Bullet Hell

Blogging’s kind of like a long, long video game for me. And you know when you get to a new area and you put the game down and for some reason you don’t get back to it for a while, it gets harder and harder to pick it up with each passing day? That’s how I get with blogging — even when I don’t post here, the world of video games marches on, and so does my work all over the place, and the catch-up mandate opens up like some beast-maw of procrastination.

So in the interest of getting caught up quickly, I hope you don’t mind if I just post a list of links to the things I have done since last time I posted here. Sorry; I don’t like doing this, but I hope you like the articles!
Kotaku: Blip Festival 2011 coverage, with video I shot myself and photos by my friends. Nullsleep tweeted it, so it must be okay!
Gamasutra:
-Analysis: Developer Disdain For Games Writing Illuminates Wider Gulf — on that infamous Danc criticism-of-critics. Interesting discussion in the comments.

-Interview: Beautiful, Creative El Shaddai Is Daring To Be Weird — it seems like it’s really “my kinda thing”, and I can’t wait to see it at E3. Related: Shane Bettenhausen (who ended up as biz dev director at Ignition, if you didn’t know) and I discuss El Shaddai and E3 on Sidequesting’s Main Quest podcast.
-Boy Meets Girl: Nival’s Unusual Prime World Goals — these Russian folks are making an online social game with a design that intends to encourage boys and girls to play together, specifically. Do most girls really prefer support roles?
-Interview: Heroes of Newerth’s Marc DeForest On Evolving Business Models — interesting data on how user bases shift depending on a company’s monetization strategy. I MADE BAR CHARTS FOR THIS ONE, Y’ALL. Leigh Alexander, renaissance woman.
-Interview: Crowdstar Raises $23M Toward Growth Efforts From Major Investors — Everyone continues to insist this space is not overvalued.
-Interview: Supercell Talks $12M Funding, Gunshine And Bridging Gaps — Big funding house likes social and browser MMOs. Surprise!!!!1

Thought Catalog:
-Looking Forward To The Rapture –Amid a lot of snickering about Harold Camping’s Rapture, I thought about how it was actually a piquantly horrible, or beautiful idea, depending on how intense your apocalypse fantasies are.
-Social Media Is Ruining Everything — My fairly controversial piece on the stress of information overload and the ability to have more social interaction than the human mind is made to handle. You can tell which commenters’ parents are currently paying for them to spend four years majoring in new media studies.
-On Crying — It’s not just for sad people anymore!
-We Are All F*cked, We Are All Fine — I CHOOSE YOU, EXISTENTIAL CRISES.
I’ve really been super busy — and in a week or two I hope to be able to surprise you with a couple of other things I’ve been working on. Somewhere in there I even hope to find time to link you to all the great things my friends are writing, too. Meanwhile, please accept the following miscellany I found interesting lately:
The inimitable, handsome and charming Jim Rossignol writes probably the only Witcher 2 review you need to read; someone named Ron Alpert talks about trying to sell a mobile game during a food truck documentary (he heard about my taco truck obsession, I gather); Head-scratching, the mysterious ‘RPGsBeBroke guy’ seems to have started blogging again. Finally, brilliant award-winning video game composer Winifred Phillips, most recently of LittleBigPlanet 2 fame, gives a neat interview to GameSpot. Oh! And I, ‘irregular non-correspondent’, join the boys at GamerDork for a new podcast.
Okay! Now I’m caught up. And I’m going to stay caught up, because E3 isn’t about to happen, or anything.