#rare footage of good parenting on this podcast

[keepin-it-on-the-d-l]

What a silly family, I sure hope nothing bad happens to them!

[commonratmiraculous]

The Chat’s Meow | Podcast AU

Where Marinette’s reaction to Alya’s starting the Ladyblog was to get a lot offended on Chat Noir’s behalf at Paris staning her while trashing him, while simultaneously realising that journalism is a good cover for escaping during an akuma. So she starts her own Podcast based on Chat Noir.

A large part of how she’s able to leave during classes while at school and what not is an agreement with her parents and teachers. They don’t want her running right into the middle of things, she should record details and edit them later rather then getting live footage, stay on the sidelines - she’s rarely seen in the middle of things so it works for easing her parents’ fears a little. And she’s got to make up all the work missed in school. Alya’s beyond pissed that Mari manages to get a good deal rather then being stuck in class.

Of course Marinette doesn’t actually get to do the podcast until later in the day when she’s home and caught up with homework, so the Ladyblog posts content quicker - sometimes even live - and it has a bigger fanbase so... Marinette’s not losing her best friend over it. If anything it’s a healthy competition.

Being a designer, she starts new shows/episodes with an akuma recap not just of what happened but a costume critique. Cue comments like, “Project Runway contestants have done better” etc. And she actually invites Nathaniel to talk about his costume because hey! he designed that. Cue comments like, “I can’t believe you went on a date with my akuma.”

But there’s still a definite focus on Chat Noir. Like how there’s Halloween specials like Alya’s Valentines day post on Ladybugs about Black Cats: stating that the only reason Black Cats hold that stereotype is because most popular media is American, and they believe Black Cats are bad luck because they were believed to be companion pets for witches and Christianity - the most prominent religion in America believes witchcraft to be a sin. Nevermind the fact that witches sought out Black Cats as companion animals because they were believed to bring good luck so long as they were by their side. Essentially, Black Cats are good luck when coming towards you and when at your side but bad luck when walking away or crossing your path.

Respect for the power that Chat Noir actually holds, like, anyone can create something and sure most would have an extremely difficult time coming up with wildly elaborate and off the wall schemes, but the implications of Cataclysm? You’d have to be an incredibly disciplined person to hold that kind of power and not be tempted to use it in day-to-day life. Given the kinds of things people in Paris are getting akumatized over... well.

Maybe Marinette cheats a bit in mentioning past heroes and especially the consequences of Chat Noirs going Rogue or Chat Noirs and Ladybug’s fighting eachother. Causing Alya to get jealous again perhaps because Marinette keeps getting new info and things and is staying ahead of newsmedia. That is if she gets away with it - after a meeting with Fu perhaps? It could be a lesson in her Guardian training about what to tell and what not to tell.

She could also give relationship advice to Chat, “Kitty if you’re listening to this, you’re not going to get very far with Ladybug if you don’t respect her boundaries. If she says no and you don’t respect that she’s only going to wonder when else you’ll ignore it.” She’s only a little hurt when Chat decides to give the Ladyblog the interview where he apologises and states that he doesn’t actually condone behaviour like that and will change/do better after realising the implications.

Though that’s not to say Chat Noir doesn’t show up in a lot of the podcasts. And there’s obvious chemistry between him and Marinette to a point where MariChat gets a large enough following to trend. To her embarrassment - because everyone who knows her well enough to know about her crush on Adrien assumes she has a type.

Marinette’s still a little unsure over whether Alya’s more upset about Chat being a frequent guest on the podcast or the fact that MariChat gets in the way of her favourite ships.

[bryonysimcox]

You've Got to Look for the Good Stuff: Week 14, Spain

Like light is to darkness, this week has been an antidote to the last. My mood has lifted and the days have flown by, as lockdown continues and we do too.

Sunshine is a simple remedy. Each day this week has been warm and dry, if not bright and sunny too. It’s allowed us to live more inside-outside, which not only makes life easier but lifts my mood. It’s been a stark contrast to the constant rain and cold which dominated last week’s blog post.

I’ve also loved seeing pictures of children out in the streets and parks again, as Spain slowly lifts its coronavirus measures. It’s almost incomprehensible to imagine what it must be like for all these youngsters, many of whom have been cooped up in city-centre apartments with their siblings and parents for weeks and weeks. Even with the generous garden we have here and our weekly walks to the supermarket I’ve been going borderline insane, so I shudder to think how isolation has affected kids and their mental health.

Gaba Podcast live streams continue to punctuate my week. Adam Martin, whose podcast I mentioned in Week 10’s post, shares breathwork and meditative practices that have really helped me ease my busy mind. One of the things Adam talked about this week was what we consider to be ‘exercise’, in light of zealous Brits moaning that people sitting in the park, standing still in public and seemingly staring into space are breaking government-imposed controls around exercise. Adam argues that we consider sport and movement in open space an essential part to looking after our physical health, whilst ignoring the ‘exercise’ or psychological nurturing that our mental health deserves.

While this pandemic takes lives, we need to keep in mind the impact that social distancing is having on our psyches.

I titled this week’s digital diary entry ‘You’ve Got To Look Out For The Good Stuff’ because I’ve realised that there’s plenty of good stuff around, but quite simply, you’ve got to look for it. That might sound pretty obvious, but in comparing this week to the last, I can see that the main thing that’s changed isn’t my situation, but more so my mindset. Admittedly, the sunshine has made a huge difference, but apart from that, we’re still stuck in lockdown in Spain in the same physical, geographical and financial situation that we were in last week.

What’s caused this shift in mindset? Honestly, I don’t know. I think life in lockdown is making us act in all kinds of strange ways, cycling through an emotional spectrum so extreme we’ve rarely experienced it before and yet now feels like the norm. Tears, laughter, smiles and frowns easily paint my face in a matter of hours. So maybe my mood this week has just been luck. But as my shifted mindset has worked its magic, somehow I’ve seen and experienced little nuggets of ‘good stuff’. I hope that some of you have seen and enjoyed those nuggets too, wherever you are.

After rain left the road to the supermarket blocked, we finally made it to the shops this week, when the water subsided.

Perhaps fearful of another rainfall, this time we piled the trolley high in the local Aldi and returned home to stock up the cupboards. A plentiful fridge has resulted in some more cooking adventures - this week including George’s new specialty, Spanish omelette, and a new fave of mine too, veggie paella.

We picked and podded the final batch of broad beans this week, and helped to dig up the patch where they were growing to make way for the vegetables of the coming season: tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers and peppers. One of the inadvertent blessings of being ‘marooned’ here in Catalunya has been to see and enjoy the changing of the seasons, and my interest in food growing and land management increases with them. George and I have always said we’d like to live in Spain in a self-built tiny house with a bit of land, and somehow we’ve landed in a situation right now that’s not far off! In addition to the vegetables we can get from the garden, I’ve been buying fresh eggs from the neighbour (often still warm from the coop!) which is a real treat.

