Sundays are for doing things you haven’t done in a long time, like a long stretch after years trapped in a languorous hunch.
Former Edge designer Andrew Hind has launched On, a premium print magazine in which he and editor-in-chief Nathan Brown invite writers to produce their dream article.
The first issue contains a firehose of Edge alum, Andrew and Nathan aside, including Christian Donlan on handheld puzzle games, Jen Simpkins on dress-up games, and most excitingly, Margaret Robertson on Japanese paper games. It’s a beautiful, shelf-worthy, design-first thing, although I’m yet to carve out the time to actually read any of my copy.
Thinky Games launched a new website, with a new database designed to help you find new puzzle (or puzzly, puzzlish) games to play.
Jeremy Peel popped up over on Games Radar to talk about how Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl feels in 2024, in an era when its systemic wildness is less of an outlier:
Its much-vaunted innovations were soon normalized, however. The year after Stalker’s launch in 2007, Far Cry 2 arrived, bringing triple-A polish to the concept of the freeform shooter and establishing Ubisoft’s formula for open world design. What GSC had posited in those early days was the idea of an emergent FPS – one where events and choices weren’t necessarily scripted beforehand, but erupted organically from the interplay of the game’s systems. By Far Cry 4, Ubi had tuned the dials such that emergent events happened once every few minutes – interrupting missions and exploration on a regular basis.
(Or you could read Jeremy in our own digital pages this week, on Sonar Shock, an immersive sim which finds fun and tension in reviving an old first-person control scheme.)
A group of former Pitchfork writers have founded their own reader-supported website, Hearing Things. Their roundup of the 100 songs that define our decade so far is a feast.
Adam Bumas at Wired wrote about “the fight that nearly destroyed the Letterboxd community”. What did the normally civil film community lose their mind over? Anime, of course.
The trouble started on September 9, when Letterboxd’s curators updated the platform’s official list of top-rated movies. Usually, the list changes only when a new movie gets rated highly enough to remove another from the top 250, but Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion had gone from No. 23 overall to off the list entirely. In a comment on the list, curator Dave Vis called the removal “an effort to align our eligibility rules,” made after “careful consideration.”
I’m reading William Gibson’s Idoru at the moment and found lots of threads to follow in Joanne McNeil’s article for Filmmaker Magazine on the 40th anniversary of Neuromancer and the past, present and future of cyberpunk:
When Gibson’s Burning Chrome was published in 1986, the writer Jeanne Gomoll, in an open letter, expressed irritation with Bruce Sterling’s introduction to the story collection. Sterling had characterized the previous decade of science fiction as “confused, self-involved and stale.” Gomoll countered that he had “whisked under the rug” the radical advances in the genre by feminist writers. Some of those feminist writers in the ’70s, like Joanna Russ and Marge Piercy, detailed proto-cyberpunk body modifications and technologies to jack into new realities. Their fiction would inspire Donna Haraway, who published A Cyborg Manifesto, a work of theory with themes simpatico with cyberpunk, in 1985. There’s an expansive history beyond cyberpunk, but a project like The Big Book of Cyberpunk branches outward from narrow roots instead of incorporating it.
Mandy Brown writes beautifully about leaving social media behind in favour of writing on her own website.
There was a time when I felt some resonance between spending time in the social stream and doing my own work. As if the movement of the water imparted some energy or power I could make use of, and then return. But it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way. I grieve that loss: a great number of my closest friends are people I met in the halcyon days of Twitter, and I find I still often long for that kind of connection, the ambient awareness of people in whose company I felt at home. But I know that longing to be a kind of nostalgia, an unrealizable wish to return to a past that never was quite as I remember it. I do not want those memories to be a burden, like stones weighing down my pockets. I want, instead, to carry them lightly and tenderly, to have the fortitude to accept the grief that comes with leaving the past where it belongs.
It’s fine that these aren’t about video games, right? If not, here’s a two-hour Tim Rogers video on his 36 favourite Xbox 360 games.
But also, here’s a lecture on the study and reconstruction of a book of psalms, discovered in 2006 after having been stored in an Irish bog since the late 8th century. They affectionately refer to the book as “the lasagna”, and you’ll see why.
Music this week is… hoo-boy. I’ve got six years of repressed music recommendations to choose from, so here’s three. I am as ever powerless to resist some laid back hip hop, so here’s 2001’s The Finer Things by Kankick, which has been on heavy rotation in my home for the past month. To prove I listen to music that isn’t over twenty years old, here’s the (extremely NSFW) Doechii track, Nissan Altima, which is great in your earphones when you’re picking up the kids from school. Finally, I’ve spent a lot of time this past year exploring my local Brighton music scene, and Lime Garden’s immaculate indie pop is still the best.