The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for crossing all your fingers and toes that you’ve not picked up a cold while travelling across the country in a packed train. I will be collecting precautionary supplies of Lemsip, Olbas Oil, and sage (you can never be too careful around this time of year, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are working overtime).

When you are armed with your sickness supplies, Sundays are for getting truly familiar with a comfy spot on the safe, ensconcing yourself in blankets, and losing yourself in some good reading for a few hours.

As is proving my habit, my reading this week outside of editing work for RPS has largely been unrelated to games. However, thankfully both Mark and Edwin are keeping the Sunday Papers from slipping entirely into recommendations of LRB articles.

First, Edwin sent me A Closer Listen’s roundup of the best videogame soundtracks of 2025. I am a dense oaf when it comes to music, unable to pick out much about what is happening within the music I like. So I am always grateful to writers who can make sense of the sounds and break it down for me. The team (including friend of this parish Captainfreakout) do exactly that, both celebrating and explaining why these albums did resonate so well in the eardrum.

I’ll pick out Sam Webster’s award for Morsels, as it shows how the music reflects the same ideas Edwin drew out in his review:

A game about innards, bodily fluids, exhausts and bacterial excess of life would probably make any listener think the soundtrack would be some sort of noise music exercise in cruelty. Rather, Webster has crafted a smooth journey of lounge and acid jazz worthy of the summer-worship of Koop’s Waltz for Koop or Kyoto Jazz Massive’s Spirit of the Sun. Without fret, the album grows under a sickly sun, its bright harmonies and relaxing melodies underlined by slight crackles and low electronic rumbles; like the sweet, sugary smell of accumulated trash, it draws attention to the beauty of the cycle of life, with all its playful maggots and breezy flies.

Mark sent me an article by Edmond Tran, who has been speaking to concept artists for This Week In Videogames about the impact of generative AI on their profession. It’s vital to hear from the workers touched by this new technology, as we so often hear only from the company heads hoping to adopt it. Two interviewees, Jack Kirby Crosby and Lucy Mutimer, capture how I feel about a lot of generative AI, that the work it replaces is the essential thinking period where you develop the knowledge you need to do the work well:

“More than 50% of their time will be spent reference gathering,” [Kirby Crosby] said. “Part of that is gathering images, but that also includes reading articles, watching media, assessing the competition, watching videos about the way things work, consuming scientific papers, literally anything vaguely related to the project will be gathered by concept artists, sometimes in a repository like Miro or Slack or Pinterest, but always in the head of the concept artist.”

Lucy Mutimer, a game developer and illustrator who primarily works with indie studios, explains that “referencing and research are core parts of an artist’s overall development. (Sometimes regrettably) you carry a piece of every project with you.”

“Something that I have found difficult for non-artists to understand is that the ‘early messy stuff’ that non-arty folks insist can be ‘fixed by a human artist later’ is where the best work is done. You cannot brute force your way to the end conclusion of an idea – you gotta work that out.”

I only recently discovered the FT’s weekend essay, but I think it will become a fixture of my Saturday mornings. Yesterday’s was from Katherine Rundell on the secret history of unicorns. I’m afraid this one is behind a paywall so you may need to subscribe/blag a pdf off of a mate who works in the financial sector. If you do, you will find that encyclopedias of old were full of bollocks:

In the year 600, Archbishop Isidore of Seville wrote the vast encyclopedia Etymologiae, a book that contained “practically everything that it is necessary to know”. Isidore was a world-completist, a furious seeker after total understanding, and in among the cornucopia of his findings he offered the “monoceron, that is, the unicorn” which has “a single four-foot horn in the middle of its forehead”.

“Isidore’s unicorn is ferocious, and appears to owe much to the rhinoceros — “it often fights with the elephant and throws it to the ground after wounding it in the stomach” — but it also had some of the otherworldly quality of the shining white horse. There are no human hunters, he writes, who can catch it; it can outrun any horse. However, “if a virgin girl is set before a unicorn, as the beast approaches, she may open her lap and it will lay its head there with all ferocity put aside, and thus lulled and disarmed it may be captured”.

I fear it will fast become obvious I’m drawing my Sunday Paper articles from a much returned to well, but over on the LRB blog Tomas Weber’s report from the battlelines of the World Conker Championships is a serious piece of writing about a serious sport:

There had been fears of a conker shortage. The hot August followed by a string of early-autumn storms had caused premature ripening, and Britain’s horse chestnut trees had shaken off most of their conkers before they could grow to regulation size (between 32mm and 35mm in diameter). But a nationwide call went out for full-size conkers and by competition day around three thousand tournament-grade nuts, including a haul from Windsor Castle, had made it to Southwick to be drilled and strung onto 20cm leather strips.

I tried to listen to some summery pop music yesterday and it felt all wrong. It is just too dark and cold at the moment. I’ll be leaning into the fact it is the shortest day of the year by exclusively listening to Icelandic musicians today. On one end of the scale, I’ve the sadly departed Johan Johansson’s Odi et Amo, which is perfect accompaniment to reading a book in the conservatory lit by thin winter light, and Retro Stefson’s Solaris, which I will deploy when I need a little sunburst of energy on a chill wind-blasted walk later.