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TV from around The Bend: The best "shows" of Blippo+ by Farouk Kannout
Saturday November 29^th, 2025 at 9:29 PM

AV Club

“Another TV is possible,” is one of many taglines for Blippo+, a channel surfing simulator available on the Playdate, Switch, and PC that’s packed with original programming from an alien planet called Blip. The game hearkens back to a bygone era of broadcast television, a time before the streaming wars when you would have to flip through various channels to find something to watch, or tune in at just the right time to catch your favorite series.

Blippo+’s catalogue is filled with a variety of shows carrying the aesthetic characteristics of basic cable in the 1980s and ‘90s, all created by a wide array of artists across various mediums thanks to the combined efforts of YACHT, Telefantasy Studios, Dustin Mierau and Noble Robot. Whether you’re looking for educational content, news, Solid Gold-style dance routines, a talk show, a soap opera, or anything else really, Blippo+ has a show for you. Its alien programming gives many of the popular streaming services of Earth a run for their money, and is a refreshing way to engage with art in the ways of the past for those of us who have grown into disillusioned luddites due to the state of the current media ecosystem.

While you can’t go wrong with any of the shows beaming in from the other side of The Bend, if you really want to understand what makes Blippo+ special, you should go straight to the cream of the crop of what all us lowly humans from Earth get to tune into.

Let’s start with Clone Trois. If you binge watched The Pitt earlier this year, and are now in need of more medical drama in your life, Clone Trois is the perfect medicine. The hospital soap opera appears on channel 18 of Blippo+, and the entire cast of doctors and nurses working at the show’s Oblivion Memorial Hospital are clones of the same person, played solely by the fictional actor Seemie Simmons (Olive Kimoto). An added layer of philosophical intrigue undergirds all of the typical workplace romance and attempted murder one can usually expect from this genre. How do all these already thorny relationship dynamics become further complicated when everyone is technically the same person? Are clones actually the same to begin with, or are they distinct independent beings? Clone Trois cleverly plays into this premise, with every character’s name being an allusion to their nature as copies: Nurse Echo, Doctor Ditto, etc. One begins to wonder what Planet Blip’s history with and ultimate stance on clones even is as the drama unravels from episode to episode.

Some of Blippo+’s shows are crucial to understand the larger fiction the game builds around the discovery of a cosmic phenomenon known as The Bend. Clone Trois is not one of those shows—and neither is Fetch!, an adorable claymation show on Channel 49. Claymie Stratford’s stop motion shorts visually recall obvious signposts like Gumby and Davey and Goliath, but with a slight surrealism closer to Adult Swim than Art Clokey. It never has the edge Adult Swim is known for, though, remaining playful and wholesome throughout. You could easily see Fetch! shorts running on Sesame Street. In our review we compared Blippo+ to MTV’s inventive bumpers from the ‘80s and ‘90s and the channel’s late-night animation show Liquid Television, and Fetch!’s bite-sized stop motion asides are a big reason why.

We’ll say it: we’re not above celebrity gossip, and we imagine few of us here on Earth truly are as we endlessly scroll through social media, learning about whatever controversial or scandalous thing our most popular humans have done in the last 24 hours thanks to the efforts of various verified accounts and users. Wouldn’t it be nice to partake in all the rumors without any of the weird baggage or discourse that comes with the names we recognize from our home world? That’s what Rubber Report offers, a gossip show that tells you of the whispers and tales happening on Planet Blip, hosted by Neomie Lifto (Chloe Coover) on the TVX network. Our Earthly lack of familiarity with the goings on of this alien society adds to the comedic effect of the program. All of the celebrity names and various locations mush into a funny word soup, while Neomie keeps the expected cadence and sentence structures of any talented gossiper. It creates the same feeling as when people parody the inherent silliness of Star Wars news for those of us lacking context, describing how “grungus” is angry with “the blorbo” or whatever the hell their names are. I laughed out loud the first time I watched Rubber Report in week two of the game’s timeline, and heard the words: “Boing boing, Blippers. It’s Neomie Lifto here with all your bounciest news.” Thank god for Neomi Lifto, and boing boing indeed.

A few familiar faces from the so-called “alt comedy” world pop up throughout Blippo+; Whitmer Thomas co-stars on Confetti Cowboys, and Brent Weinbach is the always sleepy co-host of the (excellent) morning show Wake Up, Universe! Mitra Jouhari—who co-created and co-starred on Adult Swim’s Three Busy Debras, wrote for High Maintenance and Big Mouth, voiced Cleopatra on the Clone High reboot, and recurs on The Bear as Molly (Claire) Gordon’s roommate—has the most prominent role of the lot. As Barbara Lightworker, aka “the Psychic Barbara,” she hosts Psychic Weather on the Time Dilation Network. Jouhari’s effortless union of 900 phone line New Age rambling with the tone and tenor of a weather forecast remains delightful throughout Blippo+’s 10 weeks of programming, and might be the best example of a Blippo+ show that could easily stand alone as its own thing outside of the game’s framework.

If you really want to get the most out of Blippo+, though, you’ll need to focus especially closely on the shows that contribute to its central storyline. Chief among them is State Of The State, a nightly news show hosted by Madeline Planet (Kate Adams). It should probably be the first show you watch every week, as it consistently introduces the latest developments in the ongoing saga of The Bend, with regular appearances from Blippian scientists like Dr. Zeph Boing (Kyle Mizono) and Ned Telson (Cosmo Segurson), as well as the enigmatic “Bendonaut” Michael Zero (Martine Syms), who becomes crucial to the story. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a fantastic entry point for one of Blippo+’s key strengths: its amazing collection of fantastical hair styles. It’s the first show in the rotation every week on Channel 2, which is basically as prime time as Blippo+ gets.

Ultimately the most important show to that story, though—and the one that, in our view, most perfectly sums up the entire Blippo+ ethos—is Boredome, MainScreenTV’s teen issues show. It recreates the look and feel of a very specific style of program that was common in the 1980s and ‘90s: the “by teens, for teens” talk show that anybody who grew up watching Nickelodeon’s Livewire or any MTV show shot in front of a studio audience will immediately recognize. As hosted by Birdie Telstar (Josie Jensen), Boredome captures the polarities of lethargic disinterest and all-consuming passion that all teens can uniquely flip between at a moment’s notice, as its initially too-cool-for-school stars gradually start a movement that could shake the very foundation of Blippian existence. Blippo+’s creators might be a few decades removed from teenagerdom, and hell, who knows if teens are still like this (who knows any actual teens in the year 2025?), but they tap into something about the teenage experience that we hope remains to be true.

Clearly this isn’t a comprehensive guide to Blippo+’s 50 shows (plus the text-only Femtofax service), and we wouldn’t recommend that you skip any of them—even the (very) few that don’t really work. Fortunately, Blippo+ forces you to watch at least some of every show, every week, in order to unlock the next week’s worth of programming, so even if something leaves you cold you’ll need to at least tolerate it long enough to get to the next batch of good stuff. And hey, what resembles the TV of the past more than sitting through something you don’t care about until the show you actually like comes on?

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InShaneee

1 hour ago

Chicago, IL

Canada Rolls Back Climate Rules To Boost Investments by msmash
Friday November 28^th, 2025 at 8:31 AM

Slashdot

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has signed an agreement with Alberta's premier that will roll back certain climate rules to spur investment in energy production, while encouraging construction of a new oil pipeline to the West Coast. From a report: Under the agreement, which was signed on Thursday, the federal government will scrap a planned emissions cap on the oil and gas sector and drop rules on clean electricity in exchange for a commitment by Canada's top oil-producing province to strengthen industrial carbon pricing and support a carbon capture-and-storage project. The deal, which was hailed by the country's oil industry but panned by environmentalists, signaled a shift in Canada's energy policy in favour of fossil fuel development and is already creating tensions within Carney's minority government. Steven Guilbeault, who served as environment minister under Carney's predecessor Justin Trudeau, said he was quitting the cabinet over concerns that Canada's climate plan was being dismantled.

