I recently re-jiggered them thar links down the side. Let me explain who these people are.
Badger Commander
I guess I’m still missing out on the joke, but for some reason Badger Commander is called Badger Commander. It all started with BC posting an interview with Matt James on Leave Home; I’ve been harassing his comments ever since. At some point, he decided enough was enough and started harassing me back. BC is console-oriented and tends to have contrarian views when it comes to games. This is all the more reason to love him. We love you, BC.
Arcadian Rhythms
A relatively new site run by ShaunCG who has popped up in the odd comment or two on Electron Dance. BC also writes here. Love the logo. So far this site has taught me that Wendell Pierce, the motherf–king Bunk from The Wire, has turned up in far too many computer geek movies to be healthy. Why? Why is this true? Why? Also: There is no Potter in Team.
Girl Gamer, Esq
Anne-Marie is a lawyer, who happens to be a gamer. Who happens to be a girl. Who happens to be a lawyer. Check the small print. I found GGE because she touched on the potential legal issues surrounding Marvel Brothel, and why Marvel would be within their rights to shut it down. Updates are erratic and I worry Anne-Marie will throw in the towel before we get some new juicy gaming insights of a legal colour.
Jonas Kyratzes
The extremely busy author of The Infinite Ocean and various other strange pieces of work has a blog. Comment flames will light up now and then as Jonas is apt to do a bit of the old political post. And, in a strange twist worthy of a Douglas Adams tale, he has a unique talent for attracting M. Night Shymalan haters to hate on his site. I can also write his surname without screwing up now. And I didn’t think The Happening was all that bad.
Rock Paper Shotgun
Some lesser-known PC gaming site.
SavyGamer
Do you really want to know what the gaming equivalent of two lines of cocaine is? It’s games sales and discounts. Lots and lots and lots of them. This is Lewie Procter’s blog. I’m actually weened off sales for the time being, considering my moan about the giant stack of games I haven’t even started. Lewie even dropped by to apologise after that. But oh yea, ’tis true I still suck at the teat of the Savygamer feed.
Second Person Shooter
I ended up on 2PS through Laura’s review of Saira on the late Resolution Magazine. Kent and Laura aren’t as active as they used to be, but we still get the occasional nugget of gaming cleverthinks. Laura recently expended many words on a pervasive game of Humans Vs Zombies.
The Brainy Gamer
Academic Michael Abbott came to my attention after he introduced Portal into the curriculum at Wabash College. Always interesting and the podcasts are usually worth a spin. Most interesting recently: a comparison of the narrative approaches of David “Heavy Rain” Cage and Clint “Far Cry 2” Hocking based on their GDC presentations.
The Machination
Miles and Jack pop up here now and then. Never at the same time, though. You can see how I got the impression there were the same person, like Clark Kent and Superman. BUT WHICH ONE IS SUPERMAN? They write with a particularly strong bent for the emotive and narrative side of game development. I hope they’ll be putting a game out for us to play some day soon.
Tom Jubert
I liked Penumbra and once author Tom Jubert started blogging, I found myself hanging around his blog like a groupie hoping for sex with the superstar backstage. Jesus Christ, ignore what I just said, that’s not a metaphor that’s bad imagery not even sulphuric acid can clean from your brain. Okay, so I always recall Tom’s honesty about why he walked away from Amnesia. But perhaps readers are more interested in how to be a professional gamez riting persan.
Tap Repeatedly
So up popped some asshole called Gregg B on Jubert’s blog. I stalked him back to Tap Repeatedly but it took me a long time before I actually started reading what was on the site. Low on news, high on opinion, Tap is very busy recently. I’d have to shout out for Matt Sakey’s enormous S.T.A.L.K.E.R. piece (and the massive comment by Meho is an interesting followup), Lewis B’s article on Valve’s inadvertent destruction of Team Fortress 2, and Gregg B on his habit of spending more time modding games than actually playing them.
BnB Gaming
Bits’n’Bytes Gaming has been going for six months now and has a broad staff of writers. Electron Dance friend Armand (dragged over from Tap on this very post right here) is the North American editor for the site. Something that piqued my interest was a piece on why you won’t see a Holocaust shooter. But almost everybody in civilised society has been to the site because of Armand’s Illustrated Guide to Minecraft.
Switchbreak
After protecting my ass in Neptune’s Pride, he really deserves a link. Switchbreak talks about game development on his blog, but posts are erratic. His Twitter feed, however, is so active it’s radioactive. Thankfully, TweetDeck offers lead shielding. Topsy calls him “influential”. I just call him Switchbreak.
