The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. My elbows hurt, as they often do in the mornings of late. This has now crossed the rubicon from "oh I slept weird again" to "oh this is some sort of new repetitive strain injury, isn't it." Let's look on the bright side: I now know the word "cubital" and it's a delight to say aloud. Try it. I run my cuticles along by cubital in my cubicle at work. Let's look for other new words by perusing some fine writing about videogames (and beyond) from across the week.

Almost every paragraph of Sam Henri Gold's post about the MacBook Neo is deliciously quotable. I had no interest in the device itself, but this is about what it feels like to be young and finding yourself through a computer.

Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Those are completely different lessons.

For Pitchfork, Billie Bugara wrote about Stickerbush Symphony, one of the tracks from David Wise's soundtrack to Donkey Country 2 on the SNES. The track has a surprising melancholy, and its upload to YouTube in 2012 caused it to become, Bugara argues, "the soundtrack to the internet's collective memory".

Some passages feature instruments with so much coded ambiguity that they’d transcend the tangible and turn sublime. What exactly is that otherworldly lead bridging into the song’s midpoint and bookending its call-and-response outro? Turns out, it’s an emulation of the Wavestation’s alto sax and muted trumpet presets, but Wise makes it sound like the faint score of a dream or a long-gone memory. Tethered to Wise’s melancholic songwriting, these unearthly leads paint the back-and-forth of major and minor chords with unknown textures from another world—just familiar enough to make us reflect on ours.

Christian Donlan has been considering Marathon's art style for Eurogamer.

But it's the next layer that's my favourite. Slapped all over every surface is text-babble and serial numbers and barcodes and all the fabulous Designers Republic font-work. But there's also a lot of things that look like parts of QR codes and other brilliant visual detritus: print registration marks, of the kinds you get in the corners of mags or on the folds of cereal boxes, things that invoke, to my uneducated eye, at least, ordnance survey map markings or perhaps the little tabs attached to people and things in motion-tracking suites. Oh, and because it's space, there are those cross-shaped fiducial markers of the kind that came on all the Apollo Mission images. Nothing says the bureaucracy of the cosmos quite like this.

Star Trek Voyager is a bad TV show and I love it. It's bad in the most fun ways it's possible for a TV show to be bad. That's why I'm baffled and thrilled that there's now a narrative strategy game based on the '90s show, and I enjoyed Dia Lacina writing about it for Remap Radio.

I'm on my 9th run of Voyager: Across the Unknown now. And it’s finally settling in just how ambitious this game made by German studio Gamexcite is. By any metric. But especially from a studio who, according to their website, previously remastered one Asterix game for mobile, and made two other Asterix games themselves. It's safe to say this narrative survival adaptation of a major television property is quite the scope-up in terms of project size and complexity. Voyager: Across the Unknown is ambitious. It's not quite the ambition equivalent of launching a new network with a woman at the helm of a non-Enterprise Star Trek series in the mid-late 90s, but it comes close.

Chris Dalla Riva looked at the data behind the Billboard top 100 to work out if it's true that the male pop star is dying. The answer, by the numbers, is not really, but the conjecture as to why the perception exists remains interesting. One possible reason is that there used to be a huge gender disparity in favour of men and now there is nearly parity. Another possible reason is:

Second, most of the non-country male pop stars are just kind of boring. Teddy Swims and Benson Boone are not that compelling. Of course, compelling male pop stars can still exist. The Weeknd has been making hits for a decade. But between country going pop and the median male superstar being kind of boring, it has given us the illusion that the male pop star is a dying breed.

Relatedly, Molly Mary O'Brien wrote about iPod brain for Dirt. This is still how I engage with music now, albeit via different hardware.

I used to collect music like butterflies—you had to watch them fly by, swoop them in a net, pin them to a board. This is how I learned to care about music. You had to really want it.

What if your Dad loved big egg and wanted to construct his own big egg made of jewels, and bankrupted the century-old family business in the process? Serena Kutchinsky tells the story of her father's obsession for The Guardian.

They flew on Concorde, sharing the supersonic flight with the former Prince Andrew and his then wife, Sarah Ferguson. As the jet steadied itself after takeoff, they toasted Paul’s success. Lurking behind them, strapped in alongside its bodyguards, the egg served as a constant reminder this wasn’t a holiday. (As it was far too precious to go in the hold, Dad’s creation had its own seat, booked under the name of Mr Egg.)

Where else did Mr. Egg accompany the former Prince Andrew? We may never know the truth.

Music this week is Atrophies from Blanck Mass, the solo project of British electronic musician Benjamin John Power. This guy knows how to name things: Atrophies is taken from the album Dumb Flesh, and Power is better known as one half of Fuck Buttons. The track itself is a wall of beats that's been getting me pumped for nearly a decade. Like it? Check out Blanck Mass on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.