Insert credit: Games still struggle to credit the people who actually make them by Catherine Masters
Wednesday November 26^th, 2025 at 7:28 PM

AV Club

When the hotly anticipated tactics RPG Demonschool came out earlier this month, what caught my eye the most wasn’t the vivid artstyle, the tongue-in-cheek humor, or the college setting. It was the credits. Alongside the usual list of names are a few sentences written by the game’s director Brandon Sheffield that outline exactly what Necrosoft’s team and contractors did for the game.

Thanks to these detailed credits, we know that Technical Director Shane Marks was “responsible for stitching everything together, developing and implementing underlying technologies […] and created the technique menu flow and accessibility options,” among other contributions. Similarly, Technical Audio Designer Vincent Diamante “implemented all music and sound effects and devised all sound effect and music systems.” Hayden Scott-Baron “refined minigame pacing and flow” and crucially “created fish outlines in fishing minigame” as a Designer. And so on. Without this level of depth, we could only guess what a “Designer” did on the game, as is the case with most credits.

It’s hard enough to get your name into a game you worked on, let alone have your actual contributions detailed to this extent. Many studios only credit those around at the launch of a game, regardless of the work those contracted or let go from the studio did for it during development. If you’re not around when it ships, you may as well not have been there at all. Some studios have the decency to go back and update credits if developers have changed names, but in most cases, a game’s credits stand as a monument to whoever was on the payroll at the time it shipped. What’s more, games with external partners are dependent on those partners providing their own list for the credits, with some only giving the company name.

In the past companies would even obscure credits for their internal teams, like when Capcom reduced the work of Yoko Shimomora on Street Fighter II: The World Warrior to the anonymised “Shimo-P.” This was often done to prevent their developers being poached by rival game companies, but also served to minimize their contributions and visibility—a particularly sore point in an industry where people are often assumed to be male. Atari’s reluctance to credit its developers infamously lead to Warren Robinett hiding his name within Adventure, making it one of the first easter eggs in games. Hiding names in games even became policy at publisher Atari when they saw how their players enjoyed the pursuit.

When the contributions of the many people working on a game get obscured in this way, often people gravitate to “auteurs”—the recognizable names who frequently get top billing and are front and center during the press cycle of a game. Think producers like Sakurai or directors like Kojima. When people critique or compliment an aspect of a game an auteur worked on, often they attribute it solely to that lone recognizable person. Naturally this can lead to power imbalances in the workplace or those who worked hard on a game being forgotten, like how The Last of Us is associated with Neil Druckmann as much as it is with lead characters Joel and Ellie, despite Bruce Stanley directing the first game, leaving Naughty Dog before the sequel.

As games continue to ape films more closely, we now regularly see developer credits in games. Even that has its drawbacks, though. A film tends to be two hours in length and watched in one sitting, so pretty much every viewer has the chance to see the credits. With games taking anywhere from 10 minutes to 200 hours, and varying for every player, the chance anyone will see the credits is a lot lower on average. Some studios get around that by allowing players to view the credits from the main screen—as with Demonschool—but it’s far from a standard practice. And we still see weird situations like when Nintendo introduced a new Mario voice actor in Super Mario Wonder and refused to announce or confirm who it was until players played the game and learned through the credits that it’s-a Kevin Afghani.

Even if games properly credit their workers, it’s not like many people will intently watch them and understand what every job title means. We’ve all sat through film credits before and it isn’t long before the endless stream of names loses its meaning. Still, people should be credited for their work, and a credit is vital for finding more work within the industry. And in a move to get players to pay attention to their credits, some games prefer to add a level of interactivity to them. Take Undertale’s backer credits that you can dodge to unlock a secret fight, or the waves of punchable names in Astro’s Playroom. The interactivity lets players engage with the credits like they did with the game itself. All the same, I don’t think anyone could tell you what the third executive producer listed in a row did on the game.

