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The Seven Social-Media Commandments

Published

1 year ago

August 11, 2023

Like any other technology, whether nuclear power or the printing press, social media is only as good as the people who use it—and over the past decade, we haven’t exactly used it well. What began as a promising prospect for connecting communities and amplifying new voices has gradually evolved into an engine for sowing upset, distrust, and conspiracy. As the next generation of social-media sites emerges, one question is: Can we do better?

I think so. Rather than holding out for unlikely top-down solutions from Washington or Silicon Valley, users can solve our problems from the bottom up. As individuals, we can’t necessarily make better social-media platforms, but we can make better choices on them. So whether you’re joining a new site like Threads or trying to get more out of an old haunt like Facebook, here are some tips for how to use social media without it using you.

Have a block party.

In real life, if someone crashed a gathering of strangers and started disrupting conversations while shouting abuse, they’d quickly be bounced from the party. Yet on social media, this sort of caustic conduct is not only tolerated but sometimes celebrated. In our day-to-day lives, getting disciplined for misbehavior is how we learn to be better. But because such norms were never upheld on the internet, many spaces turned toxic, and many people never got the feedback they needed to grow out of their bad habits. Blocking is part of that feedback. When people realize that their opinions won’t be heard if they express them in a certain way, they stop. Even if they don’t, you have no obligation to accommodate them. Your social-media feed is your party and you decide the guest list. By doing so, you’re not being thin-skinned; you’re being a conscientious host who cultivates good vibes.

Read the room—correctly.

The admonishment to “read the room” is one of the lazier retorts on social media. It’s a way for the intellectually unserious to dismiss an argument without engaging with its substance by gesturing to the reaction of an imaginary audience. But the concept contains a kernel of truth. On social media, we all operate in different rooms and have different people in mind when we speak. A lot of online conflict results from crossed wires, when conversation intended for one context (an ironic in-joke for like-minded people) bleeds into another (among people who don’t understand the joke). But this problem has an easy fix: Before posting something, ask yourself if this is the right platform for what you’re about to say.

Some pronouncements are meant for the group chat, not the entire internet. Others benefit from the widest possible hearing. Want TV or travel recommendations? Ask the hive mind of Twitter or Facebook. Trying to share your scenic vacation? Instagram it. Want to discuss sensitive personal stuff or work through a thorny political question? Hit up your friends in the chat or just send a private message to a trusted confidant. Done right, reading the room shouldn’t stop you from saying what you want but rather help you say things where they can genuinely be heard.

Don’t use social media as a proxy for public opinion.

Precisely because different platforms are good for different things, they attract different types of people and discourse. This means that these sites are pretty poor barometers of popular sentiment. To take one example, the Pew Research Center has found that only 23 percent of American adults use Twitter—the site now known as X—and of those people, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” Put another way, nearly all U.S. tweets come from about 5 percent of adults. There’s nothing wrong with this. In general, social-media sites each serve their own niches and communities. The problem arises when people try to use these platforms as something they’re not: representative samples of the public. This tends to result in wrong conclusions about our world, because the sites were never meant for this purpose.

Places such as TikTok and Twitter tend to privilege the loudest, most entertaining, or most abrasive voices—not necessarily the wisest or the kindest. Moreover, as is the case with most new technologies, the user base of social-media platforms skews young, which means one is less likely to hear from the elderly about their perspectives and experiences. (This is one reason why political candidates like Joe Biden tend to perform poorly on social media but better at the ballot box.) When adopting new platforms and using old ones, we should keep their limits in mind, and not uncritically permit what’s popular on them to influence the course of entire companies or countries.

Resist rage bait.

“The tricky thing about twitter is: you see how angry people get about injustice, and you’re like ‘oh this is a great place’, but then you scroll a bit further and the conversation about apple sauce is just as angry and you start to think maybe it’s not so great after all.” This 2020 observation from the video-game streamer Stephen Flavall perfectly captures the way that social media runs on outrage and othering, to the point that seemingly every online subculture is eventually overtaken by the angriest and most oppositional version of itself. There’s a reason for this: Rage travels.

