Product management through the lens of pop punk, anime and game dev. Building cooler products with more energy and less corporate nonsense.
Break the rules — Build cooler products — Have fun doing it
Luna Haruna came from Gothic Lolita fashion, had one prior single and got the closing theme for SAO's messier second half. LiSA had the Aincrad OP. That turned out to matter.
Read moreWhat's moving in anime, metal, J-pop and punk right now. One sharp take. No recap.
XG performs at Capital's Summertime Ball tomorrow — the first Japanese act to play Wembley Stadium. Not an anime show. Not a J-pop festival. The mainstream UK pop lineup.
Grand Theft Auto 6 was supposed to ship May 26, 2026. It won’t. Rockstar and Take-Two pushed it to November 19, an 18-month slide from the original May 2025 window, while Strauss Zelnick told a podcast the studio is “seeking perfection” and declined to explain further. The second trailer, released exactly when the game should have launched last year, functioned as a delay announcement dressed as a celebration. Rockstar has done this before: Red Dead Redemption 2 slipped twice, GTA 5 slipped twice, and both shipped to the kind of reception that made the waits look irrelevant. The pattern is the point. A studio with a 25-year track record of shipping games that redefine their genre has earned the right to say “not yet” without explaining itself. Most studios haven’t. The interesting question isn’t whether GTA 6 will be worth the wait. It’s whether your team has built enough trust to say “seeking perfection” and have anyone believe it.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced launches July 9 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, built on the latest Anvil engine by Ubisoft Singapore, the studio that made the original in 2013 with many of the same developers returning. Matt Ryan is back as Edward Kenway, new storylines expand Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet and the tailing system has been reworked so a failed tail no longer auto-desynchronizes: you adapt instead of restart. That last change is the tell. The tailing fix is a twelve-year admission that the original’s most notorious frustration was never supposed to be the point.
Rakuro Hizakura spent years hunting kusoge, broken games nobody else wanted to touch. When he entered Shangri-La Frontier, 30 million players were already there. None of them had found what he found.
Eric Barone spent four and a half years building Stardew Valley alone. Publishers offered teams. Fans offered help. Every offer assumed the problem was speed.
Build a Rocket Boy raised £233M with Rockstar's DNA. MindsEye launched in June 2025 with a Metacritic score of 37. The story isn't about money or talent.
When a massive manga hit pause twice in one year for creator health, no one panicked. That's the shift.
Green Day's Woodstock bet unlocked a decade of punk. Thirty years later, the torch is still burning — but nobody's holding it.
LOVEBITES and HANABIE didn't emerge from bedroom YouTube sessions. They came out of a system. The West hasn't noticed yet.
Tools and plugins built for people who think in systems and feel in riffs.
Bring the blog's pop-punk/anime/product chaos into your editor.
High-energy themes for Zed, built with the same visual language as the blog.