And so we come back to Demonschool. The credits go a long way to demystifying game development for its players. What did Brent Porter do on the game as 3D Art Lead? Why, he “did most of the 3D modeling and rigging as well as creating most backgrounds,” of course! Not all of Demonschool’s credits have this level of depth, but this does a lot more for those who worked on the game than most other studios, and should be seen as a model for the industry at large going forward.

Catherine Masters is a games intern for The A.V. Club.

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InShaneee

3 days ago

Chicago, IL

SEC Must Not Let Crypto Companies 'Bypass' Rules, Stock Exchanges Say by msmash
Wednesday November 26^th, 2025 at 7:24 PM

Slashdot

The Securities and Exchange Commission's possible plan to grant crypto companies relief from regulation to sell "tokenised" stocks risks harming investors, a group of stock exchanges said in a letter to the U.S. regulator this week. From a report: Several crypto companies plan to sell crypto tokens linked to listed equities to retail investors who want to get exposure to stocks without owning them directly. But to sell the products in the U.S., crypto companies which are not registered as broker-dealers would need the SEC to give them a no-action letter or an exemption. SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said the agency is working on crafting an "innovation exemption" from securities laws which would enable crypto players to experiment with new business models. The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), a group whose members include the U.S. Nasdaq and Germany's Deutsche Boerse, said in a letter dated November 21 that an exemption could create market integrity risks and undermine investor protections. "The SEC should avoid granting exemptions to firms attempting to bypass regulatory principles that have safeguarded markets for decades," WFE CEO Nandini Sukumar told Reuters.

Cook County law enforcement agencies get more money in 2026 by Shawn Mulcahy
Wednesday November 26^th, 2025 at 2:26 PM

Chicago Reader

In early October, a coalition of 68 organizations representing policy advocates, faith leaders, and social service providers sent a letter to the Cook County Board of Commissioners. As the 2026 budgeting process got underway, they wanted lawmakers to freeze spending on law enforcement. The hundreds of millions of dollars devoted each year to jails and […]

The post Cook County law enforcement agencies get more money in 2026 appeared first on Chicago Reader.

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InShaneee

3 days ago

Chicago, IL

Cowboy Bebop director Shinichirō Watanabe on what it takes for art to "survive beyond" by Elijah Gonzalez
Wednesday November 26^th, 2025 at 8:38 AM

AV Club

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that Shinichirō Watanabe is a big deal in the anime scene. As the director of series like Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, Watanabe is behind some of the most seminal shows the medium has ever seen. Known for drawing heavily on American culture and music, his work has often been seen as a gateway into the space for many overseas viewers, combining disparate genres and influences into a surprisingly cohesive picture.

However, beyond just offering an introduction to anime, his output is known for delivering a one-two punch of easygoing style juxtaposed against characters who hide their deeper concerns under a veneer of cool. Bebop is the poster child for this contrast; its breezy fight scenes and jazzy interludes initially obfuscate the fact that its characters are weighed down by their pasts.

Watanabe recently visited the United States for Japan Society’s Foreign Exchange 2025: Cross-Cultural Conversations With Anime Visionaries in New York City, where he participated in a series of talks. As part of the event, we had the opportunity to speak with him about what this kind of cultural exchange means to him, his interest in American music and movies, his past work, and his plans for the future.

The A.V. Club: You’re here in the United States this week as part of Japan Society’s Foreign Exchange 2025. What do you think is the benefit of this kind of cross-cultural exchange between American and Japanese creatives, both for yourself and in general?

Shinichirō Watanabe: First of all, since my very first project, I’ve never made my anime thinking that I only want Japanese people to watch it. I’ve always wanted everybody, people from all over the world, to watch, and that’s how I feel when I’m creating. So an opportunity like this is great for me to get to see people, and if it helps the work spread to the rest of the world, I think that’s an amazing opportunity. To have your work go beyond and spread to the wider world, and also to go beyond the scope of time, to go beyond generations; these two things are the most satisfying.

