Sundays are for counting the days. If you haven’t heard: I’m leaving RPS on July 31st, bringing my 12 years with the site to an end (and 8 years spent with Gamer Network websites more broadly). This isn’t like in 2021 either, when I nominally departed but continued to support the site from the management side and by writing evening news posts. This time is me gone for realsies. I have plenty of thoughts, more than I can reasonably fit in one post or a hundred. So: links? Links.
I’ll miss writing The Sunday Papers. It was a pleasure to take over this column from Jim back in– uh, 2014? Maybe? And a pleasure to get to loop back and do it again for the past six months. The column will live on without me, but if you want to construct a Graham-style Sunday Papers without me, I’ll explain how below.
First, let’s do some normal links. Paste shut down Paste Games – but wait! This is good news for a change – because they launched it as its own separate site, Endless Mode. Then YouTube gamesman SkillUp pivoted to text and launched his own games site, This Week In Videogames.
Fellow former RPS staffer Alec Meer launched a newsletter where he can indulge his love of Transformers and other toy robots, and it’s good stuff so far, even for me as a person with only a passing interest in the hobby. Very Alec stuff, too.
Yes, I can put them in these dramatic poses, these vibrant battle scenes and heroic gestures. But, once upon a time, I didn’t need to. My Transformers were bricks, and I loved them all. Their lives, their poses, their wars without end all happened in my mind – and so much more besides. Look at how much has to be engineered, and how much I have to spend, to achieve just a faint simulacrum of that ancient, joyful feeling.
Hearing Things, the reader-supported site from former Pitchfork staff, has fast become my favourite music site. They quit Spotify this month, and you can, too.
According to countless artists and reports, their per-stream rates are pitifully low compared to their competitors. Their playlist-centric strategy takes music out of context and relegated it to the background of people’s lives. Their sound quality is butt. They engage in practices that seem a lot like a modern version of payola. And there was that one time Joanna Newsom called the company a “cynical and musician-hating system” and compared it to a rotting banana. “It just gives off a fume,” she said. “You can just smell that something’s wrong with it.”
Did I already link this? I don’t think I did, but back in May Anil Dash wrote about the internet of consent, and how it doesn’t exist. “The internet of creeps”, meanwhile…
The concept of consent doesn’t exist on the modern internet. You didn’t read the terms of service. You didn’t agree to accept cookies. I didn’t consent to having my site pulled into the training model for that artificial intelligence system that’s going to use to sell the fruit of my labor for profit. I didn’t agree to have my activity tracked across all these different websites and cobbled together into a creepy and inaccurate profile of my preferences that gets sold without my permission. Nobody asks for anything, they just take it. There’s not even an acknowledgement, that any of this stuff is happening let alone a conversation about it.
I don’t know what I’ll do in my final edition of the Papers next week – my favourite RPS work? Which I edited? Or I wrote? Or simply some sort of primal scream? – but I thought it might be useful to share some of the sources where I find links each week. These are all places I’ve linked to before, or hat-tipped, but they’re good and deserve more attention.
Web Curios is a weekly newsletter stuffed with dozens of links to interesting writing, videos, online projects and other digital ephemera. It’s more AI-friendly than many of you will like, but there’s always interesting work of one kind or another to be found if you have the time to crawl through it all.
One Thing is a newsletter that will in one edition recommend samba records, in another recommend comfortable summer shirts, and in another be about the state of online criticism. Whatever the case, it’s always astutely written, and it always links out to other pieces of interesting writing from across the web.
Author Robin Sloan sends his newsletter Trespassers to coincide with the cycles of the moon. I think? Fitting if so, because it tends to arrive late at night in the UK, and too often I’ve been awake past 3am reading everything he’s linked to. The links run the gamut, with a literary bent, and I am never not inspired.
Have I ever actually linked to anything discovered via Peter Miller’s newsletter? I do not recall. But I read Miller’s short book Shopkeeping last year (on the recommendation of One Thing!) and have bought several copies for friends and family since. Miller runs an architectural book store in Seattle and his book about the specifics of running it has broad applicability, I feel, for anyone who does creative or curatorial work. Miller’s newsletter is more specifically focused on architecture books (and whipped cream recipes) but the two projects jointly transmit the sense that Miller has cracked some secret to living a considered, fulfilling life. And I like books about architecture, so.
Caroline Crampton is a non-fiction author with a wonderful podcast about golden age crime fiction, but she also sends a regular newsletter, the Thursday edition of which is always a round-up of 13 links. I fiend many interesting things to read in there.
Crampton is also the editor of The Browser, a daily email that recommends five things to read, or two for free subscribers.
I’ve been reading Molly White’s Citation Needed since the height of the crypto craze in the video game industry, and it’s no less essential now America is a kleptocracy. Many of its outbound links have appeared in the Sunday Papers. White also records each edition of the newsletter as a podcast, which is great listening while I’m walking my dog.
I’ve otherwise backed off the newsletters I consider part of the sensemaking industrial complex. By which I mean, newsletters from current or former journalists who spend all their time staring into the abyss and reporting back on what they see, interspersed with guides to how you too can spend all your time staring into the abyss. Garbage Day, for example, which once felt joyful to me and eventually became a dirge. I will make an exception however for Today In Tabs, which switched to a less frequent cadence for its author’s sanity and, as a side effect, ours. It otherwise continues the strengths Rusty Foster’s work has always had: wry mockery of the media class and political reporting from an engaged outsider. (Or you could do yourself a favour and read Foster’s walking diary, Today On Trail, which is probably more nourishing.)
Speaking of walking diaries, I subscribe to all the many newsletters of Japan-based writer and photographer Craig Mod, both the regulars and the pop-ups. Roden and Ridgeline both link to interesting articles, by Mod and others, about culture, hiking, photography, tech, Japan and more.
You might be wondering two things. First, is everything a newsletter now? Answer: yes, but most of the above can also be read on the web and followed via RSS. Two, don’t you read about video games for this roundup of articles about, supposedly, writing about video games? Answer: yes, but I don’t like any of it.
The above is but a fraction of what I read in a week and of what I’m subscribed to, but I’ve mostly limited myself to only those sources that have frequently provided links to articles later included in the Papers. The real secret, though, is to burrow down the rabbit holes. Read an article you like? Check if the writer has a newsletter of their own, where they’ll probably write more you’ll like and link to work by others that you’ll like, and so on and so on, until your inbox is as overflowing as mine. Then I recommend a subscription to Readwise to help manage it all, and to Obsidian for note-taking and quote-keeping.
Oh, this is me explaining how you too can stare into the abyss, isn’t it? Remember self-care! Drink tea! Etc.
Music this week is, well, look, it’s still Tiberius b, who released the best album of the year no one is listening to, so take Stay With Me. I did also go re-listen to Bloc Party’s first album for the first time in, ooh, ten years, after their Tiny Desk performance this week. Did they ever get better than She’s Hearing Voices? Perfect fight music. So let’s fight.
