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Image credit: RPS

Sundays are for heading into your kitchen at 7am to find the neighbour’s cat squatting with her back to you on the windowsill. The neighbour’s cat spooks easily and every time you scare her away, you worry she’s never coming back. So let’s very quietly make a cup of coffee and ever so softly click on some links to internet articles and read them as frictionlessly as we can manage.

You! I can hear your eyelids squeaking. I can hear the little wheels chewing and rattling between your temples, as you digest these very words. Please wrap some cotton wool around your head before we continue.

Some more serious pieces, to start with. In a macabre flourish, Sarah Jeong writes about her experiences of protest in the USA while doing her journamalistic duty to search engines, with a piece for The Verge on the best gas masks.

I was tear gassed by the government for the first time in July 2020 at one of the many Black Lives Matter protests that broke out all over the country. The feeling is excruciating, like your lungs are trying to kill you from the inside out. The sting in your eyes is painful, too. But oddly, after you’ve been tear gassed enough times, you mostly just resent the inconvenience of having to stand around and involuntarily gasp and sob. That summer, I learned the art of walking out of a cloud of tear gas — briskly, but not too briskly, lest you lose breath control and take in a huge huff of aerosolized pain.

I thought about this five years later, as I watched Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi appear on Fox News after Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. “How did these people go out and get gas masks?” she asked, incredulously. “These protesters — would you know how to walk out on the street and buy a gas mask, right now? Think about that.”

As a longtime gas mask user, I can sympathize. There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.

Over at Aftermath, Luke Plunkett speaks to nine game developers about their reasons for not attending this year’s Game Developer Conference. As you might expect, the US government’s policies on immigration and trans rights come up frequently, though there’s also some criticism of GDC itself. Here is an excerpt from darkwebSTREAMER lead developer Chantal Ryan’s response:

While I encourage everyone to take a stand against any sort of fiscal support toward the US, my decision is primarily based on personal safety. I’m a person of colour and have been detained by US immigration before on the grounds of racial profiling (I’m half-Indian, they assumed I was Middle Eastern). I’ve also been publicly outspoken against Trump’s fascism for over a decade now, and given the fact US immigration is searching social media for Trump criticism, I don’t want to travel 30+ hours to be turned around upon entry to the US, or worse. And even if I make it in, the idea that I might be stopped on the street, attacked, abducted because of the colour of my skin… well, the list goes on. We skipped our family US Christmas (my husband is American) because the risk seemed too big. This stuff is very real for some of us.

One for both the gaming archaeologists and the modern-day guide writers in the audience: the team at Yarnspinner – creators of narrative design tools used by Night in the Woods, among others – have blogged about the creation of a 90s videogame hintline simulator for the Australian museum of screen culture. They summarise it as “a visual novel on screen, where you’re working a fictional hint line, with critical information in The Compendium, a dog-eared binder full of official docs mixed with handwritten notes from previous counselors who figured out what actually works”. To make it, Yarnspinner consulted with actual former 90s Sega tip line workers, like Brian Costelloe. An excerpt:

During school hours, when kids were in class, the “bored housewives” would call. They were into RPGs, especially Phantasy Star. This became our Midday Mum character, a former geological surveyor who plays games during the day, shares unsolicited life tips, and absolutely refuses to accept that racing games aren’t RPGs.

Brian described super fans calling with questions from Japanese magazines most people in Australia would never see. Kids trying to scam their way past the Sega Club membership requirement to get cheats. Bogans ringing up about Shinobi being “bloody hard.” One mother-and-son team who called for every single step of Phantasy Star, from beginning to end, the mum coaching in the background. They finished the game, bought a Mega Drive for the sequel, then never called again because Phantasy Star II came with a hint guide.

This week saw the launch of Jank.cool, a new reader-supported, ad-free videogame website from erstwhile RPS honchos Graham Smith and Brendan Caldwell, plus GamesIndustry.biz editor Jon Hicks. We generally rejoice when somebody launches a new indie website, so let me state for the record that I hate those guys and all their works. How dare they do good writing elsewhere. How dare they backstab us with their dreams of a life after corporations. How dare they straighten long-bowed backs and lift ruggedly handsome faces to the sunrise as the opening bars of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 burst betwixt the waves of shimmering corn. How dare they make their website name a joke, so that we can’t even comically misname them without sounding like it’s gone over our heads. Anyway, here’s some foundational nonsense from that atrocious git Brendy.

Graham and Jonty might put the Balkanisation of the games media less dramatically (I like committing to a metaphor) but we all agree there are a lot of existential worries when launching a site like this. Will we find time to keep our flag aloft between our day jobs and freelance work? Will we muster any subscribers at all? Can we (should we) compete with the behemoths of IGN or PC Gamer? Both of whom make money not only from ads on articles, but also the big showcases that come attached to their names. Jank does not have a Jank Show. It doesn’t have 38 full-time editors. It has three bruised veterans and a blog roll. And so we join the rest of the hit-and-run reprobates out in the wilderness.

RPS might have had a Jank Show if you’d deigned to pitch one while you were here, turncoat. And what’s this so-called feature on the supposed ‘best games of the decade so far’? It doesn’t even have a Roadwarden or a Blue Prince. Might as well be a list of… of… TRAITOROUS ASSHOLES.

Over at the LRB, Thomas Jones reviews Tom Holland’s new translation of The Lives Of The Caesers. I guess this is a list of assholes.

Julius Caeser ‘invaded Britain in the hope of finding pearls’. Caesar Augustus ‘wore platform shoes, to make him seem taller than he was’. Tiberius ‘was left-handed, with joints so strong that he could push a finger right through a firm, ripe apple’. Caligula ‘never learned to swim’. Claudius ‘would never let anything come between him and food and wine’. Nero had a ‘voice that was reedy and indistinct’. Galba ‘suffered so badly from arthritis... that he could not bear to wear shoes for any length of time’. Otho ‘wore a hairpiece so skilfully fitted that no one would ever have known he was going bald’. Vitellius was ‘enormously tall’. Vespasian ‘did not let any fear of death stop him from cracking jokes’. Titus ‘was born... in a dark and tiny room in a shabby building near the Septizonium’. Domitian would ‘spend hours every day on his own, during which time he would do nothing but catch flies and stab them with a well-sharpened pen’.

The neighbour’s cat has drifted away now, so it’s safe to link some music - Our Lips Are Sealed, by The Go-Go’s. You may have heard it on a Marvel show recently. Have a good Sunday.