AVC: Much of your work demonstrates influences from Western and American pop culture. How did you first become interested in American culture and music?

SW: Ever since I was a young teen, I’ve always preferred American movies and American music to Japanese movies and Japanese music. I think it came from my desire to escape, to somewhere that wasn’t here. So, an admiration for culture that’s foreign to me, rather than culture that’s my own, I think that’s where it came from.

One thing I should add is that I grew up in a town in the countryside with no culture whatsoever. So, I think that really contributed to it. To explain how rural it was, there wasn’t a single store or a running bus.

AVC: There’s a significant emphasis on music in your work. Can you talk us through your thoughts on how a good soundtrack can elevate an anime?

SW: I think that the traditional thinking is that a soundtrack shouldn’t stand out too much. It’s there to support the story. But since I’m a big music freak, I always thought that way of using music was not enough.

That’s why, in every project of mine, every time I try to create this relationship between the movie/show and the music, where they are 50/50 partners. I always try to work really hard for that partnership to work. I’ve found that the answer to that quest, even to this day, is trial and error, and I continue to try different approaches.

AVC: More than 27 years later, Cowboy Bebop is still held in extremely high regard. One theme from the show that has stayed pertinent is how many of its characters are grappling with deep feelings of loneliness. Do you think part of Cowboy Bebop’s continuing appeal is how it addressed issues that have remained relevant, like widespread loneliness, alienation under capitalism, environmental concerns, and so on?

SW: I believe your observation is correct, and I think even now, more so, people are feeling alienated and lonely.

AVC: When you create a work, do you seek to focus on those kinds of concepts and themes that will resonate for the foreseeable future?

SW: There’s this quote by Miles Davis that I truly believe in: ‘Only things that are truly cutting edge, at the front of that era, can survive beyond that era.’ I may not be quoting it accurately, but that’s what my interpretation is (The translator clarified he was quoting Watanabe’s version of the quote in Japanese, which won’t be 1:1 with the original saying. The closest line we were able to find attributed to Davis is: “It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating, they have to be about change.”—Ed).

AVC: With Lazarus now in the rear-view mirror, I’m curious how you feel about how the show turned out? What are you particularly proud of from the series? And on the other end, is there anything that you’d go back and change if you could?

SW: Fundamentally, I don’t want to change anything that came out because once you allow yourself to do that, it’ll be endless, you’d be saying, ‘I want to fix that. I want to fix this.’ So, I don’t want to think that way.

As a visual medium, out of all the works that I’d done so far, I think that (Lazarus) is of the highest quality.

AVC: What is your favorite scene from the show?

SW: The second half of episode eight (“Unforgettable Fire”) is my favorite in particular. Even compared among all the works that I’ve done so far, I think that part is a particularly emotional piece of work. (For those who have seen the series, this is the episode that focuses on Chris’ backstory.—Ed)

AVC: Looking at some of the interviews from the Lazarus press tour, there were a lot of questions around whether you viewed the series as a follow-up to Cowboy Bebop. As a creator, did you find it a little bit unfortunate or irritating that so many people were making that comparison and focusing so much on Bebop instead of the new work you were creating?

SW: These two works have nothing to do with each other. But Keiko Nobumoto, who also participated in Cowboy Bebop as one of the writers, she was involved in the very beginning of this project, Lazarus. So I think that air of the Cowboy Bebop-ness, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was there. I’d say it’s a natural consequence of Keiko Nobumoto and Shinichirō Watanabe working together rather than us trying to consciously recreate something that we did.

In my personal opinion, rather than comparing the two titles, you know, ‘Is it better or is it worse,’ I’d like people to watch it as an independent thing and enjoy it as an independent thing without comparing. And so I think that way, you can enjoy the work better.

