Hello dear readers - here’s our latest SI:CK issue, in between our usual issues we may excrete these tepid takes, if only to relieve our continuous online cortisol spikes. This time we’re wading into (by now) well trodden waters, but hopefully you can still get something out of this, maybe even a new favourite musical act, who knows?

Backflip Man and the Collapse of the Modern age

Do you remember the backflip man? Spandex suited backflip man? I think he had a handle bar moushtache? He was huge, on account of the incredible backflips, which he performed expertly in his spandex. And he has the moustache? Me neither.

Benson Boone, ah that was it. The last of his kind. An honest to god old school industry plant. Pulled from American Idol before the final stages to shape him in the shadows into the backflipping tune lad we always knew he could be. Is he Freddie Mercury? Fuuuuuck no. He has a leap on him though, and that’s more than most. Alas, it seems he may have flipped too close to the sun, or the zone most people call ‘a bit west, mate’...his allotted time in our scrollathon is coming to a close, for a while at least.

This was a calculated effort to flip a young lad as the new showman in town. It was a smash grab. ‘Two albums MAX, and we’re out - anything more would be a miracle’ says the peptide husk in the backroom meeting. But crucially, this was done via the virality of getting this lad to flip LIVE in as many places as possible. Off pianos. In spots he probably shouldn’t, kind of ‘making everyone there uncomfortable’ type spaces. People could not help but share clips with each other, in a vain attempt to try and figure out what made that vertically rotating ‘tache tick.

The character of Benson Boone should’ve been a street level super hero, he could’ve been the Dazzlers bit on the side in another (better) life. Backflipping into goons and such. Maybe he has a kind of Purple Man/Black Bolt type thing where his voice lulls people into a state of suggestion before their head explodes after a certain time. Instead he was plucked from attending a private Mormon college, forced to watch Saturday Night Fever and the Live Aid Queen gig until he sprouted Pikmin-like into our #Foryou pages.

This was how it always was in the ‘biz’, in fact – and pardon the dash here, but – it’s kind of the reason there’s an industry in the first place. (metaphorically) Backflip close to impressionable fools until enough of them say “Hey, what do you think about this freak?” to their other fool friends. Ed Sheeran, Eminem, Michael Jackson, Art Tatum, PJ and Duncan. All backflipped into our consciousness in their own ways, whether we wanted them to or not. But how does the industry function if everyone is their very own Benson Boone? If everyone’s backflipping in the same direction at the same time, then who’s driving the car?

How does a non-backflipping Boone get noticed? More to the point, how does the poor A&R and management team keep convincing themselves that they are incredible tastemakers? In a time where the global hegemony has been irrevocably shaken, How can they possibly ask for a raise if their chosen backflip man isn’t in next week’s Rap Caviar playlist? How can the management team eat if their artists are just…fine?

…Heard of Clavicular? By now he’s been forced into every pod feed and youtube chatshow, he’s probably had a five minute interview on LBC with Shelagh Fogarty randomly telling him how much she would ban schools from teaching any Abrahamic religions not beginning with C or J. Erm, anyway - he’s the meth-addled, face smashing post-teen stream doll that the whole media world has all fallen for *in sync*, at the behest of Peter ‘I’m not the Devil, I just know where he lives’ Thiel of course, but still. It wasn’t by chance, you see.

Kick dot com , the putrid core of the manosphere, props up its (supposedly gaming but mostly) gambling streams via a huge clipping network with incentive schemes, where people spend their time slicing up 8 hour streams into shareable taggable chunks, specifically the most ‘viral’ clips, getting paid in the range of $0.40-$2 per thousand views. These aren’t street teams, usually made up of label workers or even genuine fans, eager to evangelise via wheat paste or pin badges their favourite new act. These are semi anonymous burner accounts operated on the whole by teens and people from developing countries solely for brute-forcing the algorithm for pennies on the dollar. Capital has successfully replicated the 1820s online.

This is industrial scale conversation manufacturing, using discord servers both private and public to flood every monetizable feed with hours and hours of 15-30 second clips of the promoted streamers, products, political candidates and yes, musical artists. This is how we get to a place where openly racist, sexist face-smashing Clavicular generated over 2 billion views March - April 2026 with hardly anyone knowing or actually wanting to see him at all.

Once you’re at 2 billion views in a month, that is the news story. It no longer matters how it was achieved, it has been done - we’ve been viewmogged. Shut up and watchmaxx. Geese are actually great.

So if this clipping economy is how the larger internet operates, why ever assume that the other arts were above this? What to do if your hot artists just released a hot mess? Or maybe you have a boatload of unsold tickets for a tour (read: Geese) that needs to make some money back? When botting the likes or buying a million followers comes with obvious discrepancies, how do you tip the scales to single out their new release out of the 100,000 others released that day?

