shutupandsitdown

THE TECH-GOBLIN EMERGES: SU&SD Newsletter #67

Added 2022-12-08 13:33:05 +0000 UTC

Matt: Newsletter people! Stand up! Put your hands in the air! Let me hear you pretending to be a bird who is furious that the audacity of seagulls is impacting the broader reputation of birds! Woooo!

What a year 2022 has been, eh? In the UK we tanked our economy and played a special variant of musical chairs where everyone is Prime Minister for exactly four minutes. It’s been going really well, thanks - next year we’ll probably just do the same again.

Thankfully though I’m in good health and spirits, despite currently looking down at a to-do list that makes me look like the world’s worst contract killer. I can’t begin to express just how glad I am that in our last donation drive we didn’t promise any new things, because the flow of time in 2022 has been as slippery as a bad eel.

But now though?! Hey! COOL NEWS TIME: We’re now ridiculously close to having an exciting new arrow in the SU&SD quiver: a VIDEO STUDIO we can use to film NEW, possibly DIFFERENT types of THINGS! And that’s what this newsletter is going to be about - a little peek behind the curtain for you lovely special folks.

First up, let’s eat some dull logistics! Trying to establish a fixed venue for us to film things in was one heck of a puzzle: firstly, we live in the UK - in which rooms are mostly just ‘large & expensive cupboards’. Secondly, we’re mostly based in the South of the UK, which means everything costs loads more for no clear reason: it’s like being in a cult, it’s just a sacrifice we all make without question!!

Thirdly - and most importantly - “we make videos about board games, largely funded by donations”. Studio space would be useful and cool - but there’s just no way that we could responsibly afford it! It’s so incredible that we get to do the jobs we do, and we’re really careful with the resources we’ve been given. Mostly, this just means rolling up our sleeves: there’s very little that elbow grease can’t solve!

BUT ALL ELBOWS RUN DRY EVENTUALLY, MY BOY. We had so much fun doing the crazy streams from Quinns’ flat - but crucially it required that we build & dissemble a TV studio in his home each and every time that we did it. It involved so many hours of unwiring and rewiring, and hoping beyond hope that we’d done it all correctly. I got into a rhythm of sprinting across Brighton with suitcases full of cameras, trying to catch the last train home. It was fun! But it was also unsustainably chaotic and chunky.

But then I happened upon a COOL SOLUTION: working in a shared creative space in London, I struck a deal with the lovely folks running the space to let me convert one of their event spaces into a communal pop-up studio space! Everything hard-wired into the ceiling, with cameras and lights that you can pull down from the ceilings - all set up to use a Fisher Price Style interface to start and stop the video recordings.

No packing away cables! No tinkering for hours to set it all up! We’ll get to use it for a few days a month to explore some new formats for Shut Up & Sit Down stuff, and the rest of the time it will be available to other members within the shared workspace: a solid mechanical system that helps us make cool videos, but also gives a bunch of creative types and artists easy tools to make high-quality video, for all the days when we’re not using it. I think that’s really neat, huh?

The community around Shut Up & Sit Down and the love that you project onto us and onto each other has always been a real source of fuel for me, and it’s felt fantastic to find a solution to a long-term financial roadblock that also provides a service to a new, different community. Cycles of pollination! Fabulous stuff, I love it.

And so this week we’re physically rigging up the lights and microphones and cameras, and I’m putting together the last few buttons for the UI that controls the whole system: a network of little programs that talk to one another; machines that keep an eye on machines to ensure that crucial things are working. I now know far too much about networking interfaces, and can’t wait to soon forget about it all and stand having FUN with our new part-time, high-tech studio!

That “100 Best Board Games” series we teased ages ago? It’s still very much on the cards, and this studio will be the key to it. If you listened to episode 200 of the podcast, I’m imagining that kind of energy, and I’m very excited!

And yet just for a while longer, I will shamelessly beg for your continued patience: we’ve got a couple of final things to sort out, even though a lot of it is now A Lot Of Fun. I want to think about what kind of pop-up set-building we can do! What does a SU&SD studio look like? Can I make giant cardboard standees out of wood? Would coloured plastic look better or worse? Would it be folly to wrap a massive 2D pear in FELT?

