Some of you may have seen this, but this blog gets a fair bit of through traffic which is entirely unassociated to The Usual Places, hence I'm posting it here too. Mark's an intelligent man and an editor with a greater degree of vision than most in the industry, and this could be the start of something genuinely interesting.
And, yes, when writing the New Games Journalism piece I knew that Mark was planning something like this in the near future, and considered its purpose - at least partially - at preparing the ground for him like a videogaming John The Baptist.
*****
Hello,
This is an open letter to anyone who’s interested in videogames writing or having the unique achievements of their gaming community aired to a wider audience.
My simple view is that news-stand games magazines and large sections of the gaming community have gradually drifted apart.
As editor of PC Gamer in the UK, it is painfully apparent to me that while the magazine does a reasonable job of fulfilling its review/preview functions, it does not adequately reflect the incredible diversity of culture and invention that now characterises the PC community online.
I’d like you to help us put that to rights. Games mags are constructed
by small, tight-knit teams. In-house expertise is broad enough to cope with retail gaming, but the available resources are unable to cover the far-flung corners of gaming that now exist. That’s partly why magazines have failed to keep pace with their communities.
In order to cover these communities properly, PC Gamer needs their representatives to help us out. I regularly read web-published articles which I think are easily good enough to appear in a magazine. But the writer may never have considered that opportunity. Perhaps they didn’t think a games mag was an appropriate place for such an article. Perhaps they didn’t think it was good enough. Whatever the reason, I’d like you to consider submitting your articles to PC Gamer.
What kind of articles are we looking for? Anything. Anything that you could imagine yourself, as a gamer, opening a magazine and being
interested in. I’m trying to create a magazine that communicates the incredible experiences gamers have. A magazine that reports on the amazing transformations that dedicated communities have wrought upon the games they love. I think such a magazine would print articles about the destruction of Kerafyrm The Sleeper in Everquest. It would report on the morphing of games like Grand Prix Legends and Interstate 82. It could relate the tale of a dramatic duel in Jedi Knight 2 or cover the phenomenon of swoop bike races in Star Wars Galaxies. Anything at all. Single-player gaming, multi-player gaming, modding, MUDs, indy games. The building of the Space Station in There, the development of unique in-game body language. A well-argued opinion piece on the state of videogame interfaces. Crazy antics on stunt servers or a simple essay on how a game stirred an individual’s emotions. Anything which says something fascinating about game culture. The only rules are it’s got to be about games, and, if it’s not about PC’s then the article has to be applicable to the universal gamer. PC Gamer is not a console mag.
Articles can be of any length. And PC Gamer will pay for articles published. I can’t promise to say yes to everything, but I am open to all ideas. And if you don’t want to write but know of a vibrant gaming community we should cover then tip us off. We’ve recently been mailed by people involved with Trespasser, Grand Prix Legends and Interstate 82.
I hope this letter is not seen as a threat to some of the excellent websites that I regularly visit. Publication of an article in PC Gamer does not prevent its subsequent use elsewhere. Moreover, PC Gamer is not big enough to absorb the entire community’s output. But if you have an article at your fingertips that deserves a wider audience then let us know.
Best regards,
Mark Donald
Editor, PC Gamer (UK edition)
Britain’s Best-Selling PC Games Magazine
mark.donald@futurenet.co.uk
Kieron - 4/29/2004 08:07:00 PM
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4/28/2004
"In April of 2001, Oskar Skog finally let his disaffection with the PC Gamer (UK) Forum get the better of him, and went off to create his own. That creation, State, still thrives today. If you're reading this then I believe you may be aware of it.
One day on that forum, the creator spoke a word, and that word was "newsletter". Oh, how the forum laughed and called Oskar names, saying that it was a silly idea that would never work. But Oskar, never one to give up on an idea, produced Issue 0 of his newsletter, almost conspiratorially. The newsletter was called StateMagazine.
It was such a weird thing. At the time the prose seemed, in our arrogance, to be the best ever written about gaming. Hell, some of it almost was. Part of it was random gibbering, and I hold my hands up to at least some of that. Looking back, StateMagazine made everyone involved feel important. We felt involved, we felt like we were really saying something. One of the vagaries of youth perhaps, but we certainly said enough to get noticed... and you only had to look at the sendlist to realise that journalists, developers and publishers were at the very least receiving our irregular email extravaganza; whether or not they read it is a secret they can keep to themselves."