In 2021, researchers at the University of Cambridge and NYU found that tweets about a person’s ideological opponents were more likely to be shared, and more likely to evoke angry responses, than tweets about their political allies. Disagreement, in other words, proved more viral than agreement. Meanwhile, researchers at Yale found that likes and shares of angry posts encouraged those who wrote them to make more angry posts in the future. Taken together, these studies illustrate how social media creates a feedback loop in which users are encouraged by the platform itself to post progressively more unhinged utterances about their enemies. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.

Marinating in spaces optimized for outrage has many negative consequences for both our civic discourse and mental health. If everything is outrageous, nothing is, and we lose the ability to express opprobrium when it’s genuinely necessary. Professional trolls have weaponized the fury of others for personal profit, purposely provoking outraged responses to their content in order to elevate their profile. (One of them even became president.) But there’s a simple way to escape this trap: Boost things you like and ignore things you don’t. Block bad actors rather than engaging with them. There can be exceptions to this rule, but sticking to it as a default will greatly improve your online experience and disincentivize incendiary individuals from attempting to hijack our collective attention.

Put down the pitchfork.

In June 2020, Peter Weinberg trended on Twitter and was inundated across multiple platforms with vicious, excoriating messages from people he’d never met. The 49-year-old’s home address was even posted online. The reason: He’d been captured in a viral video assaulting a girl who had been posting flyers in support of George Floyd. Except he wasn’t. The entire affair was a case of mistaken identity on the part of amateur internet sleuths. Weinberg had been at the scene of the incident—the day after it occurred. He also wasn’t the only victim of this drive-by vigilante justice. As New York magazine reported, “Another man, a former Maryland cop, was wrongly accused, too. The tweet accusing him was retweeted and liked more than half a million times.”

Outrage mobs are perhaps the most pernicious manifestation of social media’s pathologies. Many of these pile-ons are mistaken in their choice of target and nearly always disproportionate to the offense. Because you can’t know in the moment whether you are joining an outpouring that is justified or misguided, the responsible choice is to abstain. If you wouldn’t want your existence upended over a grainy partial video clip or a poorly phrased post, you shouldn’t help upend someone else’s. And frankly, getting repeatedly exercised over the antics of individuals you’ve never met and wouldn’t know existed if not for social media is neither a healthy nor productive use of our limited time on this Earth.

Choose your lane.

When it seems like everyone is talking about something, it’s natural to feel compelled to talk about that thing. In this way, social media prods us to perform as pundits and comment on events as they unfold in real time. Plenty of people ignore this impulse and just keep posting pictures of their grandkids or dog. But others give in to it, which leads to all sorts of problems. That’s because no one is an expert on everything, and we all have plenty of blind spots that could lead to embarrassment—whether about communities of people we don’t know or intellectual topics we haven’t studied. In real life, we usually don’t run into many situations where these blind spots are exposed, and when we do, we hopefully have friends who will gently correct us. A platform like Twitter is not so forgiving—it’s more like a string of ideological banana peels laid out in front of an audience of millions of strangers. Every day, something on the site or its many successors tempts us to comment outside our expertise. But we don’t have to do it.

Not only will such restraint save you from embarrassment, it will prevent you from overreacting to the latest breaking news, and it will help you make a difference when you have something important to say. The more topics you publicly pontificate about online, the more likely you will slip up and give people reasons to discount whatever else you say. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be outspoken on the internet! But you should limit yourself to your areas of actual expertise, where you most hope to be heard or influence people. The last thing you want is for your off-the-cuff take on a culture-war issue to discredit your deeply informed insights on the things that truly matter to you. This is also why journalists and academics, who rely on public trust to get their message across, should stick to their beats rather than post about subjects outside their ambit. When in doubt, recall the wisdom of the first-century rabbi who said, “All my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence.”

Read before burning.