(images, left to right) ‘Why simple changes [like growing food] are really profound’ a lovely illustration I discovered from Brenna Quinlan, George prepping the soil for tomatoes, and my new favourite thing to cook, veggie paella.

Food isn’t the only ‘good stuff’ to be grateful for. Since I mentioned Simon Mair’s article in my post from Week 11, I’ve been researching ‘Ecological Economics’ and its potential to lead us towards more just and sustainable ways of living. That research finally came to a head this week, when I had the pleasure of interviewing not only Simon himself but also friend and futures thinker from Mumbai, Mansi Parikh.

Making a video about alternative economic futures which address some of the challenges posed by Covid-19 is turning out to be a bit of a challenge in itself!

The interviews with Simon and Mansi were utterly fascinating, and I was so grateful to be able to talk to two super knowledgeable folk, who like me, are passionate about the future and how we can make it better. They shared their time and their insights, and now I’m left with over 150 minutes of recorded zoom calls to make sense of!

I want to use these interviews to make a video which engages people who perhaps wouldn’t usually be interested in economics, without ‘watering down’ the message or intent of the film. It’s such a hard balance to strike, to create something which is at once accessible and engaging but also rich with ideas. As the week progresses, I’ll start editing the footage and hopefully the narrative of the video will reveal itself.

One of the best things about making a new video is the chance to do loads of research! There have been so many articles which have got my brain buzzing, from ‘no-growth’ economics to deliberative democracies, and I’ve also just started reading ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ which is a manifesto for a post-Capitalist future. Even if this research doesn’t directly inform the video I’m working on, it serves to inspire me. I’ve actually found myself a few times this week almost overwhelmed by how much interesting media there is out there to consume, and often just resort to adding thing to my ‘read later’ list, or quoting my favourite gems on Twitter.

(images, left to right) Recording interviews with Mansi and Simon, and my latest reading project...

The realisation of a project we began in January, ‘Place Portraits: Episode 1’ was finally released this week.

George had the idea a while ago to create a video series exploring cities and places through analogue photography. Whilst it was a super simple idea, we thought these short, laid-back videos would contrast with some of the longer-format stuff or more informative films we’re hoping to upload on the Broaden YouTube channel.

Back at the start of our trip we shot on a roll of Kodak Portra 400 and Fujifilm C200, using the trusty Pentax that was once George’s dad’s camera. We’d had the photos back from the processing lab for a while, but have only just completed the edit and got the film online, which is such a nice feeling. We’ve had some lovely responses to the resulting four-minute video, and I’ve especially valued constructive feedback so we can start to think critically about what Episode 2 might look like.

(video) Place Portraits: Episode 1 - Paris

Since ‘The Hundred Miler’ hit 90K views this week (which in and of itself is pretty nuts), I knew I had to temper my expectations about how many views we’d get with Place Portraits. Even though it’s not far past 200 views, each and every one of those views counts and I’m chuffed to see it finally online. Watching Broaden’s audience slowly grow has also served as great motivation to submit The Hundred Miler into film festivals, a process which we started this week.

There’s probably plenty more good stuff which deserves to be celebrated, but the one which can’t go unmentioned is of course the company of others.

Embracing what has become a routine activity for many of us these days, I’ve spent some cheerful hours on phonecalls and videochats to others across the globe.

This week included a three-way call between Ireland, Australia and Spain with dear friends that George and I used to live with catching up on career plans, cats and newfound hobbies. I also enjoyed a game of movie charades (which involved some impressive commitment from some people!) and even attended an evening of ‘drag queen bingo’. These digital hangouts leave me asking ‘Would I be connecting with friends and family this much if the world wasn’t in a global pandemic?’ and I think the answer would be no.

(images) Just some of the beautiful humans that feed my soul.

I’m grateful that these human connections are now much more of a priority. In being restricted to a simpler and more isolated way of living, we’re certainly reassigning value to the things that matter. That’s something which I’ve found from making the economics video and learning about the idea of value, but also something I’ve felt in a visceral way when a phone call with my parents or a friend leaves me beaming.

There’s so much good stuff out there, you’ve just got to be open to it.

[newmusicradionetwork]

Country Newcomer Whitney Miller Releases New Music Video For Current Single “Diamond Country”

Country music singer-songwriter Whitney Miller is excited to release the new music video for her current single, “Diamond Country.” Miller, after being crowned Miss Texas and Miss United States, the former kickboxing commentator and MMA fighter knew there were many things she enjoyed in life and music was at the top of her list. With a blend of pop-infused country, this dance anthem contains a roaring beat, dynamic fiddle, and a rolling banjo that is rarely heard these days. “Diamond Country” highlights the many things in life that make you feel good and proves there is room in this world for a Rhinestone Cowgirl. The “Diamond Country” music video was premiered and fans can continue to expect new music in 2023! “The “Diamond Country” music video is more than a debut video. It’s a permission slip to everyone to fully embrace who you are and have fun while doing it,” shares Miller. “If I could tell 10-year-old Whitney that CMT would be premiering her debut music video, she would absolutely freak out. This moment is the pinnacle of what I thought was possible. Every doubt and worry that has kept me from fully living my dream is put to rest, at least for a little while! This is truly a thrill of a lifetime and something I will never forget! Thank you, CMT for giving even more life to Diamond Country” While filming, it was important for her to also capture the behind-the-scenes footage to be able to share it with her fans. Offering an in-depth look allows the viewers to truly understand the process it takes to create, execute and deliver a quality music video that fans have come to love and expect. Whitney Miller’s Behind The Scenes Video of “Diamond Country” was premiered exclusively by M Music & Musicians Magazine. “Whitney Miller is a force of nature in many ways! Raw talent, work ethic, and a desire to make a difference on this planet, make her a great new addition to the country music arena!” – Bernard Porter / PCG Nashville For more information on Whitney Miller and her schedule, visit her website, or follow her on social media: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Website | YouTube About Whitney Miller: Former professional athlete, Miss United States 2012, kickboxing commentator, and podcaster, Whitney Miller is a Texas-born country singer-songwriter living in Nashville, Tennessee. Whitney’s roots and deep love to write and perform original country music dates back to being a little girl in South Texas, growing up listening to acts like Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Bonnie Raitt, and Johnny Cash from her parent’s record collection. Today, her sound is influenced by those early days as well as early Miranda Lambert and Gretchen Wilson. Over the last 4 years, Whitney has specialized in unique relationship and life design. She knows how freeing it is to live life on your own terms, with less fear, and has directly supported hundreds of people from professional and Olympic athletes and CEOs, to stay-at-home parents as they step into their truth and unleash the life they truly desire. She joined forces with some of the leading scientists and researchers in the field, and for the last 2 years co-hosted an extremely popular podcast that debuted at #50 on overall iTunes charts and now has over 1 million downloads. She knows, now more than ever, our relationships, especially our relationship with ourselves, directly influence the quality and vitality of our life. In true “go for it” Whitney fashion, she has decided to take her biggest leap of faith yet and left her home state of Texas for Nashville, Tennessee to chase her lifelong dream as a singer-songwriter. Her vast life experience and comfort in the spotlight allow her to not only create feeling through her lyrics and voice but also to inspire her audience. Whitney is currently finishing her debut album recorded at Orb Recording studios with an all-star cast of guest musicians to be released in 2022. Expect a fun, country rock album filled with vulnerable real-life stories and lots of attitude! Suggested post: .@whitnlove releases #DiamondCountry music video and was premiered by @CMT. Purchase/Stream: hypeddit.com/whitneymiller/diamondcountry Read the full article

