Sunday Newspapers | Rock Paper Shotgun

Sundays are for doing things you haven't done in a long time, like a long time after a years-long hunch.

Former Edge designer Andrew Hind launched On, a premium print magazine where he and editor-in-chief Nathan Brown invite writers to produce the article of their dreams.

The first issue features a firehose of Edge alums, Andrew and Nathan, as well as Christian Donlan on handheld puzzle games, Jen Simpkins on dress-up games and, most excitingly, Margaret Robertson on Japanese card games. It's nice, it's shelf-worthy, it's a design-first thing, but I haven't taken the time to actually read any of my copies yet.

Thinky Games has launched a new website with a new database designed to help you find new puzzle (or crossword, puzzle) games to play.

Jeremy Peel comes to Games Radar to talk about how he feels in 2024, when the systemic brutality of Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl is less incongruous:

But their much-lauded innovations were soon normalized. A year after Stalker's launch in 2007, Far Cry 2 arrived, bringing a triple-A polish to the freeform shooter concept and establishing Ubisoft's open-world design formula. What GSC was pushing in those early days was the idea of ​​an emergent FPS, where events and choices were not necessarily pre-scripted but emerged organically from the interplay of game systems. In Far Cry 4, Ubi had set the dials to have urgent events occurring every few minutes; this regularly disrupted missions and exploration.

(Or you can read Jeremy on our own digital pages this week on Sonar Shock, an immersive simulation that finds fun and tension in reimagining the old first-person control scheme.)

A group of former Pitchfork writers have launched their own reader-supported website, Hearing Things. It's a treat to have brought together 100 songs that have defined our decade so far.

Wired's Adam Bumas wrote about “the fight that nearly destroyed the Letterboxd community.” What has the normally civilian film community gone crazy over? Animes, of course.

The problem started on September 9, when Letterboxd curators updated the platform's official list of top-rated movies. Usually the list only changes when a new movie scores high enough to knock another out of the top 250, but Neon Genesis Evangelion: Evangelion's End had dropped out of the list entirely at #23 overall. In a comment on the listing, curator Dave Vis called the removal, which was made after “careful consideration”, “an effort to harmonize our eligibility rules.”

I'm currently reading William Gibson's Idoru and found plenty of threads to follow in Joanne McNeil's article for Filmmaker Magazine about the 40th anniversary of Neuromancer and the past, present and future of cyberpunk:

When Gibson's Burning Chrome was published in 1986, author Jeanne Gomoll expressed her discomfort with Bruce Sterling's introduction to the story collection in an open letter. Sterling had described the previous decade of science fiction as “confused, selfish, and stale.” Gomoll countered that feminist writers were “brushing it under the carpet” of their radical advances in the genre. Some of the feminist writers in the 70s, such as Joanna Russ and Marge Piercy, detailed proto-cyberpunk body modifications and technologies to adapt to new realities. Their fiction would inspire Donna Haraway, who published A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985, a work of theory that incorporated simpatico themes with cyberpunk. There's a broad history beyond cyberpunk, but a project like The Big Book of Cyberpunk branches outward from narrow roots rather than unifying cyberpunk. BT.

Mandy Brown writes beautifully about leaving social media behind and writing on her website.

There was a time when I felt some harmony between spending time in the social feed and doing my own thing. It was as if the movement of the water was giving me an energy or power that I could use and then return to. But it's been a long time since I've felt this way. I grieve this loss: most of my closest friends are people I met in the halcyon days of Twitter, and I find that I still long for that kind of connection, the ambient awareness of people with whom I feel at home. But I know that this longing is a form of nostalgia, an unrealizable desire to return to a past that was never like I remember it. I don't want these memories to be a burden like stones in my pocket. Instead, I want to carry them lightly and tenderly, having the courage to accept the pain that comes with leaving the past where it belongs.

It's okay if these aren't about video games, right? If not, here's a two-hour video about Tim Rogers' 36 favorite Xbox 360 games.

But there's also a lesson here on the study and reconstruction of a book of psalms discovered in 2006 after being hidden in an Irish bog since the late 8th century. They affectionately call the book “lasagna” and you'll see why.

This week's music… hoo-boy. I've had six years of pent-up musical recommendations, here are three. I'm as powerless as ever to resist some laid-back hip hop, so here's Kankick's 2001 The Finer Things, which has been on heavy rotation at my house for the past month. Just to prove that I'm listening to music that's not more than twenty years old, here's the (extremely NSFW) Doechii track Nissan Altima is a great track to put on your headphones while picking up the kids from school. Finally, I've spent a lot of time exploring the local music scene in Brighton over the past year and Lime Garden's flawless indie pop remains the best.

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