Sunday is for crossing all your fingers and toes so you don't catch a cold while traveling across the country on a crowded train. I'll be stockpiling preventative supplies of lemsip, butter of olbasa and sage (you can never be too careful this time of year, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future are working overtime).
Once you're armed with all the necessary meds, Sundays are a good time to really get to know the comfy space of the safe, snuggle up in the blankets, and lose yourself in a good read for a few hours.
As my habit shows, what I'm reading this week, outside of my RPS editing work, is mostly unrelated to gaming. Fortunately, however, both Mark and Edwin prevent the Sunday Papers from becoming entirely LRB article recommendations.
First, Edwin sent me a roundup of news from A Closer Listen. The Best Video Game Soundtracks of 2025. I'm a stupid idiot when it comes to music and can't figure out what's going on in the music I like. So I'm always grateful to writers who can figure out the sounds and explain them to me. The team (including this parish's friend Captainfreakout) do just that, while simultaneously celebrating and explaining why these albums resonate so well in the eardrum.
I'll choose Sam Webster's award for “Morsels” because it shows how the music reflects the same ideas. Edwin concluded in his review:
A game about innards, bodily fluids, exhaust and bacterial excess of life, it would likely make any listener think that the soundtrack would be some kind of violent noise-musical exercise. Rather, Webster has created a smooth journey of lounge and acid jazz worthy of the summer worship of Koop's Waltz for Koop or Kyoto Jazz Massive's Spirit of the Sun. Without fretting, the album grows under the aching sun, its bright harmonies and relaxing melodies underscored by subtle crackles and low electronic rumbles; like the sweet, cloying smell of accumulated garbage, it draws attention to the beauty of the life cycle with all its playful larvae and fresh flies.
Mark sent me an article by Edmond Tran, who spoke with concept artists from This Week In Videogames, about the impact of generative AI on their profession. It's critical to hear from workers impacted by this new technology, as we often only hear from the CEOs of companies hoping to implement it. Two interviewees, Jack Kirby Crosby and Lucy Mutimer, described how I feel about a lot of generative AI, that the work it replaces is an important period of reflection as you develop the knowledge needed to do the job well:
“More than 50% of your time will be spent collecting background information,” [Kirby Crosby] said. “Part of this is collecting images, but it also involves reading articles, watching media, evaluating competitors, watching videos of how things work, reading scientific papers—literally anything remotely related to the project will be collected by the concept artists, sometimes in a repository like Miro, Slack, or Pinterest, but always in the concept artist's head.”
Lucy Mutimer, a game developer and illustrator who primarily works with indie studios, explains that “reference and research are key parts of an artist's overall development. (Sometimes unfortunately) you carry a piece of every project with you.”
“What I find hard for non-artists to understand is that the 'early messes' that non-art people insist on can be 'fixed later by a human artist' is where the best work is done. You can't brute force your way to the eventual completion of an idea – you have to work it out.”
I only recently discovered the FT essay over the weekend, but I think it will become a regular part of my Saturday mornings. Yesterday's message was from Katherine Rundell. the secret history of unicorns. I'm afraid this file is behind a paywall, so you may need to subscribe or send the PDF to a friend who works in the financial sector. If you do this, you will find that the old encyclopedias were full of nonsense:
In 600, Archbishop Isidore of Seville wrote an extensive encyclopedia, the Etymologies, a book containing “virtually everything there is to know.” Isidore was a world-completionist, a fierce seeker of complete understanding, and among the cornucopia of his findings he proposed a “monoceron, that is, a unicorn,” which has a “single four-foot horn in the middle of its forehead.”
“Isidore’s unicorn is fierce and seems to owe much to the rhinoceros — he often fights an elephant and throws it to the ground after being shot in the stomach — but he also has some of the otherworldly qualities of a shining white horse. There are no human hunters, he writes, who could catch him; he can outrun any horse. However, “if a virgin girl is placed before a unicorn, when the beast approaches, she can open on her knees, and he will lay his head there, throwing off all ferocity, and thus lulled and disarmed, he can be seized.”
I'm afraid this will quickly become obvious. I take my Sunday Paper articles from the very popular LRB blog. Thomas Weber's report from the World Conker Championship battlefield This is a serious text about a serious sport:
There were concerns about chestnut shortages. A hot August followed by a succession of early autumn storms caused premature ripening and British horse chestnuts shook off most of their chestnuts before they could grow to normal size (32 to 35mm diameter). But there was a nationwide call for full-size chestnuts, and by race day some 3,000 tournament-grade nuts, including loot from Windsor Castle, had been delivered to Southwick, where they were drilled and strung onto 20cm strips of leather.
Yesterday I tried to listen to summer pop music and it felt completely wrong. It's too dark and cold now. I will take into account the fact that this is the shortest day of the year by listening exclusively to Icelandic musicians today. At one end of the scale I'm sadly gone Johan Johansson “Odie and Love”which is the perfect complement to reading a book in the conservatory, illuminated by the subtle winter light, and Retro Solaris Stepsonwhich I will use when I need some solar power later while walking in the cold wind.
