My name is An ENB series mod was released for Skyrim! That means more second-rate screenshots while Duncan Harris does them much better.
As far as I know, there’s currently not a single self-indulgent games journalist writing at length about their lurid, scuzzy lives. In fact, all of the games journalists I know are now too busy producing real work to write about themselves. This is a problem for me, because I liked when everyone I knew or wanted to know was blogging in a loose and personal style, instead of making games and comics and books and podcasts and being famous and successful, like they all are now.
So I guess I’ll fill in. Because I’m ashamed and uncomfortable, I’ve put all the crappy camera phone pictures of my recent trip to Denmark beneath a More button.
I use Twitter and Google Reader every day, and every day I find two or three articles I want to read. Whether they’re long or short, I open them in a new Chrome tab until I get round to them. Most articles get consumed and dismissed within the hour, but others, especially if they’re lengthy, wait much longer. I often have tabs open for weeks.
I do this because I know that if I bookmark the page and close the tab, then I’ll never read it. Bookmarks are where websites go to be forgotten. But the flip of that is that when there’s more long articles I want to read than normal, I end up with thirty or forty tabs open at the same time. I will almost always eventually read everything, but in the meantime, my screen becomes cluttered. It starts to feel like my brain is cluttered, filled by half-read thoughts, and it becomes harder to finish reading any of them.
So in the interest of clearing some brainspace, I’m linking and closing all of the tabs I currently have open. I’ve done this before, by reading each article first. This time, I’ve read all of some of what’s below, and some of all the others. I’m not guaranteeing the quality of any of it.
A Beautiful Mind, about an autistic artist.
Consider the Lobster, which I think is the last famous piece of David Foster Wallace journalism that I haven’t read.
An annotated version of Obama’s third State of the Union.
Navigating Love and Autism, in the New York Times.
The Rise of the New Groupthink, from same.
The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. The New Yorker still capitalises “Internet”.
Film Critic Hulk’s Screenwriting 101.
Stumptown Girl, about the creators of the TV show Portlandia.
2011: The Cinescape, a montage of movie clips that makes me wish I was a film editor.
An interview with Bill Clinton.
Some answers to this year’s Edge question.
Response to the response to Level With Me, Robert Yang’s collaborative Portal 2 level experiment, which requests that gamers be more knowledgeable about games. Also this.
Linked from within the above: Donkeyspace.
Happiness takes (a little) magic, about stepping away from the damned internet.
Playing God: On Death, Motherhood and Creating (Artificial) Life.
Paul McCartney takes the Tube.
The Brain on Trial, which is disturbing enough you’ll tell your friends.
Lack of Love, a forgotten, probably terrible game that I am thinking about playing.
Music journalism is the new boring challenges the notion that music was boring in 2011 by pinning the blame on journalists for not finding and sharing better music. Good things to keep in mind for all culture journalists. (0)
The Luckiest Dessert in History, about how a surprisingly high number of people won a particular American lottery draw in 2005. This related TEDx talk, linked within, is also worth watching. One article from dozens that I could link from Now I Know, an email newsletter of daily, incredible trivia and stories that Tom recommended. (0)
Wonderful, life-affirming New Yorker article about Don Colcord, a local druggist who holds the small community of Nucla, Colorado together. It paints a romantic picture of small, important work.
Don’s collection of certifications is impressively esoteric. He has taken CPR courses, and he’s qualified to use an electric defibrillator. He has a pyrotechnics-display license, so that Nucla can have fireworks on the Fourth of July. When he heard about a new type of hormone therapy, he flew to California to attend two days of classes, and now he compounds medicine for four transgendered patients who live in various parts of the West. Every three months, Don talks with them on the phone and prepares their drugs; he finds this interesting. On Friday nights, he announces Nucla High football games. They play eight-man ball, although if a bigger school comes to town they switch numbers with every possession, so that each side can practice its plays. When Nucla is on offense, it’s eight-on-eight, but it becomes eleven-on-eleven when the other team has the ball. Occasionally, somebody gets confused, and Don’s voice rings out over the loudspeakers: “There’s eleven white guys and eight blue guys, and that won’t work.” The football might not be first-rate, but the players’ names are a novelist’s dream. Nucla has Seth Knob, Chad Stoner, and Seldon Riddle. Dove Creek has a player named Tommy Fury. Blanding has Talon Jack and Sterling Black, Tecohda Tom and Herschel Todachinnie. Shilo Stanley, Terrance Tate, Dillon Daves: if alliteration ever needs an offensive line, recruiting should begin around the Colorado-Utah border.(0)
The text of a 2009 lecture on Solitude and Leadership, but which is really about how to think and why to work. (0)
Jon Ronson's story of one public sector cut, and the people affected. Surprise ending. (0)
I don’t normally post about the magazine here, but the latest issue of PC Gamer is something special. Here’s the cover:
For a start, there’s a small picture of me on the cover, in the lower right. “Cover model” is totally on my CV now.
This issue of PC Gamer is especially great because it’s the first without the coverdisc. I was Disc Editor when I first joined the magazine, producing two CDs and a DVD every month, and I second Tom’s sentiments when I say that I am glad that it is now gone. There are two great advantages: we’re no longer sealed in a plastic bag on shop shelves, and we now have more pages.
Having so many pages suddenly frees us up to do a lot of big, silly, fun things we normally wouldn’t have space for. This month, that’s produced a ludicrous amount of great writing: Tom’s Skyrim diary and interview with Todd Howard, Owen’s interview with Gabe Newell, Craig’s huge feature on Firefall, large previews on Planetside 2, World of Warplanes and half a dozen others, the Making of Shogun: Total War, a free and exclusive TF2 hat and lots, lots, lots more. It is probably the best issue of PC Gamer I’ve ever worked on.
My favourite piece is the entire team playing Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator together, which is why I’m dressed as a Vulcan on the cover. It’s a multiplayer game where everyone controls a computer terminal on the bridge of a Star Trek-style spaceship, and everyone should make their friends play it with them immediately.
You can buy the magazine on shop shelves and from Apple’s new Newsstand, where it was very briefly the top grossing magazine. It’s now about 12th, which is still great. Buy it buy buy it buy it.
Chat History, from GOOD's Data Issue, about how the internet will remember us even after we're gone. (0)