Kris Ligman
Jeez, have you seen how many links Kris puts out a week? Where does she get the time? I first picked up on Kris’ writing when she wrote a series of articles about Beautiful Escape for Pop Matters. Now she’s just joined the editorial team on Critical Distance. And just hurt her knee, according to Twitter.
Critical Distance
A weekly round-up of links that focus on games criticism, sort of an RPS Sunday Papers on academic steroids. Electron Dance has made a couple of appearances: The Abstraction and The Aspiration. This round-up also appears on Gamasutra and GameSetWatch.
Satisfied
Long-time comment-gymnast BeamSplashX has a blog and I, apparently, am its only reader. He’s been steady with the updates for a while now and so I’ve added him to the Friends list. You can download music that Sid has been working on and also review a bizarre series of short scripts called DOOMFLESH.
I am sorry to admit I removed Veret’s Intelligent Design, not because of his Neptune’s Pride war record, but because the dude’s not updated his site since 1942. If he starts up again, I’ll be sure to add him to the flux linkage. Bonus Electron Dance points to anyone who can identify why this post is called a cosh curve.
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Thanks for the link!
I considered cheating and googling “cosh curve”, but no. I’ll let someone who actually knows show off that knowledge… 😉
You link me now that my posting isn’t once week? Just kidding, I am honoured.
Going under the Cosh was something that was a sign of humbling oneself in admittance of crimes that people weren’t going to kill you for circa Roman and Greek ancient history (also known as going under the yolk). It was a deeply shameful act and you were often ostracised after doing so. To be under the cosh is more frequently used to mean that your partner has full control of you in modern times.
Not sure what the Cosh curve might mean.
As for ‘Badger Commander’, man it is an in-joke amongst people who have worked at the company I do. I feel bad because it wasn’t mine to covet, but it was there and ‘The Compliance Wizard’ was not something that is easily searchable.
I have to say that when you start getting fanart made of a Badger commander sticking a grenade in a squirrel’s mouth you know that the moniker is a keeper.
Also, you don’t know how happy it makes me that you actually liked ‘There is no Potter in team’.
I was really worried that it was way too personal and that only people who were there would get it and find it funny.
I’m both glad to be linked and now encouraged even further to keep up with the updates (though this is the record first week where I haven’t done a DOOMFLESH script, eek).
I’ve had some issues with posting comments on Badger Commander’s blog for a while, though perhaps they’ve been magically resolved by now, since we all know computers really operate on magic.
By the by, I had completely forgotten where the excellent article on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. had come from. I might start reading Tap Repeatedly if I can ever find more time…
I left all these comments hanging for a good day because I was trying to get that stupid featured posts slider working on the front page. And I’m still not happy with it. I’ll be messing around with it again in due course.
To Shaun & BC – you’ve been on the sidebar for a while now but these things tend to be cross-blog tokenism, not many readers actually go jumping through sidebar links like this. So I’ve been wanting to make a point of running through all the links for a while now.
BC, I really did like the Potter piece, it’s the best thing I’ve read from your output. I may not have agreed with your conclusion but the journey to it was awesome. I know what you mean about personal pieces; they can be quite tricky. WTF has happened to the Metacritic project!?!
@BeamSplashX: Tap’s output is pretty high right now and it can be a bit tricky keeping up. I do my best. But I realised after I said you need to keep it regular that – as I’d been out of the loop while writing The Aspiration – you had gone regular!
Cosh is the hyperbolic cosine, closely related to the everyday trigonometric cosine. In fact the simplest expression of their relationship is: cosh x = cos ix where i is the square root of -1.
In mechanics, it can be shown that a chain hanging between two points will follow the shape of a cosh curve, also known as the catenary.
And what is a chain made out of? LINKS.
I know you all hate me for this.
You could be making that whole thing up for all I know/remember about mathematics.
So… clever job, I guess?
@ HM: The metacritic stuff is trundling along in the background. I have beaten Nier and but not written the review. I have finished Plants Versus Zombies, written the opening for it but not written the review. I am still trying to track down a copy of Naughty Bear. Have started Crazy Mouse and bought a copy of Mirror’s Edge.
It will get done before the end of the year, it will just take me a long time to write all the pieces and put them together.
@bc I bet you promised the same thing last year, you shameless tease.
Don’t know what you are talking about. I always deliver.
“On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…”
Just for the record, I have stepped down as North American editor of BnB, and am but a lowly writer now. 😀