This is Roddy. He’s our dog. He was born on Tuesday, June 15, 2021 in Hitchin, and now he lives with us. He’s a working retriever, which means his fur is a little darker than a regular golden retriever and it won’t grow to be quite as thick and long. He’ll also have a lighter build. His mother is Maple, who is owned by our very dear friends, David and Jess, and is the best-natured dog you’ll ever meet.
A couple of months ago, Edge published a feature I wrote about the MiSTer project. I’d been wanting to write about MiSTer for a while, because it’s such an exciting platform for retrogaming – I’ve been spending many happy hours exploring shooters on the PC Engine, messing around with a 486 PC, and revisiting the SNES classics, all in fantastic fidelity and feeling just how I remember them.
I’m no poet, but I found myself writing a poem. I listened to Blur’s song Oily Water, which I’d ripped years ago from my CD of their album Modern Life is Rubbish, and heard in it a little audio aberration which I’d forgotten about but was immediately familiar. For me, it’s even part of the song, since I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Oily Water that hasn’t originated from that CD.
It’s pretty well-established that 2020 was “a weird one” and also “bad”, and my line of work has been affected by it in various ways. But I’ve been incredibly lucky to have been able to continue working throughout on various books, articles and other projects. Here’s my year in work.
As a dork and serial procrastinator, I’ve amassed a set of tools and ways of working over my seven years of freelance writing which I’ve fumbled into something like efficiency. I like to read about the ways others work, in case their methods and tools also work for me, so here are mine.
I wrote a feature for the latest issue of Edge (E353) about boredom, which was a far easier pitch than I thought it’d be. (Thanks, Jen!) It’s about our psychological experience of boredom, and how game designers understand and work with it.
I wrote another book! This time about a bunch of computers, and it came out last week. What a time for a book launch. Gah, let’s not think about that!
It’s called Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation, and it collects 100 machines which tell the story of the rise of the home computer, from the kits of the 1960s to the off-the-shelf all-in-ones of the late 1970s; their entry into living rooms and bedrooms in the 1980s; and then taking a role in everyday life into the late 1990s.
One of the reasons I’ve been messing about with the backstory behind my Genestealer Cults army is 28. This beautiful – and free – magazine was founded to celebrate a certain cadre of players who have emerged from the INQ28 scene, which is based on a much-loved small-scale and RPG-flavoured interpretation of 40K called Inquisitor1.
It’s been a while since I last posted some of the features I’ve written in my Mechanic column on Rock Paper Shotgun. In The Mechanic, I talk to the developers behind a specific feature of a game in an effort to help players understand the hard problems and thinking that lies behind apparently simple things.
Lately, I’ve been building a Genestealer Cults army for Warhammer 40K and a band of gribbly desperadoes for Kill Team. And, well, one thing led to another and now here I am having written a bunch of lore and stuff that explains my army’s roots. What has happened to me. I even designed a bloody cult symbol.