25 Oct 2021 - Graham
previously: spring update 2021
Don’t worry, you haven’t missed anything. This is only my second newsletter since January. The reason for the gap will become clear in minute…
This is also my first issue using buttondown instead of tinyletter. Please let me know if you notice the change in a bad way.
I’ve decided, retroactively, that the 2020 postcards were Vol. 2, and the emails from 2018 and 2019 were Vol. 1. If you’d like to revisit either, both are archived here.
Vol. 3 will be one essay, serialized. Expect an issue each Monday.
Without further ado, let us begin again.
Who do you think of when you imagine a video game addict? A teenager in a dark basement illuminated only by the pulsing light of his screen? Or perhaps, not an actual child, but a Cheeto-stained alt-right neck-bearded man-child?
I’m a video game addict, too. I’m an adult. I’m well-educated. I have a loving partner.
And yet, three months ago, I had to sell my computer and renounce video games forever because there was no other way I could stop playing Call of Duty: Warzone.
I wrote the following to tell myself the true story of a year in lockdown. Not a sob story, not an excuse. I wrote this to understand myself.
And I wrote this because hundreds of millions of us play video games. While playing, we give billions of hours and billions of dollars to an industry that doesn’t share our best interests.
Check out Cassandra Jenkins’ Hard Drive. The video doesn’t exactly match my impression that the song takes place under a fiddle leaf fig in a bright millennial pink yoga studio. And, to nitpick, I’d say the brain is more like RAM than a hard drive. Still, the track vibes. That is, it captures something about this moment.
You’d be silly not to at least consult 21, this year’s version of James FT’s playlist of his favorite songs from his favorite albums.
next post: life of pablo