled too soon and mourned ever since, showed a writer who understood character the way few in Hollywood do. His run on “The Avengers” delivered the most difficult ensemble superhero film anyone had attempted, and he pulled it off. The talent was real.

So was the fan worship.

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