Well you create a battalion of imaginary fans, of course! They magic them up via ‘marketing’ firms, creating 100’s of fictional accounts of people who do not exist to exert a sort of ghost peer-pressure, coercing algorithms into thinking they really ought to push them. Of course they fucking do. The chart functions a lot better for large labels if they don’t have to rely on actual fans to hype an act. Everyone in your life all magically hears a slither of an act at the same time, sometimes the same day, organically? As if all tuning in to hear the new single from the Beatles on the wireless?

We’re afraid to say that the internet and your phone is just not real any more. It has ceased to be, the music business is no different. This is really bad; it shouldn’t make you shrug your shoulders and move on. The world has been pretty much synthesised, digitised and tokenised into asset classes. The past 15 years of social media likes and content output is building a digital you that is actually the most valuable part of you to the market, our fleshy husks are less and less viable to capital that largely operates without us. They are salivating over a near future they see where businesses do not need to worry about holiday pay, sick pay, or really any human wages at all. Or a weekend, or retirement. These are outdated necessities of production to them - or more likely as their Claudebot told them. It doesn’t matter if the technology is clearly not ready, the imminent death of the petrodollar and cloud based, CEO-facing chatbots is hastening an already sketchy rollout (or winding up?), and it will be very bumpy from here on out.

The clipping programs mentioned before usually all pay in stablecoin cryptocurrencies, driving adoption of these borderless but mainly centralised digital currencies, especially in developing nations where the clipping rates are seen as competitive. Pollsters are beginning to ask LLM chatbots to act as specific voters instead of actually conducting any testing research, unsurprisingly LLM’s trained on Reddit suck at pretending to be anything other than the median white person. Our online portals are now completely filled with not-so-secret shills and chatbots simulating human interactions, interests, hopes, fears. Fictional attention anglers, hooking real humans into a cyclical conversation of nothingness, or gaslighting them into thinking they’re stupid for not hearing [act] already.

We are stealing a brainrot and we don’t even know it, though. Neither does the music industry. Even with a legion of imaginary fan accounts and viral boosting clippers, the music industry can’t begin to contend with Tung Tung Sahur and the slop tsunami only just cresting, none of us can. Suno is siphoning more of the non-listening listeners from streaming sites. More and more users are turning back to p2p sharing after realising nothing is actually being sold any more anyway.

Luckily at least for now, the whole Geese thing (YES THIS WAS ABOUT GEESE) seems to have shone a light nicely on the practice enough for a wider audience to instantly clock the signs. The horrendous campaign around pumping Yung Lean’s new indie slop into as much of the algorithm as possible seems to have marked the end of this particular industry move. We can only assume the next technique will be more invasive and less perceptible.

Again the only answer for getting to the root of things is to touch grass. Karaoke night, barn dance, interfaith Broodwars Lan party, whatever it takes to get you out the earbuds and off the phone. It’s gotta be offline and out of sight of any roving CCTV enforcement vans for you to stand a chance of an authentic human experience. If you’ve been suggested something online and it’s not a DM from Drake asking for money or a flow to steal, it’s probably a bot and the music is probably fine if you’re into that sort of thing. Or you could make your own music and tell no one about it. Record it in secret and release it to only yourself.

Take some small consolation as well in the fact that the clipping economy and musical ghost-chatter are a tacit admission from Capital that we, on the whole, are tired of the mechanism of social media and need to be explicitly paid to participate too far out of our natural circles. Here’s hoping someone brings back the Bebo daily love heart or something.

Subscribe now

That’s it for another SI:CK, like and share if you fancy. Join our dormant discord and prod us into activities, for the love of god please.

We’ll be back soon with another Skill Issue proper, but until then remember to start with a half, always check under waterfalls and:

Welcome to SKILL ISSUE, a newsletters for the ravers, gamers and the haters. Tell you what, finding the time to write in over the past year and change sure was tricky. We’re just two overworked busy boys with love in our hearts and words in our brains, and after being forced to prioritise the jobs that, you know, pay our rents and keep us in the freshest rhythm game peripherals and novelty controllers, simply getting the digital pen to digital paper often felt daunting.

But that’s only a small part of the reason that the past 12 months saw a reduced number of transmissions from our humble HQ. There was simply too much to cover. Whenever we were two puns into a bit on a far right streamer being taken out by a Helldivers 2 etched bullet, Elon Musk would announce a child named after an Elden Ring spell before turning Twitter into an illegal porn generator. The White House would start comparing ICE to Halo’s battle against the Flood. Trump would get into Warhammer Emperor posting. Rockstar started Union busting, totally unaware of the irony, given how many Pinkerton boys we gleefully killed in RDR2. And everyone started using generative AI, from AAAs to indie darlings, kicking off the events that lead us towards either The Matrix, Terminator or Warhammer 40k Universes. With any luck, we’ll be necking pints in the Genestealer Cult hideout before you can say “Roko’s Basilisk”.

