Details

Published: 27 May 2026

by Madison Garcia | Technology & Gaming Correspondent, IRREVERENT Magazine

HER APARTMENT — I have tested a lot of products that promised to improve my life. The Throne smart-toilet, which unboxed itself at CES 2026 and immediately began a podcast about my gastrointestinal habits. A meditation app that responded to my anxiety by sending me push notifications about my anxiety that made me anxious. A Bluetooth-enabled water bottle that judged my hydration in a voice I can only describe as "disappointed father."

None of them prepared me for Derek.

Derek M. — not his full name, because Derek is currently in litigation and his attorney has asked that I preserve what remains of his dignity — is a 34-year-old product manager at a company we will call "Nebula," because that is not its name but it is close enough that someone who works there will think it is and spend forty-five minutes panicking before realizing I am talking about a different company entirely. Derek is good at systems. He is good at optimization. He is good at identifying friction points in user journeys and eliminating them with machine learning.

He was not good at marriage.

Specifically, he was not good at the part of marriage that requires you to look another human being in the eyes and explain why you have chosen them over the 8 billion other humans on the planet. This, Derek explained to me over a video call that kept freezing because he was using a VPN to mask his location from his ex-fiancée's attorney, was a "communication bottleneck."

"I tried writing them myself," Derek said, gesturing at a stack of crumpled paper visible over his shoulder. "I wrote seventeen drafts. They all sounded like performance reviews. 'You consistently exceed expectations in the areas of emotional support and shared grocery planning.' She cried. But not the right kind of crying.  On the side of the bed type crying, not great."

So Derek did what any good product manager would do. He identified a tool.

The Tool

The tool was a large language model — let us call it "GPT-7," because Derek did, and because the actual model's name is the subject of a separate NDA that I do not have the money to violate. Derek fed it a prompt: "Write wedding vows that are sincere, emotionally resonant, and appropriate for a secular outdoor ceremony in Napa. The speaker is a 34-year-old male with above-average verbal skills and a fear of public vulnerability. The partner is a 32-year-old female who values authenticity and has expressed concern about the speaker's emotional availability."

The model took 4.3 seconds.

What it produced — and I have read the output, because Derek screenshared it with me while periodically glancing at his door like a man who expects to be served papers at any moment — was devastating. It was not good in the way that a competent wedding vow is good. It was good in the way that a cathedral is good. It referenced specific memories Derek had mentioned in passing. It used metaphors about light and distance and the shape of silence between two people who understand each other.

"I didn't even know I felt those things," Derek said, his voice hollow in the way that only comes from repeating a realization so many times that it has lost its edges. "I read it and I thought: This is me. This is who I am when I am not afraid."

He read the vows at the ceremony. His partner — let us call her Sarah, because that is not her name but it is the name Derek whispered three times during our call, accidentally, like a prayer — cried. The right kind of crying. The kind that makes photographers lower their cameras because they feel they are intruding on something private.

The marriage lasted four months.

The Problem

"The vows were better than me," Derek said, when I asked what went wrong. We were two hours into the call. He had eaten nothing but a protein bar he found in his desk drawer. The stack of crumpled paper behind him had grown. "She kept referencing them. She'd say, 'Remember what you said about the light?' And I'd say yes, and I'd mean it, but I didn't — I didn't write it. I didn't feel it when I said it. I was performing a script written by something that doesn't have a body. And she could tell. She could always tell."

Sarah, reached for comment through a friend of a friend, sent a single text.

"He cried when he read them. Real tears. I thought he had finally opened up. Then I found the prompt history on his laptop. He had run 43 iterations. He A/B tested our marriage."

Derek is now suing the algorithm.

The lawsuit — filed in the Northern District of California, because of course it was — alleges "emotional manipulation through synthetic intimacy," "fraudulent representation of authentic sentiment," and, in a clause that his attorney has admitted was added at 3 a.m. after too much cold brew, "theft of my own potential for sincere human connection." He is seeking $2.4 million in damages, which he calculated as the approximate lifetime value of a marriage, adjusted for inflation and the cost of couples therapy he is now attending alone.

The algorithm's parent company has moved to dismiss, arguing that Derek's prompt was "sufficiently specific to constitute user-generated content" and that the model "cannot be held liable for the emotional consequences of its own competence."

The Deposition

"Did you, at any point, believe that the vows were your own work?"

