It's been a short, eventful week here at Remap. Howling winds across New England brought with them a lot of fun stuff, including Austin Walker's first byline for Remap. They also brought a lot of anxiety for my dogs, who cannot stand the rattle of the doors in their frames or the sound of tarpaulins snapping on the roof. The fact that one of them would get me out of bed by 5 AM every day this week probably contributed a lot to how much I managed to get done. A lot of that stuff is listed below but there's also some good stuff coming next week as well that I'm really excited to see published.
Stream: Cado and I painted another masterpiece in Motorsport Manager.
Article and Podcast: Early one morning, with the world still in darkness beneath a vault of clouds tossed by the northerly gale, I woke to find a draft and a recording from Austin on Dragon's Dogma 2. We published the article on the website, and his chatty and somewhat improvisational reading is for our Library Tier subscribers (and those folks who were kind enough to sign up for the Foundation Tier in our first six months of operations).
Podcast: My Turn watched Shin Godzilla, and we delighted in its combination of awesome monster battles and lighthearted bureaucratic satire. What comes next for My Turn? To be determined. But honestly, much though I think Cloverfield is a natural follow-up, I think the correct answer might be Oppenheimer.
Podcast: Cado and I had wide-ranging chat for Remap Radio Episode 40. It must be this new Baratza coffee grinder life I am living, because we just ended up hanging out as we compared Balatro strategies, I wondered why I'm not playing Shogun 3 alongside the new FX series, and we discussed the possibility of transitioning from Motorsport Manager to Funselektor's upcoming Golden Lap.
By the way, I completely missed that they made a smaller game along these lines some years back called The 107% Rule, which I might like better as a title because it's a very mild "real ones know" reference to a defunct requirement in F1 qualifying. It's neat how much you can see what is going on in Golden Lap in this video for 107%. To my ears it sounds like they mixed the audio so that you hear what you would hear sitting on pit lane, but as cars move away around the circuit, the pitch of their engines changes and they grow quieter. What an awesome, evocative touch.
Article: Patrick and I discussed the Sweet Baby situation in a letters-series piece called "The Shrieking Minority", available to Library Tier subscribers on upwards. Featuring a couple rants I've been holding onto for some time.
...even at face value, the GamerGate rallying cry wouldn’t have remotely interested me. The notion that we all had to uphold some notional code of ethics propounded by randos was laughable. What bothered me was the people in the business who gave it a moment’s serious consideration. Because if you want people to live their lives at all times to avoid even the hint of a possible conflict of interest, you should probably pay them a fucking living.
Meeting Up: As I mentioned at the start of the week, we're gonna be at the Birch Bar in the Westin across from the BCEC at PAX East from 4-6 PM Eastern on Saturday. I met a few folks already after my panel with Josh Sawyer, Elea Gadea, and Eloise Singer on historical research and games (which went really well, it was a blast). I hope to see more folks at Birch Bar!