Could it be?
Could it be happening?
Could I be wiping the dust off this place?
I could be, in fact I am. The relaunch of the former Background Noise begins here, starting with the kind of rebrand I'm told is very fashionable these days. Yes the new name is an awful pun, yes it's sticking around, no I don't really know who I'm talking to just yet. It was, is and remains a work in progress.
It's all an attempt to leave what's behind me firmly in the rear view and press forward into a shiny new future of possibility. The stops, starts and intermittent spaces between them are past tense and there they must stay. Tally ho, farewell and goodbye. But also hello!
Seven years is a long time. Lots of change, same as it ever was and not forecast to end any time soon. A glance online and sometimes it seems like every opinion imaginable is a battleground that will tolerate no compromise or dissent. Some people out there are choosing some very strange hills to die on. Other times it's cats, all the cats, nothing but cats.
Actually even that seems like dated shorthand for online culture now. Needs an update in the age of influencers, instagram-friendly cuisine, Snyderverses, streamers, YouTube phenomenons, NFT's and the insert-topical-subject-here-laters of our time.
Internet-based whiplash. At any moment you're a click away from a wildly diverging tone or sensibility. At once it can be wonderful, weird, entertaining, hopeful, isolating, polarising, informative and deceptive. It can be some, all or none of these, it can lead you adrift or otherwise clinging to a rock.
I have no idea where it's all heading but then I'm not looking to be an authority on the subject. Just seems to me like we're running headlong faster in more directions than ever before. It might be a new thing or an old thing forgotten and remembered. That feeling that more and more plates are all spinning at once and we have only the luxury of hindsight to look forward to. It's a wild place out there and I'm just looking at the fragment of life you see online.
Against this epic backdrop are the subjects I feel more ably qualified to talk or opine about. Season passes, loot boxes, emulation and the preservation of videogame history, the evolution of storytelling in gaming, corporate buyouts and the changing structure of the industry itself. The ongoing success of the MCU, the failure of everyone else to make their own MCU. Which is the better wrestling move, the powerbomb or the piledriver? Yes of course it's the piledriver but let's discuss it at least.
Point is, this blog here is not going to be about the loftier stuff, the big picture if you will which remains too big a subject to pin down into paragraph sized chunks. I mean, you will get a little of it where required obviously, when I absolutely have to but no more than is strictly necessary.
It's going to be about what it has always been about. The things I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about. The games, the comics, the films that provoke endless mental chatter. The expected stuff, the random stuff, the where-the-heck-did-that-come-from stuff. The stuff I've been meaning to commit to the written word all along but haven't had the time. It's been a busy few years to say the least. Still ongoing in fact, but here I'm going to make an effort
No, really!
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