[maddythenarwhal]

Tw: depression, family drama, trauma, guilt, mentions of abuse, a whole bunch of stuff

I'm sending this out into the void, because I need to talk it out. I dont want to bother my friends with it, because they have other shit going on. I dont care if anyone reads this, I just need to get it out.

Today has been rough. A combination of hormones, depression, stress, and exhaustion have left me feeling pretty deflated and angry.

My period showed up a couple of days ago, a full month late. Pretty much every month I get super irritable and depressed around shark week. Sometimes dangerously depressed.

I've been working from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed most days, with short breaks here and there throughout the day to watch a short fun video or scroll through social media. Of course, social media is currently doing me more harm than good, since its flooded with wildfires and shootings and so many other painful things.

I got sick a few days ago (probably a combo of my hormones being all over the place and stress) and had to take 4 days off. I felt guilty pretty much the entire time. I wasn't being productive. I wasn't making any progress on the long list of things I have to get done on fairly tight deadlines.

I recorded a podcast episode yesterday, and somehow the footage got corrupted. I'm still deciding whether to try to salvage it, re-record the whole damn thing, or just give up. I'm fairly sure that last one is an irrational reaction, but it would definitely be the easiest option.

This morning, as I was grabbing breakfast from the kitchen (I hadn't had a chance to wake up yet, and wasn't really coherent), my aunt (who I live with because my other options were go back to live in an unsafe house with neglectful and emotionally abusive parents or homelessness) decided it was the perfect time to remind me that I'm not grateful enough for everything that my uncle (her brother) does for us. She listed everything he's paying for, and then told me that I have to apply for food stamps myself because she can't afford to feed me.

Now, I've been feeding both of us a couple of days each week. I clean up after her animals as best I can. I work a ridiculous number of hours. She very rarely cooks, never cleans (her room and car are infested with fleas), doesn't take out the garbage until its literally piling up onto the floor, and spends all of her time either watching tv (loudly) or napping. The kitchen is a mess, with no free counter space. It's all covered with dirty dishes or kitchen gadgets she buys and then uses for maybe two weeks. We're both disabled, but I bear the brunt of the physical chores, plus also having a physically demanding job and maintaining a fairly large garden in an attempt to save some money on produce in the long term.

She also has no idea how to cook. Turkey burgers should not have pink in the middle, and a slightly warm raw potato is not "roasted".

Then tonight during DnD, I shared a cute pic of a sphinx kitten. I mentioned that I'd love to have a sphinx cat. My cousin decided to remind me, for about the 4th time, that I "don't need any more animals". Thanks, definitely didnt ask your opinion, and definitely don't need to be reminded that I'm not going to be able to have a cat anywhere in the foreseeable future.

I feel like I'll never be enough for my family. I'll never be productive enough, capable enough, responsible enough, or make the "right" decisions about my own life. As much as I tell myself I dont need their approval, it still hurts to constantly be reminded of my shortcomings.

I also cannot cook, clean, maintain the garden, work full time, go to school, and parent my 60 year old aunt. There aren't enough hours in the day, I dont have enough spoons, and some of that shit straight up is not my job. I'm tired of raising adults and being expected to be their mother while also being treated like a child who doesn't know what's best for myself.

I guess I just have to work harder, and do without fun stuff or anything for myself so I can pay bills. I guess this is being an adult.

[shirlleycoyle]

Mothers Against Sinister Technology

Today's Terraform speculation is extra super-special: We've got a collaboration with Rose Eveleth, who brings us a story that takes place in the same world of the latest episode of her inimitable Flash Forward podcast—which, to the uninitiated, is a show all about investigating possible futures. This time, she imagines one way the internet as we know it might cease to be—not with a hack, or a crash, but a, well, you'll see. Enjoy. -the ed

Tuesday, September 8th, 2020 // 3:12pm // Morgantown, VA

The news was calling again. Knocking on the front door, interviewing neighbors. How couldn’t you know? Were there any signs? He was a quiet kid. The son of scientists. A nice quiet house. A good street. No warning? Really?

Cindy Williams was standing in the kitchen, holding a cup of coffee that was burning her hands but she didn’t notice. Perhaps if she stood still they will go away. Perhaps if she closed her eyes and stood perfectly motionless they would stop showing footage of her house on TV, stop cycling through the same two photos of her son. Stop knocking on her door. Stop asking her, really? She really didn’t know?

There were flowers on the table. They were at first a welcome surprise. Then she read the card. “For Mrs. Williams. Your son is a hero. All hail the Supreme Gentleman Parker Williams.” She had nothing in her stomach to puke up but coffee, and it burned in her throat.

Even her friends haven’t called. What could they say? What would she say to them. She knew what she wanted to say. It could have been your kid. It could have been yours. Nobody believed her when she said it. Nancy hung up on her when she said it. Nobody wanted to hear it.

The flowers had to go but she didn’t want to touch them. They felt radioactive, like a poison, like she could somehow catch whatever it was had curdled her son.

The walls were still swimming, but that idea was enough for her to open her eyes. To look at the clock. Poison. Her son was poisoned. He caught a sickness. An infection. A horrible disease. Those friends, vectors, and there is no immunization, no retrovirals. A virus. Why not? Things seemed clearer to her now with this thought. Cindy Williams was a scientist. This was a thing to do. Trace the victims to the original well. Find the source of the sickness.

Her cup of coffee was somehow now empty. She opened the side door. It was four steps to the garbage can. The news will replay the footage for weeks. Mother of mass shooter throwing away flowers. Clearly a sign of rot in their house. Perhaps this is where he got it from. Perhaps she did know.

*

Wednesday, September 8th, 2021 // 10:12am // Washington D.C.

"Every mother hopes to see their son’s name in the papers one day. Perhaps as a Nobel Prize winner, or a heroic doctor who cured cancer, or on stage at the opera singing his heart out. We mothers imagine taking the paper around to our neighbors, our sisters, fellow parents at PTA meetings, pointing, saying “look! It’s my boy!” Last week, my son’s name was in the paper. But instead of being my greatest triumph, it was my worst nightmare.

"You likely know my son by now. His face and manifesto have been plastered and dissected by nearly every outlet you can imagine. Last week, he killed thirty two people, barging into a mosque in San Diego, California wielding several semi-automatic weapons, before committing suicide. Like so many other young men these days, he was radicalized online — led down a hellish rabbit hole that warped his mind and slowly eroded his connections to the real world until nothing was left but a lava-like rage just waiting to erupt.

"It didn’t have to be this way. Parker was always a quiet kid, introspective and thoughtful. He had sandy brown hair, and glasses that always seemed too big for his face no matter how many times we got them refitted. He cared deeply about fairness. He stood up to bullies. He worked hard and was always looking out for others. He mowed our neighbor Mike’s lawn when he got too old to do it himself, and never asked for money.

"Like so many boys, Parker retreated from us as he became a teenager. He was a sensitive boy, and the injustices of the world wore at him, slowly eroding his faith in humanity. And who can blame him, really? I too have felt that familiar ache reading the news, that feeling like you’re slowly drowning in a sea of unjust decisions you can do nothing to stop. But Parker seemed to feel them all more deeply, more personally. We worried, of course, as parents, but what was there to do? He didn’t seem any more sullen than the neighbor’s boy, so we let his long hours locked in his room go by.

"It was in those long hours that eventually, Billy found a community. We thought that this was a good thing — he was suddenly talking about friends, making jokes, making eye contact with us even. He came to the dinner table energetic, full of ideas and provocations that he wanted to discuss and debate. We often disagreed with him, and wondered where these new opinions had come from, but at least he was speaking to us. We had no idea where these so-called friends might lead him, to gun shops and ammunition stores and ultimately to horrifying, premeditated murder."

*

Monday, November 16th, 2020 // 11:32 am // Morgantown, VA

It was the idea of sickness that got her going. Her son was a normal kid, infected by something sinister. Cindy Williams was a scientist. She started reading papers, gathering statistics. She guessed her way into her sons accounts. She started making maps of his network. She started sending emails.

The other parents were easy to find. Their names were always somewhere — on PDFs for local soccer tryouts, letters to the editor, public comments at town council meetings, or posted plainly on message boards celebrating their sons. Cindy Williams knew how to find them, and more importantly she knew how to reach them.

“I know you might not see this email. I know because I know what your inbox is like right now. I know because I’ve been there. My son and yours are probably in the same cubicle in hell right now. Parker killed eleven people at his high school two months ago. You can google my name to check.

Anyway, I’ll keep the email short. I’d like to talk. I think we can these horrible things into something good. We can stop this sickness. Call me. 722-398-9937.”

The phone calls came surprisingly quickly. Maria from Cincinnati. Samantha from Bend. Patricia from Boise. Their voices were somehow familiar immediately, that slight hesitation when their boys names come out of their mouth. Like they haven’t said it in a long time out loud.

There was always guarded smalltalk at first, but Cindy wasn’t one to beat around the bush. “It could have been anybody’s kid,” she’d say, abruptly. “Anybody’s.” There was always silence at this part — half relieved, half stunned. “Our kids were infected. It can happen to anybody. And it can be stopped. I think I know how. Do you want to help me?”

*

Wednesday, September 8th, 2021 // 10:12am // Washington D.C.

"It’s tempting to cast Parker as an outlier, and aberration, an extreme and rare case of Internet poisoning. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Just last week the New York Times published proof that the five mass shootings carried out in the last few months were all perpetrated by men who had connected with one another online at some point. Parker had texted with John Graham, the Tempeh shooter, about ammunition supplies. He had shared memes and talked politics with Brian Lewis, the Dallas gunman. He had emailed back and forth about a climate denial conference with Mark Adamson, the Memphis sniper. They were friends, palling around, recruiting new members and spreading their sickness to others online.

"And it’s not just extreme acts of violence that the Internet is spreading like a contagion. Racism, sexism, homophobia, abelism, transphobia, it’s all seeping out from our devices and into our brains. Experts estimate that today, over twenty percent of America is unvaccinated thanks to conspiracy theories pushed by anti-vaccine advocates online. The CDC considers drop in vaccine rates is a bonafide public health crisis, and just two months ago a measles outbreak killed thousands in Berkeley, California, where residents no longer have herd immunity. A full fifteen percent of Americans believe that the Earth is flat. Thirty percent reject the scientific consensus that climate change is real, and are blocking any real action on it — a move that will eventually lead to millions of deaths not just here but all around the world. Online bullying has become an epidemic. Just last week researchers at Northwestern University published work suggesting that the suicide rate among teens is ten times higher than it has ever been in human history. Fifty thousand teens every year take their own lives in the US, and the leading risk factor is Internet use — the number of hours spent on this network where they’re bullied, tracked, and fed unrealistic stories of what they should look like and achieve."

*

John’s hands gripped the steering wheel tightly.

“I can’t believe you’re taking this meeting.”

Cindy stayed quiet. No use in having the fight again, for the fourth time. She smoothed her navy skirt in her lap and rehearsed her spiel in her head. It was a four hour drive to the capital. She had note cards. John turned on the radio.

When they finally wound their way into the city, it was nearly noon. The sky was clear and John had forgotten his sunglasses. He squinted and leaned forward, looking for road names. Cindy looked at her cards. John took several wrong turns. Cindy didn’t notice.

Sliding out of the car, Cindy didn’t look back. John managed a tight “good luck,” and watched her go. He had no idea how long she’d be. He was tempted to drive home, and leave her there. Why did she want to continue to relive this? To talk about their worst moment, to put their family in the spotlight again and again. Instead, he drove himself to the National Gallery of art, and wandered, half aware of his surroundings, avoiding every painting of a family.

The floors in the Senate building had just been waxed. Cindy rarely wore heels, but every television show about Congress suggested that she should. In the lobby there was an imposing black sculpture that could look like a bird or a fighter jet or a cloudy mountaintop. The hallway to the office was long and the fluorescent lights were slightly dimmer than she expected them to be. American flags dotted the way, casting weak shadows on the shiny floor. Half way down the long hallways she realized she had left her cards in the car. But by now she knew what to say.

