There’s a lot about Perfect Tides: Station to Station’s Mara that I find relatable. Like me, she’s recently moved to a place simply called “the City” from the middle of nowhere, and like me, she’s an avid writer. But these biographical details aren’t the important thing; it’s the way she’s painted by the game’s incredibly sharp writing where I start to feel uncomfortably seen. There are a lot of characters in media that are awkward or socially anxious, but few that are drawn with such piercing specificity.
The point-and-click game is minimalist in its mechanics. Consisting mostly of conversations, it’s broken up by a few puzzles, object interactions, and minigames. This is not a complaint: it’s in talking to people that the game shines, because it’s how we get to see most of Mara. And she’s such a realized and resonant portrait of a person that I found myself grasping at where we were different as a coping mechanism against spending the whole time introspecting. I pride myself, for example, on never having had an awful boyfriend. In this, surely, I could find some self-soothing superiority over this poor video game character.
The dynamics of Mara’s relationship with her controlling, older, long-distance partner are sketched with both narrative and mechanical thoughtfulness. In one conversation, a health bar suddenly appears, and you must navigate a particularly difficult conversation without losing all of your hearts, some of which you gain only if you’ve spent time nurturing other connections. It’s one of many neat metaphors, and combined with the clever moment-to-moment writing, led to a particularly notable moment, which wrenched an “oh, for fuck’s sake” out of my mouth in real life.
It was then that I had completely bought into Station to Station . I thought I had the shape of it. Dear relatable Mara and her messy relationships that I could hold as a simplifying buffer between us. But the game wouldn’t settle for simplicity.
Aside from conversation, the other important mechanic is Mara’s writing. These manifest in assignments for school, guest blog posts, and, in one real low moment for Mara, an overly involved forum post, and you’ll need to combine topics together to complete the piece in question. These topics include the city, music, and sex, and they level up as you talk to people and experience the world. It’s a pretty simple but effective representation of how writing works: you learn things through living and then combine ideas into, hopefully, something new and expressive.
There’s one piece that works differently. Mara writes a story that is clearly a thinly veiled allegory for her own life, and a tutor gives her some relatively harsh feedback. For the rest of the game, the story looms in the back of her mind. You can’t fix this just by combining a thought your friend had about movies and your own ruminations on death caused by your ailing grandmother. But each of those might help a little as you chip away at it bit by bit. Without getting too self-indulgent about my own recent writing experiences, suffice to say Station to Station had once again skewered me. I had Mara work on it whenever I could, every time reminded of my own festering project and the trust necessary to wait and address it slowly.
At this point in the game, it’s clear that the aforementioned partner is not Mara’s only problem. In fact, most of her interactions with other characters are marred in some way or another. I, for one, would simply not get involved with these people! But again, the game resists simplicity. Although it always presents harmful interpersonal dynamics honestly and without excusing bad behavior, it absolutely refuses the idea of shutting yourself away to avoid them. Because you would miss out on too much. Too much joy, too much connection, too much potential.
Image: Three Bees, Inc.
In one of the only conversations in the game that feels purely uncomplicated and productive, a character tells Mara “you just have to risk it with someone and see.” Station to Station argues, over and over again, that being open to others, despite the risk of awkwardness, and of not being treated well, is worth it. Mara is naive, and not very good at knowing what she wants, let alone asking for it. And she does get hurt. But she also lives a much more beautiful life when she doesn’t close herself off to experiences and people. She deals with the consequences, and through this she learns and grows and flourishes. My knee-jerk perceived superiority in being avoidant is suddenly the crack through which Station to Station has sunk its claws into me. I will be thinking about it for a very long time.
There’s a lot more I could talk about, like the multiple excellent musical interludes, or the hugely exaggerated animations that feel genuinely expressive while also being consistently comedic. I could even complain bitterly about some of the incidental environmental puzzles and the way they ground the story to a screeching halt if you happened to miss one small interaction point. But what kept me thinking about the game long after the credits rolled was its emotional honesty and the emotional honesty it demanded of me while playing it.
After playing the game, I stewed for a couple of days, thinking about Mara, myself, and one particularly memorable bit of karaoke. And then it hit me: I never finished Mara’s rewrite. No matter how important it felt in the moment, it turned out to be much less crucial than Mara and I opening ourselves up and accepting the consequences, good and bad.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station is out now on PC.
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![John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper](https://i2.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/john-grisham-1280x853.jpg?ssl=1 "John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper")
![John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/john-grisham-1280x853.jpg "John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper")
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