The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. As Football Manager is to Championship Manager, so The Lie-In is to its predecessor. Which is to say, sure, we no longer own the rights to the name, but the database and engine are still right here. Let's gather up some links worth reading from across the past week of t'internet.

Mothership is a new reader-supported website aiming to be something like "Teen Vogue, but for games". It's queer and women-owned, independent, aims to create an inclusive community, and will publish "writing and perspectives that specifically focus on gender and identity as they relate to games." You should read it and subscribe if you can. To highlight a specific article, I enjoyed Nicole Carpenter on why Gunpla is for the girls:

Gunpla, like lots of other stay-at-home hobbies, saw an international boost during the COVID-19 pandemic's lockdown restrictions. Not only were more people — including women — building models, but they were also livestreaming their processes and watching others do the same. That new group of enthusiasts continued to grow with the 2022 release of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, which included the main series' first female, queer protagonist.

The Bathysphere, the wonderful newsletter from Christian Donlan, Florence Smith Nicholls and Keith Stuart, is now wholly free. If you weren't reading it already, now you have no excuse. This week Donlan wrote about Evil Egg, which was already firmly atop my 'to play' list and now stretches, inexplicably, higher.

When it comes to twin-stick shooters, I often feel like that elderly American couple that Bill Bryson spots in a supermarket in The Lost Continent. They’re scanning the shelves for some kind of weirdo cereal flavour combination that will bring them a little fresh joy after many decades of trying every weirdo cereal flavour combination capitalism will allow for. In other words, I love a twin-stick, but since I play them all, I need to be really shaken about in order to have a memorable time.

I have always been fascinated by decades-long game projects. I was thrilled, therefore, when Tanya X. Short, game designer and co-founder of Kitfox, who brought Dwarf Fortress to Steam, wrote earlier this month about the unique concerns of lifetime game projects:

But in a lifetime project, a community member can grow alongside the game for twenty or more years. A six month break is a blip. For that reason, it didn’t hurt Dwarf Fortress much that there were often six or twelve months (or longer) between major updates. The game is played less like a consumption impulse and more like a seasonal ritual or old-school hobby, made more meaningful with each year it’s repeated.

At The Guardian, Keza MacDonald reviewed Cairn, the new rock climbing game that I'd be playing right now instead of writing this if we lived in the best of all possible worlds.

Mountaineers and climbers, especially the free-solo kind, are humanity’s most fascinating maniacs: single-minded, daring souls who throw themselves into profoundly optional life-endangering feats. It is hard not to be compelled, and appalled, by someone like Alex Honnold. Even with ropes, a single wrong move can mean death in mountaineering, a mad activity that puts you at the full mercy of nature. You cannot help but wonder what kind of person willingly chooses this: what kind of person looks at a towering cliff face, or a wall of wind-whipped ice, and thinks, I bet I can get up there.

Scott Adams - misogynist, racist, and the creator of the Dilbert comic series - has died. This lengthy exploration of his life and work was the best thing I read afterwards. It is simultaneously generous and mean towards the man, because there is no way to write frankly about Adams life and all his absurd activities without sounding as if you're mocking him, even if you're describing things plainly. He was certainly more than a comic creator.

In the thrilling climax, which takes place at Stacey’s Cafe (yes, it’s the real-world restaurant Adams was managing - yes, he turned his religious-apocalyptic thriller novel into an ad for his restaurant - yes, I bet he thought of this as a “hypnotic suggestion”), the characters find the Prime Influencer. She is able to come up with a short snappy slogan so memetically powerful that it defeats fundamentalist religion and ends the war (the slogan is: “If God is so smart, why do you fart?”).

I had not previously paid much attention to the news surrounding the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree, but I enjoyed this story in Harper's Magazine by Rosa Lyster which explores the strange court case and outpouring of public grief that followed:

He maintained his denials in court when being cross-examined by Graham’s barrister, Christopher Knox, who then called up a video of Carruthers in a cherry picker, working confidently at the trunk of an ash tree. The moaning of the chainsaw filled the courtroom like the sound of a kicked beehive. Then there was a selfie Graham had taken, in which he is squinting into the camera looking pleased while, in the background, Carruthers once again saws away with evident expertise at the trunk of a large tree. There was a set of pictures that Graham had shown to the police—they came to be known as “the owl photographs”—which showed Carruthers in his workshop, grinning and holding a baby owl in each hand, with a collection of at least eight chainsaws behind him. It almost seems unfair at this point to continue, but Knox also produced a post on an online forum called All Things Chainsaw U.K. in which Carruthers sought parts.

Launching Jank felt like a good reason re-visit Craig Mod's rules for running his membership program. Running such a program to make books is not the same as running one for a website, but there remains food for thought here.

12. You must have faith that the work itself is strong enough to be a binding agent

13. If the work isn’t strong enough, work more on the work

We launched Jank for many different reasons and I suspect you'd get different answers if you asked me, or Jonty, or Brendy. Here's one of mine: launching Jank meant I got to play around with fonts. Since my magazine days, futzing within InDesign and working with wonderful art editors, I've had opinions about typefaces but no real understanding of the building blocks of type design. Why did I like one font family and not another? A recent guide towards answering that question was The Ohno Book: A Serious Guide to Irreverent Type Design, by James Edmondson. Edmondson makes wonderful typefaces which ooze personality, and his book is likewise an extremely human introduction to the world of type design.

Relatedly, I want to shout out Mark Wynne, the designer of the Jank logo. Mark was one of those wonderful art editors from my magazine days, who also spent many years designing the impeccable Edge magazine. His portfolio shows him to be a master of working with typography and much more besides. He was our first choice when we knew we needed help to make a logo, and I couldn't be prouder that he agreed to help us. Thanks Mark!

Thanks also to you, the readers, for being here with us in week one of Jank. Blogs are built one post at a time and we will continue to work out what we're making here together. Even this column may veer off in bold new directions given time. Did you know it's very difficult to come up with a name that hasn't been used thousands of times for a weekly link round-up posted on Sundays? Because it is.

Music this week is Pixel Grip, as I've been listening to their KEXP performance for weeks. Reason To Stay is my favourite from the set: