If there’s something we can all agree on, it’s that 2025 is The Year of the Blog. V Buckenham is saying it and Robert Yang is saying it, so here is another roundup of blog links. If you find anything you enjoy, be sure to subscribe to their sites with your RSS feed reader so you can catch further updates.
Video Games
Voting on the MAGS adventure game jams is now open. Even if you don’t have an interest in voting, Wraithkal’s link is a nice little roundup of point-and-click adventure games made in jams that you may have missed.
Aysha U. Farah has a new buttondown newsletter and writes Alan Wake 2 Knows Writers are Weird Little Freaks.
Jolt Country writes about the shareware classic Abuse.
There was a new Ink console announced that sounds like a disaster to me but smarter people like Andrew Plotkin and V Buckenham have already posted about it.
Atari Archive goes into the history of the Superman game from 1979.
Rob asks Who Gets To Sonic Meme?, a reference to the meme featuring Sonic saying they want shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less.
RetroStreamers reviews one of my favorite modern ZX Spectrum games Last Train to Tranz-Central.
TTRPGs
Jeff Stormer from the ttrpg podcast Party of One has thoughts about Actual Play as nonfiction.
Music
Nat Clayton writes about her favorite music of 2024.
Dev Logs
.plan updates are back and on erysdren’s blog.
Harris Powell-Smith talks about how they write their Choice of Games interactive fiction.
Tech
Will Smith (not the actor) declares email bankruptcy and endorses fastmail (I love fastmail too).
Izzy keeps making updates to the blogging tool Bimbo.
I haven’t used it yet but Rewild, a tool for hosting a site from your own computer, sounds interesting.
Poetry
A new issue of Beestung is out! It’s a poetry magazine for non-binary writers and I think it’s fucking great.
Not Blog Posts But
I liked reading about the early history of MMORPGs in Brazil.
A retro gamer YouTuber uploaded a Wolfenstein 3D video but it’s mostly about how Elon Musk is a Nazi.