Not to mention what it’s done to our poor backlog. 2025 will likely go down as one of the best years for video games in our lifetimes, and 2026 already looks even more packed to the gills. Each month there was at least one game that seemed totally unmissable, at least until another game out, and you missed them both anyway because Vampire Survivors is on your phone and the cable that charges the PlayStation controller in the next room and we DESERVE to see numbers go up don’t we? After a day / week / month like that? Personally I had a record year in terms of number of games I played until the credits rolled, but I had even more that I didn’t touch. I still don’t know a single person who started Death Stranding 2. If Kojima games are getting deprioritised you know you’re eating good. Or maybe we’re already too far gone.

So for the remainder of 2026, we’re gonna be aiming for something a little different. A restructure of sorts. A shorter, more digestible newsletter. One or two articles from each of us or something, on a more reliable time frame. This marks the last edition of our trusted “add everything we think of to a document until it’s too long to read or edit” approach, and from April onwards we’ll be going for something more traditional. A relaunch of sorts.

To celebrate that new approach, we’re throwing a little do in Brixton this Friday 17th at HENGE in Brixton. Come down from 6pm for a cocktail, a game of SEGA Bass Fishing 2, and some probably inappropriately loud jungle records courtesy of the two of u as well friends of the stack Itoa and JLTE vs Chef.

So why not keep the positivity rolling, and talk about some of the stuff we DID really give a shit about last year but never got the chance to sing about? Hopefully it rubs off on the remaining months x

SKILL ISSUE is written by Christopher Watson and Hue. You can get in touch if you’d like to contribute, if you’ve got anything you think we’d be interested in, should be covered, or if you're just looking for an Overcooked squad - hit us up at skillissuecrew@gmail.com.

/// THINGS WE LIKED IN 2025

///GAMES

BLUE PRINCE [Dogubomb]

It’s easy to look at the late stage capitalist hellscape that defines our waking lives and wonder just how independent art could even survive in such a world, let alone thrive. But thrive it does, and no matter how many mega corps with flotillas of marketing managers and corporate think tanks flood the Steam store the games that define the year always seem to come out of nowhere from a solo dev you’ve never heard of. Blue Prince was that game for 2025. An absolutely unique roguelike puzzler with tonnes of vibe and even more seemingly inscrutable riddles, it’s intriguing plot had us dedicating entire notebooks to working out how best use our limited digital step count, utterly decimating our IRL step count in the process.

A little too much RNG meant there were frequent moments of controller smashing frustration, but ultimately it was something genius we had never seen before - and it’s that genius that made my favourite gaming podcast (Get Played) name it their Game Of The Year, despite each of the hosts absolutely hating their time with it.

Expedition 33: Clair Obscura [Sandfall]

Uh oh, cancelled game alert! Not in the mass firing of employees to protect shareholder investment way, like EAs Black Panther game or the Perfect Dark reboot, cancelled like when an adult you revisits anything from Sasha Baron Cohen’s back catalogue and you think, hold on, didn’t this guy go to Eton? This is surely not ok! And yet you still can’t help queuing up a perfect “wa wa wee wa” whenever opportunity knocks.

Ok, maybe that’s a me problem. And Clair Obscura is pretty far from Ali G. Nevertheless, it is disappointing when one of the best games you play in the year has its Indie Game award stripped from it for shipping with assists made using generative AI, that were removed with an early patch. Despite this controversy, if someone had told me that actually the best JRPG of the year would not just be French but the Frenchest thing since that video of Serge Gainsbourg being serenaded by a children’s choir smoking fake darts I’d have been concerned for their wellbeing. Ultimately E33 had it all, amazing gameplay, brilliant art design, a stunning soundtrack and a wild story that had me absolutely hooked long after I’d completed the main quest line.

Split Fiction [Hazelight]

Couch co op has always been one of my favourite activities, and it’s a real shame that as games get more complex, we’ve more information on screen at any one time, they’ve been increasingly hard for developers to make. Which is a real shame. But Hazelight buck that trend with consistently fun, ever changing co op adventures that throw what often feels like a totally new game at you before you’ve finished processing the last one.

The story and voice acting in Split Fiction was so bad that when a live action film was announced it inspired an unfinished article about why we need to stop making video game adaptations immediately. But as a game, it’s responsible for some of my favourite memories this year. A rollercoaster love letter to the artform. And the ending sequence is comfortably one of greatest I’ve ever played.

Brazilian drug dealer 3: I opened a portal to hell.... [Joeveno]

Is this the greatest shit post game since Cruelty Squad? BDD3 is a Quake II / id tech engine based riotous fever dream of a boomer shooter that cuts all the fluff of multi team development by only concentrating on what is really important to the player: the vibe. As long as your kinda vibe includes the above-mentioned breakcore and some chunky textures, this is the game for you. A Boomer-shooter for sure, but with a gen-alpha backroomsy twist. Its sparse and mazey level design, speedy and tight controls and copious gore mean this would’ve cleared up in 1995, and still does the business today. Maybe it’s the encroaching boomer within us all, or maybe its the shrieking teen we know deep down we actually still are, but Brazilian Drug Dealer 3: I Opened A Portal To Hell Tn The Favela Trying To Revive Mit Ala I Need To Close It is an intergenerational bridge in these extremely trying times. We gotta say Obrigado.