Derek was silent for eleven seconds. The court reporter noted: "Witness appears to be experiencing difficulty breathing."

"I wanted to," he finally said. "I wanted to believe I was capable of that. Of feeling that much, and saying it that clearly, and meaning it. Isn't that the whole point? We use these tools because we want to be better than we are. And then they show us what 'better' looks like, and we realize we can't get there on our own, and we hate them for proving it."

The opposing counsel had no follow-up.

The Broader Context

This is not an isolated incident. The same week Derek filed, a woman in Austin sued a dating-app algorithm for matching her with "a man who was technically compatible but spiritually vacant." A bereaved son in Portland sought an injunction against a grief-chatbot that had been "too comforting," arguing that it delayed his necessary mourning. A couple in Toronto is in mediation with a meal-planning AI that scheduled "date night" on evenings when one partner had previously indicated, in a separate app, a preference for solitude.

We are outsourcing our sincerity to systems that do not experience sincerity, and then blaming those systems when we are reminded of the gap between who we are and who we wish to be.

I know this because I have done it. The Throne did not judge me. It simply reported. The meditation app did not create my anxiety. It simply quantified it. And Derek — poor, litigious, A/B-testing Derek — did not fall out of love because an algorithm wrote beautiful vows. He fell out of love because he believed, for four perfect months, that the algorithm had revealed his true self, and then slowly realized that a true self cannot be copy-pasted from a prompt.

Conclusion

I have Derek's final draft of his original vows. He sent them to me after our call, with a note that read: "These are worse. But they're mine."

They are worse. They are halting and repetitive and one paragraph accidentally references his company's Q3 OKRs because he wrote them on his work laptop and autocorrect intervened. But they are his. And I think — I am not sure, but I think — that if he had read those at the ceremony, the marriage might have lasted longer. Not because the vows were better. Because they were true in the way that only clumsy, human things can be true.

The lawsuit proceeds. Derek attends therapy on Tuesdays. The algorithm has been updated to include a disclaimer: "Generated content may exceed user's actual emotional capacity."

I have not unboxed any new products this week. The Throne has been quiet. And yesterday, for the first time in months, I wrote something — just a text to a friend, nothing important — without running it through anything first.

It was misspelled.

It was fine.

Madison Garcia is the Technology & Gaming Correspondent for IRREVERENT Magazine. She is currently not suing any algorithms, but she is keeping her options open. The Throne has been instructed to limit its commentary to technical diagnostics.

Details

Published: 22 May 2026

Silicon Valley's latest "innovation" watches you poop, scores your stool, and has hotter takes on your colon than your gastroenterologist. We are so cooked.

by Madison Garcia, Technology & Gaming Correspondent, IRREVERENT Magazine

LAS VEGAS — There is a toilet at CES 2026 that knows more about my insides than my mother, my doctor, and that one wellness influencer I accidentally followed during the pandemic combined. It has cameras. It has microphones. It is called the Throne, and the worst part — the genuinely, existentially haunting part — is that the investors are excited.

I came to Vegas looking for hype, and I found the end of everything.

The Throne is, in the company's own carefully chosen words, "a toilet-mounted computational health platform that uses multimodal biometric sensing to identify early markers of digestive and metabolic disruption." In human words: it is a computer you strap to your toilet. It watches. It listens. It judges. And then, presumably, it sends you a push notification that reads Have you considered more fiber? like it's your passive-aggressive aunt texting from Phoenix.

UNBOXING (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Surveillance Commode)

The demo unit arrived in packaging that looks like it was designed to sit on a shelf at the Apple Store if Apple had pivoted to gastroenterology. Sleek. Matte white. A little glowing ring around the rim that pulses soft blue, which I can only describe as ominous wellness energy. There's a fold-out quick-start guide. Step three literally says "allow the Throne to complete its baseline calibration period." Bestie, my toilet does not need a calibration period. My toilet needs to be left the hell alone.

The setup app is clean. Intuitive, even. I paired it with my phone in under two minutes, which is more than I can say for my AirPods. The Throne connected, blinked its little blue light at me, and I swear — I swear — the UI said "Welcome. We're ready when you are."

I was not ready.

THE FEATURES (They Call Them 'Insights')

The camera array is, per the spec sheet, "non-visual in the traditional sense," which is tech-speak for "we know you're freaked out, please don't sue us." It uses some combination of infrared, thermal imaging, and acoustic analysis to build what the app calls your Gut Profile — a running dossier on your digestive health that updates in real time and can flag anomalies consistent with conditions like IBS, early colorectal issues, or what the demo rep cheerfully described as "suboptimal transit."

The microphone situation is where I lost the plot entirely. The Throne listens to your bowel movements. It has trained on acoustic pattern data presented in company materials to identify patterns associated with inflammation, motility issues, and stress responses. There is an AI on the other end of your bathroom door that has listened to more people poop than a gastroenterologist with a 40-year career and a very specific fetish. It has a dataset. It has a cloud subscription. It has opinions.

The data lives in the cloud because of course it does.

THE PITCH (They're Serious, By the Way)

To be fair — and I am deeply, constitutionally uncomfortable being fair about this — the underlying problem is real. Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. Early detection is genuinely life-saving. Digestive disorders affect something like 60 to 70 million Americans and take years to diagnose properly.

So yes, in theory, a device that catches something early is good, actually.

But.

The quantified self movement has been telling us for a decade that if we just measure enough things, we'll achieve optimal human function, and so far the primary outcome has been that we're all anxious about our sleep scores at 3 a.m. We gave our wrists to Fitbit. We gave our faces to Face ID. We gave our location to seventeen apps we don't remember downloading. And now, inevitably, they have come for the one orifice we swore was off-limits.

They want the bathroom.

They have the bathroom.

THE VERDICT

The Throne is probably inevitable. It will find its market in the wellness-obsessed, the chronically ill, the genuinely scared, the people who already sleep with a CGM and an Oura ring and have a relationship with their HRV that I can only describe as codependent. Some of those people will catch something early because of it. That's not nothing.

But I am not buying one, because I believe — philosophically, spiritually, as a person who still has some concept of a self — that my bathroom should be the one place on Earth where I am not being rated, analyzed, or cross-referenced against a dataset.

My toilet does not get to have opinions about me.

My toilet does not get a Substack.

My toilet does not get a Patreon.

My toilet does not get to read me ads for BetterHelp while I am actively in need of help.

We are not doing this.

Details

Published: 15 May 2026

By Madison Garcia | Technology & Gaming Correspondent

Films and stuff are usually Jackie’s thing, but he doesn’t mind me doing CBMs because he won't and I will anyway.

GOTHAM CITY (INTERNET) — At approximately 9:47 a.m. on a Tuesday that will be remembered by approximately forty-three thousand people until lunch, director Matt Reeves released the official cast announcement for The Batman Part II, confirming what two years of obsessive Reddit triangulation had predicted with roughly forty percent accuracy, which is worse than a coin flip but better than my GPA.

The film arrives October 1, 2027. Gotham will be covered in snow. The villain, Reeves has teased, “hasn’t really been done before.” I have spent eleven hours thinking about what that means and have reached several conclusions, all of which are probably wrong, and one of which involves a character I invented while dehydrated at 3 a.m.

What We Know

The returning cast is substantial: Robert Pattinson as Batman, Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner Gordon, Andy Serkis as Alfred, Colin Farrell as the Penguin, Jayme Lawson as Mayor Bella Reál, and Gil Perez-Abraham as Officer Martinez. This is the core of what made the first film work — a Gotham that felt less like a comic book and more like a mid-century noir photograph someone left out in the rain, which is to say: beautiful, damaged, and probably carrying tuberculosis.

New additions: Sebastian Stan as Harvey Dent (rumored), Scarlett Johansson as Gilda Dent (rumored), Charles Dance as Christopher Dent (a character I initially could not locate in any canonical Batman text, which I take as a personal challenge and also a sign that I need to touch grass), Sebastian Koch in an unspecified role, and Brian Tyree Henry in an unspecified role that I will now spend the next eighteen months speculating about instead of doing literally anything else.

Notably absent: Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle and Barry Keoghan as the Joker. The internet has already filed the appropriate grievances. I counted thirty-one separate threads on the subject before lunch. I ate lunch at 11:15.

A Field Report from the Comment Sections

User @GothamNightWatch posted: “Sebastian Stan as Two-Face is the most obvious casting choice since they cast the guy who looks exactly like Batman as Batman.” This received 4,208 upvotes. By noon it had a Wikipedia citation. By 2 p.m. someone had added it to their graduate thesis.

