The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for unsubscribing to the deluge of ‘Happy 4/20! Here’s 10% off’ emails I’ve gotten from every place I’ve ever bought CBD from in the past five years. Before I do so much clicking my fingers get sore and I immediately order some soothing CBD - perhaps at a tempting 10% off? - let's read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

Over at the British Comedy Guide, Tom Crowley interviewed Robert Florence and Ryan Macleod to celebrate 20 years of Consolevania.

“These days, we're spoilt. If you've got a pastime or an interest, whether it's video games, yo-yo collecting or the work of the British television star Leonard Rossiter, you can find subreddits, social media feeds and Discord servers filled with like-minded folks sharing opinions, memes, podcasts and videos all dedicated to your specific interest. You can cherry-pick the creators whose perspectives on the Rossiter community you like best and watch their whole lifetime's output on your phone while you're going to the toilet. So, if you're too young to remember, imagine what it was like in those early days of online video publishing, when you had to trawl news websites and message boards to find interesting new creators who shared your interests. Then, if you did, your only option for watching them was on your computer, at your desk. These esoteric joys were hard to find, and were all the more precious for it. Rab says, "We just liked talking about games and making obscure references, and we knew that any audience we did manage to pull in would be our kind of people, as Barrymore might say."

For Noemag, Maria Farrel and Robin Berjon wrote about the importance of ‘rewilding the internet’. It’s a dense, historically comprehensive piece that gives voice to something I’m sure we’ve all felt at one point. Crucially, it gives a clear picture of the issues, stakes and potential solutions, in a way that’s easily digestible by your average idiot i.e me. The rare piece that feels at once like a radical poetic manifesto and a practical guideline. It’s some damn fine writing, in other words.

“Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists know something just as important, too; how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.”

Over at Polygon, Cass Marshall wrote about the recent furor over Warhammer 40k introducing female Custodes (aka Henry Cavill's army of choice.) I'm not sure if 'extremely online' quite covers where you'd have had to be over the last week or so to run into this, but YouTube simply will not stop recommending me outraged chuds.

Change can be good, and the Custodes still retain all the moral ambiguity and lore from their previous iterations. Some fans will simply be delighted at the possibility of a 10-foot-tall woman who could crush the enemies of mankind — and I think that’s beautiful.

PCGamesN interviewed the fan that bought a cardboard box filled with 4000 useless Alan Wake download cards from ebay. As of the time of writing, Sam Lake has still not responded to their request to sign the cards.

Music this week is this stunner acoustic cover of Millencolin’s No Cigar. Turns out mentioning the Pro Skater soundtrack last week sent me down a rabbit hole. Thanks for the memories, Emily Davis, and thank you, readers. Have a great weekend!