Despelote [Julian Cordeo, Sebastian Valbuena]

A simple walking sim about a boy and south American football fever was probably not high up in the Polymarket EOY betting stakes, but the down to earth personal tale of Uruguay reaching the world cup for the first time told through the eyes of a small lad really nailed the daydreamy floatiness of free time as a kid. The sound design grounds the whole playthrough, with grown up conversations or scoldings or invitations to play gliding into your periphery as you happily boot the dithered ball in front of you. Plays like how watching The Railway Children feels, but en Espanyol.

Sword of the Sea [Giant Squid]

Surfing sand dunes, Journey style! Well not entirely, SotS is as mellow a session you could’ve hoped to have in ‘25, with engrossing end-of-trip visuals (actually good use of motion blur), smooth handling and almost zero enemies, this one is a good old fashioned silent environmentalist allegory. Bring back the ocean with your sweet sword flips, catch a ride on a sperm whale, try and beat a score challenge or just glide around. Akin to playing SSX in an episode of Blue Planet, it’s a very nice vibe and a good hangover afternoon for any who need it, and a rare example of a small developer using the haptic wonders of the PS5 Duelsense to it’s full potential.

Donkey Kong: Bananza [Nintendo]

After the Switch 2 dust settled on to its perfectly adequate launch, initial hype has faded into a gentle murmuring of “Erm...Mario?...Zelda...maybe?”. After the OG Switch dropped two of the best games of all time within its first year, it’s hard not to feel a little let down by the S2’s offerings, but if you play one Switch 2 game that isn’t Hades 2, you can’t go wrong with DK. Smash the whole game to bits. Simple, yes, easy: pretty damn, but hey, popping bubble wrap is still hard not to do when available. This is a fidget toy-ass game where, apart from some very by-numbers boss fights, you truly are just smashing up every level looking for trinkets (bananas obviously). It’s Mario Red Faction Odyssey, with a slice of Samba De Amigo, what more do you need? If Mario Odyssey hadn’t come out this would be hailed as a grail,

///MUSIC

Esdeekid - Rebel

A mule-kick of an album sounding like it was plucked out of a Lament Configuration found beneath Sefton Park’s magic tree. 11 tracks in just about twenty minutes, Esdeekid, Rico ace and producer Wraith9 plant their sonic flag firmly in the asphalt with what must be the aggiest album of the year. The only problem with the memeification of the Chalamet rumours is that Esdeekid risks becoming another flash flood brit award Slowthai type. If he sticks with Wraith9 and Rico he should be alright, or sound alright at least.

Pinkpanthress - Fancy That

Functioning as the kind of talisman of the recent transatlantic Bae-trade, looking like the cool new careworker at the Tracy Beaker dumping ground, with a voice sounding like Mya by way of the TFL announcer and with a tik-tok synthesis of 00’s era Hospital records drum n bass and attention-deficit garage production in a way peak Neptunes would be proud of before suing each other. The heartfelt irreverence in her lyricism and aloof persona brings it together as a sound that encapsulates the current time - i.e mirroring the 2007/8 financial crisis and Freeview BBC3 - unlike any other mainstream artist.

Medlar - Islands

After years of stellar 12” work and cosmic dalliances with various collaborators, South London Medlar came back with a virtuoso LP on Delusions of Grandeur. As ever the Medlar production is crisp and delicate when needed but with plenty of 303 wiggy doof for the darker scenarios. Imagine a furious but jovial jukebox battle between a couple wanting a Balearic sip to Badarou via YMO while the pool sharks in the corner keep interjecting with nice n ripe vibes and you’re still only partially there.

Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek – Yarın Yoksa

What a gem this was. A throwback psych voyage that manages to stay the right side of pastiche via sparse and fruity arrangements, with Derya’s playing and voice backed by tight as fuck band and production. Probably will get rinsed and reused in adverts and idents to the point of annoyance, and maybe it already has, but it still hits unbelievably hard.

Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist - Alfredo 2

Oldheads were truly blessed this year with a myriad of uncs eluding to good ol’ days when they were selling drugs or shooting poison rather than picking drugs out of weekday labelled dispensers or shooting insulin. Anyway, this is some of the gloopiest, smoothest pimp shit you’re likely to play while you descale the kettle. Alchemist was truly on fire with a flawless two year run punctured only by a brain-dead generative AI video for a Badu collab, further proving the real market for generative “AI” is small business owners, stoners, and irrationally optimistic mystics (or a combination of the three)

Yuno Miles - just generally

The first of his generation rapper to take up Lil Bs mantle (take your Dave Blunts irony pilled immortal technique dead baby jokes outside). The amount of acts Yuno Miles has birthed is potentially incalculable. Absurd Dadaist bars made for attention deprived future thought leaders.