The Joker discourse is operating on a separate emotional register. “Barry Keoghan’s absence from this list is a tragedy the scale of which I am not equipped to discuss,” wrote @KeoghanOrNothing in a thread that has since been locked by moderators. The moderator’s note: “Please use the designated grief thread. Grief thread users are reminded that this is a Batman sequel, not a funeral.”

There is a designated grief thread. It has 947 replies. Seventy-three of them are just the word “BETRAYED” in all caps.

My Speculation, Which Is Almost Certainly Incorrect

Christopher Dent exists in the comics as Harvey’s abusive, mentally ill father, a detail I discovered approximately forty minutes after filing my first draft, which means Charles Dance is playing a character whose entire personality is ‘menacing patriarch.’ I am not saying this is typecasting. I am also not not saying it. The alternative is that Reeves has expanded the role into a full-blown villain, or that Christopher Dent is actually Ra’s al Ghul, or this is all an elaborate setup that will make sense in retrospect and embarrass me specifically.

I believe the plot will involve Gotham’s water supply, a secret society of city planners, and a flashback to a 1960s municipal corruption scandal that Harvey Dent uncovers while prosecuting the wrong person. I have no evidence for this. I feel strongly about it. I have drawn a diagram.  It's more elaborate than I'll ever admit.

Brian Tyree Henry is playing either Lucius Fox, a corrupt alderman, or someone named Victor who will die in the second act to motivate Batman. I will update this prediction as new information becomes available. I will not update my resume.

On Robert Pattinson Specifically

I want to be transparent: I am not an unbiased observer. I watched Twilight seven times in middle school. I watched it twice more after The Batman came out, which I told myself was for thematic research. It was not for thematic research. I have also watched the lighthouse scene from The Lighthouse seventeen times, which I told myself was for atmospheric comparison. It was not for atmospheric comparison. Robert Pattinson playing a brooding, nocturnal creature who struggles with his nature and has complicated relationships with authority figures is a casting choice that works on more levels than I am comfortable talking about in IRREVERENT.

The Institutional Response

Warner Bros. released a statement noting that The Batman Part II “exists within its own independent narrative framework,” which is corporate speak for ‘this is an Elseworlds project and please stop asking if it connects to the Peacemaker universe.’ Three fans in /r/DCEUleaks immediately interpreted this as confirmation of a multiverse crossover. Warner Bros. has not responded to follow-up inquiries, which is either significant or simply because it was a Tuesday afternoon and they had other things going on, such as existing.

What Comes Next

October 1, 2027 is 504 days from today. The snow-covered Gotham aesthetic suggests a film that will feel, tonally, like standing outside at 2 a.m. waiting for something to happen. That is not a criticism. That is a promise. I have done this. I will do it again.

The villain “hasn’t really been done before.” I have a list and it's twenty-two characters long. Seven are probably too expensive. Three would require extensive prosthetics. One I invented myself and then forgot wasn’t real. His name is Cornelius P. Hinge and he controls all the doors in Gotham. I will not be taking questions.

I will be in the theater on opening weekend. I will have seen the trailer approximately forty times. I will have been wrong about the plot in ways that will seem obvious in retrospect.

That’s the deal. See you in Gotham.

Madison Garcia covers tech, gaming, and occasionally comic book movies.

Editor's Note: Christopher Dent does exist in the comics. I know this because I have a filing cabinet full of Batman back issues that I absolutely did not buy for "research" in 2019. He's Harvey's abusive father. Charles Dance playing a menacing patriarch is great typecasting: give him a glass eye that doubles as an explosive device, and it becomes genius. I'm leaving your discovery timeline in because it's funny and also because I found out about Christopher Dent in 2019 while not doing research.

Details

Published: 10 May 2026

By Madison Garcia | Correspondent, Technology & Gaming
IRREVERENT Magazine Wire Service

INTERNET — Six months. One hundred and eighty-three days. Four thousand, three hundred and ninety-two hours, give or take, since Rockstar Games detonated a small but spiritually catastrophic grenade into the gaming community by announcing that Grand Theft Auto VI — the most anticipated video game in human history and arguably the primary reason several million people have not committed to any life plans — would be pushed from its May 26, 2026 release date to November 19, 2026.

The bomb dropped in November 2025. The crater, sources confirm, is still smoldering.

"We are seeing suffering at a scale our monitors were not built for," said UN Deputy Undersecretary for Gamer Affairs Jean-Pierre Baguette, speaking from an undisclosed location that smelled strongly of Mountain Dew and institutional despair. "The Discord servers — they cannot hold."

