The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference –Elie Wiesel Last week the site Aftermath, had what they called Hater Week, where the staff opened up on things they did not like. There were some interesting takes. Aftermath Hater Week – I totally stole this image Some of them I felt in my bones, like the one about how awful Adobe is. I remember having a beta copy of Photoshop 2.0 back in 1991 and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. I am not even a creative by profession, but everybody I know in that domain hates Adobe with the combined heat of a thousands suns. There is a post about hating fall damage and Souls-type games and what we’re really mad about around Sony abandoning physical discs and even some paired point/counter-point articles about a few topics. You can read the collection here. I don’t think you need to be a subscriber. (I am a subscriber, so apologies if there is a paywall.) It was a fun series of posts, not all of which spoke to me… and there was a topic or two I thought might be missing like how maybe we could all give Fortnite, Roblox, GTA V, Call of Duty, and Minecraft a freaking rest and play something else. I mean, it is the same thing on XBox every freaking week from Cricana. (Image posted by Mat Piscatella of Circana. Blue Sky link.) Circana Stats for PlayStation, XBox, and Steam w/e July 25, 2026 There are times when I feel like I play the same games all the time. That is kind of an MMO thing. But man, I feel like an expeditionary compared to those charts. (Also, congrats to Palworld and its success on its 1.0 launch. Look at its Steam rank!) Overall though it was something of a cathartic week because one cannot be constantly positive about everything. In fact, I am not sure how you can be a blogger and not give into your emotions. The Jedi were bullshit. You can’t bring “balance” to the force when the Sith are part of the equation. There is no neutral ground. To claim neutrality it to reinforce evil. Blogging is a passion project. Nobody is making any real money doing this. I maybe pay my hosting fee every year with ads, but that is a long, long way from quitting my day job. And likely almost nobody is reading what you write. I got 2,000 views the other day, half of them from North Bergen, New Jersey, a location that hosts some data centers, so it was probably just bots scraping my site to feed the demon LLMs. Seriously, I don’t even get upset when people steal my content, because it at least implies it has value. Also, I secretly enjoy the idea of my work messing up some LLM’s response. Somewhere somebody may be getting a response that suggests punching Amy Tan. Passion is what gets me to open the site and start writing… and a lot of it is negative. But that is fine, even good in some ways. Because passion is caring. Passion is giving a damn. So there is no sin in being negative about something that you care about and want to be better. I am here to have an argument. That argument is often with myself. But I try not to be the reply guy, automatically gainsaying anything from a person or company I do not like. I have said on more than a few occasions that I rarely write about things I really do not like. In part I find just unbalanced negativity to not be enjoyable, but also if I don’t like something I often don’t care that much about it. When that is the case, it is hard to get beyond “it sucks,” and I have a soft 500 word minimum on the site these days, so unless I can surround those two words with another 498 of context and back story, then that post isn’t going anywhere. (Though, to be fair, have you read me? There are times when I can surround “sky is blue” with many words of context.) And, frankly, you can get the facts about any game I write about elsewhere. My only value add is my opinion, the context I am able to put around events, and occasionally remembering to link out to other posts on the topic. I can be like Smithers in the first few seasons of The Simpsons who, when Mr. Burns would ask who this Homer Simpson was, would then give the backstory about him thwarting his run for governor, his wife painting him in the nude, running over his son, etc. It was an unparalleled gag that had to be killed off because it reached a point being too much. (Though it did get a bit of a replay in the Who Shot Mister Burns? episodes.) Here in text however, not only am I not constrained by the limits of audience attention spans… I mean, what audience, right… but I can often link back to the context in the form of past posts for those few who come here to wallow in what I have to offer. My point here being… and I realize it keeps getting lost in my meandering style of asides and vague pop culture references… is that passion is a driver and that negative emotions are often the strongest of the bunch. This blog might not have existed except for the fact that I started playing EVE Online two weeks earlier and was annoyed at how bad the tutorial was. The game was very compelling, but JFC is that all they could manage when it came to onboarding new players? It made me mad, and I harnessed that to launch into this soon to be 20 year long venture. So there is all that. But there is a line, right? There is passion, there is giving in to the dark side now and then, and there is being a hater. And going full hater is bad, right? I would have said before the past week. Enter Ed Zitron, self identified hater on the topic of AI. You may remember him from the 2009 Darkfall review scandal where the publisher of the game complained loudly that Ed couldn’t possibly have played enough to write his review, which culminated in a 2/10 score at the end. Eurogamer lept to the defense of its contributor and… mostly caved, getting the game a second pass review where they managed to double the score to a 4/10. Nice work Aventurine. A real golf-clap level of effort. Zitron has long since moved on to other ventures and has more recently become the absolute, number one, go-to AI Hater when you need somebody to cut through the smoke screen of bullshit that OpenAI or Oracle or Microsoft. That he gets the call to appear on all sorts of media to speak is a testament to his standing on this. I have linked out to his free posts a few times here on the blog. Anyway, at the culmination of Hater Week at Aftermath, their weekly podcast had Ed Zitron as a guest and he went into depth about what it means to really take on the mantle of hater. You can find it here. It is worth a listen. His main point is that to be a true hater you must learn all you can about that which you hate, you must know what you hate at least as well as those producing it. You must transcend the mere dislike of something and know why it is bad in as much detail as possible. And the main focus of his hate has evolved from “well, AI just sucks” to detailed analysis of the financials that tell a very compelling tale about how the various AI companies are lying or are involved in what amounts to an elaborate, high finance check kiting scheme of interlocking investments to the same pile of money gets counted on multiple balance sheets. His work is almost exhausting in detail as he cranks out 8-15K posts on a regular basis. But that level of effort earns him a living, as his newsletter has enough subscribers to be considered a pretty obvious success. I am not even sure how to characterize that level of passion and where it has taken him. It is more than just a bit. But what is it? Cover what you hate and you’ll work hard every day of your life but feel some amount of satisfaction when you’re proven right? Not sure I can recommend it, but it has worked out for him. If you are interested in either Aftermath or Ed Zitron’s work, they are linked below. Aftermath covers video games, the internet, and the cultural miasma that enfolds those things. And, while Ed Zitron hates AI, he also hates other things like Microsoft, Oracle, and other Silicon Valley related boondoggles. He also occasionally shares pictures of his cats. Aftermath Where’s Your Ed At?