316: Cadfael and God
Hullo
The (“Flip” - Ed)
J Nash
Waterstones
Protagonism
The Girl And The Robot
Links
Bye
The Power Fantasy's trade starts appearing in shops next week, but single-issue comics marches on. The order cut off for issue 6 is on Monday 28th. And we've done a teaser.
So, yes a good chance to jump aboard. Talk to your retailer if you want to grab the trade and join the fun and/or horrific tension.
Knowing that swearing gets punished on some socials, I also made this one...
...which I kinda like for the hot pink.
Do share around, if you feel the urge. We've actually got something a bit heftier to pass around too, which should be done by next week. Word of mouth and all that. I'm a fan.
I got a mail from Mil Millington yesterday, telling me that J Nash's mum had been in contact. J Nash had died.
You probably don't know Nash. If you do, you're probably going “Oh No”. He's that kind of cult figure. He got to you. I'm trying to find way to explain him, and struggling, which is at least part of the point. J Nash – Jonathan Nash, amongst others – was a comedy writer, games journalist and unique. I'd never read anyone like him when I first read him. When I first met in a pub, I'd never met anyone like him. It's three decades later and I still haven't.
How to picture him? He was fiercely polite – he never, ever swore. I occasionally read a story and it reminds me of a friend. That never happened with Nash. About the only time I recognised him in an anecdote told about someone else, it's Brian Eno watching David Byrne being mugged in New York. Byrne got dragged backwards into a bush while going “Uh-oh”. If you want to imagine Nash, that's his energy.
Nash was, in the simplest terms, a big ol' weirdo. He was world-leading expert in being Jonathan Nash, and no-one was even close. No-one wrote like him, and god knows enough people tried. You wrote a mail to Nash, and you got a Nash essay back. You felt a bit humbled, and had to up your game to respond. It didn't seem to turn off. J Nash wrote like J Nash, every single time his fingers got near a keyboard.
I think I was first exposed in the final issue of Your Sinclair, but I got to know his work across Amiga Power (Tsch! AMIGA POWER, Kieron – The Angry Spectre Of J Nash). One could say Nash was self-indulgent as a writer. He was known to (for example) start reviews with a script, describing a team up between medieval detective Cadfael and God, for no discernable reason. How can you get away with that? By being as good as he was, by making people delighted when you just got on with your shit. One could say he was quirky, if it only to illustrate how misapplied that word is. He was to the common understanding of quirk as a biblically-accurate angel is to a cherub. His writing imploded into itself, and chased itself around in circles and delighted, delighted, delighted. He made me glad to be alive. So, yes, yes, fuck.
He was also fearless, in a polite, immovable way. He did things no-one else would do, as if they were the most normal thing in the world (which, for him, they were). In his interview for Your Sinclair, he apparently wore a sandwich board and gave out flags. And didn't get the job. In AP2, a colleague describes him as: “If AP were all crosses between characters from Animaniacs and Watchmen, Jonathan would be Chicken Boo and Rorschach.” Yes, exactly that.
In short, you had fun with him around.
Comrade Walker writes about some of his reviews and prose over at Kotaku, but I'm going to just pick one. In the last issue of AMIGA POWER, he reviewed Alien Breed 3D 2.It's Page 14-17 here, if you want to read it but I'll paraphrase the basics. It was a much hyped game, with pretensions to save the dying format. It's a big, four page review.
You flip to the end (because, of course you do) and the bottom line says it's 98%.
AMIGA POWER was the hardest marking magazine of its period. 90% was a huge deal. Any higher was astounding. It just didn't do that. This was clearly something special.
You read the review, and Nash slowly dissects the game (and Team 17), which sounds... well, not great. Mediocre at best, with huge technical errors. Huh. Weird. And then you hit the midpoint and...
Why, then, you may muse, have I awarded it 98%? I haven't, obviously. I'm lying. I've always wanted to do a false The Bottom Line. In fact, I've given the 2Mb version of AB3D2 59% and the slothful 4Mb version 54%, speculatively edging up into the mid-60s if you have a fast enough Amiga to run it property, which we don't. I strongly dislike the idea of neat little summaries absolving people of reading the review and await someone rushing in to say, "AB3D2 has scored 98%!" at which l'il raise my head from the crumpled heap in which I'm contractually obliged to lie, ha ha at them and then fall lifeless.