The legendary StateMags finally get an archive of its own. For those who weren't around circa then, StateMag was the finest ground-level games criticism the UK produced in its period and, in the words of none less than Develop Magazine's Owain Bennelack, was on the edge of something genuinely new.
A fair chunk was rubbish. A chunk significant enough to respect was genuinely groundbreaking. All was done with a correct and noble heart.
I'll go through it eventually and link directly to some articles I'm particularly fond of, but you should browse immediately. On average, the early issues are more pretentious, the later issues more like what the State site grew into. I prefer the early-mid period, when Tim Edwards - who I hired on the strength of his work - was doing things like describing what it was like to go down on his girlfriend while she played on her GBA.
Except - y'know - not as tacky as that makes it sound. Rather tacky in a good way.
Sticky.
Kieron - 4/28/2004 12:43:00 AM
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4/27/2004
Don't normally link to this sort of stuff here, but - in case any Americans reading have missed this particularly piece of footage - here's Dubya cleaning his glasses on an unsuspecting woman's shirt in an ad break on Letterman.
For fuck's sake. This man is your leader. Do something about it.
Kieron - 4/27/2004 04:31:00 PM
As I said, I've been away. On a press trip to see Electronic Art's 2004-2005 line-up, involving a treck along the West coast of the North American Colonies.
Now, Press Trips have somehow picked themselves up a bad reputation, often being nothing more than glorified junkets to try and bend the wills of humble, gleefully corrupt journalists. And they have a point. In the past, there's been some ludicrously decadent press events. In terms of sheer opulance and/or insanity, you'd be looking at that Playstation boom era for the genuine monstrosities, such as the famed Tomb Raider event in Egypt which featured all manner of adventures in Cairo and on the Nile. All before my time. Nowadays, most press trips are humble affairs, in cheap hotels for a minimum of days and a maximum of running around and covering the story. Horrors like being forced to sit in a coach to drive to Germany to walk around a swimming pool are all too present. And we're all big boys. If people sincerely think anyone with a brain is going to be influenced by a flight to another city, they're very much wrong. After a while, Press trips are often just a thing to be avoided rather than celebrated.
Weekends and seeing friends is nice. Jetlag and German Journalists aren't.
But still, they maintain a bad reputation.
Press trips like the one I've just got back from are why they do.
It was considerably more fun than a fair chunk of my "real" holidays. And while, yes, I did some work - hammered out four pages when I was out there with a lot more to do when I'm back, and spent a couple of days doing Dev stuff, interviewing people, watching games and the usual selection of things that pass for work in my neck of the woods - the majority of the time was gloriously lazy. Left to my own devices, I probably would wander the streets of Vancouver and San Francisco, looking for trouble. So I did.
If you're interested, the justification (Well - one of them. Relationship building be the main other I've heard cited) for taking journalists out for much longer than is required is that it costs hugely more to book a return flight inside a week than one which crosses a weekend. So in other words, it's actually cheaper to pay for the extra days in a hotel and associated expenses rather than the swifty return. Though when you ate in the number of high class restraunts we did, that particular logic begins to look a little threadbare.
(Best of the week, and probably the best of my entire life, would have to be West in Vancouver. Simply exquisite, in every single area, from service to food to ambience. If you're ever in the area, with money burning a hole in your pocket, do pop in. Runner up would be the French Vietnamese place in San Fran where we did battle with sinister Lobster. Worst of the week, despite the food being brilliant, was the French place in San Fran where the waiter-cum-Van-Damme-impersonator did everything short of pulling down his trousers and throwing handfuls of ejaculate in our faces to show his disapproval of our very existence.)
Can't talk about the games themselves, alas, as am under an NDA for a couple of weeks. However, in the interest of full disclosure, here's some assorted memories of the trip.
1) First day in SF we hired a bus which drove us to Yosemite park, which was spectacular, as demonstrated in Fig 1. Our coach driver was one Rodrigo, an exuberant Donny-Osmond-gone-to-Mexico gentleman who acted as our first Sherpa to the culture of this fair city. He introduced us to...
Fig1. Nature's majesty. Also, a waterfall.
2) The Shocker: Er... Vaginal, clit and anal, like a sexual trident. And no more information will be given than that - except a raised eyebrow - so don't ask. And then he took us to...
