The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for waking up and remembering you said you’d help your sister-in-law move house. A burning fear flares in your gut, not of the manual labour, but of how she said it was fine because she’d bought a flatbed trolley off a Chinese website for £40. The fear fades into sad resignation that you’ll end the day picking up splinters of shattered plywood out of a carpet.

This week’s readings are a little light on actual videogame stuff. Though let’s be honest, sometimes videogames don’t deserve it.

Suda51’s been hitting the interview circuit ahead of Romeo is a Dead Man releasing next week. My favourite is Conor Makar’s for Eurogamer, in which some of the answers include the audible sound of Mr. 51’s eyes widening.

But it’s hard for me to say what my style, or Grasshopper style, is. It’s hard for me to look at it objectively. We get called a lot of things, and have a lot of labels put on us. A lot of people say we’re a ‘punk-style’ studio. That sounds kind of cool so I’m happy to hear that. In an interview yesterday one of our interviewers said for a while I was referred to as a “maverick of game development”! Honestly, I thought that sounded really cool once I had the word explained to me. Not only does it sound like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, or whatever, it sounds like the way we try to develop games and function as a studio.

Staying within the realm of game developers with silly names responding to questions, here’s Stardew Valley creator ConcernedApe speaking to IGN’s Rebekah Valentine about the life sim’s 10th birthday.

I think the hardest part is just staying totally high energy about it for 10 years. Like I’ve said, I’ve wanted to move on and work on other things and I’ve struggled with that and with thinking about, “What is my purpose? What is my life purpose? Is it going to be to just work on Stardew Valley forever, for the rest of my life?” That’s been a little bit challenging. So I have to keep reminding myself of all the people that are affected by the updates and playing Stardew Valley to try to stay locked in for so long.

Here’s SEND teacher Mark Ezra Stokes on repurposing a TTRPG system he created as an educational tool.

Just like Leo’s song wasn’t just music, and Tim’s voice wasn’t just in-character, these expressions carry over. After intentional TTRPG sessions, you see things that weren’t apparent before. Students begin to speak up in class. They start checking in with each other. They notice emotional tone. They practice empathy. TTRPGs give them rehearsal space for the kind of communication real life demands.

With just the right amount of barely contained rage, Glenn Kessler of MS Now examines the Bezos empire’s mismanagement of The Washington Post, which hit a new low this week with one foreign correspondent laid off while reported from a blacked-out, war-struck Kyiv.

As notifications went out, executive editor Matt Murray announced that “for the immediate future, we will concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact and that resonate with readers: politics, national affairs, people, power and trends; national security in DC and abroad” and “forces shaping the future.”

These are the words of someone with no sense of strategy or journalistic purpose.

This was fun: food writer Nicola Miller shares tips on how to manage a ballooning cookbook collection. Something I have experience with, as come Christmas or birthdays, my friends and family tend to conflate my love of eating food with a love of preparing it. This also serves as a whistle-stop tour through the increasingly deranged breadth of themed cookbook publishing.

I have books on what dictators like to eat; what to serve in a bordello; how to feed cowboys; books about funeral food, which can be spectacularly kitsch; books about cooking in American prison cells (some painfully grim, others scholarly, a few amusing); and a book I’ve written about previously called True Grits, containing recipes inspired by John Wayne. Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking has to be mentioned too.

“How penis injections became a Winter Olympics talking point”, by the Beeb. Hey, if the science is there…

Hyaluronic acid, which is not banned in sport, can be used to increase penis circumference by one or two centimetres.

This would increase the surface area of their suits during competition, which, according to FIS, the international ski and snowboard federation, could increase their flight in the air.

“Every extra centimetre on a suit counts. If your suit has a 5% bigger surface area, you fly further,” said FIS ski jumping men’s race director Sandro Pertile.

Music this week is Architects at Abbey Road, further proof – not that it was needed – that all music is better with strings and brass sections. Also, and I’m not sorry about this, There’s a McDonald’s In The Pentagon.