We’ve all done it. Incensed by a headline, tweet, or screenshot of an article, we shared our upset about a story—without actually reading the piece in question and finding out whether the headline was accurate or the context of the excerpted quotation changed its meaning. Doing this may seem harmless in isolation, but in practice, it’s not happening in isolation. Many social-media users today believe it is perfectly reasonable to pass judgment on content they haven’t actually consumed, and the collective accretion of such potemkin pontification has the effect of polluting the public discourse.

Your first-grade teacher had this one right: Don’t judge a book by its cover, or, in this case, a story by its tweet or headline. Commenting confidently on material you haven’t bothered to read isn’t just intellectually dishonest; it disrespects your followers by telling them you don’t think enough of them to read the things you share with them. It turns social media into a farce in which individuals spar over imagined arguments that nobody actually made. No one wins these debates, and no one emerges any wiser. It’s time to collectively commit to ending this practice, and, when necessary, call out those who engage in it.

Oh, and if you got to this point before commenting on what’s written here: congratulations. You’re already part of the solution. Now feel free to tell me why I’m completely wrong.

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It’s time for a Halloween movie marathon. 10 iconic horror films

Published

2 days ago

October 19, 2024

Anne Joseph

Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.

That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.

We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?

“Rear Window” (1954)

“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.

James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.

— Bob Thomas

“Halloween” (1978)

At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”

Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.

The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.

— Bob Thomas

“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)

“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”

Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.

Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.

— Bob Thomas

“Scream” (1996)

In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.

If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.

By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.

— Ned Kilkelly

“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)

Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”

“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.

The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.

But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.

— Christy Lemire

“Saw” (2004)

The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.

This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.

You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.

But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.

— David Germain

Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.

“Paranormal Activity” (2009)

The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.

The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.

The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.

— Glenn Whipp

Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.

“The Conjuring” (2013)

As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.

“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.

But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.

— Jake Coyle

Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.

Read the full review here.

“Get Out” (2017)

Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”

In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”

It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.

— Jake Coyle

Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.

Read the full review here.

“Hereditary” (2018)

In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”

A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.

Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.

The hype is mostly justified.

— Jake Coyle

Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.

Read the full review here. ___

Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.

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Sutherland House Experts Book Publishing Launches To Empower Quiet Experts

Published

1 month ago

September 19, 2024

Sasha Stoltz

Sutherland House Experts is Empowering Quiet Experts through
Compelling Nonfiction in a Changing Ideas Landscape

TORONTO, ON — Almost one year after its launch, Sutherland House Experts is reshaping the publishing industry with its innovative co-publishing model for “quiet experts.” This approach, where expert authors share both costs and profits with the publisher, is bridging the gap between expertise and public discourse. Helping to drive this transformation is Neil Seeman, a renowned author, educator, and entrepreneur.

“The book publishing world is evolving rapidly,” publisher Neil Seeman explains. “There’s a growing hunger for expert voices in public dialogue, but traditional channels often fall short. Sutherland House Experts provides a platform for ‘quiet experts’ to share their knowledge with the broader book-reading audience.”

The company’s roster boasts respected thought leaders whose books are already gaining major traction:

• V. Kumar Murty, a world-renowned mathematician, and past Fields Institute director, just published “The Science of Human Possibilities” under the new press. The book has been declared a 2024 “must-read” by The Next Big Ideas Club and is receiving widespread media attention across North America.

• Eldon Sprickerhoff, co-founder of cybersecurity firm eSentire, is seeing strong pre-orders for his upcoming book, “Committed: Startup Survival Tips and Uncommon Sense for First-Time Tech Founders.”

• Dr. Tony Sanfilippo, a respected cardiologist and professor of medicine at Queen’s University, is generating significant media interest with his forthcoming book, “The Doctors We Need: Imagining a New Path for Physician Recruitment, Training, and Support.”

Seeman, whose recent and acclaimed book, “Accelerated Minds,” explores the entrepreneurial mindset, brings a unique perspective to publishing. His experience as a Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, and academic affiliations with The Fields Institute and Massey College, give him deep insight into the challenges faced by people he calls “quiet experts.”