3) A Gay Karyoke bar whose name I forget. Filled with eight-or-so games journalists, half-a-dozen ageing moustachioed homosexual gentlemen and songs of great cheesiness. And booze. Oh yes, booze. This lead to increasingly ambitious song selections. Take me, for example. First choice: Psycho Killer Talking heads. Nerdy-pop classic, all twitchiness and false-voices. Except - y'know - I forgot the torch singer croon at the end of the chorus and the fact the entire third verse is in FRENCH (On the mike: "Run-run-run-run-aways... [Screen fills with french] Oh shit."). Still - not too complicated. Second choice: Fight For Your Right To Party, Beastie Boys. Not hard, but requires a certain shouty vigour which only a drunk man can possess. Third choice: Total Eclipse Of The Heart, Bonnie Tyler. Batshit mad diva hollering. Fourth Choice: When I thought that things couldn't get any more downhill, Gerant NGC and my good self add a splash of homoeroticism to the mix with a duet of "I need a Hero" by the same Miss Tyler. Everyone was similarly ludicrous, though C&VG Online (One of the very few genuine news-hungry journalists in the games industry) Johnny Minkley clearly cheated by being able to sing really fucking well. And Kingsley Official Nintendo has a Stars-in-his-eyes future with his shockingly accurate Bowie impression.
4) Oh yeah - that Booze. Drunkest I've been in two years. Genuinely seeing double when I was going to bed. Got all nostalgic for those falling-over years of 1999-2001. You would too.
5) Blowing a couple of hundred dollars in Amoeba Records, some comic place and an Anarchist bookshops in the Haight in SF. I excused myself because the exchange rate is so ludicrous at the moment I was effectively saving money. Only wimped out on finally getting the Palomar hardback because I didn't think I could physically carry it alongside my stack of second-hand CDs.
6) Getting suited up to hang out with the cool kids. Namely Laurenn "XXXLiveNudeGirls" McCubbin and Tristan "How Loathsome" Crane, who proceeded to be ridiculous friendly and took me to a solo gig of the Spoon lead singer, Britt Daniel, before driving around town being loud and telling me stories about places. Both have good stories. Both tell them well. If you're not reading their stuff - well - catch up, stupids. Test will be given later.
7) The actual meetings where journalists fell upon defenceless EA Producers to try and make them admit stuff they shouldn't. With considerable success.
8) Vancouver girls. Rarely have I seen a town conspire to torture men as what will henceforth be referred to as Hot Fuck Canada City. Everywhere! Toned limbs and wanton lips and... oh, Christ. Here I go again. Cheerfully reduced the group to inarticulate staring parodies of men, much to the amusement/despair of PR Jodie Van Hibb who had to get used to talking to journalists who started to fade out half-way through a sentence or spend the entire conversation staring over her shoulder in vague arse-height directions. As I idly put it, "If it's legal for them to look that good, it's legal for me to fall to my knees and masturbate before them". In the final bar of the trip, I had to get some small evidence. The waitresses were all too happy to comply. All this and narcissism too.
Fig 2. Some Girls, Yesterday.
9) Cycling around Stanley Park. Physical exercise and PR trips don't famously go together but the pure joy of forming a lo-fi Rebel Without A Cause gang and zooming around an astounding park with perfect scenery on a balmy day is pretty much as good as life gets. Worthy of a couple of other points to deal with a couple of moments...
Except the final hill to the peak on the far side of Stanley Park (See Fig 3).
Fig 3. Steeper than it looks. Honest.
9a) A Racoon in the excellently named Beaver Lake. Trades Description people won't be pleased.
Fig 4. Cute. Also, rabid.
9b) On the final leg out of the park we're driving in tight formation. We zoom past an example of the species Homo HotVancouverGirlus talking on a mobile phone. She yelps at the person she's speaking to. The vangard of the group is later informed that she then squealed "OHMYGOD! Four HOTTIES on bikes have just zoomed past". Hot. Narcisstic. Utterly deluded. I salute the xx-chromosome-bearers of this fine Canadian city.
10) Man, I can't end a list without getting to a round number. Er... watching the Third Man on the flight on the way home? Actually, getting back to discover that Chrissy has been thrown out of America due to Visa confusion. That'll do.
Quick plug for Arthur Goodman's 24 Hour comic, which I like a lot. Strong storytelling with a human heart and a splash of melancholy.
