Sundays are for playing around with the Nintendo Switch 2, of course. Let’s round up some writing from across the week first.
Jon Hicks, the former fifth Beatle of RPS and current co-host of Alice Bell’s post-RPS podcast Total Playtime, has launched a newsletter. It’s called Screen Grab and he’s beginning it with a series of missives about the not-E3 showcases. You should subscribe, because Jonty is smart and funny and I want him to write more.
The first look at IO’s Bond game revealed that it stars an almost instantly insufferable Young Bond, who looks like they fed every online argument about who should replace Daniel Craig into an AI and told it generate an average of the white ones. IO say this is because they wanted a Bond “who’s comfortably just his own game character,” which is announcement-speak for “licencing the real person would be an incredibly expensive administrative nightmare and we don’t wanna”, although of course the role is currently vacant anyway.
The secret diary of a video game horse, by Kathleen O’Mara for McSweeney’s.
Today, the hero left me standing on the edge of a cliff as he glided off with some kind of flying machine. I did see a staggering amount of horse bones at the base of the ravine, as though someone was crass enough to just run their horse right off the cliff. Unsure why he needed me to gallop at full speed for no more than thirty feet, but he always knows what’s right and good. I’m sure my contribution was necessary and strategic, not just something he tried because it’s cool.
Every few months, I go to eBay and Discogs and I type in “Ridge Racer” just to see what comes up. I don’t even know what I’m looking for, other than to somehow crawl through the monitor into the blue skies and yellow UI of Type 4. I always come away empty handed, but I did enjoy this video on the rise and fall of the series by Greg Sewart.
Dan Olsen, better known as YouTuber Folding Ideas, did two talks at two different PAXes this past year. I enjoyed this one on “Silkposting”, the culture of trolling in the Silksong community.
I listened to Ben Kweller’s album Sha Sha a lot back in 2002. This recent profile in Vulture about Kweller and the sudden death of his son in 2023 has stuck with me all week, and so I exorcise it here.
Kat Bailey, formerly of USGamer and IGN and currently of the Axe Of The Blood God RPG podcast, has launched a newsletter. It’s called Nintenkats and is dedicated to news, reviews and takes about Nintendo games and hardware. You can subscribe to the newsletter for free, or upgrade to receive exclusive content (and to help fund ambitions of launching a podcast). Kat is great and I hope this is a success.
My son no longer really remembers the pandemic, which puts him in the odd position of learning through school about an event that happened to him. He has asked me if I think it will happen again, and I tell him what I want to be true – probably not in our lifetimes – and then I pivot hard to talking about how incredible vaccines are. These are the things I thought about while reading Hannah Nicklin’s short piece about Animal Crossing from April 2020, which she recently re-linked on social media.
I cannot visit others via online play. I can only travel to empty islands for resources. Or engage with essential workers Timmy & Tommy, who after selling you what you need, mime their pleasure as they wish you a good day. In a way, I am not sorry. I bought the game only after payday, and am a week or so behind most people. I don’t want to see their wonderful gardens, their large houses, the art they’ve (re)constructed. The great aesthetics they’ve cultivated. The meaning they have made of it. I stare at the night sky and I think I probably don’t know how to use the (R) button properly. I still haven’t seen a shooting star.
Yes, I am once again trying to get you to read Marx. W. David Marx, in his newsletter Culture: An Owner’s Manual, writes about how generative AI can best be understood through the lens of how previous “synthetics”, such as polyester, “lost value in the long-run”.
But there was also a massive aesthetic backlash to polyester, and this can’t be separated from the fabric’s social position. From the 1980s, cotton growers ran a massive advertising campaign to raise its profile among wealthy Americans and re-establish the fiber as luxurious. The Official Preppy Handbook arrived at the same time with the guidance: “Wool, cotton, and the odd bits of silk and cashmere are the only acceptable materials for Prep clothes.” The book’s editor Lisa Birnbach warned that a “small percentage of polyester” can ruin a shirt, and pointed to the fraying collar of over-washed cotton shirt as a status symbol. By this point, the connotation of polyester was no longer “high-tech” but low-class. This class bias imbued polyester with a negative status value that made it ultimately look ugly. John Waters could conjure up an intense feeling of kitsch by just naming his film Polyester.
There’s been no standout music to define my days this past week, or at least nothing I haven’t already linked here. YouTube did throw me the new single from Stealing Sheep, which I liked, so have that.