Hi. I’m Talen Lee. It’s 2024. Let me tell you what you’ll see here. But first I need to talk to you about podcasts.
I listen to a lot of podcasts? Well, that’s not true. I listen to a small number of podcasts, but I listen to a lot of them. In 2023 I listened to 45 days of one podcast, and that podcast has absolutely no advertising and sponsorship, just supported by patrons on Patreon. That archive empty, I went to listen to another podcast, which does have ads, which means that in listening to this one podcast daily, I have listened to a lot of adverts for other podcasts. Podcast advertising is a special kind of hell where you get a 30 second audio spot with some music in which someone
Look yeah you clicked on the right link I’m doing something here, shut up
In which someone who you might recognise, but usually just some mediocre person with a media career access, tells you that hey, they’re making a podcast, and you should check it out because hahaaah, it’s a podcast! They’re there to talk about the subject, another subject, and another subject and whatever strikes their fancy.
I hate this.
I haaaate this.
I hate this because it betrays this ambiguity of purpose, and feels like the person in question isn’t really interested in what they’re talking about. I’m doing a podcast or whatever, y’know, come up with some reason to engage with this if my name recognition or my tone of voice doesn’t specifically do it on its own. It’s the worst kind of basic advertising that isn’t trying to connect a person with something they might want, it’s instead throwing the seeds into the wild with all the enthusiasm of a Nigerian Prince spam scam email, casting fistfuls of rotten seeds into the air in the hopes that they will land and arrive in a listener’s ear and at that perfect moment tell them: Ah, products exist.
It’s even more dire because in many cases these are podcasts that are essentially working as a kind of marketing product, a literal form of ‘content’ that an attract ‘an audience’ of ‘a demographic’ which means they can ‘monetise’ that content by sticking ads between the ‘content.’ True Crime podcasts are dire as a whole genre but that is at least a genre with a problem and that problem can be examined in terms of what the genre is doing and what it’s affecting.
This? This is just ‘I make content, and that content is a land of contrasts.’
Okay.
Then.
With that in mind.
Hi, I’m Talen Lee. I’m a game maker, games studies academic, game critic, and media studies graduate with an honours degree working on a PhD in board game making. I’m bisexual, I’m cis, I grew up in a cult. I think that people make games as cultural artifacts, I think there are more interesting ways to talk about games than as just commercial products, and I think that academic concepts are not beyond you, a casual or common audience who are tangentially interested in them. I have had students who have scraped through classes with minimal effort managing to wrap their heads around ideas like paratext agonic play, you can get there too, I’m confident.
Every day, there’s a new article posted on Press Dot EXE. What you’re going to find here fits broadly into these categories:
- Games, from my perspective as someone who makes and loves games
- Media, from my perspective as someone qualified in Media Studies
- My experiences growing up with Fundamentalism
Like, that’s kind of it. Games, media and fundamentalism, that’s all I do. That takes a lot of different forms, of course.
I don’t like repeating on a topic too much. That means there are things I do with a mindset of ‘once a month’ – I try not to make a single subject too common, too often. To hit that goal, I try to limit myself to once-a-month articles about:
- My original characters
- My ‘original’ world for tabletop RPGs, Cobrin’Seil
- Worldbuilding advice and guidance in general without a specific example
- The franchises Transformers, Pokemon, and Magic The Gathering
I do write about D&D a fair bit, the two editions I know well, which are 3rd edition and 4th edition (which is the best edition). They get a slot each each month, and so does the special series How To Be, which describes a process for trying to make a particular character from pop culture media in the game system of 4th Edition D&D. I started this because I thought the complaints about 4e D&D being ‘inflexible’ or ‘like an MMORPG’ for character building didn’t make any sense to me, and then decided to show that you can translate a lot of different kinds of characters to that format.
Every week, I start the Monday with a piece on a media work, which I call Story Pile, and then the Friday, I publish an article on a game, which I call Game Pile. Every two weeks, the Game Pile article will be a video, and published on Youtube, and here!
Every even month, I use a theme to unite the content on the blog. That means if you like a particular type of content, it’s easy to look for in the archives. The themes and their corresponding months are:
- February is Smooch Month, where I talk about romantic media
- April is Talen Month, where I talk about things that matter to me personally
- June is Pride Month, which is about queer media
- August is Tricks Month, where I talk about magical tricks and illusions
- October is Dread Month, where I look into horror and darker topics
- December is Decemberween, a celebration of cool things I’ve seen through the year
That’s the goals for the year, with an aim for every article clocking in at one thousand words. I also aim to be better and more consistent about alt text this year – this is an example of a bad habit I’ve let fester for a long time, like not using categories and tags, and I intend to address it going forward.
That’s what you get here. You get media analysis. You get games. You get an ex-cultist thinking about things and a deliberate attempt to keep things from getting too repetitive and boring.
Where all good podcasts are sold.