Vayda - Laffy Taffy

You already know we have stan’d producer and MC Vayda for basically our substack’s entire existence, and that isn’t going to change for a while. Vayda building up the kind of catalogue 90s would weep at, all at her own pace and inimitable style

Sully - Model Collapse

We already talked about this being hopefully a high watermark in vinyl production excess but the point still stands that this release was fucking insane. Sully, an unassuming name for such a dancefloor murderer, really did the bits and we are all better for it

MC Gimenez, MC BN, DJ Yuzak - Silenciazinho

Taking funk into slo-mo jacking Territory this Doom Scroll slammer feels ephemeral, like all current genres worth watching, existing via WhatsApp chats, reels and tik tok sounds.

Yakiyn - Like Butter

Another sound born of the anglosphere osmosis, deserved more love than it got for the video alone, so here’s our little shout out ❤️

Oklou - Choke Enough

What a worm this one is. Kind of Enya on nitrazepam, Bubbling out of djm900 sounding reverb like an NTS ident, a distant Figma-user recreates Frutiger Aero from first principles and is content. think technically it came out even further back than this list permits but fuck it, its a keeper.

Sheet noise - SHOSTAKOVICH’S 5TH PLAYED BACKWARDS IN A CONCRETE SILO

We understand the contrarian underground electronic label Long Island Electrical Systems’ proprietor has some dumbass Randian takes but it’s long been known he’s actually from what we refer to as Gen “X”, and frankly we only have the ungodly levels of lead back in the day to thank for a label which releases stuff like this.

Do: go full goblin to this sheet rain amen bliss, especially if u dig Rezzett, Lee Gamble old ‘’core ruminations

Don’t: ask Ron Morelli about the Gorton & Denton by-election

Brazilian Drug Dealer 3 OST

Yep it’s gone and got the Skill Issue equivalent of an EGOT - The sound of the favela in 2025...after you accidentally open a portal to hell and have to close it again, or so the game title and Djalma Joe tells us. The type of genre mash up you only find in pre-facescan discords, potentially what.cd adjacent sounds. A musical tuci-blend of breakcore, funk / bruxia. All intense, somehow cohesive. Maybe this portal to hell ain’t so bad after all? 10/10

That’s it for SKILL ISSUE as you know and love it! But really, its more of a Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Join us next time for some hopefully more focused but still rambled thoughts, side eyes, and chat about records, games and general entropy. And we will hopefully see you this Friday at HENGE Brixton! Anyone who beats Chris at the OG Mario Kart gets a shot of our choosing. Thank you for putting up with our haphazard schedule, and moving forward, we’ll try and aim for something you might not be able to set a watch to, but can at least expect monthly.

Do get in touch at skillissuecrew@gmail.com with any thoughts and please, if you’re into what we do, tell your similarly-minded mates and help get the word out.

Share

Thanks, friends. Always check behind waterfalls, start with a half and remember:

Welcome to Skill Issue, the newsletter for the ravers, gamers, haters and the late-rendering textures. We know we’ve been absent, but we haven’t seen your latest issue out either tbh. What have you been doing? Being merry at least, we hope.

Well this time, we’re gonna just serve up one little slither of content for you. Yer average substack slop, really; vaguely personal, usually about a hot topic functioning between the level of a too-long tweet and a wistful and hopeful message scrawled on some dried plant husk from a deserted island, pushed into a bottle and thrown into the indifferent waves.

In fact, lets call these vertical slices something like Skill Issue: Communiqués and Kompromat. More room for one idea that may not fit into our usual smorgasbord. Not long enough for you to really start questioning everything, but long enough for everything to raise interesting questions. Expect more of this format as the tides of fate throw us ever off course and we are forced to rebrand shrinkflation as actually a good thing.

It does mean we are both free to post bits and bobs whenever we feel like now, which is what the original plan was, but the issue format is actually just too fun to put together with a mate, so it meant sitting on bits and cutting extra reviews. Anyway, the mainline S.I. will continue as long as we aren’t Irradiated, it may just continue to be published erratically. We hope you had a non-shit christmas, and if it was bad, it most probably was not your fault and you did as good as you could <3.

We’ll get to all the round up shite before 2026 (debatable) 👀 So as you mull over which of your presents to vinted first, here’s the first and last SI:CK of 2025 !

Spec Ops: Way Over the Line

As you unwrap the small reflections of your perceived personality this yule, spare a thought for your poor hobbies. Are hobbies doing okay ? It’s not just your lack of time to put into them, they seem to be growing further and further out of reach financially. Hobbies, much of which can be enjoyed for as close to free as you’re imagination allows are now captured by secondary financial markets. Adults have regressed into their make believe worlds and cardboard artefacts while the dwindling population of Children are sent to work in the Roblox mines, run a premier league troll account or operate a Minecraft server to pay for their parents card pack addiction.