The Senator was running behind, but when they got into the same room, it was easy. They were just as charismatic as everybody said. Cindy made her plea, and the Senator smiled, took notes. She had a son too. A son who liked to spend time online. A son who could be infected too. “It could have been anybody’s kid,” Cindy said, and the Senator didn’t stop her. Instead she nodded in agreement.

*

"We cannot stick our heads in the sand any longer. My quiet, strange, lonely boy is no longer an exception. There is a darkness spreading. A deep, fundamental sickness. The Internet is poisoning us all and it’s time we did something about it. It’s time to admit that it’s too dangerous, too toxic for public use. It’s time to walk away from the Internet.

"I am no Luddite, nor do I desire to go back to the stone age or drive a horse-drawn carriage to work. There are functions of the Internet that can stay: financial transactions, transportation systems, international shipping, power supplies, infrastructure. We need not cut the cables literally. But everyday people like you and me cannot risk being exposed to such a dangerous technology. We don’t let citizens handle nuclear waste, or certain kinds of military grade weapons. We already recognize that some technology is too dangerous for everyday civilian use. It’s time we realize that the Internet is one of those technologies."

*

Wednesday, September 8th, 2021 // 10:12am // Washington D.C.

Cindy asked John to lint roll her suit one more time. The third time. There's no lint on it. But she’s nervous. She gets one chance to testify. This is the big moment.

She practiced her hand gestures, the way she would transition from grieving mother to powerful change-maker as she went. The caveat just before the crescendo. She practiced balling her fist and punching it into her opposite hand. No, too much. She practiced putting her hands down flat on the desk and leaning forward. Yes, that one.

She walked into the chamber, and notices a piece of lint on her skirt.

No time now, just a proposal to make.

She bent the mic to her mouth, and began.

"There was, perhaps, a time when we could have done something less extreme than cut ourselves off completely, cold turkey. There was a time when we could have regulated the Internet in one way or another. Surely you remember the proposals, the laws, the anti-trust lawsuits. Perhaps you also remember that they never went anywhere — technology companies were already too big, too powerful to stop. Driven by greed, chasing engagement and clicks, they inadvertently created the perfect vector for this sickness. They say mosquitos are the deadliest thing on the planet — killing 725,000 people every year by infecting them with malaria, dengue, yellow fever, west nile. They’re no match for the Internet, infecting millions each year with hate, fear, rage and panic.

"But the Internet has given us so much good, you might be thinking. How can we turn our backs on it? It’s true. I met my husband through the Internet. I share cat memes and make dinner reservations and order groceries online, just like you. But this is bigger than us. Bigger than our convenience, our easy access to media or sex.

"Think of it this way: imagine there was a road in your town that snaked along an active volcano. Driving along the road offers some of the most beautiful views in the world. But it’s treacherous — about 25 percent of people who drive down that road are subsumed by lava. Another twenty percent come out the other side alive, but burned, their lungs permanently altered by the smoke and ash. If you were the mayor of your town, you would close that road, wouldn’t you? Even if the road happens to have some of the most scenic views of the city. Even if you had your first kiss at the roadside pull-off, you’d close it. It’s simply not worth the risk.

"We must close this road. If we don’t, we’re putting our children’s future at risk."

*

Thursday, May 10th, 2026 // 8:00 am // Faxed Statement from MAST

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Pioneering Anti-Internet Advocate Cindy Williams Passes Away

Cindy Williams (1972-2026) – The charismatic founder of Mothers Against Sinister Technology (MAST), an organization dedicated to pushing for heavy regulation and even destruction of the Internet, died today surrounded by her friends and family. Sparked by her own son’s descent into what MAST later dubbed “Internet Madness,” Williams successfully lobbied Congress to pass several bills heavily restricting access to the Internet in the name of public safety. Reviled by Internet Freedom advocates, Williams held fast to her belief that the Internet was simply too dangerous for the average consumer to navigate.

Thanks to her tireless advocacy, the world is a safer place.

Mothers Against Sinister Technology syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[recentanimenews]

ONINAKI Lets You Confront Grief in a Unique Way

In all my years of playing video games, I’ve found that the games I enjoy the most fall into one of three categories. First, of course, are the big budget AAA games―the attention grabbing titles forged from having millions and millions of dollars funnelled into their development (and marketing). It comes as no surprise when these games are good after months and months worth of footage and impressions have already circulated. Next are the beautiful disasters. These are the games so erroneously awful that they somehow loop back around and become outrageously entertaining. A rare breed of game for sure, but a fun one nonetheless.

  The types of games that make up the third category, though, are the ones nearest and dearest to my heart. These games release with little fanfare and acclaim. Their graphics and gameplay are rarely anything to write home about and their fan bases are quite small. The fans they do have, though, are passionate ones. Whatever they might lack in polish and development funds, to their fans they more than make up for it with their ambitious ideas and unique stories. These games are the raw gemstones of the video game industry. Underneath all the rough, jagged edges a captivating game can be found. ONINAKI―the latest game from Square Enix and Tokyo RPG Factory on Steam, Switch, and PS4―is one of these games.

      Death is held in high regard in the world of ONINAKI, such so that grief is strictly forbidden. Grief shackles the spirits of the dead to the world of the living. Unable to reincarnate, these spirits are known as the Lost. Should the Lost continue to wander in this form, they’ll eventually transform into monsters known as the Fallen. Rare individuals who can travel between the worlds of the living and the dead are known as Watchers. These Watchers aide in the cycle of reincarnation by eliminating the Fallen and ushering the Lost onto their next lives. It’s in this world that ONINAKI sets its sights on Kagachi―a stoic Watcher well-acquainted with grief. A chance encounter with an ageless girl named Linne and the vengeful spirit pursuing her sets Kagachi off on a bloody journey to discover the truth about reincarnation.

  From the outset there are noticeable conflicts happening within ONINAKI. The first is between the game’s art style and its actual content. The game is presented in a beautiful 3D quasi-chibi style not unlike Bravely Default. It’s textures can look rather flat and its environments angular, but there’s a certain quality to the lighting that gives it a realistic sense of depth. This combination gives its world and characters an overall cute, toy-like appearance. Imagine my surprise, then, when the game’s tutorial chapter concluded with me executing a pair of grief-stricken parents who were mourning the death of their son. 

    ONINAKI is a game that’s infatuated with death, and as such treads in some rather dark territory. The Watchers’ order exists less to protect the citizens of the realm than it does to uphold the tenets of reincarnation. This can mean anything from stopping “unsanctioned killings” at the hands of monsters and serial killers to euthanizing the sick and assisting the hopeless in committing suicide. The game never clearly attempts to comment on these controversial topics or the debates being held over them around the world. It instead simply presents them as the natural result of a religious order that worships death. 