Kieron - 4/27/2004 01:14:00 AM
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4/26/2004
"Here at UKTerrorist we've interviewed the top players, event organisers, CS developers, mappers, anti-cheat software developers, even eachother. Unfortunately we were bound to run out of ideas, so out of sheer desperation we find ourselves interviewing freelance gaming journalist Jim Rossignol.
Jim has contributed to most of the UK's major gaming publications both PC and console. He was also a staff writer for PCGamer before deciding to become a freelance journalist. Jim is one of the few lucky reporters who played the much anticipated Doom 3 and is an avid multiplayer gamer. Jim through his publications manages to bring a coolness to geekdom not witnessed since Quentin Tarantino first hit the limelight. Thus without further ado, I introduce Jim Rossignol."
Rossignol is interviewed by popular CS site, the CIA-worryingly named, UK Terrorist.
Superstar videogame journalists. Here we go.
Kieron - 4/26/2004 10:14:00 PM
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4/24/2004
"Eight thoughts on a band:
1) Bits of Pitchtuner recall that period when Bis had just enough money to get a something which synthesised things other than a bee with a kazoo. But there's none of the slight smugness that crept around the edge of Bis' kinder-egg pop – but, simultaneously, none of the sense of a big idea."
Still in the colonies, but have net access and a few spare minutes so bring you attention of New Noise's updating, and specifically a review of Germanic/Japanese popeterica band, Pitchtuner.
Interesting trip so far. Tales of excess and debauchery when I return to Blighty.
Kieron - 4/24/2004 01:04:00 AM
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4/16/2004
Negativeland Updates. Episode 11: Girl.
I like this one a lot. Makes me wanna use words like "formalist", but I'll spare you
Couple of other things:
1) Apparently MCV have printed the redux version of the New Games Journalism today, so if you've found yourself here looking for the full text, follow this handy hyperlink.
2) Am off to San Francisco for a week tomorrow. I have approximately 2000 things to do before I actually head off - train at 5:50 am tomorrow, Kieron sleep pattern fans - and almost certainly won't get them all done. If you're expecting a reply to an e-mail and don't get one, my apologies. I promise I'll catch up the second I'm back in blighty, but it's of paramount importance I do things like shave my head before leaving, as otherwise I'll get turned back at US customs for having the mange or something.
Kieron - 4/16/2004 04:19:00 PM
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4/15/2004
"Oooh: Mortal sin. Naming yourself after something another band did. While despicable when you actually sound like your inspirations, it’s both despicable and bewildering when you don’t sound anything like them at all. Hence Surferosa, who don’t actually sound anything like the Pixies. Or even misspelled Early Pixies, for the fucking pedantic.
This neatly leads to the following, more appropriate, suggestions:"
A little something for the Plan B website.
Kieron - 4/15/2004 08:33:00 AM
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4/14/2004
A quicky: Charity posts about The Work and sticks up another panel from Something's wrong.
Kieron - 4/14/2004 02:19:00 AM
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4/11/2004
"Zero-K, this is a secret of the highest order, but I believe that Pardius Haemoglandulum is no longer worthy of the title of Black Hyper-Pope."
"I should have guessed you’d have noted the lesbian fireworks that are currently bright in the firmament – it recalls to this scholar of culture the New-Old Pop of New York and the grand men-chains. Buggery as far as the eye can see: grinding flesh and the sweet symphony of anus and penis. Hopefully soon we’ll see clitonauts reaching equal depths."
"Here things go well. We reached Istanbul during a large civil disturbance: there’s nothing like a tourism of a city on fire, famous landmarks in ruin... I was fortunate enough to witness a riot-creature being born in the destruction of a large warehouse. The beast was beautiful to behold and I have put out a bounty of $30 million to anyone who can bring the beast to me alive. Imagine the zoo! Oh, my. Needless to say, the mob was soon dispersed, and we were able to dine in the Marag Flesh Vaults, where I took part in eating one of the most vicious colossal squid that I have ever encountered. The rotating hooks were tough, but delicious."
"Curse my predilection for youthful iconic assumption! But who listens to tales of Pseudodemyn infection at that age? Youth, like coitus with School Hockey Teams or Oedipal flushes, is wasted on the young."