Nowadays music demands a monthly fee, unless of course you listen to a radio like a quaint, subservient grub. Your personal algorhythm is much better than a DJ with twenty years of ongoing music discovery and defined tastes, not to mention worth every penny (those wrapped graphics aren’t going to prompt themselves)! Yes, maybe some of the artist are totally fake and some AI generated tracks may be maliciously uploaded under other artists names to leech streams. It's true, swathes of catalogues are ultimately owned by private equity now, and the artists who do exist and do make original music obviously don’t make any meaningful income from it, but at least you’re doing your part funding the future BRICS NATO conflict.

DJs now, by and large, learn digitally through controllers or the cheapest rung of “CD”J capable boxes, not through belt drives and a bag for life full of eurotrance and Tijuana brass compilations. Instead of incentivising younger people to pick up records, chuck em around, figure out what (not) to do with them, labels by and large justify printing records by creating coloured, embossed and double priced special editions – meant to be treated as object first.

Your regular dance 12’ are regularly well over a tenner each now, rap albums often £50+ new. No more 3 for £10 days or even 2 for 15. We can only hope that the over printed house and techno of the 2000-2016 era will eventually reach the hands of budding gen alphas before they are encased by Aoki and his goons and auctioned off to a randomly picked boredape holder.

Music making and its performance is shielded by the fact that those truly compelled to create will find a way, often the lack of equipment or institutional knowledge is the actual reason they’re worth listening to in the first place. There is always a mentor out there with *some* access to something, plus lone wolf tinkerers willing to revive discarded bits and bobs. That’s the good stuff anyway.

But for those trying to regularly watch your favourite artists is a pursuit now only for the totally insane (“always was 🔫” etc.). We have covered the monopolistic practices that plague the industry many times here but we’re now unironically at the point of having to use TOR to book tickets. Ticketmaster has recently made users sign a ‘no class action lawsuit’ clause before buying tickets, surely it can’t get worse? Live Nation’s CEO begs to differ, recently quoted saying tickets are still ‘underpriced’ after rising 32% in 5 years. The post covid yearning to experience things in a crowd has been well and truly rinsed already and prices are not coming down.

Take the price of supporting a top-flight team. As premier league teams revenues have exploded due to increased international television rights, so has the price to see your team play, creating the perverse scenario where a lowlife in Cincinnati (you heard me, Aaron) can watch every single match live on TV (not possible here) for a fraction of the cost if a fan here bought and in bids to attract the always lucrative jetset crowd aka Aaron Moitié-Moitié, match days have often become unrecognizable experiences for people used to Bovril and a fist fight at full time. Fireworks, light shows, loaded chili fries - the yankification of football is almost complete. Alan Shearer twitches in a corner mumbling about xG’s, we’ve lost.

Sports fans are as captive an audience as you can hope for, the most dependable cash cow willing to watch and spend on a woeful team as much as winners, and forever being squeezed for it as a reward. Kits being split into ‘fan’ and ‘match day’ tiers guaranteed to have caused tears and overdrafts on Christmas. Lower leagues do a lot better at encouraging young people into the sport or supporting, but are not immune from this international financing fuckries.

Birmingham City [currently 9th in the championship at time of writing] are pitching to build the incredible late-stage edifice [above], perfectly conveying the complete lack of modern landmarks or signifiers by repurposing the brick chimneys that Dibnah took such care bringing down. The stacks now funneling the interlinked clouds of contactless cards to self-service terminals, powering the club and thus the stadium. Elsewhere, the American owners of Sheffield United thought it would be a good idea to propose a merger with the currently ownerless, bottom of the table and bitterly hated local rival Sheffield Wednesday. Well, at least Preston are above Wrexham in the Championship.

Other hobbies aren’t so sheltered from rising costs. Comics right now are going through a massive industry upheaval and publishers are grappling with the fact that kids in general don’t give a fuck about comics any more. It can’t be that comics haven’t given a fuck about kids since maybe the 90s, no it is the children who are wrong.

The comic boom in the 90s seemingly froze its target market in place, leading to a constant peddling of 80s & 90s storylines and heroes, not just in comics but seemingly all of the western male psyche. Major tie ins and reboots in both DC and Marvel more and more reached towards lofty intellectual tones and grounded or dour themes, fine and all but what we’re left with is a market that has shed any idea of being a large print business, instead of trying to expand readership, they instead incentivize the secondary market through limited cover prints and variants.