  Death and reincarnation as objects of worship are central to the other major conflict within ONINAKI. Though there are specific, named enemies Kagachi finds himself in conflict with throughout the game’s story, the ultimate conflict Kagachi faces is between himself and his faith in reincarnation. That much is fairly obvious from the beginning, but the twists and turns that take place throughout the story and the conclusions he’s ultimately led to are best left experienced by oneself. 

      My feelings on the story by the end were honestly pretty mixed. ONINAKI’s premise is novel and intrigued me instantly. The game’s gradual worldbuilding felt like a breadcrumb trail made up of bits and pieces of truth about the world that led all the way to the story’s final big reveal. It was a rewarding experience that had me constantly on the hook for the next morsel of information. It unfortunately fumbles, though, when it comes to writing Kagachi. He’s a bland and boring character in a game that lacks a party of lively personalities to make up for his lack of one. It’s hard to ever understand what he’s thinking, so his eventual moments of “character growth” come across less as believable actions and more things he has to do because he’s the hero. That combined with some pacing issues in the game’s second half are the biggest issues in an otherwise pretty good story.

  Still, though, a good story on its own probably isn’t enough to recommend. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be, because ONINAKI is actually pretty fun to play too! When not experiencing the story, players will be running around 3D areas battling hordes of Fallen with spiritual weapons called Daemons. Daemons are rare beings who were unable to reincarnate yet too strong-willed to become Fallen. Only elite Watchers are able to possess and wield a Daemon. You start off with one sword-wielding Daemon in ONINAKI, but as you explore and progress through the story you’ll find many more each with their own unique weapons and combat styles. Up to four Daemons can be equipped at a time and can be cycled through as you please during battle. 

    Every Daemon starts off with a basic attack and one special skill that can be triggered on a cooldown. As you continue to fight with that Daemon defeated enemies have a chance of dropping upgrade items called Soulstones unique to the Daemon you’re using. Each Daemon has a unique skill tree where these Soulstones can be exchanged for new skills, passive buffs, and even memories from that Daemon’s past life. Each Daemon has their own set of stats separate from Kagachi’s increasing stat levels and Soulstone drops are rather generous, so upgrading a newly acquired Daemon to the level of your very first is a fairly easy task.

  The Daemons are easily one of ONINAKI’s best features. Unlocking new Daemons adds a lot of variety to the game’s combat. In the interest of time I mainly stuck to two Daemons―one for fighting normal enemies and another for boss battles―but had I more time I would have tried to grind out the skill trees of the rest as well. While grinding out these skill trees is nowhere near a herculean task, it isn’t a very fun one. A few of the passive skills locked away in every Daemon’s skill trees are features that simply make combat less fun to be without. The simple ability to cancel out of skills, attacks, and a Daemon’s unique mobility option is essential to a satisfying combat flow, so it’s rather frustrating to have that feature locked away behind multiple upgrades. I’d say it takes about a full level of forcing yourself to use the Daemon you want to use to be able to upgrade them to a point where they’re actually fun to use. Stick with it, though, and they can become absolute wrecking balls. 

    The various Daemons found throughout the game are also, surprisingly, the game’s best characters. Not only are their designs all quite captivating, but also their individual stories are some of the best writing in the entire game. Each Daemon was once a living soul within the world of ONINAKI, and as you go through their skill trees you’ll receive pieces of their backstory and find out how each one of them died. In addition to being well-written side stories in their own right, they tie in to the central narrative and themes of ONINAKI as well. At a certain point, I found myself wanting to upgrade my Daemons less for the combat benefits and more so I could learn more about them. In fact, once I finish this review I plan on going back and doing just that. Given how much time was put into fleshing them out as characters, it’s an honest shock that Daemons never factor into the story as anything other than a weapon. 

  Looking back on my time with ONINAKI, I think it can be best summed up as a game that’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s an odd patchwork of concepts and ideas―weird, ambitious ideas that don’t always make a lot of sense or even feel like finished thoughts. It’s a conflicting game that strikes conflicting tones, a decision reflective of the many dualities presented in the narrative. There are two sides to this story, two worlds to jump between, two names for our heroes, two choices to make at the very end, and two moments I’ll remember most from my time with ONINAKI. The first was a moment of loss; the other an inconsequential choice. ONINAKI may not be my favorite game, but it is my favorite type of game, one I’ll be recommending for years to come.

    REVIEW ROUNDUP

+ Beautiful soundtrack

+ Good character designs and well-realized art style

+ Daemon side stories contain some of the best writing in the game

+/- Novel premise and strong ideas that mostly carry on to a satisfying conclusion

+/- Gameplay is varied and interesting, though some boss encounters are altogether frustrating

- Essential quality of life combat features are locked behind upgrades

- Kagachi is a really dull protagonist

  How does ONINAKI compare to your favorite Square Enix RPGs? Let us know in the comments below!

      -----

Danni Wilmoth is a Features writer for Crunchyroll and co-host of the video game podcast Indiecent. You can find more words from her on Twitter @NanamisEgg.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[chestnutpost]

Everything Else You Want To Know After Seeing ‘Leaving Neverland’

This post was originally published on this site

“Leaving Neverland,” which HBO aired in two parts on Sunday and Monday, offers the Me Too era’s most detailed portrait of sexual abuse to date. In profiling two men who say Michael Jackson charmed his way into their childhoods, only to molest them repeatedly and later cast them aside, Dan Reed’s documentary shows how an alleged predator courts and manipulates vulnerable targets, leaving behind emotional wounds that are hard to mend.

However thorough the film may be, it leaves many unanswered questions. Reed had a lot of ground to cover in order to piece together a resonant compendium of Wade Robson’s and James Safechuck’s experiences, so even with a four-hour running time, “Neverland” skirts certain particulars.

I’ve attempted to fill in some of those gaps. If you’ve seen the doc, let’s dig into a few omissions. (You can also learn more about the movie via my interview with Reed, conducted a few days after “Neverland” premiered at Sundance.)

First thing’s first: Macaulay Culkin. When’s the last time he spoke about his relationship with Jackson? 

As recently as January. On an episode of the celebrity interview podcast “Inside of You with Mathew Rosenbaum,” Culkin said that nothing untoward happened with Jackson ― a refrain he’s repeated time and again over the years, including when he took the stand during Jackson’s 2005 molestation trial. “It’s almost easy to try to say it was weird or whatever, but at the end of the day, we were friends,” Culkin told Rosenbaum, calling the relationship “normal” and “mundane.” 

Based on what we know from Culkin’s 2005 testimony, many of his experiences with Jackson ― extensive phone calls, limitless shopping sprees, childlike games ― mirror those of Robson and Safechuck. A key difference, as Culkin tells it: The bed they shared was platonic. 