"My aim is to create an organic amplification and loudspeaker system, as suggested in your paper ‘The Successful Hybridisation of Bass Units and Large Marine Mammals’. It cannot fail. It is a project that obsesses me. Such insight into mutilatory constructs! I can only assume that you too have read the work of Abomnus Quail, the inventor of the sythis-cow. I had a herd of his beasts shipped in from Israel, but their psychedelic braying caused me to run wild with that converted assault-bore man-gun.
"Your Meat Science is exemplary."
"I can think only of bombs. Explosives are like a dream to me, the heaven of fury, an exultation of impact, a delirium of detonation. I have taken demolishing a range of hills that lies to the east of my estate, an activity that goes some way to alleviating my frustrations over current political matters. At night, when I cannot sleep, I take to the Russian howitzer in my garden, and sit, punching shells into distant horizons, letting the decibel cannonade stun me to sleep. There is no finer rest that the total oblivion of acute shell shock."
"Sensible spending? Surely the one thing we can’t afford is moderation."
"The wanderer was mostly silent through our passage, not even the brief shortcut through the infamous New Yorgy where the a posthuman Angelina Jolie, body and mind tragically warped in the structural enhancements required to survive the latest avatar film role, attempted to fuck the entire northern sea coast to death. The only means of containment was a pile on by specially drafted stud-brigades. The 911V911A is a writhing mass of flesh that’s visible from orbit, and caused the entire Earth in the dimension to be classified “XXX” for alien astronomers."
"The pelvic weapons are the best."
Extracts from an incomplete, co-operative work.
Kieron - 4/11/2004 01:34:00 AM
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4/10/2004
"After almost a decade's attention, careful planning, construction, elaboration, I still can't quite trap the lightning in the bottle. I've gone through thesis, antithesis, counterthesis, human faeces and visits to distant places, and it's still not tied down satisfactorily.
It's alive. I can't grasp it for more than a second, though I'll carry it with me always.
Like any good fractal experience, the first moment contained the entirety. I was firmly informed that "We Can't Be Contained". The mAKE-UP, 'Live at Cold Rice', and I was visited by a ghoul-falsetto.
The question I asked, and still can't answer, is exactly how serious I should take him."
New Noise updates with issue 6, and I take on Weird War's second LP.
Kieron - 4/10/2004 11:18:00 AM
"Every town has its cast of minor characters. Travelling everywhere on foot means you get to see a lot of them. The kids at the end of the road, the junkies at the phonebox, the old guy under the bridge - these are all regular fixtures on my route into town and a few of them have popped up in my writing.
One of them who has yet to make a debut is the man who collects the trolleys at our local supermarket. He's in his early forties and has a dopey, docile look to him. He's lanky, and perhaps a bit boyish for his age. Today I got a small and rather surprising insight into his life. As I exited the car park I rounded the corner to see him kissing a man half his age. Greying trolleyman and oily skate kid were locked in passionate tongue wrestling. Then, as I passed, the trolleyman's lover suddenly pushed him away, saying in the broadest west-country accent: "Eurrgh! You've been eating parsnip!"
"Have not.""
Comrade Rossignol finally submits and starts a blog, with tales of West Country homosexuality.
Kieron - 4/10/2004 12:49:00 AM
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4/08/2004
Panel from "Something's Wrong", one of my two scripts for the Variance Anthology. Art duties handed with finese, wisdom and almost superhuman endurance by Charity Larrison.
It's our little Apocalypse Romance.
Available to order from Cafepress in May. Details forthcoming closer to the event.
Kieron - 4/08/2004 08:16:00 PM
New comic companies come along all the time. Take a glance in the second half of Previews catalogue you'll find several new companies each month that tend to blend into one huge, somewhat undistinguishable blur. It seems to make a dent into the world of comics, you need to provide something unique. That's where Variance Press hopes to come in.
A new comic company, Variance Press's first book is an anthology, aptly titled Variance Press Anthology #1. Newsarama had to chance to sit down and talk with Travis Johnson, publisher of Variance Press, and find out exactly what's up his sleeve.
Chris Arrant of comics site Newsarama interviews Travis on the Variance Anthology.
Just got the lettered pages through from Charity on one of my two stories. More later. Perhaps art.
Kieron - 4/08/2004 04:21:00 PM
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4/06/2004
Server referrals have one unfortunate side effect. While they'll tell you whoever is linking to you, if it's a link from a place you're not allowed to axis you're put in the position of knowing someone is talking about you - and, in fact, knowing where someone is talking about you - and not being able to know what's going on.
