It’s official: I am once again the Sunday correspondent around here. That means it falls to me to round up (mostly) good (mostly) writing about (mostly) video games. I will otherwise be spending my Sunday continuing the fight against my dog’s fleas, which rebound every three weeks no matter how much I spray, scrub or throw things away.
On, the independent video game magazine which I linked to last week, has run a series of brief interviews with each of the contributors to its launch issue. I recommend Christian Donlan’s for the puzzle game recommendations and Margaret Robertson’s which expands on her fascination with Japanese paper games.
“When I started filling in Japanese forms – especially business forms – I noticed some bureaucratic quirks that felt indicative of bigger cultural differences. Often someone would help me fill in some parts of a form, but they would never fill in the date. It was clearly somehow vital that I did that myself, even if I couldn’t tell how that piece of information was more personal or important than my address or my resident card number. And here the ‘sign here’ field is often somewhere you’re expected to just neatly print your full name (especially a Western name) rather than a signature – the unique unforgeable identifier here is often expected to be a seal, and there’s zero legal weight behind the concept of ‘my name but in bad handwriting’. It felt like a reminder that all these things are always some species of magical thinking – in the West we think signatures are a binding bit of business, but here they’re just for fun. I felt like I was catching a whiff of something important.”
Readers seemed to enjoy last week’s article about cyberpunk by Joanne McNeil, so here is another by that same writer. A video store selling VHS tapes and DVDs is helping to fund local journalism in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Much of my favourite writing this year has been about people going on walks and hikes, such as newsletters like Today On Trail by Rusty Foster and Ridgeline by Craig Mod. The latest entry in Mod’s broader culture newsletter, Roden, isn’t about walking – well, it is a little – but about doing what you love, “the full-throttled commitment to that play, the showing up day after day for it, the dialing in of a private obsession while simultaneously giving it back to the world as a gift.”
The Comics Courier met its Kickstarter funding target. It’s a “newspaper-format journal dedicated to in-depth comics criticism edited by Tiffany Babb”. I interviewed Tiffany for what became her role as deputy editor of comics website Popverse, and it was clear just in talking to her for an hour that she was smart, funny, and the kind of person who deserved a space to write about comics the way RPS writes about games. The Comics Courier looks like that space, with a squad of contributors helping. The campaign is over but you can still late pledge to receive rewards, and a digital PDF of the first issue is around £5.
How might you have died in the 17th century? Find out with Death Roulette, drawn from real death records.
These went live a couple of weeks ago now, but I don’t think they were linked previously. The XOXO Festival ran its first event in five years and its final event ever, and the talks uploaded to YouTube feature several relevant to our interests. The presentation by Kim Belair of Sweet Baby Inc is worth watching, but if you have time for just one I’d choose Cabel Sasser’s. Sasser is the co-founder of Panic, the company which published Firewatch, Untitled Goose Game, Thank Goodness You’re Here, and created the Playdate handheld. But his presentation is about a mural in a McDonalds and the importance of appreciating and remaining curious about the world around us.
An oldie but a goodie came across my desk this week for the first time in years: Paul Graham writing in 2006 about how to do what you love. I’m sensing a theme here.
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind — though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
Let’s go for another three music recommendations, as per last week. Cinderella by Remi Wolf is a perfect piece of summery pop – if only it hadn’t taken me until autumn to listen to it. I like Charli XCX and Brat, but I still think the six-year-old Watch Me by the Pom-Poms is the best song in the brat genre.
Finally, remember that Dr. Carter can teach you everything you need to know about writing. You “gotta not be cliché, gotta stand out like Andre 3K”, but you can also recycle – “Or rereciting, something ’cause you just like it, so you say it just like it, some say its biting, but I say its enlightening.”
Comments are still off for maintenance, but all being well they should return tomorrow.