“He enjoyed my youthfulness,” Culkin said on “WTF with Marc Maron” in early 2018. “He liked being a kid with me. It never struck me as odd. I never felt uncomfortable. That was just the way he was.”

I reached out to Culkin’s publicist to ask if the “Home Alone” actor would talk about “Leaving Neverland,” vowing to treat the interview with care given the sensitive subject matter. “We are receiving myriad requests all with the promise of intent to ‘handle the topic responsibly,’” she responded. “We appreciate your interest Matt, however no thank you.”

Kevin Kane via Getty Images Michael Jackson and Macaulay Culkin at a star-studded concert celebration for Jackson, held at Madison Square Garden in 2001.

Let’s talk about the other members of Jackson’s entourage mentioned in the documentary. What about the makeup artist who escorted Safechuck to Jackson’s trailer on the set of the Pepsi commercial?

That’s Karen Faye, who worked for Jackson for almost three decades, until he died in 2009. She was fiercely loyal and attentive, so much so that gossip mongers wondered if she and Jackson were having an affair while he was married to Lisa Marie Presley. Faye testified in his 2013 wrongful-death trial, describing the painkiller dependence Jackson developed after his hair caught fire while shooting a 1984 Pepsi ad. 

It appears none of that loyalty has faded. On her unverified Twitter account, Faye has spent the past several weeks defending Jackson against Robson and Safechuck.

Michael Jackson’s name, art and legacy will live on forever. The accusers and con artists will disappear into obscurity when we stop saying their names.

— Karen Faye (@wingheart) February 25, 2019

Where can I see Safechuck’s Pepsi ad?

Right here. 

What about the housekeeper mentioned in Part 2?

That’s Blanca Francia, who worked for Jackson from 1986 to 1991. Francia said during the 2005 trial that she spotted Jackson showering with a 7-year-old Robson, something she’d alluded to years earlier in an interview for the popular TV tabloid series “Hard Copy.”

Francia’s son, Jason, was allegedly molested by Jackson on three occasions ― twice at Neverland Ranch and once at Jackson’s Los Angeles apartment known as “the hideaway.” In 1996, the Francias reached an out-of-court settlement with Jackson worth a reported $2 million. Jason testified against him in 2005.  

Then there’s Adrian McManus, another housekeeper, who defended Jackson in a 1994 deposition because she worried about potential ramifications but reversed course on the witness stand in 2005. McManus isn’t directly referenced in the documentary, but she recently told the Australian edition of “60 Minutes” that she saw Jackson “kissing” and “petting” boys at Neverland, including Culkin and Jordan Chandler, whose family settled a civil lawsuit against Jackson outside of court in 1994. (Investigators later opted not to pursue criminal charges because Chandler did not want to testify. In the process, they found two other alleged victims who also declined to testify, according to the Los Angeles Times.)

McManus said she signed a confidentiality agreement and was “conditioned” not to question the singer’s behavior. “I was threatened,” she revealed on the program. “His bodyguards told me that if I ever came up on TV that they could hire a hitman, take me out, slice my neck and we’d never find my body. … I lived in fear for many, many years.”

Where have I seen the lawyer with the white hair before?

Thomas Mesereau, who helped get Jackson acquitted in 2005, has made a career out of defending celebrities accused of things like sexual misconduct or murder. The list includes Bill Cosby, Mike Tyson, Suge Knight and Robert Blake.

“I am 100 percent convinced Michael never abused a child, never harmed a child, certainly never molested a child,” he maintained during the same “60 Minutes” piece that features McManus. “I think this is hogwash.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS Michael Jackson and attorney Thomas Mesereau enter the Santa Barbara County Superior Court on June 13, 2005. 

What else happened during the 2005 trial?

A lot, including testimony from Martin Bashir, the journalist responsible for the damning 2003 TV documentary “Living with Michael Jackson,” which became evidence because it featured footage of 13-year-old accuser Gavin Arvizo nuzzled up against Jackson. (I asked Bashir to discuss “Leaving Neverland,” but his manager declined on Bashir’s behalf.)

If there’s a defining takeaway from both the 1993 and 2005 lawsuits, it’s how similar Chandler’s and Arvizo’s accounts are to the ones Robson and Safechuck outline in “Leaving Neverland,” including the tactics Jackson used to coach them and the progression of his alleged sexual acts.

You can reach all about the ’05 trial in the excellent Esquire explainer.

Why doesn’t “Leaving Neverland” feature accounts from members of Jackson’s entourage?

Dan Reed, the director, has been fielding this question a lot. When I asked him about it at the Sundance Film Festival in January, he said he saw little value in including perspectives from people who, unlike Safechuck and Robson, don’t know what unfolded behind Jackson’s security-laden bedroom door. Reed apparently spoke to various legal investigators and Neverland Ranch employees who could only produce “circumstantial corroboration.”

“What we have in the story is from the horse’s mouth,” he explained. “We have the child speaking about what happened to him, and I didn’t know how much more credible it would appear if I have a maid going, ‘Well, yeah, I saw Wade.’ … I never found a single investigator who didn’t think Michael was guilty, and I never came across anything at all that led me to doubt either Wade or James.”

Reed doubled down on “CBS This Morning” last week, responding to accusations of one-sidedness by pointing out that “Neverland” includes Jackson’s perspective via footage of the pop star’s denials from 1993 and 2005. “This isn’t a film about Michael Jackson,” he said. “It’s a film about Wade Robson and James Safechuck, two little boys to whom this dreadful thing happened long ago. It’s the story of them coming to terms with that over two decades, and the story of their families.”

Jackson’s inner circle was huge, so the collective cover-up also must have been huge, right?

In a word, yes. It’s impossible to glean exactly how much everyone knew about the molestation allegedly going on at Neverland and elsewhere, but there’s no doubt that Jackson employed a lot of people who turned a blind eye or reduced his behavior to mere eccentricities. Every time the Robsons or Safechucks were summoned to Neverland, it surely wasn’t Jackson who was booking their plane tickets, chauffeuring them to and fro, or tidying up after them. For comparison’s sake, a striking aspect of last year’s Lifetime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly” was realizing the breadth of R. Kelly’s co-conspirators. 

“It was very rare that Michael was alone,” Robson told Oprah Winfrey during a special that aired after “Leaving Neverland” on Monday. “He had a machine around him at all times. Secretaries organized most of my phone calls and cars to pick me up to bring me to him. Security guards were always there outside of the door. There were so many people around. There’s no way that Michael could have abused at the level that he did and the number of kids that he did without a machine behind him helping him do that.” 

Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP Wade Robson, director Dan Reed and James Safechuck at the Sundance Film Festival.