“Our goal is to empower quiet, expert authors to become entrepreneurs of actionable ideas the world needs to hear,” Seeman states. “We are blending scholarly insight with market savvy to create accessible, impactful narratives for a global readership. Quiet experts are people with decades of experience in one or more fields who seek to translate their insights into compelling non-fiction for the world,” says Seeman.

This fall, Seeman is taking his insights to the classroom. He will teach the new course, “The Writer as Entrepreneur,” at the University of Toronto, offering aspiring authors practical tools to navigate the evolving book publishing landscape. To enroll in this new weekly night course starting Tuesday, October 1st, visit:
https://learn.utoronto.ca/programs-courses/courses/4121-writer-entrepreneur

“The entrepreneurial ideas industry is changing rapidly,” Seeman notes. “Authors need new skills to thrive in this dynamic environment. My course and our publishing model provide those tools.”

About Neil Seeman:
Neil Seeman is co-founder and publisher of Sutherland House Experts, an author, educator, entrepreneur, and mental health advocate. He holds appointments at the University of Toronto, The Fields Institute, and Massey College. His work spans entrepreneurship, public health, and innovative publishing models.

Follow Neil Seeman:
https://www.neilseeman.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/seeman/

Follow Sutherland House Experts:
https://sutherlandhouseexperts.com/
https://www.instagram.com/sutherlandhouseexperts/

Media Inquiries:
Sasha Stoltz | Sasha@sashastoltzpublicity.com | 416.579.4804
https://www.sashastoltzpublicity.com

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What to stream this weekend: ‘Civil War,’ Snow Patrol, ‘How to Die Alone,’ ‘Tulsa King’ and ‘Uglies’

Published

1 month ago

September 13, 2024

Anne Joseph

Hallmark launching a streaming service with two new original series, and Bill Skarsgård out for revenge in “Boy Kills World” are some of the new television, films, music and games headed to a device near you.

Also among the streaming offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists: Alex Garland’s “Civil War” starring Kirsten Dunst, Natasha Rothwell’s heartfelt comedy for Hulu called “How to Die Alone” and Sylvester Stallone’s second season of “Tulsa King” debuts.

NEW MOVIES TO STREAM SEPT. 9-15

— Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is finally making its debut on MAX on Friday. The film stars Kirsten Dunst as a veteran photojournalist covering a violent war that’s divided America; She reluctantly allows an aspiring photographer, played by Cailee Spaeny, to tag along as she, an editor (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a reporter (Wagner Moura) make the dangerous journey to Washington, D.C., to interview the president (Nick Offerman), a blustery, rising despot who has given himself a third term, taken to attacking his citizens and shut himself off from the press. In my review, I called it a bellowing and haunting experience; Smart and thought-provoking with great performances. It’s well worth a watch.

— Joey King stars in Netflix’s adaptation of Scott Westerfeld’s “Uglies,” about a future society in which everyone is required to have beautifying cosmetic surgery at age 16. Streaming on Friday, McG directed the film, in which King’s character inadvertently finds herself in the midst of an uprising against the status quo. “Outer Banks” star Chase Stokes plays King’s best friend.

— Bill Skarsgård is out for revenge against the woman (Famke Janssen) who killed his family in “Boy Kills World,” coming to Hulu on Friday. Moritz Mohr directed the ultra-violent film, of which Variety critic Owen Gleiberman wrote: “It’s a depraved vision, yet I got caught up in its kick-ass revenge-horror pizzazz, its disreputable commitment to what it was doing.”

— AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr

NEW MUSIC TO STREAM SEPT. 9-15

— The year was 2006. Snow Patrol, the Northern Irish-Scottish alternative rock band, released an album, “Eyes Open,” producing the biggest hit of their career: “Chasing Cars.” A lot has happened in the time since — three, soon to be four quality full-length albums, to be exact. On Friday, the band will release “The Forest Is the Path,” their first new album in seven years. Anthemic pop-rock is the name of the game across songs of love and loss, like “All,”“The Beginning” and “This Is the Sound Of Your Voice.”

