Keeping distance. Things got a little icky early in the year with the Wuthering Heights press tour. Margot Robbie kept bringing up Jacob Elordi’s attractiveness, and how he made her weak in the knees. Luckily, that cringe-station is behind us. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are wiping the red carpet clean. No weird sexual innuendo on promo tours of The Drama. Just actors who are done acting their parts.
Flagging this. Grimes is on LinkedIn under her government name, Claire Boucher. You’d think the best part of being a pop star (and former partner of Elon Musk) was never having to look for work, or hear the Microsoft Teams ping, or pretending to understand what “synergy” means. Alas, late-stage capitalism spares no one.
Unlocking levels. Yang Binglin just completed Resident Evil Requiem. He’s 91. If that weren’t flex enough, here’s another: Instead of a console, he used paper and pen. The Guinness World Record holder for the oldest video game streamer — known as Game Grandpa in China — mapped levels, cracked puzzles and turned survival horror into a handwritten thesis. Your move, controller kids.
Scared to commit. Netflix’s Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen has all the elements of a good horror thriller – trails of blood in hallways, ominous warnings, a family curse. But the most terrifying thing in the miniseries is (Trigger Warning) a couple that is unsure of whether they’re rushing into marriage. Creator Haley Z Boston says it’s inspired by her own fear of romantic commitment (“What if you marry the wrong person and it ruins your life?”) She’s so real for this.
Experiencing FOMO. Why did no one tell us about the sci-fi webnovel that’s practically Chinese lore at this point? The Morning Star of Lingao has over 3,000 chapters, is crowd-sourced and features stories of engineers, scientists and industrialists travelling 400 years back in time to try to trigger an industrial revolution that will change modern China. Christopher Nolan, are you seeing this?
Feeling jagged. Leave the book-versus-movie debates on Project Hail Mary to book club nerds. We’re just replaying the scene where Rocky shows Grace (Ryan Gosling) how “elegantly” aliens eat. “Grace look disgust when eat,” Rocky says, then proceeds to suck chunks of stone into his lower orifice. Can’t unsee. Amaze. Amaze. Amaze.
Going to confess. We love a good mockumentary (The Office, Modern Family, This is Spinal Tap). Now, the action roleplay game Fable – which is getting a reboot – will have similar character cutscenes. Guildmaster Humphry reminisces about his days as one of the greatest heroes in Albion (a self-proclaimed title) and characters drop bits of lore in snarky British accents. This could either be super cringe or the greatest thing. Play it already.
Berry intrigued. Think that Love Island stans are weird? The people who really cross the ‘cannot be saved’ mark are those bingeing Fruit Love Island, a series of AI-generated videos that replaces human participants with fruit avatars. This is the kind of AI that’s using up our energy and clean water. Throw tomatoes at them!
From HT Brunch, April 4, 2026
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