2023.exe
Let’s get things started with a recap, shall we?
Hey everybody. 2022 is over. It has been for months now; it just took me ages to summon the courage to start this newsletter. Here’s a picture of some fireworks in The Whitsunday Islands on New Year’s Eve. From a distance, I realise that it kind of looks like a nuclear test…
In my 27 years of growing up in England, I’ve never been in another timezone during the holidays. Don’t get me wrong, I had a fantastic time going AFK down under for seven weeks, but it was also bizarre to experience Christmas and New Year before most of my nearest and dearest. I now hold great empathy for those of you who do this regularly. It’s a quantum cocktail of FOMO and deja vu.
You miss the peculiarities of the festivities, the rituals and creature comforts, but when the events come around for the second time in 24 hours, it feels like you’re rewatching a movie you’ve just seen.
This is compounded by the fact that everything seems to speed up in Australia during the holidays, whereas, in England, everything slows to a crawl until we hit that post-Christmas-dinner time void. It makes sense - it’s mega hot, and everyone is off, but trying to wrap your head around this is hard. Wrapping your face around a sausage sizzle, on the other hand… almost too easy.
Anyway, let’s move past the antipodean wisdom I’ve gained and on to the (beef) sausage of this introductory newsletter, which will be a bit of a recap-explainer ahead of regular programming.
What did I even do last year? I really struggled to summon the energy for a 2022 Year in Review Twitter Wrapped McThread, even though I’ve slam-dunked hundreds of thousands of words into the feeding pit for The Algorithm Scraper, the slime-gurgling necrophage of the net. A description that is crusty with irony, dear reader, because if you google ‘slime-gurgling necrophage,’ I am the second (and third) result. The monster manifests itself.
He’s sure had a few good dinners off of me, and I thought I should point towards some of my favourite consonant casseroles, if only to get away from this horrible metaphor, for your sake and mine.
The lion’s share of my pride (hehe) is attached to the time I spent working on the Future Games Show and The Golden Joystick Awards. This is a gig I started with the 2021 E3 show, but it kicked up a gear in 2022, with four shows broadcast in total.
As well as many odd jobs behind the scenes, my main gig is writing the script for the presenters, helping with live direction, and providing line read and intonation feedback with my bespoke northern accent. I’ve worked with some incredible performers so far, some serious legends of the craft. They were all extremely sound, though, and always put my nerves at ease. Some of them even laughed at my jokes!
E3 2021: Troy Baker and Laura Bailey (Joel and Abby, The Last of Us Part II)
Gamescom 2021: Maggie Robertson and Aaron LaPlante (Lady Dimitrescu and The Duke, Resident Evil Village)
The Golden Joystick Awards 2021: Nolan North and Emily Rose (Nathan Drake and Elena Fisher, Uncharted)
Spring Showcase 2022: Ashly Burch and John MacMillan (Aloy and Varl, Horizon Zero Dawn)
E3 2022: Doug Cockle and Denise Gough (Geralt of Rivia and Yennefer of Vengerberg, The Witcher 3)
Gamescom 2022: Christopher Judge and Daniela Bisutti (Kratos and Freya, God of War)
The Golden Joystick Awards 2022: Troy Baker and Laura Bailey ( Kanji and Rise, Persona 4)
Spring Showcase 2023: Cody Christian and Briana White (Cloud and Aerith, Final Fantasy 7 Remake)
I also sat in on a live session with Jeff Goldblum, and though I was starstruck into silence, I did find out that he is manually funny without trying (and likes to snorkel).
Cosmic timing meant that John MacMillan popped up in House of the Dragon shortly after the 2022 Spring Showcase, Denise Gough in Andor after E3, and then Ashly Burch in the new season of Mythic Quest, which made my evening streaming quite surreal. The other day, I was rewatching Modern Family when Nolan North popped up as an extra, and suddenly I was flashing back to the time I had to verbosely pronounce ‘Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island Expansion’ over Zoom in a broad Geordie accent… as if that made it any easier to read.
It’s certainly led to some stories that I’ll tell the grandkids, that’s for sure. Perhaps the most surreal/heartwarming consequence is me (unintentionally) becoming a friend of the #Clerith shipping fandom by sneaking a load of FF7R references into the latest script.
I’m several years into this freelance thing, which is often a very lonely road, so honestly, it's just cool to feel like a part of something. I even went to a wrap party and got an official Team FGS t-shirt (which I now wear as pyjamas).
Elsewhere, I managed to share some screen space with Louis Theroux, by which I mean on The BBC homepage, where my Grand Theft Auto retrospective subtly brushed up against his hard-hitting journalism like the fruity twist in a can of La Croix.