This with the rise in comic graders like CGC, graded or slabbed comic books has lead to a massive boom and bust situation, one which has recently seen the historically de facto comic distributor Diamond distribution go bankrupt, with publishers such a dynamite and omni press being owed millions in lost product and payments. Three new distribution streams have appeared now, publishers crave the market buzz of a special event to justify bigger and subsequent print runs, and shops needs hype around these upcoming events or new number one issues to keep afloat (and also buy all the issues they had to purchase in order to unlock one 1:500 ratio cover variant to sell on ebay) and this all leaves readers trying to catch up with which number one should you begin with and what parts of stories and events are cannon or matter at all even out of the seventeen tie-ins that are required for the complete collected story, and as is the case with many variants which feature no one from the story inside, “What the fuck am I even reading?”.

That’s not to mention the cover prices. Long gone are even the days of £2 comics, they also are approaching 5-7 per issue (more for special issues), making keeping up with multiple runs (pull lists being historically the life blood of a lot of shops) practically impossible to people in low paid jobs, let alone younger people. The next craze is the ‘blind bag’ where the comic book is contained in a sealed bag (pokemon style) so you’re not sure which special variant you get (so you may as well buy five!).

There are digital or ‘infinite’ comics on the marvel app, which are definitely aimed squarely at getting the younger audience drawn into the medium, but it’s obvious with the vertical layout and scrolling action used to read them, they aint trying to convert them to the paper funny books. As we have mentioned on SI before, DC are making strides with the DC compact formats, their sales steadily growing and demand soaring with the incredibly popular new Absolute DC universe . Contrary to popular thinking people still want to read books, but companies want the guaranteed bucks of a dwindling, and terminally ageing speculators. Some stories will just have to wait until found in a bargain bin.

Maybe the nucleus of all this rampant speculation is the fact that many people in finance and venture capital may themselves have been children at one point, and a lot of millennial people in finance will have fond memories of the toys and music and cards of their youth. Moreso even than financial products, Cards - specifically Sports, Magic, and Pokemon - are the grandaddies of all this recent speculation explosion. Card games are rife with the sort of speculation that would make a 450 year old dutch vampire weep, and have instilled a zealous pursuit of first edition shiny’s into the generation who reached adulthood as the myth of money was first totally exposed.

Pokemon card release days cause black Friday type random encounter fights between Amazon Drop ship bro’s and botnet resellers, neither parties even open packs and mostly sell to tik-tok Slop-Jocks who spend 8hours ripping packs open for people to like and pay for. Not much fucking *playing* going on ! In fact, playing with the card in any way completely destroys the value of the card. People are routinely flipping memecoin money and storing it into unopened boxes of Pokémon cards as the returns are more stable (a totally insane, but factual sentence to say). This is 21^st century gains my boy, not a game to be enjoyed with friends !

With the release of 34 variants of Diary of a Showgirl [with at least eight vinyl variants] Former 4channer and billionaire music lawyer Taylor Swift not only unlocked a new exploit to obliterate the chart competition on launch day with her Gotta Catch’em all collection, but has no doubt ushered in an era of trading card vinyl. Everything is gambling now, even buying an album. We are already in the perverse situation where the bloated modern #streamingfirst albums are put out on vinyl missing half the tracks, the Carter VI from earlier this year being an especially egregious example.

I wonder how pissed off artists like Beyonce are when their team tells them that a load of her carefully crafted tracks are going to be cut from the physical record. Do they even give a fuck? We can’t be far away from hearing about the new ‘incomplete’ album from El Kestrelss, a Pitchfork and Halliburton backed acoustic psychobilly act, With a tracklist over 100 songs but only 10 included per-record and sealed in a blindbag printed with only its metacritic rating, fans are compelled to keep buying the record until the track they like is on the release.

What about LEGO, i hear you weep. Definitely just about still a child’s toy but also the number one thing cohabiting couples use to decorate the boys nook. If your partner is in a cushty mid-tier email gig, and *NOT* home by 6.30 to fix his character positions on his Rivendell LEGO set, you may have cause to worry. LEGO has become the de facto stocking filler for 20-40 year olds and again in a chicken or egg scenario, it’s not really because we asked it to be? They sell dioramas now and kids famously think dioramas suck.

You spent how much on the LEGO Himeji Castle? Little Jasper doesn’t even understand the concept of Japan let alone appreciate late Sengoku architecture?? The new ‘Death Star’ is barely a death hoop, being a D.K. book single slice of the innards. Cool in a Polly Pocket kind of way but when I tell you it’s £800 who do you think is going to be fettling with this monstrosity? I’d be surprised if more than half of these ever leave their box.

The world is rapidly waking up to the fact that money is not entirely as real as we were always led to believe, some have known this for a while, mostly those people who spend a lot of time working out how to create more fictional money out of the money they theoretically have. They’re the ones buying up your hobbies, for a fair few decades now.