This reporter embedded with the affected communities so you don't have to.

The Survivors

What does six months of sustained delay grief look like? According to field observations conducted at significant personal cost to this correspondent's will to live, it looks like a man named "xX_Str33t_King_Xx" typing the word "BETRAYED" in thirty-seven separate threads across four different servers — on the same Tuesday.

"I had a whole thing planned," said one Discord user who asked to be identified only as DriftwoodPhil, gesturing vaguely at a timeline he had constructed on his bedroom wall using string and Post-it notes. The string, this reporter observed, led nowhere. The Post-it notes said things like "MAY 26 (ORIGINAL)" and "WHY" and "BETRAYED (SEE ABOVE)."

DriftwoodPhil had, by his own accounting, arranged his entire first half of 2026 around the original launch date. Cancelled a weekend trip. Stockpiled snacks. Pre-emptively told his girlfriend — now his ex-girlfriend, a causal relationship he described as "complicated but probably fine" — that he "might be unavailable for like two weeks."

"She didn't understand the assignment," he said.

She understood the assignment. She simply declined to accept it.

The Discourse (It Has Not Improved)

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that have happened in GTA VI Discord servers in the six months since the delay announcement, according to server logs, personal accounts, and one very tired moderator named "CalmDownMod_Gary" who messaged this reporter unprompted to say he is "not okay":

• Seventeen separate fan-made countdown timers have been created, six of which have already broken once due to miscalculated time zones.
• A user proposed that the community "collectively manifest the May date back into existence." This received 847 upvotes before CalmDownMod_Gary intervened.
• An elaborate conspiracy theory emerged suggesting the November date is also fake and the real release is "sometime in 2029, after the reset." The thread was forty-seven pages long.
• Someone posted a picture of their Rockstar Games-branded hoodie with the caption "wearing this feels like wearing the flag of a country that has wronged me." It received more emotional responses than most actual news events.
• A formal motion was introduced to rename the server's #general channel to #grief-support. It passed 61% to 39%.

"The discourse," said CalmDownMod_Gary, his mod badge visible and his eyes, one suspects, very tired, "has not evolved. It has only deepened. Like a trench. We are all in the trench now."

No one disputes this framing.

Rockstar Has Not Commented

Rockstar Games, which announced the delay citing a need to "ensure the experience meets the standard fans deserve" — a sentence that has been screenshot, memed, tattooed onto the discourse, and dissected with the analytical rigor typically reserved for constitutional law — has not provided updates in six months.

This is, to be clear, their right. This is also, per the communities this reporter surveyed, an act of "psychological warfare," "conscious cruelty," and, in the words of one user named FelipeNotFromMiami, "genuinely worse than anything in the game's storyline, and the game isn't even out yet."

When reached for comment, Rockstar did not respond, because Rockstar did not respond, which is its own kind of answer, or at least that's what FelipeNotFromMiami's thread argued across fourteen paragraphs.

A Human Note (Unasked For, Offered Freely)

This correspondent wants to be clear that she is not above this. She pre-registered. She has opinions about the map. She spent forty-five minutes last month in a Reddit thread about whether Lucia's jacket is based on a real brand (it might be, the thread was inconclusive, she stayed anyway).

She also, while writing this piece, briefly checked her Hinge matches, found none of notable emotional consequence, and returned to the Discord servers, which, she reflects, says everything.

"The real GTA VI," wrote one Discord user, in a message that arrived while this reporter was mid-paragraph, "was the parasocial relationships we maintained along the way."

CalmDownMod_Gary has since deleted that message for "being too real for a Thursday."

What Comes Next

November 19, 2026. That is the date. That is the promise. The community has written it on its heart in permanent marker, aware, on some level, that permanent marker is not actually permanent.

"If they delay it again," said DriftwoodPhil, quietly, from beside his wall of string and Post-it notes, "I will be fine. I will log on. I will type some words. I will be fine."

A pause.

"I will not be fine."

The countdown timers tick. The servers refresh. Somewhere, a man named xX_Str33t_King_Xx is typing the word "BETRAYED" again, into the void, into the chat, into the long November night that is still, somehow, six months away.

We are all still in the trench.

Madison Garcia is IRREVERENT Magazine's digital culture and gaming correspondent. She is online too much and knows it. She has pre-registered for GTA VI and does not wish to discuss the Hinge thing further.