I was also asked to write for The British Medical Journal. Initially, it was going to be about the reality of medicine in Football Manager, but it ended up more virtual gonzo as I tried to survive the Doctor career in The Sims 4 and spoke to real doctors about how the in-game profession lines up with reality, which was an honour. This was a daft piece at its heart, but one that was very illuminating to write and, in some spots, quite profound, I think. If it made at least one medical professional chuckle, I’ll be happy. God knows that is the very least I owe The NHS.
When I was writing it, I didn’t realise that it was going to be a capital-a Article, at least in the academic sense, with citations and nightclub appearances in international research databases and all that. I’m used to lower-case articles, those ones that are made for Professor Google. My pal (a junior doctor in The RVI) sent words like ‘PubMed’, ‘doi’ and ‘H Index’ in an attempt to explain its sought-after significance, which I couldn’t quite comprehend.
It is yet to be cited, but I am hoping my joke about hospital food looking like 2D pickups you might find in Minecraft will shape Hippocratic research for generations to come. Or, at the very least, it might bring some gracious light to a student on deadline, trapped in the library at 2 AM on a Friday morning, doom-searching tangential terms to flesh out a paper. Based on my own experience of studying Archaeology at uni, that’s what aloof research is really good for.
I’m now experiencing the writer’s equivalent of when your speech goes on too long at an award show, and they start pumping in that dodgy music to see you off. As is only right, I will now, under pressure, let out the truth lurking behind my accomplishments in 2022.
As you can tell by that little smorgasbord of my work, it was a fun year! But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. I’m still recovering from the traumatic shockwave of burnout and tragedy that was COVID, and figuring out The Balance as I go. I have also accrued a Health Problem™️ from that period, which I’m on a bunch of referral lists for, awaiting consultation. It’s meant that I’ve had to come to terms with having a new sensory limitation, which I’m learning is one of the most humbling and scary of all processes. It has knocked my confidence across the board, but especially in social settings.
I’m also still haunted by the extremely loud ‘what the hell am I doing’ voice that I’m convinced other freelancers must also have, especially if you started when I did. I scared myself the other day when I realised how long I’d been writing for, and promptly went looking for my origin story. You don’t want to see what I wrote for *shudder* exposure or, god forbid, pay-per-click, but you can see my first paid piece, which was for …Playboy, here:
https://www.playboy.com/read/what-the-f-k-is-a-miitomo-navigating-nintendos-new-social-network
Ha! Got you. That webpage doesn’t exist anymore. Like many of my old articles, it’s a lose-lose ‘tears in rain’ situation, so you can only marvel at what remains. The curiously-censored URL slug and a big H2 ‘Sorry’, as if that covers it.
It definitely hasn’t gotten any easier to grapple with the impermanence and erasure of a good chunk of my work, especially as more and more ships burn ominously off the shoulder of Orion. We lost Wireframe Magazine *and* Launcher at the start of this year, which felt like a big gut punch, summoning similar feelings to when we lost Kill Screen, later GamesMaster, and then Kotaku UK. There are many more I’m forgetting.
Hard to feel hopeful with that in mind, especially when I’m looking to lean into my funkiest, dustiest pitch ideas. Doors seem to be closing, generally, so I need to find some new ones or at least create some holes that I can shout about things through.
…Here’s one of them.
So! For the foreseeable, I’ll be here, Mr Permalance, writing about the stuff I’m consuming (subconsciously or not) that I think people should care about. I know I’m very late to the Substack gravy train and have missed many opportunities to launch this at what would have been an opportune time to promote it — like, say, the very public beginning of the slow, agonising death of my most prolific social media platform (I took so long I’m about to lose my blue tick!), but I hope the bargain bin Hi-Fi Rush approach captures what this is really about.
I’m not naive, though — this is not a groundbreaking rhythm hack ‘n’ slash — at best, I want to talk to interesting people, cover topics that aren’t easy to sell, and make you Think About Things. At worst, it will just be a venue to let off some steam and write for me, which will no doubt be good for my mental health.
Like all earnest endeavours, I’ll be feeling this out as I go, but I am hopeful that it will find some structure amid the chaos of my drafts:
Postmode is old games, new trends, internet culture stuff, music recs, fashion chatter, tips and tricks, Q&A, opportunity roundups, and ruminations on The Job Writ Large. Some budget-hostile stuff I need to write about so my brain doesn’t explode. Expect the retro-spected, and a much shorter newsletter next, after this massive word lasagne you (may) have valiantly endured!
Listen:
I recently learned that the Japanese studio Love-de-Lic (of Moon: Remix RPG Adventure) was named after this YMO album. Impress your weird friends with this fun fact!
Watch:
I’ve been salivating at this less action-y, Silent Hill-inspired take on Resi 4 that was dropped in favour of one of the best games of all time. Definitely a bittersweet feeling!
Read: Jay Castello’s brilliant investigation of TikTok sludge content, for Polygon.
Pitch: Abram Buehner of Lost in Cult is looking for Zelda pitches! I suggest 2000 words on the Ooccoo.