Back to uni/work, and that stupid Bar Refe-whatever Coke Zero/PSP advert
After a lengthy winter break I'm finally back at UCA Farnham full-time (and back from an unannounced blogging hiatus).
I've got a chock-full year of education, games (From BioShock Infinite to the 6ED of 40K) and lots of student media work coming up. Here's a brief outline of what you can expect from ScreenZombie over the next few months. Since I'm working on a couple of different publications, this blog will serve as sort of a diary, with links to the interviews when they're written. I'll also host any of my own more opinionated pieces here.
- Interview with Gavin Dunne, AKA Miracle of Sound. This will be published on the Glue site.
- Interview with Olli & the team from Almost Human Ltd. (Also Glue).
- Video interview with DragonForce with a Hit the Floor colleague. (For HTF).
- Interview with Anthony Rosner, director of IRL. (Glue again).
- The ScreenZombie vlog will launch. Don't expect any typical vlogger jump cuts or money grabbing, this will purely be me faffing about on games, yelling mindlessly at musicians that don't know I exist, and occasionally advice/Q&A vids for junior journalists like myself. It's going to be incredibly awkward just to make this so you should probably watch just to see me squirm.
- Battle reports, games events, and painted models, oh my - a ruthless organization of my Chaos/Tyranid/Skaven collection is resulting in some far more efficient painting and gaming.
- There's also rumblings of my graphic novel, working title Steam, finally emerging from the bleak basement I shoved it in last year with a few collaborations with authors and artists shaping up. That may or may not be hosted here, depending on the blog's popularity at the time.
I have no doubt whatsoever that plenty more content will be arranged as the year goes on, but I can't promise regular updates just yet.
That's my 'professional' life out of the way, now for another stinging, forced opinion.
Feels good.
This advert... what? Now rest assured I keep as up to date with the gaming industry as I can, as a freelance writer still clinging to voluntary positions in the vague hopes of getting a paid job someday. Using sex to sell videogames is a pretty standard, but dated method of pushing products. I'd like to think that the gamer community in general doesn't still appear to the outside world as Tron Guy or the Warcraft episode of South Park. Come on, whilst gaming had its roots as a hobby within a male audience, those times are past!
I'm not extolling the values of feminism here (Gender has no impact on intelligence or common sense, so it makes no difference to me) but using supermodels to push consoles just seems so very out of touch. If you're going to use sex to sell your product, at least be classy about it. I'm just glad that this wasn't some obnoxiously jiggling pneumatic peroxide blonde making blundering attempts to appear in with the gaming crowd. I'm not going to buy the PS Vita anyway, but this has done nothing to help my opinion of Sony.
-SZ
