The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for screaming "IT'S CAHHMING HOME" and caving your wall in. Before you watch people kick a football around, let's read this week's best writing about games.

For Unwinnable, Yussef Cole wrote about Mundaun, solitude, beekeepers, and cost. A brilliant piece this. I almost don't want to share a paragraph below for fear I'll spoil its magic.

Even apart from its monstrous inhabitants, the mountain itself seems to be your enemy. Atop its crown are pitch-black, rocky horns. Within are dark caverns lined with hissing geysers and watching eyes. Its primary tenant is an old man with a burnt-cork face who walks with a cane; who makes illicit deals and exacts dreadful payment.

For PC Gamer, Alexis Ong wrote about the groundbreaking 1997 all-women Quake tournament.

Online multiplayer was different in the '90s. Quake didn't have a chat feature, much less voice chat, and Fitzgerald often had to find players on IRC. "You had to get an IP address, someone had to host it, you couldn't just fire up the old console and hit roulette or whatever ... I did not like playing with random people, because, you know, men." There also weren't as many people online, which somewhat encouraged self-moderation if you still wanted people to play with you.

Over on Eurogamer, Hirun Cryer wrote about the Silent Hill and Siren devs' return to horror. It'll probably be a bit too scary for me, but they're clearly cooking up something interesting.

If it's monsters that these creatives could be collaborating with, they've got their work cut out. Toyama tells me that Miki Takahashi, an artist who collaborated with Toyama and Okura previously on Siren (and also worked on Knack, of all things), is in charge of the monster design for Bokeh's new game, a fascinating prospect considering Takahashi's terrifying body of work. "We're working towards a theme which is both horrific yet aesthetically beautiful," Toyama adds, saying that the fusion of these two aspects is really something that Bokeh is striving for.

For Vox, Emily VanDerWerff wrote about how Twitter can ruin a life. A superb read, but what happened is just awful.

The story — and especially its title, which co-opts a transphobic meme — had provoked days of contentious debate online within the science fiction community, the trans community, and the community of people who worry that cancel culture has run amok. Because there was little biographical information available about its author, the debate hinged on one question: Who was Isabel Fall? And that question ate her alive. When she emerged from the hospital a few weeks later, the world had moved on, but she was still scarred by what had happened. She decided on something drastic: She would no longer be Isabel Fall.

I'm trying to read more books this year and I'm pleased to announced that it's going alright. Currently I'm reading The Bells Of Old Tokyo: Travels In Japanese Time by Anna Sherman and I'm really enjoying it. It's a meandering look at how Japan has changed over the years as she searches for the bells of Edo.

And I recently stumbled into a Guardian article about the curse of Masakado which still haunts Tokyo. It reminded me of the book I'm reading, basically, and it's a super interesting piece to boot.

Music this week is I Can't Remember If It Was A Dream (Jordin Post Remix) by Pierce Fulton and Jordin Post. I've always loved progressive dance tracks and I've been listening to this non-stop for months now. It's dreamy, euphoric, and one to savour with your eyes closed.

That's me. Have a solid Sunday everyone!