— For fans of raucous guitar music, Jordan Peele’s 2022 sci-fi thriller, “NOPE,” provided a surprising, if tiny, thrill. One of the leads, Emerald “Em” Haywood portrayed by Keke Palmer, rocks a Jesus Lizard shirt. (Also featured through the film: Rage Against the Machine, Wipers, Mr Bungle, Butthole Surfers and Earth band shirts.) The Austin noise rock band are a less than obvious pick, having been signed to the legendary Touch and Go Records and having stopped releasing new albums in 1998. That changes on Friday the 13th, when “Rack” arrives. And for those curious: The Jesus Lizard’s intensity never went away.

— AP Music Writer Maria Sherman

NEW SHOWS TO STREAM SEPT. 9-15

— Hallmark launched a streaming service called Hallmark+ on Tuesday with two new original series, the scripted drama “The Chicken Sisters” and unscripted series “Celebrations with Lacey Chabert.” If you’re a Hallmark holiday movies fan, you know Chabert. She’s starred in more than 30 of their films and many are holiday themed. Off camera, Chabert has a passion for throwing parties and entertaining. In “Celebrations,” deserving people are surprised with a bash in their honor — planned with Chabert’s help. “The Chicken Sisters” stars Schuyler Fisk, Wendie Malick and Lea Thompson in a show about employees at rival chicken restaurants in a small town. The eight-episode series is based on a novel of the same name.

— Natasha Rothwell of “Insecure” and “The White Lotus” fame created and stars in a new heartfelt comedy for Hulu called “How to Die Alone.” She plays Mel, a broke, go-along-to-get-along, single, airport employee who, after a near-death experience, makes the conscious decision to take risks and pursue her dreams. Rothwell has been working on the series for the past eight years and described it to The AP as “the most vulnerable piece of art I’ve ever put into the world.” Like Mel, Rothwell had to learn to bet on herself to make the show she wanted to make. “In the Venn diagram of me and Mel, there’s significant overlap,” said Rothwell. It premieres Friday on Hulu.

— Shailene Woodley, DeWanda Wise and Betty Gilpin star in a new drama for Starz called “Three Women,” about entrepreneur Sloane, homemaker Lina and student Maggie who are each stepping into their power and making life-changing decisions. They’re interviewed by a writer named Gia (Woodley.) The series is based on a 2019 best-selling book of the same name by Lisa Taddeo. “Three Women” premieres Friday on Starz.

— Sylvester Stallone’s second season of “Tulsa King” debuts Sunday on Paramount+. Stallone plays Dwight Manfredi, a mafia boss who was recently released from prison after serving 25 years. He’s sent to Tulsa to set up a new crime syndicate. The series is created by Taylor Sheridan of “Yellowstone” fame.

— Alicia Rancilio

NEW VIDEO GAMES TO PLAY

— One thing about the title of Focus Entertainment’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 — you know exactly what you’re in for. You are Demetrian Titus, a genetically enhanced brute sent into battle against the Tyranids, an insectoid species with an insatiable craving for human flesh. You have a rocket-powered suit of armor and an arsenal of ridiculous weapons like the “Chainsword,” the “Thunderhammer” and the “Melta Rifle,” so what could go wrong? Besides the squishy single-player mode, there are cooperative missions and six-vs.-six free-for-alls. You can suit up now on PlayStation 5, Xbox X/S or PC.

— Likewise, Wild Bastards isn’t exactly the kind of title that’s going to attract fans of, say, Animal Crossing. It’s another sci-fi shooter, but the protagonists are a gang of 13 varmints — aliens and androids included — who are on the run from the law. Each outlaw has a distinctive set of weapons and special powers: Sarge, for example, is a robot with horse genes, while Billy the Squid is … well, you get the idea. Australian studio Blue Manchu developed the 2019 cult hit Void Bastards, and this Wild-West-in-space spinoff has the same snarky humor and vibrant, neon-drenched cartoon look. Saddle up on PlayStation 5, Xbox X/S, Nintendo Switch or PC.

— Lou Kesten

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