The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for landing on a mysterious planet. At first, the surface seems barren, a dusty sheet of paper stretching towards the grey horizon. Does anything live here? Could anything live here? Is there anything here which can inform how I’m supposed to feel about it all? The emptiness is a feeling, but one can only deploy the world bleak so many times before starting to read it as ble-ack just to try and avoid dying of boredom. Then, the ground around you opens up. A great dark space into which you slide. Everything goes cold, dark, and wet. Suddenly, you’re back among the stars in a flurry of movement. Adrian Edmondson’s planet-sized head stares at you, licking its lips to get rid of leftover spittle. Well, there’s two of you in the bleakness now.

Knowing you’re both stuck in this celestial waiting room, Ade asks you to provide something interesting to read, or he’ll suck you into his maw once more. Naturally, you commence your search, and find Jasmine Gould-Wilson’s musings on Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era’s Next Fest demo for GamesRadar.

The way I choose my Heroes faction still rests on one thing, and one thing only. How strong is the strongest creature in a given faction’s roster? More importantly, are they cool or cuddly enough to make me want to either be one or hug one? This deciding factor is what always led me to opt for Stronghold in Heroes 3. I considered Behemoths my “babies” back then, and I still find them adorable to this day. Look at those silly claws!

“A strategy game,” planet Ade roars, “you absolute anorak!” Ok, ok, no need for him to lose his rag. Sportsball, you think, that’ll pacify his need for non-boffiny wordage. Perhaps, like you, he’ll be entranced by the tale of the Seattle Mariners, a baseball team currently battling for the first ever shot at winning a world series. You dig out some reflections from Defector’s Kathryn Xu on the inherent Milhousey day of daysness of the Mariners’ predicament, at least before they subsequently gave up two home losses.

The Mariners went into their series against the Blue Jays on Sunday hoping they could steal one game out of the two from the hottest offense in baseball. Even that hope felt faintly contingent on being able to deploy Bryan Woo, who was left off the ALDS roster due to pectoral inflammation, to patch up their starting pitching woes; just two days prior, the Mariners were forced to exhaust many of their high-leverage bullpen arms and use two extra starters in a 15-inning grindfest against the Detroit Tigers. Woo was not available to pitch in either of the two ALCS games, and yet the Mariners will, somehow, be leaving Toronto with a convincing 2-0 series lead. Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

Instead of writing an insane sentence like “All of this is happening because Humpy the salmon finally won the salmon race in the middle of the 15th inning on Friday,” I will acknowledge the on-field explanations for how the Mariners got away with it.

AsterAde lambasts you for thinking he’d fall for your ploy. Fine, you think, I’ll give him multiple barrels of good writing at once. You pull out a series of features published by The Verge, all taking on the subject of what the future looks like for trans people on the internet. You open up Sydney Bauer’s piece about efforts from musicians like punk band Ekko Astral to help publicise trans causes and provide mutual aid.

“Imagine if bands just decided to take it upon themselves to use their platform as they’re on the road to say, ‘If you’re at the merch table, would you give, like, $5 to help this person pay their medical bills?’ Imagine how far that would go,” she says.

For trans artists, Holzman adds, many of them are “acutely” aware of just how tenuous access to robust, lifesaving healthcare is for our community. Add in the layer of being an artist, a group that rarely enjoys the benefit of healthcare access through employment, and you have a group primed to use tools such as mutual aid to make up for where governments and corporations lack.

You can feel his stern gaze wavering. I’ve got you, man who used to be in Bottom. You reach for an Alyssa Wejebe column for Unwinnable, which delves into the making of “turn-based DinosauRPG” Clever Girls, which has a demo out on Steam.

Then Goglin considered what would actually be taught at a dinosaur school. He eventually thought it would probably be tactics and pack hunting, and that led to envisioning a turn-based game about positioning and stealth.

“The kind of game where you can literally enact the cool ‘Clever girl’ moment in Jurassic Park where the Australian guy is ambushed,” Goglin explains. “But I still wanted to preserve the relationship angle. So, I thought perhaps the tactics will connect really deeply with the relationships between the characters, which is really the root of the game. But then, in order to have all this complex relationship drama, the raptors had to be a lot smarter than an animal-level intelligence for it to be compelling.”

“Jurassic park’s a good film, innit,” Ade concedes. The pair of you form an uneasy truce amid the intergalactic nothingness. The sexual tension can only be sliced through by a song like Joji’s Pixelated Kisses or something by Portishead, so those sort of have to be this week’s music.

You wonder, with trepidation, whether you’ve stumbled into a universe whose landmasses are exclusively ageing comics. Or, more worryingly, if Ade is the only one, and thus some sort of highly-evolved overlord.