The latest one is Serious K's livejournal. Who is she? Why is she - or someone else in her livejournal messages - decided to link to me in a *private* entry? I dunno.
Clues:
1) She's clearly a London Indie sort.
2) She links to Dickon Edward's livejournal, Fosca's entertaining living pop-art installment.
3) And that's it.
Hmmm. Only connection I can work out is that Dickon and myself, along with Taylor Parkes, are the entirity of Plan B's blog list (Except, checking, they've just added a fourth, Kontent ).
Paranoid Guess out of the blue: What on earth is an uber-geek games journalist doing in such elevated company?
(Answer: David McNamee wants to kiss me on the lips, with tongues and fingers and everything.)
Answers in the comments, hopefully, by a passing Serious-K-link follower-cum-Samaritan.
Kieron - 4/06/2004 06:20:00 PM
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4/05/2004
"We are your friends/We come in peace/We've brought our guns to set you free"
A little on the New Games Journalism fall out.
I wrote it knowing it would attract comment which - well - was kinda the point. You don't climb on a soap-box when there's no chance of a crowd. Linked all over the web, running in an editted form in MCV (British Trade Paper) and leading to what I think is the single biggest hit-spike this humble work-blog has ever seen (Even above the Deus Ex: Invisible War comments and Chimplants).
I'm still pleased I wrote it and don't mind the ridicule at all.
Of course, the ridicule was less than I expected, though I'm sure that's because most people are too polite to actually say it to my face. The manifesto wrote itself an out by being mostly about the industry and an analysis of another piece. Without AB's "Bow Nigger" as a model to commentate upon, I'd have come across as more of a self-agrandising buffoon that I did. In fact, the manifesto was worth writing just to get AB's piece in a few more people's faces. One of the standard comments was that the New Games Journalism rant was a little long and boring but the feature was ace.
Which was totally correct. My piece while about the New Games Journalism wasn't actually New Games Journalism in and of itself, was aimed at a much smaller audience than AB's. It was written for people who give a toss about games journalism as theory and practice rather than just reading games journalism. It was a mixture of bringing people up to speed on stuff that's increasingly prevalent in the memepool, and trying to inspire them to actually write something of it.
If someone's stupid enough to care, a manifesto can still inspire them, and that was very much its point. I should know: I'm terribly influenceable by such things. In other words, I was writing it for anyone like me out there.
And I'm happy to accept a little bit of ridicule to do get a message to anyone who's even vaguely like me out there.
"Why distrust our obvious success? God's on our side. We know we're right."
As smart readers may have been able to predict, the NGJ (The terms already been abreviated on a few forums, which is charming. It's also been turned into ironic l33t speak, which is predictable doltism) ramble was linked to by its constituents. That is, those who are attempting to practice the games journalism of attachment already, in one form or another. I link to the major ones, to return the favour, in a vague order of number of hits provided.
INSERT CREDIT: The American State, basically, except much better organised and with considerably more intellectual stringency. Their extended Journalism: The Videogame feature touched on many of the same issues, with perhaps less stressing of the commercial aspects and the fact that this is, in fact, potentially more populist. Actually, I was vaguely asked to contribute to that having been introduced by Ste Curran last year... but just never got around to writing the piece. I like to think of the NGJ rant as my late contribution.
UK RESISTANCE: Heartening that the piss-takery provides this many hits. Like web-fu akido, I turn the force of my enemies blows against them. Also heartening that it tells me that UK Resistance is still kinda alive and still doing their vaguely sarcastic Segacentric gag-stuff. Gave me a flashback of the summer of 2000 when it was - quite literally - something to read on the days when Old Man Murray couldn't be bothered to update, and when all of Edge's staff had eight pseudonyms on their forum.
SLASHDOT GAMES: Slashdot about games, basically, and always worth reading due to it picking up a more interesting and wider selection of stories than most game tickers. Also amusing for aanand's description of me as a "Superstar UK Games Journalist". That is The Funny.