AVC: Something found throughout a lot of your material is a focus on characters from diverse backgrounds, whether it’s LGBTQ+ characters, influences on your work from African American culture, or how you incorporated traditional Ainu and Okinawan music into the soundtrack for Samurai Champloo. Why has focusing on characters from different backgrounds been a priority for you?

SW: I think it comes from this feeling or belief that I have that if I’m setting out to create works that I want people all over the world to watch, then the human beings in my work should include everybody in the world, beyond different races and sexual orientations. So I think that’s where it comes from.

AVC: Are there any genres or subject matter you’d like to cover in a future work that you haven’t gotten a chance to yet?

SW: I’ve never done horror, so for my next work, I’d love to try to tackle that genre. But I can’t reveal too much of my ideas on that, they’re in my head.

AVC: Similarly, are there any creatives you’d like to work with whom you haven’t collaborated with?

SW: There’s one musician that I would love to work with. His name is Haruomi Hosono, and he’s a Japanese musician. He was the leader of this Japanese band called The Yellow Magic Orchestra, which was the most influential to me when I was young. Since he was the most influential to me, I would love to have an opportunity to work with him in my career.

AVC: Related to your career, you’ve focused a great deal on creating original works. Why is making anime originals important to you, and why do you think that they’re so rare these days compared to adaptations?

SW: One factor that I think even viewers have grown a little bit more conservative in their tendencies. Rather than investing their time in original works, where they don’t know whether it’s going to be good, they prefer to watch something based on an IP that they know is going to be entertaining to a certain extent.

But for me, personally, making an original show is more worthwhile, so I want to continue to create original works. Having said that, if someone offers me an adaptation job that is really exciting, then I would probably take it.

AVC: What is the number one work you would want to adapt if you got the chance?

SW: It’s a secret, because there is one, but I can’t share it. That said, there’s one sci-fi author whose work I’d love to adapt, and maybe I can talk about it. I’ve always been a big fan of Philip K. Dick. If I could do an anime adaptation of his work, that would be amazing.

AVC: What’s your favorite aspect of the creative process when it comes to making anime?

SW: Creating visuals is really difficult, but the moment when I get to match music and the visuals is the most exciting.

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InShaneee

3 days ago

Chicago, IL

Next Page of Stories

TV from around The Bend: The best "shows" of Blippo+ by Farouk Kannout Saturday November 29th, 2025 at 9:29 PM

Canada Rolls Back Climate Rules To Boost Investments by msmash Friday November 28th, 2025 at 8:31 AM

Insert credit: Games still struggle to credit the people who actually make them by Catherine Masters Wednesday November 26th, 2025 at 7:28 PM

SEC Must Not Let Crypto Companies 'Bypass' Rules, Stock Exchanges Say by msmash Wednesday November 26th, 2025 at 7:24 PM

Cook County law enforcement agencies get more money in 2026 by Shawn Mulcahy Wednesday November 26th, 2025 at 2:26 PM

Cowboy Bebop director Shinichirō Watanabe on what it takes for art to "survive beyond" by Elijah Gonzalez Wednesday November 26th, 2025 at 8:38 AM

TV from around The Bend: The best "shows" of Blippo+ by Farouk Kannout
Saturday November 29^th, 2025 at 9:29 PM

Canada Rolls Back Climate Rules To Boost Investments by msmash
Friday November 28^th, 2025 at 8:31 AM

Insert credit: Games still struggle to credit the people who actually make them by Catherine Masters
Wednesday November 26^th, 2025 at 7:28 PM

SEC Must Not Let Crypto Companies 'Bypass' Rules, Stock Exchanges Say by msmash
Wednesday November 26^th, 2025 at 7:24 PM

Cook County law enforcement agencies get more money in 2026 by Shawn Mulcahy
Wednesday November 26^th, 2025 at 2:26 PM

Cowboy Bebop director Shinichirō Watanabe on what it takes for art to "survive beyond" by Elijah Gonzalez
Wednesday November 26^th, 2025 at 8:38 AM