Ever since blowing the whistle on a cheating scandal at Stones Gambling Hall in 2019, Veronica Brill has grappled with the best way to present a clear and compelling argument detailing how the villains pulled it off.
Blending various visual aesthetics and storytelling styles, she has finally delivered such an argument: the short animated video series God Mode, recently released on YouTube.
How do you feel about some of the ‘villains’ of the Mike Postle story talking more about it since it came out?
None of that has any sway in how I decide to live my life and the content I want to make and the story I want to tell. I just came forward with information about a cheater and I did what I could to get the information out there.
I wrote a book about my experience and then I released it on my own YouTube channel for people who are my subscribers. And so the fact that some people on 2plus2 have a problem with me because of that is so freaking weird.
But I’m not bothered by the opinions of people who side with a cheater. The villains of the story, and the losers who meet every night in Twitter spaces, they for sure had a negative response.
And I don’t care. I’ve been listening to the negative responses of men my entire life.
I have a rule: if someone is a piece of shit online, I think that their life probably sucks and they’re either broke or living with their mom or haven’t accomplished what they wanted to accomplish in life or whatever. They’re just shitty people and they’re just…If it’s not me, it’s someone else.
So I’m not persuaded or stopped by anyone with terrible opinions. And I’m not interested in having people tell me what I can and can’t do.
Basically, I don’t give a shit is what I’m trying to say.
Is this meant to be your ‘final say’ on the Mike Postle scandal, and what were your goals for releasing it?
I was writing this as a book during Covid and that was a really rough time for me and I’m happy to be done with it. I just don’t want to be working on it anymore. I really wanted to finally get the story out in full because I was at a standstill with writing.
I think because of the DOJ, I’ve gone through a ton of pain and so has everyone else who got cheated. And because of their lack of doing anything about this very obvious cheating…
You know lawyers are the only ones who made money in this whole thing, the lawyers probably made more money than Mike Postle stole from the community. So I realized that nothing’s gonna get done.
I just wanted to get this out there for people who were interested in the story, who wanted to know the characters behind the story rather than just see the hand breakdowns – although through the poker hand breakdowns by Joey and Doug and Bart Hanson, it’s already so apparent that it was cheating.
What is it about this animated video medium that made you feel like it’s best suited to present your message?
I don’t think I’m as good of a writer as I thought I was when I initially took this on. I was writing it and I felt like I couldn’t get it done. It wasn’t really the way my brain enjoys taking in media.
One day I was like: I’m just gonna release it on YouTube in my way, my version, and I’m just going to figure out a way to create the visuals, which ended up really being inspired by Ray William.
And so it just kind of slowly ended up in this medium where my brain really liked it. And it almost forced me to finish, right? In the writing I hadn’t yet fully laid out my complete theory of how I think they did it – really all the different possible theories.
Did you have any help putting it together?
I have this problem in my head where I’m just like, how hard could it be? So I tried to take on a huge AI learning curve all by myself and it was a struggle.
I do think that some of the images probably could have used a bit more quality control but I will tell you: I was gonna put out a bloopers reel because it was so freaking annoying!
AI doesn’t know the difference between a poker table and another gambling table, so half the time it looked like a roulette wheel, and then half the time it’ll generate images with people with no heads, or it’ll be raining in the casino, or they’ll just randomly put a camera coming out of someone’s head, people’s hair on fire and a dragon coming out of someone’s head…
It does such weird shit and I don’t know why it would do that! This stuff is how someone coming from another planet would draw something I asked them to draw.
So it was an interesting process learning how to do this. But I did not pay anyone to produce it, and you can tell. So that’s why I would say the last 75% of the videos look a little better than the first two. But it is what it is, that was the best I could do.
Were you ever concerned about liability for defamation, libel, slander, etc.?
Everything I said was the truth, and they can kiss my ass. Fuck that. None of them is going to sue me. We’ve already done this. That’s the thing with cheaters. Cheaters tend to be broke because they’re scammy little worms, you know?
Yeah, I don’t give a shit. I’m not gonna sit here and say I’m the best person in the world, but so many people cave to these scammers because they’re afraid because all they do they have a lot of time and they attack people online.
I get attacked day in and day out by these guys, but I don’t give a shit. They have no power. They’re just louder. I’m not afraid of telling the truth.
What are your success criteria for this project? How will you decide if God Mode was a success or a failure?
I don’t think all successes should be measured in a monetary sense or a popularity sense. I don’t like to live life like that. I don’t even have this monetized.
I get angry tweets like “I know you’re making a dollar a view.” I’m like, holy fuck, I wish I made $50,000 off of this. That’d be nice. But no, I don’t have it monetized. I don’t know. I just kind of did it for me. So I think it’s already successful.
I don’t mean to make this about a ‘woman power’ thing, but honestly, I think you have to just go through life sometimes stubbornly, just doing what you want to do, regardless of the outcomes, not being results oriented. Otherwise, you’ll just…I don’t know. Otherwise, life won’t be fun.