Here’s a big one: How are we supposed to feel about the mothers?

Your conclusion is as good as mine, but it’s certainly complex. Something “Leaving Neverland” does particularly well is grant every subject what amounts to a full profile, respecting everyone’s vantage no matter how objectionable.

Jackson didn’t just court Wade and James ― he courted their parents too, quickly ingratiating himself as a pseudo family member and showering them with gifts. As James says, “It’s all a big seduction.” And so it’s easy to see how these middle-class parents with talented sons got swept up in the enchantment, deluded by what Stephanie Safechuck calls “the life of the rich and famous.” 

But at what point does myopia become willful blindness? Neglect, after all, is a form of child abuse.

It’s not impossible to understand the mothers’ positions, though; in America, wealth is an addiction and fame an elixir. These moms thought Jackson, who held all the power in the situation, was fostering their sons’ budding artistic careers. The innocent facade that Jackson projected ― long explained away as a Peter Pan complex stemming from the physical abuse and general frenzy he suffered in his own childhood ― lent them false comfort. 

On the other hand, who in her right mind would leave her 7-year-old at a celebrity’s mansion while spending a week at the Grand Canyon? Who would leave her son in Jackson’s hotel suite overnight after learning that Jackson’s staff had booked her own room far away from his?

They were a pre-Kardashian era’s version of opportunistic momagers. At a certain point, sympathy turns into befuddlement, even if they never lose their humanity ― a conflict that Robson and Safechuck are still grappling with in their adult lives. During a Q&A at the Sundance premiere, Safechuck said his mother is seeking forgiveness that he has struggled to grant.

One quick, peripheral detail: Do celebrities always give away memorabilia willy-nilly?

This is hardly the most vital tidbit from “Leaving Neverland,” but it is mind-blowing that Jackson gave a young Safechuck one of the red jackets from the “Thriller” video. (I say “one of” because another “Thriller” jacket sold for $1.8 million at auction in 2011.)

Safechuck also made off with a bullwhip from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” given to him by the one and only Harrison Ford. I guess when you spend most of your life surrounded by props and costumes and … just … stuff, you stop caring about one little jacket or whip, even if they’re worth millions.

ASSOCIATED PRESS Neverland Ranch in 2009.

Let’s fast forward to the present day. What’s going on with Neverland Ranch?

It’s currently for sale, if you have $31 million and don’t mind living in an alleged pedophile’s home. The 2,700-acre California compound was first listed for $100 million in 2015 but ― surprise, surprise ― found no takers. With the discount, someone will inevitably think it’s a steal, right?

Neverland Ranch, now called Sycamore Valley Ranch, was raided during Jackson’s child-molestation investigation in 2003, but it remains largely unchanged, minus the wild animals and train. 

Will Jackson’s music be muted? 

The first, and to date only, major institution to remove Jackson’s discography from its rotation is BBC Radio 2, the United Kingdom’s most popular station.

A jukebox musical based on the making of Jackson’s 1992 world tour is slated to open on Broadway in 2020. It’s being developed by the Jackson estate, which has already collected a reported $2.1 billion since the singer’s death. I reached out to the writer, Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage, to ask if production plans had changed and whether the show would include Jackson’s allegations, but I didn’t hear back.

I sent similar inquiries to Spotify and Sirius XM, but no responses there either. Spotify, for its part, nixed R. Kelly from official playlists but did not scrub the alleged child abuser’s catalog altogether; time will tell whether it does the same for Jackson.  

There’s also a Jackson-themed Cirque du Soleil performance running in Las Vegas. “Because of current legal proceedings involving one of our partners, we will not comment on this situation,” a representative said in a email.

Are there more survivors who haven’t spoken out?

Yes, though it’s impossible to say how many. Reed told me he knows of at least one more who declined to participate in the doc. Not counting the two anonymous victims the Los Angeles police located in 1994, that brings the total number of accusers to six: Jordan Chandler, Jason Francia, Gavin Arvizo, Wade Robson, James Safechuck and the unknown man Reed met.

“I do think there are others out there,” Safechuck told “CBS This Morning.” “But I also don’t expect them to just come out now that we’re coming out. It’s such a difficult thing to do, to come out. You have to do it when you’re ready.”

What’s up with all the Jackson superfans still defending him?

Oh boy. My Twitter notifications have been inundated ever since I tweeted about the documentary at Sundance. Meanwhile, Reed has received death threats. Loyalists are targeting the contradictions in Robson’s and Safechuck’s accounts, as the men previously maintained that Jackson hadn’t touched them inappropriately ― a commonality among sexual assault survivors who once felt affection for their abusers. (Robson, for one, said in a sworn statement that he didn’t grasp the nature of what happened to him until undergoing therapy in 2012.)

The coalition of superfans is operating offline too. Seany O’Kane, a British disciple, raised money to purchase advertisements on London buses that promote a website proclaiming Jackson’s innocence. (Another woman is apparently attempting to do the same in Los Angeles.) Almost $7,000 of the roughly $16,000 that O’Kane raised came from the Michael Jackson Chinese Fan Club, according to Vice.

If anything, fans’ refusal to recognize Jackson’s flaws speaks to our limited understanding of sexual trauma and the way hero worship becomes a blinder. He is almost inarguably the most beloved public figure to fall in the Me Too era, having soundtracked childhoods, proms, weddings and other cherished memories. However inexcusable, it’s easy to see how someone would dupe himself into trusting Jackson the same way his accusers did. 

What’s disheartening is that many of those fans probably won’t even watch “Leaving Neverland,” much like Jackson’s relatives, who are denouncing the film and suing HBO for $100 million despite refusing to see it.

But the arguments leveled by Jackson’s siblings are vague and limited, specifically the claim that Robson and Safechuck are only out for money. A judge dismissed the sexual assault lawsuits Robson and Safechuck filed back in 2013 and 2014, respectively ― and not because they lacked credibility, but because California’s statute of limitations invalidated them. (Both suits are pending appeal.) Furthermore, Reed said the men, who are subjecting themselves to relentless scrutiny by speaking out, weren’t compensated for participating in “Neverland.” 

Robson told Rolling Stone he agreed to take part only to “help other survivors and play [a] small role in education and prevention.”

Safechuck, meanwhile, said, “[We started this] pre-Me Too, so I had to set realistic expectations, which I try to do for myself. I figured we were gonna get trashed by everybody else, so I didn’t expect people to believe us or come out in support of us. My focus was just on other victims, that they could hear the story and hopefully see themselves in it.”

RELATED…

The post Everything Else You Want To Know After Seeing ‘Leaving Neverland’ appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/everything-else-you-want-to-know-after-seeing-leaving-neverland/

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]