But here’s the elephant I left just outside of the room: I am currently in the process of moving house, which has obviously had a pretty big impact on a lot of stuff! We SHOULD be moving into a new, slightly bigger place, sometime in the new year. Until then we are very kindly being housed by my in-laws, which is why you haven’t really seen me making videos on the channel lately: I’m kind of living out in the middle of nowhere, and don’t have anywhere to film right now.

That’ll change, soon - and COR it’s gonna be good - but between you and me I’m a very tired gentleman who will be spinning quite a lot of plates until January at the earliest. In the meantime I’d like to once again thank you for your love and encouragement and patience: we’re on the cusp of revving this engine’s motors all the way up to “Honestly, THAT’S RADICAL”.

ALSO! In case you miss this poppin' up on your radar, our 2022 Christmas/Holiday Gift Guide is out! We had a lot of fun making this one, as you can tell by the long list of games we came up with!

Wishing you all a hot cocoa and a nice rest this holiday season!

Lots of love from the whole team! ♥

What are we video games! 🎮

Tom: I was not entirely sold on Wildermyth when I first played it, I found the ideas to be exceptional but the execution to be a little unpolished and hard to really dig into. I was a fool! A dweeb! A dingus! What I really needed, with Wildermyth, were people to play it with. Myself, my partner, and my housemate all sat on the sofa for about 8 hours across the weekend plugging through a campaign-and-a-half of this game - watching our characters change and the generative narrative spit out some wondrously odd scenarios for them to interact with. If you have a situation like this, with someone else to sit alongside and chuckle at all the odd narrative strings this game throws at you? It’s worth the time. More thoughts as I get deeper into the teeth of the ‘Legacy’ systems, after PAXU.

I also played two more narrative games! Foretales is an absolutely delightful little game with so much heart and charm - with card-driven systems that are very different from the usual fare - well worth checking out if you see the Steam page and go ‘this might be my kind of thing’. Chances are, it probably is. I also played Pentiment and boy howdy I was expecting something even a SMIDGE less dry from that game. I can see it’s clever, I adore its attention to detail… I just had almost 0 interest in literally anything happening within the first hour! Should I go back? Is there a game in there that I will enjoy if I don’t generally enjoy learning history? Who is to say. You are! Email me if I’m totally wrong.

What are we music! 🎵

Tom: Not much new music for me, this week. I really enjoyed the debut record from Knobs - a bunch of ‘guitar ASMR’ that’s well worth the 20 minute runtime - especially as a fan of his artfully crafted pedal reviews. This one in particular is like a warm bath of sound I'll just listen to sometimes to chill out. Claude Lavender has provided some great background music for editing - a warm, analogue buoyancy that gets me excited to be creative.

Outside of that, though, nothing new - although I’ve very much enjoyed the Jokermen podcast’s very laid-back approach to meandering through the Bob Dylan Discography - especially savouring the episode on Time Out of Mind, and the Steely Dan Special where they talked about Two Against Nature.

What are we watching? 📺

Quinns: My wife is away with her family this month and I’ve somehow ended up watching entire seasons of Downton Abbey. I would prefer not to answer questions at this time, except to say that the editing is so fast! Goodness gracious. It rockets along, does Downton!

I will also add that the politics of the show are absolutely bizarre. What starts as a show about the decline of British nobility in the face of the 21st century, chipping away at their veneer of untouchability... very quickly realises that the show is now extremely popular and begins re-applying that same veneer because they’ve got to keep this plot going for seven seasons and two movies and maybe the nobility are alright actually??

Just nuts. But I’m always here for a well-researched historical drama, giant dweeb that I am.

What are we reading? 📚

Quinns: On the recommendation of a friend who enjoys books about “sad, lonely women” (how’s that for a sales pitch), this month I read the award-winning Outline by Rachel Cusk. And yes, it is a teency bit miserable, but I couldn’t put it down and found the pages flipping under my fingers as if by magic.

But that’s precisely one of the perverse, magical things about reading! The idea of watching a movie or TV series that’s predominantly miserable is exhausting to me, the sadness is sort of inescapable. But books? Something alchemical happens when sad scenes are put down in writing. You get a piece of art that’s feisty and voyeuristic and moreish, like watching rain fall against your window when you’re nice and warm inside.

If you like the sound of that but don’t want something quite so literary as Outline, I’d be quick to recommend the new novel Luster by Raven Leilani or suburban meltdown classic Music for Torching by A.M. Homes.