The last line is a reference to the running joke in the last issue of Amiga Power, where each writer was killed off at the end of their final article. There's a happy ending on the last page, when we're all gathered in Amiga Power Heaven. I'd say reading Jon getting squashed by an anvil doesn't seem so funny now, but it still is. Jon could make anything funny.
However, there's a line in AP2 which I often quote...
We were always funny (we hoped). We were never joking.
(And while I don’t know if he wrote it, it feels like him, and why I loved his work. If you wanted to boil Nash's influence down to anything, that would be the line to take, and (I hope) you see it chase down the best parts of my aesthetic)
Anyway. That's an example of Nash being Nash. Reading him was always exciting. You had no idea what he was going to do next. You hired J Nash to get a piece written by J Nash. He was unedittable. Sometimes literally. When I was on PC Gamer, Nash once crept into the office after hours to change some captions back from what an editor had tweaked them to.
He was also a great editor, if entirely uninterested in a writer's ego and only in creating the best possible piece one could. I was chatting to Rossignol who remembered being edited: “It's funny that the overwhelming thing I remember about Nash is him prodding a piece about some shit Counter-Strike clone and i suddenly understood. I still use the same stupid jokes now.”
There's a line in Cryptonomicon where the narrator is using a D&D metaphor when talking about tech people. These other people were humans. The character considered himself a dwarf – a crafter, someone who believes in work. He describes another character as an elf, someone entirely beyond their understanding. Nash was a bit like that, but when you saw him work, you saw bits of the design, and could learn. You could never be him, but you could learn.
He was a mystery to even people he was good friends in – he was intensely private. Among the strangeness of the news was it coming from his Mum. I'd never imagined Nash having a Mum. He was the sort of person you just imagined wandering out the woods one day, and then wandering back in, never to be seen again. Of course, now that's all I can think of, and my love goes out to her and his family. It's awful. He was an amazing human. I'm so sorry.
He was the first person who I'd describe as a actual hero who I was friends with. We briefly worked together on a thing (Digiworld – a website, which I mainly did as I wanted to work with J). He did things since – his collaborations with Mil like The Weekly and The Adventures of Sexton Blake need to be singled out. At some point, he left Bath and I never saw again. No-one knew where he was, or at least didn't tell me. That was Nash. Our friendship grew more casual. I dropped an occasional mail (for all the normal reasons, plus he was better at tech than me then and was good at kicking my rubbish website). At some point around 2014 he stopped responding to mails (which I didn't notice for years at a time, because of my own brain). At some point, I figured that I'd done something to offend him. Jonathan was a man of unbendable principles, so I was sad if I had, but I also respected it. I also knew that it could just be Jon being Jon. I hoped it wasn't just me asking about FTP stuff.
In the 1990s, I had four contemporary writers on pop culture who I am consciously aware were my biggest influences. Only writing this do I realise that one of them - Neil Kulkarni - died at exactly the same time last year, almost to the day. How I felt when Kulkarni died was likely on my mind when I last wrote to Nash after arriving back in Bath, prompted by someone wanting to get in contact with him for an interview with a book. I wasn't expecting a response.
Nash wrote back. I was delighted. The friends I told were delighted. It was just tech problems, apparently, and we bounced a few mails and I was so happy he was alive and in the world.
Oh.
I can imagine a universe where Nash became someone like Charlie Brooker, and took their perspective to a huge stage. They weren't similar writers (as I said, Nash didn't swear. Perhaps he lent all the swears to Charlie) but they were two who were obviously too good at this shit for games journalism. It's easy to imagine that universe, and it would be a better universe than this one.
But it's not. We've got the one where Jonathan did the work he did, was loved for it, and is gone forever. That's a rubbish universe, but it's the one we're stuck with.
(C'mon, C-Monster. Don't end on a downer, you big ol' goth - Ed)
Er, sorry. I've got nuttin'.
(You're Fired. - Ed)
Around the signing, I'll be doing a signing at Picadilly Waterstone on February 18th between 1pm and 2pm. Come along for your lunch hour.
(There's also the GOSH signing on the evening of February 12th)
[I just saw Matt Rosenberg post this](https://bsky.app/profile/ashcanpress.com/post/3lgel7xoyd227) which, as the quote suggests, I liked a lot. I've interviewed Matt for the backmatter profile in the Power Fantasy, and I'll run the full answers here too.