STATE/QUARTER TO THREE/RLLMK/NTSC: Mainly linked from their forums, which I'm plugging here. State I've talked about enough, but all are on a similar model - smartish talk about videogames by people who can generally complete sentences. Some stuff is highbrow. Much is in-jokey. Don't know much of Quarter To Three or NTSC's history, but RLLMK seemed to exist as a parallel Edge-forum from that particular pit of despair's decadent period. Insert Credit has a similar sort of forum to all of these. If you want a smart gaming community, you could do a lot worse.
WORLD OF STUART: Site of veteran outspoken games journalist-cum-activist, Stuart Campbell.
THE A-BUTTON: Similar to the above forums, but on Delphi and a tad more Americicentric. Less injokey, more on topic, a tad less highbrow. Though clearly "highbrow" is a relative term when talking about videogame forums. Posters with a fondness for English as a first language before l33t is pretty much all a videogame forum needs to make a claim to be highbrow.
WAY OF THE RODENT: Underground punky-gonzoid games site. Currently doing an amusing head-to-head between (deluded) C64-advocates and (righteous) Spec-chums, and generally is smart, witty and funny. I like them a lot.
THE VIDEOGAME OMBUDSMAN: Opinionated videogame culture-blog, news-centric. Never actually linked to me, but actually droped an e-mail, which is even better.
HERMIT GAMES: Know absolutely nothing about these chaps, so put the link here to remind me to investigate. Linked to me in the context of a link to Way of the Rodent's Speccy/C64 war, which shows good taste if nothing else.
I think there were more, but I forget them. Will perhaps update later, when my memory isn't so tiny and weak.
"We have no fear of your obvious disgust/You hate us because you're jealous of success"
Interjections courtesy of Bobby Conn's "The Homeland", the first decent post-9-11's protest album with an impecable faux-Republican schtick. Early contender for my album of the year.
And, as a personal note, going to see Le Tigre/Erase Erata/Kaito last night and found that the semi-fictional curse I'd inflicted on the closest I've written for an autobiographical character kicks in the second I enter the venue.
Be careful, people. There's writing out there.
Kieron - 4/05/2004 10:23:00 AM
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4/02/2004
Negativeland Updates. Episode 10: Dragos.
Which is always nice to find when you've just got back from a moderately entertaining night at Purr. Its immortality will be ensured by Surferosa, who despite committing the cardinal sin and (mis)naming themselves after a record, actually proved deeply entertaining in a kind of seventies Atari Teenage Riot fronted by a glitterpop Toyah/Margaret O'Hara/Iggy Pop crossbreed. However, I won't be writing about it since I've idly got my eye on doing some manner of review for someone or another about them.
Instead I'll talk about girls kissing.
While in modern indie-pop circles there's a lot more gloriously prickteasing of girls-making-out action than in my youth - much to my sadness - there was a particularly onus on sapphic amusements this evening. Cambell, Walker and myself sat in a mixture of amusement and mild arrousal as a sizeable group of peroxided creatures snogged with great enthusiasm for a gentleman with a camera. This immediately gives me an idea for what would clearly be the greatest episode of Negativeland of ALL TIME. Enough with this artsiness! Hot girl on Girl action... in negative. I want to singlehandedly bankrupt Jim's server bills by tapping into the inversed-colour porn-dollar. As well as these exciting additions to the world of Purr bicuriosity their were hardy perennials henceforth known - as Walker sinisterly dubs them in Gillen-speak - "The Vixens" doing their very best. Even the lead singer of Surferosa was getting in on the act.
The only people not snogging girls, it seemed were, us. Which is fine for Stuart and I, as we're taken, but leaves John feeling sad and alone. Except, he stressed, while he can't stop looking at the girls kissing, he doesn't fancy any of them in the slightest.
Oh no, John. You just look at them for the articles.
He's actually saving his affections for a girl with a fringe who due to her extreme resemblance to Cassandra Project lead Charlotte Williams, if she ever did make a pass at me, I'd have to turn down with the line "I'm sorry. I can't sleep with you. I think I wrote you".
That's enough of that I think. Time for a Masturbation Break.
And talking about Masturbation breaks, a quick plug for a friend of mine's new alt.porn site The Sin Garden which launched a few days ago.
Probably not work safe. And if it is work safe where you are - well - any spare jobs going?
Kieron - 4/02/2004 01:41:00 AM
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4/01/2004
Charity forwards me this.
And as I look, the seven-inch of Art Brut's "We Formed A Band" shouts its DIY manifesto geekily. And I shout back, equally geekily, "We Made A Comic".