The smart money is on physical things. AI is increasingly muddying all digital waters with surface noise and vulnerabilities; many people want to bite on their golden nuggets again for themselves. Hobbies are largely people making fun out of nothing, an infinite fun glitch humans can opt into at any time. Hard to monetise imagination and spontaneity but damn it, why not give it a go. If hobbies can’t be monetized further than the purchase of the items you need to join in, the only lever to crank is the price of entry.

Gaming, ever at the forefront of taking the piss out of its biggest fans, has been perfecting the games as a service model over the last decade, making paying full price for broken, unfinished games not a last gasp tactic from a studio on the verge of bankruptcy, but a viable business model. If the game needs another two years but your burn-rate is through the roof, simply release the mess with big fanfare showing all the features that are two years away, and spend half the PR budget on scripting the perfect apology and a plausible roadmap (back to where the advertising had originally promised).

You don’t own your games, a feature which permeates music and video as well. How many different versions of Skyrim have you got? They’re all the same version, they just sit in a different box on a spreadsheet, unlocked when you plug in your WiiU to check on your infinite wheel of cheese save. The digital versions of games are exactly the same price as physical discs, despite the lack of shop margins, materials, or logistics. This is industry practice.

Skins spawn their own insidious aftermarkets, digital items are being hoarded and speculated on. The monthly game subscription has also absolutely gutted the physical industry, making it harder for midsized games to make a dent and harder for physical shops to survive at all, further silo’ing players into online rental ecosystems (..or back to piracy). Indie games, much like in the music space, universally struggle with the democratisation of self publishing, surviving solely on the potluck of viral streaming clips and online word of mouth campaigns to make any kind of impact or financial return.

This, for popular culture enjoyers of any stripe, is all on top of the fact that Adverts are being forced into many of the subscription models they already pay for. Spotify injects adds to premium subs. Same for Netflix. Same for Amazon. Samsung are injecting adverts in their smart fridges that are giving people nervous breakdowns, and Ford has patents for scanning passing billboards and beaming a small version of them to your car.

The only thing we can do is hope that the clamour for AI mean the gaze of Sauron’s market eye gets too preoccupied with building an extinction-level threat to care about our fun stuff. We can definitely hoard stuff for sure, keeping a nice collection of whatever it is you’re into is a pretty historically human thing to do. We have to stop replacing perfectly working kit, for next years models - we can surely hold out longer than their earning reports can. Or, if you still have some semblance of joy and spark left, find people to give your stuff to.

Never throw away fun old technology, give it to someone you know. I dunno, make a shared Plex server or something for your family and friends, introduce them to Full Metal Alchemist or whatever, you lovely gregarious mega weeb. Don’t fucking buy Abbey Road or Rubber Soul at big Tesco. If you’re going to buy special editions of records, buy from a local indie shop or at a gig obviously. Do NOT buy BOXES of ANY trading cards to put in a cupboard. FINISH YOUR GAMING BACKLOG! Support your local non-league team. Think twice about that next Livenation ticket, support a local venue instead and at least give the maybe not-so-terrible band playing a few songsworths of your precious time.

We should walk out of any shop that has introduced dynamic pricing, especially a Northern Quarter experience bar. Look after the things you want to keep, but also enjoy them, take them out to play/read otherwise you are only turning your room into a very niche, badly guarded vault. Never be afraid to talk about a hobby, they aren’t weird, it’s not your account pin. They are what make people interesting.

Hang on to what you truly want to pass down however, Chances are by the time people born today are grown, everything not personally inherited will only be available bugged and tracked via lease from the local G4S Leisure allocation branch, possibly already is. Feels a lot like the endgame. Start ticking off your fallout shelter library list because if we don’t blow ourselves up first, they may just stop making anything other than a completely virtual reality very soon. Yes, this all could stem from bitterness about trading in my Gamecube as a teen.

That’s it for now, folks. As ever, start with a half, always check behind waterfalls and:

CW - SI:CK1

Welcome to SKILL ISSUE, a newsletter for the gamers, ravers and the haters. We’re writing this edition under the watchful eye of our lawyers, who have advised us that we’re one forced pun away from joining Palestine Action as a proscribed group in the UK. Not that we have any opinions on the matter of course. Why would you think that? We’re just a coupl…

Read more

Welcome to SKILL ISSUE, the newsletter for the gamers, ravers, AFKers and haters. We may be delivered by unconventional means, with no discernible schedule or manifest so as to avoid American interference, but like a Ukrainian 10th-prestige Switchblade drone operator, we don’t miss. Join us on Discord, for infrequent updates and more!

We hope this finds…

Read more

Read more

…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Welcome back to SKILL ISSUE, the newsletters for the gamers, the ravers, and the haters. It’s hurricane season again, and there still hasn’t been a Switch 2 announcement. We have to get by on crude napkin drawings, and we’re probably never going to finish processing Jeremy Sylvester’s debut album.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

It’s the ultimate t…

Read more

We’re so thankful that so many of you have been …

Read more

It’s not just the near-constant rain and stench of stale ale that h…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more