I wrote a new thing on Old Men Running The World, chewing over something in the excellent Girl Underground which got me thinking.
I played Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross’ Girl Underground a couple of years back, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s a Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA) Portal Fantasy game , where the group play a girl who arrives in a fantasy world, meets some chums, travels across the world, learns some lessons and eventually clicks their ruby slippers and goes home.
In short: it’s a Wizard-of-Oz-’em-up.
It’s an excellent game. This article isn’t going to be about that.
It’s going to be about the one element which didn’t quite work for me, and where that took me.
More about Protagonism and RPGs in here.
Vulture's article on Neil Gaiman went live since writing. If by any chance you are unaware of it, it's worth reading, though should be warned it's intensely disturbing. Here's an archive version of it, if there's a paywall.
Elia Ayoub on why he can't mourn Gaza. “Those final bombs over Gaza killed 16- and six-year-old Adly and Sama al-Qidra, in addition to their father Ahmed who was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Twelve-year-old Yasmin dragged her eight-year-old sister Aseel before a second Israeli missile hit the same spot that had already killed their loved ones. In other words, a 12-year-old had the forethought to drag her younger sister immediately after witnessing three loved ones killed because she knew that Israel often deployed their infamous double tap strikes whereby they bomb, wait a bit, and then bomb again. Yasmin knew it was time to run away as fast and as far as possible, because she was 10 or 11 years old when Israel started its genocide, and 15 months are more than enough to understand the pattern of death and destruction unleashed by that genocidal state. I cannot mourn the dead of Gaza yet because it is not over.”
I saw that DriveThru RPG has Codex: Glamour 2 on pay what you want, which includes a hack for Monsterhearts which basically turns it into a WicDiv game. If you want to try such a thing, this is where you start.
One of the current Bundle of Holding has (amongst other things) all the Designer & Dragons books, which were one of the things I read when researching DIE. It's basically profiles of every company that made RPGs, so its exhaustive. Not theory led (for that, you'd want Jon Peterson's books) but if you're interested in tracing thing stuff, this is good stuff.
The always good Mark Sable's running an 8-part online class on Writing Adventures for Tabletop Roleplaying Games and you can sign up and nose here.
The latest Hardcore History Addendum interviewing Zeinab Badawi about the kingdom of Kush was really good, and made me order her An African History of Africa, which I'm reading at the moment. Listen to this, and you'll likely do the same.
The final part of From Death Do Us Heart dropped, and folks seem to really like it. I want to write something at length about the experience of running an Actual Play soon enough, but now is a great time to binge it all. Naomi did a great job editting this. I even sound vaguely competent.
Jim writes about Agon on Old Men Running The World.. I really like Agon. I've got a hack I want to write for it, even.
Marguerite Bennet forwarded Nick Lutsko's Crickets ages ago. I finally got around to listening to it. Now you listen to it.
I need to still go back and write about J Nash, so I'll keep the end piece short.
I've been working, but not enough. My basic calm in my everyday life has been juxtaposed with a world going to hell, with even the positive things being bitter. This house is quiet in a world that isn't. It's Iris' birthday in the coming week, and I've been working out what to bake.
Here's me playing around with Chocolate cake last week...
A friend notes how wholesome my instagram feed has become, which is true, and also strange. You'll note the cake stand, courtesy of my brother as a christmas gift, however. To be thine own self be true, especially with skulls.
Still – I don't feel I have been productive, except where I have. The Power Fantasy #8 has been hard to write... but all the issues have been hard. I think I just have to accept it takes me two weeks to do an issue of TPF, at least if you include my procrastination (and one should always include your procrastination when working out how long it takes to do something). Caspar's pages are coming in for 7, and are beautiful – he's sent 4 pages from different bits of the book, and they're all doing such wonderfully different and strange things.
I've been also chewing over hype stuff for the trade – there's a thing I've done which I reference above that I'll be finishing pulling together today/tomorrow, and get out. I also need to edit all the Decompressed interviews with the team – I talked to Caspar, Rian, Katie and Clayton, so we've got a month's worth of podcasts. I'm unsure whether I'll do myself, and what form it'll take. We'll see.
Next week: onto a third script for Stephanie, as she's sent me half the previous issue, which is (surprise, surprise) beautiful.
In the world, I advise taking beauty wherever and whenever you can find it, and I'm lucky enough that it turns up in my inbox once or twice a week.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
23.1.2025